A bowl of pasta

Note: Serving sizes may vary. I cook with what I have, for those who need food at the time.

Recipe~ (2-3 servings)

Ingredients:

- 3 carrots

- 2/3 eggplant

- 1/3 zucchini

- 1 tomato

- 1 small can tomato concentrate

- 1/3 tofu, fried

- 2 white mushrooms

- Olive oil

- 1 tbs lentils

- 2-3 portions spirelli pasta

- Italian seasoning

- Paprika powser

- Mushroom seasoning (kinda like a soup base... it's Asian stuff, I don't know how to describe it)

- Salt, sugar to taste

- A few leaves of basil

Procedure:

1. Dice everything.

2. Cook the lentils according to the package. Meanwhile, boil the carrots and eggplants. Cook the pasta according to package instructions.

3. Cook the tomatoes in oil until liquefied. Add in the now tender eggplants and carrots, along with the tofu, mushrooms, and zucchini. Reserve the water in which you cooked the eggplants and carrots.

4. Add the tomato concentrate. If too thick, add the water reserved in step 3. That will keep the sauce from tasting watery. Add in lentils.

5. Season with the seasoning mentioned in Ingredients, to taste.

6. Serve and top with basil~ Enjoy!

On sushi

Sushi is a very common dish. Not only is it delicious and simple to eat, it's easily made.

In my family, however, the image of "traditional sushi" is a little different. There are a few reasons for that. For one, most of us are vegetarians, so the classic raw-fish-on-rice thing just wouldn't work. And somewhere along the way of homemade sushi, we began putting Mozzarella cheese in our sushi. And dipping it in Maggi soy sauce [note: the Maggi sauce we buy is the one with the red cap, here in Europe, for the yellow capped ones have some type of... "meat" in there. I think it's fish oil or something.] So our sushi is very Westernized.

We always try various variations. Also, since for some reason, we almost never buy the pink, pickled young ginger, I make ours. Of course, it's not pink, nor is it young ginger. It's just very thin slices of regular ginger, minced into thin strands. I leaved it in a covered jar of white vinegar that was seasoned with some salt and plenty of sugar. Almost every time we eat some, I have to go sliced some more ginger, to keep the supply up.

For wasabi... We've gone through various types. Personally, I don't eat spicy (though I can stand some milder Malaysian curries, Italian pizza spicy oil, and a few shreds of chillin in dip sauces for spring rolls and such), so I used to never take any. Recently, that has been another story. My parents first started using this tube of wasabi, ready-made. Then they got this powder to mix with water. At the moment, we have this mix of wasabi-salt-pepper to mix with soy sauce. It's good, and not too strong -- especially since I can control how much powder I want to put in.

To get the typical sushi rice... usually, we don't really bother with the normal round-grain rice usually used for sushi. Being an asian family, we always have rice handy. For us, any rice is good, as long as cooked to the right texture. And the rice-cooker does that for us ^^. Recently, we also used red rice~ It brings another flavor to the rolls. I just bought a bottle of sushi vinegar at the asian market, and mix that into the rice. There should be varieties of vinegar that are all ready, but I accidentally got a bottle that wasn't "sweet," so I take the sugar, mix it in a little hot water to dissolve it, and mix it into the vinegar before adding to the rice. It takes a little experimenting.

For "stuffing" -- usually anything we can get our hands on. On good days, it would be Mozzarella cheese, avocado, boiled carrots, black sesame, takuwan (daikon... pickled radish. Most of the time, it's a crunchy, and yellow)... It's not bad with apples, green beans, sliced fried tofu... the possibilities are limitless! Most anything sliced into little sticks work well with sushi. Sometimes, we put shiitake mushrooms cooked a special way, but despite the good smell, I dislike the taste of shiitake. So no mushrooms for me!

I have gone to two different sushi restaurants recently. One was just a very small place in Ukiah, California, where reservations are required. Another is a restaurant in Munich, Germany, where I ate "running sushi" for the first time! Both had sushi that had cream cheese in it, so maybe next time I make sushi, I'll put that in, since it's so tasty!

Here's just a plate of makis (sushi rolls) and onigiris (rice balls) I made for a snack~ All composed of red rice, nori (seawed sheet), a sesame and wasabi paste, and some soy sauce.

Forgive me if I made any mistakes in the names. I am not Japanese, but got used to seeing the terms in mangas and online, among other things.

Enjoy~

Pasta salad

Some pasta salad I made because my cousin and I were hungry. Hidden under the pasta (because they were uglier) are sautéed Belgian endives and fried tofu. On top is a mix of diced tomatoes, olive oil, chopped basil and Italian spices, parmesan, and rucola.

Birthday cheesecake~

Made another cheesecake for my brother's 29th birthday. The crust is store-bought pastry dough this time, since I was short on time.

For topping, it's blueberry sauce that was too runny, and "leaves" and numbers cut out of apples.

Tonight's dinner

Pasta:

Asparagus rolls with cottage cheese/herb sauce:

Random things

Blood orange

Technically not something I cooked... Well, I cooked the peel. We had an organic chemistry lab, in which we had to extract limonene from the orange peel. Afterwards, we could either bring the orange home, or leave it in this basket in the lab room. I took mine home, and they were delicious! Very pretty, too, so I wanted to share.

