Vietnamese Braised Pork with Eggs (and Happy Lunar New Year!)

Today is the first day of Lunar New Year, and we're making our (now) annual Lunar New Year dinner. The past few years, we've cooked Chinese dishes (Chinese Turnip Cake, Lion's Head meatballs, several noodle dishes), so this year I wanted to make sure we branched out from just Chinese celebratory dishes. While I was...

Hot Smoked Salmon Dip

This recipe from my most recent issue of Bon Appetit caught my eye for several reasons. It came together in about 5 minutes. I used Trader Joe's staples we had on hand, for an even easier quick creation. The original uses canned, oil-packed salmon and sambal oelek. We used Trader Joe's Hot Smoked Salmon (an...

Farewell 2023!

Ever since starting this blog, we've done our year end roundup of our favorite recipes and other statistics (see: Adieu 2022, So Long 2021!, Good Riddance 2020, Goodbye 2019!, Recap of 2018, and Looking Back on 2017) Kinda hard this year with the very few posts we've made, but I hate to break tradition... 2023 Year...

End of 2023 Update

For the 3 people who read this with any sort of regularity. We started this blog as a creative outlet while in graduate school. The goal was never to become some famous bloggers with a monetized site or a big following, but to keep track of the dishes we made that we wanted to remember....

Istanbul 2023

Seems like we traveled more than we cooked this year... A few food-related shots from our trip to Istanbul! Drinking tea and coffee all day, everyday, like the Turks: Market in Beşiktaş: Grocery store snack dinner, Turkish style + our amazing view of the Bosphorus: I love mısır - an ear of corn! - you...

Italy Trip 2023

Finally! Our first international trip since COVID started! We were actually supposed to leave the country, taking the then-baby on her first international trip to meet Selim's family in Turkey, right as the whole world shut down. We were supposed to leave the US on Sunday, March 22nd. We spent most of the weeks leading...

Mazesoba

When we first started this blog, we found and gathered many prospective recipes on Pinterest. Now, we save so many delicious prospects, like this one, on Instagram. Who knows where we'll be finding inspiration in the next five years!? This recipe for mazesoba caught our eye there, and we're glad it did! Thanks Genius Eatss!...

Gaziantep’s Celebration Soup (Yuvalama Çorbası)

It's hard to find words to describe the devastation of last week's earthquake in Turkey and Syria. It's a strange feeling... just going about your normal day, knowing so many cannot, but as just an average person, being unable to really do anything about it. Pretty much every time I feel this feeling, I channel...

Ginger-Garlic Meatballs in Coconut Broth

We've now made this twice in two weeks. It's a pretty easy addition to the weeknight rotation, despite seeming to me to be a little fancier at first glace. It gives off nice Thai-ish flavors and other than the lemongrass, uses ingredients we generally have on hand. Ginger-Garlic Meatballs in Coconut Broth (Adapted from Smitten...

Chinese Turnip Cake

Last year our attempt at a Chinese feast for Lunar New Year was a little bit of a flop. I made Lion's Head Meatballs and just didn't get it quite right. The meatballs were good, but the broth was very bland and the cabbage was a little unwieldy. We'll try again one day, but this...