I’m currently in Mexico at the beautiful ClubMed Ixtapa resort with my good friend, Diane of WhiteOnRiceCouple and my brother. It would be silly to call this a “work trip,” since we’ve done more relaxing, napping, eating and drinking than actually working, but I guess that’s the whole point of ClubMed, right? They’re hosting us for a wonderful Food and Wine festival and I’ll be posting more when I return. In the meantime, enjoy this recipe for Grilled Fish Tacos with Roasted Corn and Pepitas.

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All my friends from “not-Florida” and are gushing about their cozy Fall dishes, how it’s time to break out the dutch oven and that finally, they can start wearing boots without looking like a summer fashion faux-pas. And I’m just here loungin’ in my swimsuit, sipping iced tea, toes dangling a $3 flip-flop and beaming from ear to ear, gently shaking my head.

Don’t get me wrong, I love long braises and warming stews, but Fall is just starting to breeze in and it’s still too damn hot to turn my kitchen into a sauna. Fall is finally grilling time. Oh, sure, we grill plenty during the summer, but pity the poor person with grilling duty outside in the middle of the sweltering, suffocating summer heat, which usually is my husband. It’s worse especially when we have a dinner party and I have to hand him his sunglasses, hat, sunscreen and a mountainous platter of foods to be grilled.

I get the glare. He heads outside. Read the full story

The ebony-blue, bursty blackberry fruit was just too pretty to pass up at the market the other day, so I picked up 2 pints, one for breakfast (plain yogurt with a generous drizzle of honey and then topped with the berries) and the other pint to experiment with. I was thinking: Sauce. Brandy. Salmon.

But that night, disaster. Three times I had failed to concoct a stellar sauce. First, too candy sweet, then too annoyingly seedy and the last attempt, I had accidentally added brandy in twice, way too boozy. With no more blackberries to play with, what’s a defeated cook to do, but collapse in a pathetic, wilted heap on the kitchen floor and slam shots of the last tragedy. I gave up.

“Ay ya…young grasshoppa, learn from your mistakes, you will.” Okay, so sure, that voice sounded more Yoda than Confucious, but I really did stop and think about what is that one thing that makes someone a great cook. Because it’s not culinary education (Me ain’t got none), experience in a restaurant (never worked at one before), nor is it the ability to follow recipes to the “T” (can barely color inside the lines, much less follow instructions.)

And then it came to me after trickling down the last bit of blackberry sauce. The element that I was missing was that sour tang, a bright note to cut the sweetness in the sauce and tame the saltiness of the fish. “Ah-ha, grasshoppa! Balance flavors, you must.” The reason why Thai and Vietnamese food is so appealing is that every single dish is a harmonious balance of sweet, salty, sour and spicy, or as it’s known and easy to remember, the “four S’s”

I grabbed the kids and took off to the market to buy more blackberries, returned home and tried again. Pachinko! Sauce, splendidly harmonized in my Salmon with Blackberry Brandy Sauce.

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I’m the newest guest author at my friend Elise’s blog at Simply Recipes!

My first recipe is Chinese Shrimp Fried Rice.

Come on over and read the secrets to light, fluffy and flavorful Chinese Shrimp Fried Rice — secrets that my Mom taught me.

New friend, Deb Puchalla, who is Editor in Chief of Martha Stewart Living Magazine, is hosting a Zukes and Cukes party and this is what I’m bringing!

Instead of just stirring in basil leaves at the end like I normally do, this time I deep fried the basil leaves to create airy-light, brittle-crisp basil that elevates this dish to another level.

Describing Perfectly Cooked Shrimp

Previously, I asked you guys to describe the TEXTURE of perfectly cooked shrimp. In Cantonese, my Mom uses the phrase that’s pronounced “song chuy,” Japanese “puri-puri,” Singaporeans “QQ.”

There’s no English equivalent. Bummer.

The texture of perfectly cooked pasta is “al dente,” and we need to come up with a concise way to describe the texture/mouthfeel of perfectly cooked shrimp. Read the full story

Cooking Chinese for the Olympics! This is the 2nd recipe in the series…see the end for links

Oh…and there’s a contest in the middle of this post!!!

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Last fall, my parents treated Scott and I to a 10 day group tour around China. Our first stop was Beijing, and first thing I noticed was how clean the city was. I literally could eat off the streets, as there was an entire team of sanitation engineers whose sole job was to scrape gum off the streets and sidewalk. I’m so not kidding - they wore white gloves and could scrape even crusty, 2 week old Bubbalicious in one quick motion.

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