Wow, It's Only Been Two Days Since I Last Posted!

I love outdoor barbecue. You get to enjoy the ocean and the beach sand while waving a stick with meat around charcoal with your friends. For some reason my Chinese parents liked to put honey on a lot of their meats, especially chicken wings and it makes sense. I didn't realize it was weird till later when I can't find it in Canada at all. The closest is honey garlic chicken wings but those were deep fried and just not it. So I resorted to make it myself and it's really simple. I used the same method with my chicken thighs since they were on sale!



Honey Glazed Chicken With Balsamic Zucchini
Servings: 2

Ingredients
Chicken thighs - 4
Soy sauce - 250ml (1 cup)
Honey - 55 ml (about 3 1/2 tablespoons)
Butter - 20g
Zuccini - 300g (I reduced the amount from the picture, that was way too much zucchini)
Oil - 15 ml (1 table spoon)
Balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper - to taste

Instructions



Chicken
1. Add chicken to bowl (preferred) or plastic bag Brine chicken with a tablespoon of honey and enough soy sauce to cover the chicken halfway, brine for an hour, flipping the chicken once after half an hour
2. Turn oven to 350
3. Rub the thighs with the oil and put in oven on the middle rack, skin face down
4. Heat up honey in the microwave, mix with a little bit of soy sauce (not the ones that touched the chicken), it should be a bit sweeter than your like
5. Brush the honey mixture on the chicken, brush generously
6. After 10 minutes, flip the thighs and then brush the honey on the skin
7. After 10 minutes, brush again and move the chicken to the top rack till done (10 more minutes)

Note: I don't really want to give a time to when the chicken is done cause all ovens are different. I say you should use a thermometer to make sure the chicken is at 163 degrees Fahrenheit so the carry over heat will cook it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit. You could also tell when the meat is quite firm but gives in. If the meat is stringy you overcooked it.



Zucchini
1. Cut zucchini in quarter slices
2. Melt butter at medium high heat
3. Once butter is melted and starts getting a bit blubbly,add the zucchini and salt
4. Season with pepper after almost done cooking
5. Add vinegar

I really like how the sweetness of the honey and the saltiness of the chicken and soy sauce really balances out and work together. Also balsamic vinegar really makes the zucchini tastes more refreshing!

http://joyciel.livejournal.com/

Going Off Tangent

I have a new mission! I think I've gain quite a bit too much weight lately so I'm trying to lose it...and instead of starving myself like an idiot I'm going to eat my weight off. Not like diet pills or anything, just good to honest nice, balanced meals with more vegetables and some what less fat.

So for the next while, I'm going to focus on more healthful food so to say though I don't want to label it that cause it usually means "inferior tasteless cardboard and you might as well kill me now".

NO! I'm going to make things that you actually want to put in your mouth! So no steamed vegetables or boiled to death chicken breast. Just flavorful, filling, satisfying food. Now lets get this shit started.

Something easy: a sandwich.



Avocado and Tuna Sandwich. It was actually a byproduct of me trying to make this sardine toast by Alton Brown but I was missing...um, everything but avocadoes, and especially the sardines (it's in the freaking name!) cause my mother ate them. But I had tuna and it's a fish too! I like the more fishiness of sardines cause avocadoes really mellow out the fishy taste but it still tasted fabulous.

And I shall now attempt to write out a recipe:

Ingredients
Avocados - 2, medium sized
Tuna - 1 can
Tomatoes - 1
Bread - 4 slices, whole wheat
Salt and pepper - to taste

Instructions
1. Pour out any water from the tuna, dump tuna into a bowl and using a fork, break them into pieces
2. Cut avocadoes in half and take out the pit (just hit the blade of your knife on it so it gets lodged in and twist, or you can use a spoon), using a spoon, scoop out the flesh and add it to the tuna
3. Using the fork, mix and mash the avocado with the tuna till well intergrated
4. Salt and pepper it till it's a bit more seasoned than youjavascript:void(0)'ll like (only a little, the bread and tomato will balance it out)
5. Toast bread, and slice the tomatoes, spread the avocado-tuna mix onto one side, add slices of tomato and put the other slice of bread



See? Don't even really need a recipe. This sandwich is really healthy since while you do need fat for your body to run we eat too much bad fat (that tastes amazingly good) but avocado is fatty but gives you good fat (monosaturated and polyunsaturated) and for the tuna, it gives you vitamin D like nothing else. Also whoever said carbs are bad, it's a bunch of bullshit, you do need carbs but white flour and shit are very refined so they don't really give much nutritional value unlike whole grains. It's not as fine and fluffy but it tastes more complex than just white bread. And the tomato...it's a fucking tomato, of course it's healthy!

