Hitting the (Thai) Sauce

By Sandy Hu

When Lynn cooks, the whole house smells mouthwateringly fragrant. Garlic, chiles and fresh herbs comingle, creating irresistible aromas as inviting as a Thai restaurant. Lynn, my new daughter-in-law, is from Thailand. She’s not a trained cook, but she has an instinctive sense of how to put ingredients together to make delicious Thai meals.

When we made kalua pig after returning from our Hawaiian vacation this summer, Lynn contributed a sprightly Thai dipping sauce that added zest, turning classic Hawaiian into Polynesian-Southeast Asian fusion.

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Simply Delicious Macadamia Nut Cookies

By Sandy Hu

Growing up in Hawaii, we had a macadamia nut tree in our front yard. We’d wait for the nuts to fall, then remove the outer husk and get a hammer to crack the rock-hard inner shell. It took a lot of patience to line up one nut at a time, and to keep the nut in place long enough to connect with the brunt of the hammer. A traditional nutcracker was useless against the mighty macadamia.

My ever-resourceful mother figured out a more efficient method. She would corral the nuts in one layer in the base of a shallow candy box, put a piece of cardboard on top to hold the nuts in place, then whack away with a hammer indiscriminately. Eventually, all the nuts would yield their buttery meat.

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Chinese Noodles

By Andrew Hunter

There’s a Chinese noodle house east of L.A. called Din Tai Fung. Their specialty is dumplings and boy, are they special – glutinous rice shaomai, green melon and shrimp bundles, and tiny soup dumplings bobbing in clear chicken broth, to name a few of our favorites. Din Tai, as we call it, is a regular and possibly favorite stop on our weekend rotation of dim sum houses.

The place is sleek, clean and crowded with a large tinted kitchen window that gives a shady peek at cooks working shoulder to shoulder rolling noodles, stuffing discs of dough and crimping them into round, crescent and purse-shaped dumplings.

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Talkin’ Pumpkin (and not the Carving Kind....)

By Lori Powell

Not too long ago, I shared my story about the pumpkins growing wild in my backyard. I promised I would tell you how I cook them.

Well, the pumpkins did grow but they would not have won any national pumpkin prize for size. That was A-Okay by me.

It was a first-time thrill to have kind of raised my own. (To tell the truth, they grew by themselves. I was just an observer.)

I so enjoy squash of all kinds and now is the time cook with them, with the first chill of autumn in the air. So reluctantly, I picked my orange globes and none too soon, since I noticed the vines were shriveled and dying, I think due to all of the monsoons this summer.

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Texas Toast with Italian Inspiration

By Katie Barreira

The other day I saw a commercial for Dunkin Donuts latest offering, the Big ‘N Toasty, a tower of fried eggs, bacon and cheese, sandwiched between slices of Texas Toast. “What’s Texas toast?” asked my mom, as the breakfast behemoth spun for the camera. Thick-cut bread was my best bet and hating to be at a loss in the face a culinary quandary, I went off in search of a more satisfactory answer.

As it turns out, Texas toast is, in large part, defined by the thickness of the slice. Manufacturer’s like Wonder Bread sell bags of the stuff in its unadorned state: honkin’ slabs of white loaf bread, cut about twice as thick as the standard sandwich variety.

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