Mac and cheese and pizza

March 22, 2025 10:43 PM

My focus has definitely been on my Teochew site lately, but I still make time to have some fun cooking sessions with my friends! My friend and I get together every other week and we alternate picking a dish to cook. This Friday, it was her turn and she chose pizza and a spicy mac and cheese, because she's really into spicy food and because she had a whole bunch of heavy cream she needed to use up.

For the most part, I was in charge of the pizza. I just wanted to do something with a simple tomato sauce and cheese, but I let my friend pick the toppings. We added mushrooms, onions, bacon, arugula, and sliced tomatoes, because tomatoes are my favorite pizza topping. My friend really wanted to put jalapeño on it as well, but Aldi was all out!

I think I'm getting a little better at spreading out this pizza dough into a nice circular shape! We cooked the pizza at 500°F for nine minutes, and I was actually really happy with how it came out. I feel like I almost always overcook my pizza and end up with a really hard crust, but this was still nice and soft! I might try to crank up to oven to 525 next time, but I have no idea what my pizza pan can withstand.

My friend did most of the cooking for the mac n cheese. She took out her cast iron pan for the first time ever, and we honestly didn't know whether it needed to be cleaned or seasoned before using it, and we also didn't know how to properly clean and season it after using it 😅 But it seemed to cook the mac and cheese well!

The mac and cheese was quite tasty, but man it was heavy. I took a small portion for myself and then I felt like I couldn't eat any more. But I thought it actually worked quite well with a bit of that pizza sauce on top.

And even though I don't care for spicy foods like my friend does, I'll admit that jalapeño would have been really nice in this. Maybe I'll try making another spicy mac and cheese again, but I think I'll just stick to using milk in my mac and cheese. The heavy cream and bacon was too much for me.

Overall, this was a successful meal! Next time it'll be my pick for what we're making. What should I choose? 🤔

Taco night!

March 15, 2025 7:39 PM

I made some carnitas and invited some friends over to have a taco night! And two of my friends brought homemade tortillas and guac, which were 👌

I was too excited to eat so I didn't really put a lot of effort into photos, but I'll share a couple of photos that my friends took!

Tacos are always delicious, but tacos with friends are even better 😊

A weekend with my mom

March 6, 2025 6:43 PM

My mom visited me this past weekend, and we spent a lot of time cooking and eating. I didn't really have much prepared for her when she got here on Friday night, but I did have some leftover shumai and broccoli so we ate that with rice. My mom thought that my shumai was okay, but the texture was off and she said she had a better recipe. To be fair, the pieces that she had were from my first batch this year where I forgot to add cornstarch.

So we decided to make more shumai. My mom said that in order to get the right texture, you need to "cheep" the filling, and she made a folding motion with her hands. (I know she was saying something in Chinese, but as of right now, I have no idea what the Chinese character is for "cheep", but I think it basically means "to knead". If I ever figure it out later, I'll update this post) Mixing the filling with my hands is much easier than using chopsticks. She also mentioned that we needed to add the oil last, after we already mixed everything else.

I'll admit, the batch we made together was a lot better than the one I made on my own.

Because I wanted to have some vegetables to go with this, I also made some brussels sprouts and bacon, which I know doesn't really make sense with Asian food, but I already had all the ingredients for it.

We didn't have all the ingredients for the shumai, so we needed to go to the store for that. I wanted to check out one of the newest Asian stores. The last time I went there, it was really empty and it seemed like they were still stocking the shelves, but this time it was actually really nice!

My mom noticed that shelled peanuts were being sold for a good price, so we bought a bag of those, and my mom roasted them later. And then we saw some peanuts in the shell, and my mom said that that was also a good price, so we boiled those!

But the best deal that we saw at the store was some sad looking grapefruits that were being sold for 99 cents each! My mom told me that these grapefruit were perfectly fine, even better than the nice looking ones because it has more time to ripen and get sweeter. So we bought all of the discounted grapefruit.

And I agree, that sad looking grapefruit was delicious.

But you know what was the most delicious thing I had this weekend? It was my mom's ginger chicken stir fry. I had specifically asked her if she could make it and also teach me how to make it. So I'm gonna try this on my own at some point!

I've looked up ginger chicken stir fry recipes on google, but none of them are what I'm looking for. Most people cook with very small amounts of ginger, just to infuse its flavor in the dish, but not here. Ginger is a first class vegetable. And that means that we need just as much ginger as chicken in this recipe. Honestly, I wish we could have added more ginger.