Pita

Again, not something I cooked, but it's delicious. Got it at the Grand Place in Brussels.

Some pasta

Didn't have anything to make for dinner one day, except a bunch of cans.... So I made spaghetti.

Tartiflette~

Actually a tarniflette, since it's vegetarian.

No, the things on top are NOT strips of ham or whatever. It's Reblochon cheese.
And since it's pretty heavy with potatoes and cheese and cream, it's nice with some salad (and my mom's homemade passion fruit juice)~

Orange cheesecake

Same cheesecake as the last one, except for the topping~

Actually, I was out of blueberry jam, which I usually water down to top my cheesecakes. But I had an orange! So I peeled it, took out the quarters, peeled the inner skin, cooked the peel I just removed with a ton of sugar.... into a syrup with candied orange bits, which I cut up really small. I also made some candied orange peels~ They're good~

My most artistic cheesecake so far! Took me a while to make it, since I was going by instinct/impulse the whole time. Dunno how it'll taste, since it's for my brother~

Ok, recipe. I know the link above leads to the other recipes and all, I'll still copy everything in this post for convenience's sake.

CRUST

Ingredients:

- 400 g flour

- 100 g ground almonds or hazelnuts

- 110 g sugar

- 350 g butter

Procedure:

1. Mix the flour, nuts, sugar and butter.

2. Refrigerate for about 30 mins.

3. Spread into a thin layer in pan. Poke generously of holes/put raw beans on top to prevent rising.

4. Cook 15 mins at 180°C in the middle of the oven.

5. Cool before adding cheesecake filling.

CHEESECAKE FILLING

Ingredients:

- 2 Philadelphia cream cheeses (300 g)

- 250 g or one small tub sour cream (fromage frais ou fromage blanc)

- 2 eggs (I use Orgran egg replacer)

- lemon juice

- vanilla extract

- topping (anything you want, really)

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven (71°C)

2. Mix sour cream, cream cheese, lemon juice, vanilla, then add in the eggs

3. Pour into the crust then put into the oven for about 45 minutes or until slightly cracked

4. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours

5. Decorate with topping, and refrigerate until served.

Tip: The longer the cheesecake is refrigerated, the better it will be.

ORANGE TOPPING

Ingredients:

- 1 orange

- Sugar

- Water

Procedure:

1. Peel an orange. Reserve some of the rind aside.

2. Separate the quarters.

3. Delicately remove the thin skin around the orange, leaving the fleshy interior. BE CAREFUL, the rounded part is very easily ripped along with the skin. Keep these skins aside as well.

4. In a small pot, boil the thin orange skins as well as one of the quarters, for fragrance. Add sugar until syrupy.

5. Dip the peeled orange quarters into the syrup and refrigerate.

6. Take the syrup out of the pot and rinse the pot. Remove the white from the orange rind, and cut the remaining orange part into thin strips.

7. Take the now candied skins out of the syrup, and chop them very small.

8. Meanwhile, boil the orange peel pieces. Once thoroughly softened, add sugar until this mixture is syrupy. Taste a peel to make sure it's sweet.

9. Arrange the orange quarters on the cheesecake.

10. Spread the first syrup mix all over, covering the orange pieces, and all around.

11. Take the second syrup mix (with the candied peels) and spread around the edges, near the crust.

12. If you wish to emphasize the "star" shape in the center as I did, take a small spoon and delicately remove the syrup from between the quarters, putting it elsewhere on the cake.

13. Refrigerate before serving.

Enjoy~

Another cheesecake

Same-old, same-old recipe, except for..... THE CRUST! I used an almond cookie recipe to make the crust, and it turned out perfect. Not the typical graham crusts you can find in the USA, and it was a little fragile and cracked a bit in the oven, but it tasted fine. Maybe this will be my ultimate crust?

Incidentally, I found a trick to keep cheesecake from cracking in the oven. It's very simple! Just put a pan full of water under the one that holds your cheesecake when you put it in the oven. It works like magic~

I got the recipe from my cousin. She made Christmas cookies with it, but I tweaked it a tiny bit to adjust to the fact that it would be for a crust~

ALMOND COOKIE RECIPE

Ingredients:

- 400 g flour

- 100 g ground almonds or hazelnuts

- 110 g sugar

- 350 g butter

Procedure:

1. Mix the flour, nuts, sugar and butter.

2. Refrigerate for about 30 mins.

3. Spread into a thin layer in pan. Poke generously of holes/put raw beans on top to prevent rising.

4. Cook 15 mins at 180°C in the middle of the oven.

5. Cool before adding cheesecake filling. Follow up with the Cheesecake recipe.

6. Tip: Put a pan of water under the cheesecake in the oven to prevent cracking~

Pizza breads

I had some leftover spaghetti sauce... So I decided to make "pizzas," basically putting the sauce on top of slices of Moroccan bread drizzled in olive oil, topped with shredded cheese~ It was good.