Last week was my good friend’s birthday and like me, she popped out kids back to back, 16 months apart, which meant we both had the same momentary lapse of judgment. Date nights are rare events, not because we’re lame, married, boring people, but that trustworthy sitters are really hard to come by. The good ones, i.e. kids with no arrest record, know that they’re in high demand, thus can play the game of extortion and can charge as much as a car payment and require a 20% tip.

Even a bigger deal is when we want to double-date with my friend and her husband. The planning started 2 weeks ago, going back and forth on a suitable date, scoring a sitter each, keeping our children quarantined in a bubble so that they wouldn’t catch any dreadful diseases, and of course collecting every bit of loose change into a jar just so we could afford a good night out without having to turn dish-washing tricks in a restaurant kitchen to pay for our meal. Read the full story

I was eating cold slices of leftover grilled steak and just had to take a photo.

I love happy meat!

The arranged slices are out of order - I had already eaten half of the steak by the time I noticed. But wouldn’t it have been fun to arrange them in order, fan through them like one of those kids flip sketch books and see the range of facial expressions!!

Or damn. If I wasn’t so hungry, I could have sold these meat slices on EBay.

I could be a rich! famous! or just stupid and the subject of endless mockery.

but I do like happy meat. and there are SO many jokes that are running through my head right now but I’ll just keep to myself because my mother reads my blog now.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had my food smile at me:

***

Thank you Washington Post!

Food columnist, Kim O’Donnel from the Washington Post interviewed several female food writers and bloggers to share their favorite ways to cool off in the kitchen — suppers that are raw, uncooked or using as little stovetop power as possible.

Come read our answers! Bea of La Tartine Gourmande and Rachel of Coconut and Lime also contributed!

Read the full story

from my column in Tampa Tribune

Tat-tat-taaaat-tat-tat-taaaat-tat! That, my friends, is the beautiful sing-song sound of Chef Martin Yan’s cleaver as he chops bok choy. In fact, everything about Martin is musical, from the lyrical harmony of his Chinese accent (yes, it’s real - I asked) to the way he rhythmically pulses the food processor. Brrrrrr…brr.brr…brrrrr.

Read the full story

(Grilled Porterhouse with Garlic-Herb Butter, Shoestring Fries and Spinach with Garlic Chips. If you are a meat-lover, I hope that the title of this post + luscious photo is enticing enough for you to read though the entire article. Because I promise you that it’s worth it. Even if you don’t eat meat, this is a must-read…as you can impress the hell outta your carnivorean friends. (and sometimes, when you’re a vegetarian in a herd of carnivores…it would just be nice to have that extra, “dude….you didn’t know that about steak???!” in your pocket.)

My entire family (including the 2 yr old kid) just adores steak…you could probably classify us as professional steak-eaters. In fact, it is my husband’s life-long quest to hone his grilling technique so that our steaks at home turn out charred crusty on the outside and perfectly med

ium-rare on the inside. With grill marks for show, of course. Seriously, we are too cheap to eat out at nice steak restaurants. For the past 4 months, we have been experimenting with how to get full, juicy, beefy flavor of a ribeye with butter-knife tenderness of a filet mignon without paying up-the-butt for Prime cuts. And after 4 months of eating steak 2x a week, I think we’ve figured it out. So, my friends, I am offering you a very juicy secret, one that will turn an ordinary “Choice” cut of steak into a gucci “Prime” cut.

Do you know the joy of buying Choice and eating Prime? It’s like buying a Hyundai and getting a free mail-in rebate for a BMW upgrade!!!

Read the full story