And I do highly recommend you try Alton Brown's recipe, because I love sardines. Not only do they have low mercury levels but they are plentiful, not endangered, and can be farmed like crazy without any terrible repercussions!

http://joyciel.livejournal.com/

Happy New Year!

So I haven't updated in...forever but I finally buckled down and used my camera! School is like taking up my life at the moment so I haven't really made anything that great lately and photographing actually takes a lot of time (yea, just imagine how ugly my photos will look if I DIDN'T TAKE MY TIME, and you think they're bad now! Anyways, I made a somewhat fancy meal last week so I whipped out my camera (which is half dying but never mind that).

So my boyfriend never had lobster (yea, I know, but he's a small town boy in and out of South Detroit~) so I decided to make him a more special meal.


Lobsters don't photograph well upclose...but anyways, I made garlic roasted lobster with pasta with tomatoes and basil, and cheddar biscuits.

Come along with me~ http://joyciel.livejournal.com/118713.html

So Here It Is, Merry Christmas! Everybody's Having Fun....

Well it's actually Merry Fourth Day of Christmas! (I wiki'd it up cause the 12 days of Christmas song was confusing me).

Now my family is very typically Asian so they don't celebrate but this year we finally decided to stop procrastinating and me and Jenny had a Christmas dinner. Like a normal dinner party it is awkwardly filled with people we don't talk to that much. But I did get to cook a four course meal!

First and Second Course - Starters:

Krab Kakes


Cream of Cauliflower Soup

They're Krab Kakes as opposed to Crab Cakes because I used those imitation crab sticks from sushi places =P. Real crab are expensive D=! The Krab Kakes turned out well though, my dad bought it and it's the kind they used in his restaurant. A bit sweet and not too fishy. Also, it had a nice crust outside. The soup was creamy and really flavorful.

Third Course - Main:


Turkey!


Sides: Mashed Potatoes with Gravy, Stuffing, and Roasted Vegetables.

There was also Garlic Roasted Portabello Mushrooms but they didn't photograph well. Unfortunately the turkey was a bit overcooked, it was perfect the first time but then I never cooked a Turkey and thought it would take longer to cook and then when I reheated it it was dried =.=. But the mashed potatoes were really good and really easy to cook, I used a rice cooker and you just have to add a VERY small amount of water and it steams itself! Than you add cream and butter and seasoning! I cheated on the gravy (cause Jenny hates homemade gravy for some reason), it was powder with turkey drippings and on the stuffing (cause stuffing is annoying0.

Fourth Course - Dessert:


Fruit Cake - Asian Style~

The cake could be a bit lighter but I liked it, it was not too sweet and I thought the flavors are really genuine unlike the crap you usually get at Chinese bakeries. But need more refrigerating time or just use more gelatin for the whipped cream, it was still to soft. There was supposed to be an apple sorbet as a palate cleanser but I forgot it >.>...


Drinks!

A great cocktail that Jenny made: peach juice, Sprite, and Ice Wine (which apparently comes in red!). I'm really sensitive to the taste of alcohol (I personally think beer taste like wet socks) but I couldn't taste alcohol in it. So great for getting young girls with low tolerance drunk! DO NOT DO THAT!!!! I'LL CALL THE COPS ON YOU!!!

We also had copious amounts of Jack Daniels and I had drunken sex.












Merry Christmas =D!

http://joyciel.livejournal.com/

Would You Like Fries With That?

Okay so we can all kinda agree McDonald's is kinda shit right? But there is one thing I just can't escape from: their ORGASMIC fries. It's like deep fried in cocaine or something it's SOOOOOOOOOOO addicting. Of course I later learned it was "natural flavoring" which I'm guessing is as natural as the breasts on those playboy bunnies. So I try to do second best: my own homemade version!



Yep fries with mayo. IT'S A CANADIAN TRADITION OKAY!!! And anyways, nothing is better than homemade mayo, I use to hate mayonnaise too but it's because I thought it was Miracle Whip all this time. But real mayonnaise is creamy with a bit of tang but it's more subtle and does not taste like cheap vinegar you use to clean the tables.

Instructions: http://joyciel.livejournal.com/114981.html#cutid1

Oh god I'm updating this place so little I should call it A Dish A Month or something =/. Hopefully with break soon I can post more =D!

A Long Laborious Dish For My Long Not-So Labourious Absent!

This is one the MOST time consuming things EVER!



Xiao Long Baos, if you're Chinese you better have had these orgasms wrapped in a tiny and cute package. Exploding, leaky juices and everything >D!

http://joyciel.livejournal.com/113340.html

A Taste of Childhood

When you bring your own lunch to school and your mother just packs you a tiny ass sandwich in between two slices of white, soft, bread.

Well this is an upgrade of that...because I read the recipe wrong...and put in a lot more butter than I was supposed to XD! But there is never really too much butter, that's just ludicrous!