But I'll go on more about ginger in a future post. Since my mom was helping me a lot with making food, I wanted to make sure I made her some fresh food of my own. My mom really likes carrot cake, so I made her some carrot cake muffins. She thought they were a little too sweet for her taste, but she still liked them!

And finally, I made her some scallion noodles. I wasn't sure if she was going to like this, but after she took a bite she said "Not bad! Can I add sriracha to this?"

So all in all, it was a successful weekend with lots of yummy food.

Pizza lesson

March 4, 2025 2:21 PM

My friend had noticed that I kept having pizza fails, and they offered to give me a pizza lesson! Really, it was just me watching them make some pizza, but it was so good. They made a whole bunch of pizza dough a few days in advance, and my sister told me that that's really legit to make your own dough and make it days in advance.

They mentioned that a Detroit-style pizza would probably work best in a home oven, so we had a couple of these. I don't have the same special pan that they have, but I have a cast iron pan and I also have some metal baking pans, so I think I could try this on my own!

I don't know if I had ever actually had a Detroit-style pizza before, but this was really good! Definitely on the heavier side, but I don't care, it's pizza. And I love pizza with cheese on bottom and sauce on top.

Since they had so much dough, they also made a bunch of Neopolitan style pizzas, with a really fancy backyard pizza oven!

It was really cool to see the pizza cooking in the oven in real time. I know I can't replicate this at home (my friend said they tried to make this style of pizza in a home oven many times in the past, but you really need much high temps and home ovens just won't get that hot), but I guess one of the things I learned was that you should cook your pizza as hot as you possibly can.

But because I was scared of too many new variables at once, I did not take that advice when I made my own pizza yesterday 😅 But I did buy a new pizza pan! I wasn't really going to do that, but someone in the Aldi Aisle of Shame Facebook group mentioned that this pan was "too non-stick" and that their pizza fell right off the pan! And the pan was only $3 so I was sold! I walked the extra ten minutes to the slightly further away Aldi just to buy it.

My friend also told me that cornmeal works well to prevent the pizza from sticking, so I bought some of that too. And I ended up making some strawberry pizza! I had been wanting to make strawberry pizza for a while, but every time I mention it to other people they're like "Wait...strawberries on a pizza? I don't know about that 🤨" I don't understand the skepticism. When I first saw the idea of a strawberry pizza, I thought, that sounds amazing. Nothing weird about it at all.

So I went to Aldi a couple of days ago to buy my dough, but all they had was jalapeño dough, and I'll admit, now the pizza is sounding a little weird to me. But whatever, it's all they had, so I bought it.

I didn't quite follow the original recipe, but I ended up topping my pizza with ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, strawberries, bacon, basil, leftover marinated tomatoes from when I made some bruschetta, leftover diced (and sautéed with garlic) sweet onions from the taco night, and leftover balsamic vinaigrette from some salad last week.

And it ended up being delicious. (Of course it was, because strawberry pizza is always delicious) The dough definitely was jalapeño-y, but it wasn't spicy. I don't think I'd ever choose the flavored dough if the regular one was in stock, but it worked fine enough.

And to make things even better, my pizza didn't stick! Honestly, I think it would have been fine without the cornmeal and just a little bit of flour on the bottom. I really think the new pan did all the work to make it not stick.

I definitely want to keep making more pizza. Maybe I'll try Detroit-style next.

Updates in progress!

February 24, 2025 3:48 PM

So, I've definitely been slowing down the frequency of these posts. That was partly because I was sick recently, but also because I've spent more time on food blogging than is sustainable, and I want to give myself more time to focus on other things. And you know, I'm living my life inefficiently now.

Part of the other stuff I want to focus on is...making more updates to this blog? Well, not new posts, but updates to the site itself. This is also my tech project, and I've honestly been itching to do more coding. I have a fun little feature that I'm working on! If you want to follow along to see what updates I'm making, my flailing-in-my-kitchen repo is now on github!

I've also been re-making some of the same recipes, to just experiment and find what goes well for my taste buds, and I've also been working on some new (-ish) recipes of my own! I actually make brussels sprouts a little differently from the recipe that I've posted, so I want to update that eventually.

I mentioned in another recent entry that I want to post a recipe for my mayonnaise roasted potatoes. I've made it twice in the past week (where I actually made note of measurements), but it still isn't quite right so I'm tweaking it.

And, please bear with me if you try to access the site and it just doesn't work at all! I need to do some server maintenance, and that's going to require rebooting the system a few times and I honestly don't remember most of the things I did when I first set up this site. But I'm making progress!

So, I'll end this post with a few more photos of some tasty things I've made recently that weren't exciting enough to get their own post: