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I’m sticking to this bread-making thing; I’ve been making a loaf a week. This past month, I started making wheat breads. Lesson learned: Always use the optional wheat gluten.

Bread #6: Debbie’s Honey Whole Wheat Bread

I tried to make this bread twice. The first loaf was incredibly dense. There was almost no air bubbles. I know wheat breads don’t rise as high, but I was convinced that my yeast was dead or something. I gave it another shot with new yeast… still dense! It was like eating a loaf of unsweetened and bitter cake. This recipe has an 8:1 ratio of wheat flour to bread flour, so it probably wasn’t a good beginner’s wheat bread. The more bread flour in the recipe, the better texture and rise the loaf has. Oftentimes, wheat gluten is added to give wheat breads better shape, though it wasn’t listed in this recipe as an option. I think I’ll try some other wheat breads before trying this one again.

Bread #6: Anita’s Italian Herb Bread

After my wheat bricks of failure, I went back to a white bread to give myself some motivation.

This was my first bread recipe using buttermilk. Considering how pungent that stuff is, I was surprised how mild the bread turned out. I thought it was a bit boring considering the ingredients, which included grated Parmesan.

Bread #7: Honey ‘n Oats Bread

To use up the rest of the buttermilk, I made this wheat bread. It has a 1:1 ratio of wheat flour and bread flour, so it had more rise. Still a bit on the short and dense side though. Because of all the bread flour, it was a mild wheat. I didn’t really see what the oats add to the bread.

The bread is kind of plain, so I usually ate this toasted with Nutella. I’ve decided Nutella can save any bread.

Bread #8: Carrot-Herb Bread

This wheat flour has a 2:1 ratio of wheat flour to bread flour, but I used the optional wheat gluten in the recipe. Man, that stuff makes a huge difference. This bread was rose well and had a light and fluffy, but moist, texture.

It had a really nice brown/orange color, and I liked the combination of flavors. I ate this toasted with butter… very snackable.

I had mainly been using a bread box until this bread. Previously, I had been finding the bread box doesn’t keep my bread moist, so I tried zip lock bags again, starting with this bread. The bread stayed a lot softer in the zip lock bag than the bread box, which isn’t sealed. They say bread should breathe, but I’m not seeing the benefits of using the bread box. I’m debating buying a reusable bread bag so I don’t have to waste zip lock bags.

On the other hand, I’ve been loving the butter bell I got. A butter bell is a little clay thingy that holds butter upside-down immersed in water. You leave it on the counter, and the water keeps the butter cool as well as seals the butter from the air. This thing gives you easy access to soft, spreadable butter, and so far, my butter has stayed fresh for weeks. (I haven’t pushed it past three weeks.) I’m sure it doesn’t work as well when it gets hot in the summer, but for now, it’s been great for my bread-buttering needs.

Bread #9 – Anadama Bread

I was worried this would come out yucky when I opened the bottle of molasses I got. I bought dark, or full-flavored, molasses, and it’s got a strong smell. Only after I opened the bottle and made my bread did I look up if people use dark or light (mild-flavored) molasses more for their cookery. Apparently, most people use light molasses. Doh!

It turned out it didn’t matter; the recipe only used a little bit, so the bread didn’t taste like how the bottle smelled. It did have a brown color because of the molasses, making it look like wheat bread. This is also the first bread that rose to the point where it smooshed against the top of my bread maker (as you can see in the picture, it got a weird tumor on the side), but luckily, the bread was still okay despite this. It tastes like white bread, and this loaf had a really nice texture and crunchy crust right out of the bread maker.

Bread #9 – Sweet Oatmeal Bread

This simple bread has few ingredients, but is surprisingly tasty. It contains molasses, so it’s brown despite not having any wheat flour.

Bread #10 – Heavenly Whole Wheat Bread

This wheat bread has a lot of bread flour in it, and as it result, it kind of tasted like healthy, fortified white bread… which I don’t like. It’s not even that healthy; the dough has quite a bit of butter in it. I was disappointed with this bread and ate it with tons of Nutella.

I haven’t quite figured out how to light my breads. The Heavenly Whole Wheat Bread pics look like white bread, but the bread is typical wheat-brown in color.

Just 128 recipes to get through! Only maybe half of the recipes in the book actually bake in the bread machine; a lot of recipes just use it for dough. I haven’t tried any of those recipes because baking in the bread machine is just so easy, and I’m so lazy. Next update, I *promise* to bake at least one bread out of the bread machine pan.

New thing I learned today: Anadama bread is a traditional New England bread made of cornmeal and molasses.

A couple Christmases ago, I asked for a bread machine for a Secret Santa gift. My sis-in-law, Kimi, was my Secret Santa that year, and she gave me the bread machine along with a bread machine recipe book. I made a few loaves of Outback bread, but got bored with my toy. The next time I used my bread machine again was a couple times during the holidays: once to make dough for sweet potato rolls, and another time I used it to make the blankets for pig-in-blankets.

Then in February, Kimi sent me a forwarded email from Amazon. There were a bunch of bread book recommendations because she had ordered my bread book through Amazon, and she had asked, “make anything good lately?”

Well, embarrassingly, the answer was no. In fact, the only time I ever used the book she gave me was for making those pig-in-blankets with the dinner roll recipe. How frickin’ lame is that? I’ve been sitting on my ass since August being the lamest apartmentwife ever. I can’t find a job, our apartment is still a sty, and I can’t even put a bunch of crap into a machine and push a button.

So I decided I was going to make every damn bread recipe in this book, Bread Machine Magic by Linda Rehberg and Lois Conway. All 138. And I’m going to post every stupid loaf I make. Yes, I’m going to pull a Julie & Julia, except with 1000x less effort and 1000x more boring. (Give me a break, I can’t cook worth %^$&.) I’m posting bread as proof I made it, but most of the bread is going to look the same… so yeah.

Bread #1 – Basic White Bread
This is the first recipe in the book. Most of my breads will pretty much look just like this one.

You can see the bread’s tushie-hole where the kneading blade pops out in the middle pic.

In between this bread and the next bread, I made a wheat bread (disaster, no comment) and French bread using the recipe book that came with the bread machine.

Bread #2 – Irish Potato Bread
Made this for St. Patty’s Day to go with my corned beef. Like white bread, but a little moister, I think.

So far, I’d been using a 5.5in serrated utility knife from our knife set to cut bread. After mauling all our previous breads very similarly to the second picture above, I decided to invest in a real bread knife, as well as a bread box.

Bread #3 – Brown Bagger’s White Bread
This is supposedly a good sandwich bread. It’s got more ingredients than the regular white bread, but other than that, I can’t tell them apart.

Bread #4 – Herb Bread
Gosh, this bread was noms. It has onion and random herbs in it, so it’s really flavorful and nice to snack on.

Look carefully, this one actually looks different from the other ones!

This was also the first bread I cut with my spiffy new bread knife!

Bread #5 – Dennis’s Blarney-Stone Bread
This bread sounds Irish, but I don’t know what’s Irish about it. There’s no potatoes in it. It’s got oats and honey in it, but it’s about the same as regular white bread.

I think I’m going to start tackling some breads that aren’t boring looking white breads. I’d like to attempt wheat bread again and maybe even some ryes. The thing that sucks is that the nearest Safeway to me doesn’t have many options for flour. In fact, I’m pretty sure it used to have bread flour, but when I went to the store a couple days ago to get more, the bread flour’s spot had been replaced with graham crackers (in the middle of flour and corn meal, wtf)! So now they don’t even have bread flour. I’ll try the fancy shmancy grocery store that’s down the street from us next. I usually avoid that place because they’re Whole Foods-level pricey.

New thing I learned today: Bread flour has additives that help yeast work and makes the dough more elastic to retain gas better. These characteristics help make for better shaped loaves and softer breads.

Sorry for the lack of posts last week, wasn’t in the mood for blogging. I’ve also tried to avoid blogging during “work hours”, but I give up today :P

I went down to Los Angeles to attend Sandra’s bridal shower, and Sandra and Owen let me stay with them the entire weekend, along with giving me rides and taking me to a bunch of yummy places to eat. Outside of flying (don’t get me started), the weekend trip was fun and not too crazy. Much thanks to Sandra and Owen for such hospitality!

btw, Sandra asked what I wanted to do while I was in LA; I said I just wanted to try good food. She delivered, so if it seems like all we did was eat, then… well… yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Friday
Flew into LAX around 10PM, where the first thing I heard in the background when I exited the gate was “I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan…“. (Thank you LAX for getting crappy teeny bopper music stuck in my head for the rest of the weekend.) Sandra picked me up, and we headed straight to Hakata Ramen for a late dinner.

Sandra and appetizers

I’m told that you know a place is good if you have to wait a long time to sit down, and this was certainly the case for Hakata Ramen. We had to wait a good 45 minutes or so to get seated, but we were entertained by conversation and a TV with advertisements for more Japanese food (must… get… yakitori…). The ramen was indeed delicious. Their pork broth is flavorful, yet not too heavy, which is rare. The noodles are flour noodles instead of egg noodles. Very reminiscent of Maru Ichi, but with much thinner noodles.

They like their ginger, apparently.

After dinner, we went back to Sandra’s, where I chatted with Owen (who had awoken from his bear nap) and Sandra until 3AMish. I think I should talk to them more online, because we apparently had a lot to catch up on!

Saturday
Bridal shower day! I woke up in the morning to Sandra’s super nice friend and maid-of-honor, Patty, coming into the apartment with Sandra’s altered wedding dress. I hung out with Owen while Sandra and Patty did their bridal tailoring stuff in a different room. When they were done, we headed off to the bridal shower, which was completely organized by Patty.

Sandra took Patty and me down to Santa Monica, which is where Anisette Brasserie is located. While Patty set up (I tried to help but she’s rather… insistent), I chilled with Sandra at the bar waiting for guests to arrive. Once everyone was there, it was bridal shower time! Anisette Brasserie has generally nice ambiance, but the manager had seated us in a small area upstairs, which was even nicer. It was isolated, looked over the entire restaurant, and had a great view of the kitchen. We dined and played shower games.

What makes French hamburger French?

The freebie bread was really good (and indulgent), very buttery and flakey with touches of cheese. For lunch, I had the Croque Madame. It’s kind of like a French grilled ham & cheese sandwich with an egg on top, except the middle isn’t really grilled much and the bread is incredibly bad for you. I wasn’t a fan of the weird French cheese, but other than that, not bad.

Patty + three members of Owen’s zany family

Sandra gave all attendees these very fancy all natural soaps from Soaptopia. Kelvin’s been wanting to try all-natural soaps, so this was conveniently nice. I’m not a big fan of handmade soaps because they tend to have pleasant smelling natural scents. That may sound weird, but it bothers me a little when soap smells good enough to eat. Like maybe I’ll find myself eating soap or something. And these do smell heavenly.

I got to have the extra one!

After the bridal shower, I was feeling zombie-ish because of all the heavy eating we’ve been doing. We dropped by Owen’s aunt’s place to pick up baby pictures for their wedding slideshow, and then the rest of the afternoon was vegging in front of the television, recovering from the heavy eating. Eventually, we managed to get our butts off the sofa to grab dinner. San Mateo is seriously lacking in Korean food, and I wanted something easy on the stomach, so we went to get tofu at BCD Tofu House.

Sandra and Owen munching on fish

With the grumpy tummy and the chilly weather, it really hit the spot. I was pleasantly surprised by the fried fish they give each person as a snackie. For dessert, we got more fermented goodness at Yogurtland. Back at Sandra’s place, Owen seemed offended that I had never watched Zoolander, so he made me watch it. It was, um, entertaining… Orange Mocha Frappuccino!

Sunday
Everybody got up late, so the original plan of dim sum for brunch was out of the picture. Instead, we went to Don Antonio’s for Mexican food. It was sooooo good (and heavy), and I really like the freebie chips and salsa. It wasn’t even a hole-in-the-wall place, so it was a nice place to sit down and chat.

Mmmm…

After lunch, we went to Little Osaka to shop at toy stores and get some boba. We also dropped by Sandra and Owen’s friendception venue, since Owen hadn’t seen the place in person before. The venue also sells cupcakes, so I grabbed a couple red velvets for the road.

Having consumed heavy Mexican food and a large cup of milk tea, I did more resting on the couch back at their place. (I’m always amazed at how much nothing I enjoy doing.) Owen played Fallout 3 and Sandra napped until it was dinnertime. I wanted something light again, so they took me to get some Tender Greens. Very fresh and crisp salads.

Owen’s half-blinking in this one. Sorry Owen!

Sandra dropped me off at the airport right after dinner, and five hours later (after stupid delays and self-inflicted airport drama, such as forgetting cell phone at Sandra’s place), I was finished with my SoCal diversion and back in the Bay.

Thanks again to Sandra and Owen for taking me places! See you next month!

New thing I learned today: Gruyère is a hard cheese made of cow’s milk, and it is the cheese commonly used in croque monsieurs/madames.

With increased rent (and, looking at our latest PG&E, increased energy expenses), we need to eat out less. Kelvin still eats out everyday at lunch, but for dinner, we need to grow up and make our own food. Despite this necessity, we’ve still managed to try quite a few places. There’s just so many options up here! Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve tried so far. A couple of them were before we moved and were looking at apartments.

Big Joe’s Cafe

We had lunch here while looking at apartments. Pretty typical diner that serves breakfast all day. I had a generic breakfast meal, and it wasn’t bad or exceptionally awesome, so I don’t remember much about this place. I just remember some random lady started asking Kelvin weird questions about iPhone games because he was wearing an Apple shirt.

Everyday Beijing

We wanted to go to Santa Ramen, but we looked up an old address which put us at the end of B street in San Mateo. Santa Ramen is now at El Camino, apparently, so we looked for other options. Seeing a guy walk out with a giant pile of takeout boxes, we tried Everyday Beijing.

Kelvin and I both had noodle soups. I had beef noodle soup, which was decent but nothing exceptional. Kelvin had some sort of Szechuan noodle soup, which just looked like a bowl of red. It made Kelvin cry from the spiciness, but he claims to have really enjoyed it. Service was good, even though we were eating during their afternoon closing hours. Definitely would come back again.

Espetus

Kimi took me, Kelvin, and Clay here for our January birthdays. It’s all you can eat Brazilian meat, and it’s kind of like dim sum, where servers go around and ask if you want some of what they’re offering. We didn’t pay, but I’m assuming the place is expensive.

They have a salad bar and a neverending appetizer bowl that consists of a cheese bread, some strange French fry-like thing, and fried plaintains. I tried most of the red meats, and all of it was good. Sirloin + anything (cheese, garlic) was exceptionally delicious. I also loved their grilled pineapple; I kept asking for seconds on it!

Waiter brings giant stick o’ meat

For dessert, I tried their tres leches cake (a Latin American dessert I never heard of until very recently). It was like a milk sugar sponge, and it was soooo good. Sweet, rich, and dense, but yet not overwhelming. Kelvin and Clay also got ice cream because it was our birthdays.

If I had enough money, I’d definitely come back here again. Word of warning tho: this place will eff up your digestive system for at least a couple days. Sure, you can try to pace yourself or not overeat, but it won’t happen.

Silver House

The first place we ate at after we moved. We were craving more Chinese food and tried this place on El Camino. Pretty standard, but the food’s good. We had West Lake Beef Soup, Mongolian Beef, and Ma Po Tofu. West Lake Beef soup had a lot of cilantro, so Kelvin didn’t like it as much.

Wasn’t a fan of the sauce for the Ma Po Tofu, but there was a lot of ground pork and the tofu is really light and fresh, so I’ll have to try their other tofu dishes. Mongolian Beef would have been great except they put bamboo in the dish, which is kind of strange.

Instead of fortune cookies, they give you red bean soup at the end of the meal, which was nice for the cold wet days we had been experiencing. Plus Kelvin doesn’t like sweets much, so I got most of his serving too! The service was also good here. It reminds me a lot of Hong Fu’s service. We’ll come back here also, but we’ll have to try other dishes.

Noodle Shop

The Chinese name of this place is not Noodle Shop. It’s something like “Mao’s Family Dishes”, referring to dishes from Mao Zedong’s Hunan hometown. Yes, THAT Mao Zedong. In fact, his jolly Communist self is prominently featured on the front of menu. Kind of ruins my appetite, but whatever. It just means I won’t be taking my mom here.

Food propaganda

I had beef noodle soup again, and Kelvin (and later Avery) had rice dishes. The name “Noodle Shop” apparently was the name of the last Chinese restaurant that was here, and the new owners just kept the name instead making it more Mao. Which makes sense, because the noodles were incredibly mediocre and bland, even after I dumped a ton of hot sauce in it. The rice dishes seem pretty good, though. They have special rice dishes where the rice is steamed in tea leaves, adding subtle flavors to the rice. And the portions of the rice dish is huge. I’ll have to get one of those next time.

btw, all the Chinese options so far have been really cheap. Noodle Shop was $7 a meal, so I think this one was the cheapest so far.

Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot

This place sounded good, but man, what a mistake. I hate curry and Indian foods because of the overkill of spices and flavors, particularly cumin. As it turns out, Mongolian hot pot is exactly that, in soup form. They put all sorts of spices in their broths, making it taste like Chinese medicine. One of the spices is either cumin or something that tastes a lot like cumin. As soon as I walked into the restaurant, CUMIN. I could tell from the strong smells I wasn’t going to be fond of this place, but we tried it anyway. It was something different.

You order dishes a la carte, which is different. It’s like $7 to $9 per meat dish, $4 per veggie, and $4 or $5 for noodles. We got a beef/lamb combo, beef shoulder, napa cabbage, and flour noodles. It was about the right amount for us at the time, but portions weren’t very big. If we didn’t get noodles, I would have still been hungry. Ignoring the overwhelming mash of flavors, broth is not bad. Spicy soup is, well, spicy (flavor spicy, not hot spicy), and the non-spicy soup tasted like ginger and other Chinese herbs. It’s flavorful enough to not require sauce for the stuff you cook. I like Taiwanese hot pot a lot more: blander broths and flavorful sauces. I think they put a ton of MSG or salt in the broth, because some of the pieces I was pulling out was REALLY salty.

Overall, this dining experience sucked. First of all, parking is a BITCH in this part of San Mateo. It was like 8PM on a Tuesday, and it still took forever to find parking. Second, we were seated quickly, but were the closest table to the door. There was constantly a draft, and the restaurant was freezing despite boiling soups everywhere. Third, this place is expensive! It was like $17 a person for not that much food (which you cook yourself anyway). Fourth, anything that comes in the restaurant will smell like its gross spices for days. Clothes, hair, purse… all smelled like cumin :( Needless to say, I’m not coming back here again unless a friend is dying to try this place for some unknown reason.

Dessert Republic

After Little Sheep, I demanded a treat. I got pearl milk green tea and two egg puffs. I didn’t know what egg puffs are, but they’re basically poofy waffles. Pearl tea sucked because it was obviously a powder mix and not real milk tea. Egg puffs were yummy. I saved one for the next day, and they reheat well in the toaster oven.

Partially eaten egg puff

Heidi’s Pies

Yesterday, I made a disaster out of dinner, and Kelvin took me to get pie for a treat. I tried key lime pie since it looks delicious (if deadly) on Dexter. But Heidi’s key lime pie looks nothing like the ones I’ve seen before. It was a darker, slime-looking green, and very plain and unappetizing in looks. I thought key lime pies were more light and creamy. It was overly sweet and tart. Kelvin’s apple pie a la mode was much better, though it reminded me a lot of apple sauce. I think for pies, I’d rather go to Marie Callendar’s. The main selling point of this place is that it’s open 24 hours.

New thing I learned today: Tres leches cake has its name because it uses three kinds of milk: evaporated milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream.

This yummy educational tidbit brought to you by my food-obsessed TF2 friend, Bean.

(This post is a little late, but not as late as, say, the rest of my honeymoon posts!)

Before I met Kelvin, Christmas tended to be non-eventful for me. When I was child, my Taiwanese immigrant parents only celebrated Christmas for me as an American tradition. Once I became old enough where I was somewhat indifferent to the holidays, it was just a night to eat a nicer-than-usual meal. Even after I met Kelvin, Christmas was just an excuse to get my mom something nice every year outside of her birthday. I guess it doesn’t seem too strange when my mother is the only family I have in the US, but it seems like nothing when compared to the events American families plan out during the winter season. As usual, we had two family meals to go to, as Kelvin’s parents are divorced so there’s something going on for each side. I brought homemade stuff to both of them like I did with Thanksgiving; I guess 2009 was the year I decided to actually start contributing to these gettogethers.

The spread at Xmas Eve dinner

I didn’t try anything new for the Christmas Eve dinner with had with Kelvin’s father, but I made two quarts of ice cream I’ve made before (one each of honey pecan and oolong tea) since they were in need of desserts. We were fed well, considering the amount of hors d’oeuvres we had while waiting for dinner and the amount of food actually at dinner.

Hanabi (and her dress) having oolong tea ice cream

It’s tradition on Kelvin’s dad’s side to trade Christmas presents with family members on Christmas Eve. Before Xmas 2008, we would buy something for everybody in the family. That’s 5-6 people, not including the nieces. A couple Christmases back, we implemented a Secret Santa system where everyone (except the little girls) draws names at Thanksgiving, writes a wishlist of what they want, and buys presents for only one person, with a target $200 budget. People get one large item they want instead of a bunch of smaller items they might not want, and so far it’s worked really well. Last year, I got a nice apartment-sized breadmaker that I’ve unfortunately been underusing. This year, the item on my wishlist went out of stock, so I have to wait until January to get it. I’ve been refreshing the website that sells it everyday to see if/when it comes back in stock. (I want it so bad.) In the meantime, my Secret Santa (Kelvin’s stepmother Greer) gave me a sweet 4-book set of Williams-Sonoma books. I put Williams-Sonoma books on my wishlist since I’ve dug the ice cream one Anna gave me. The 4-book set I got has Pasta, Soup, Chicken, and Salad. I am especially excited about the Pasta and Soup ones.

Presents!

After dinner, I started on our assignment for the Christmas brunch, which was “appetizer”. What’s an appetizer for a brunch? I have no idea. Under Kelvin and Krang’s advice, I decided to go with mini-pigs-in-blankets. I also decided to be more hardcore and make the dough from scratch instead of using store-bought crescent roll dough. For the “blankets”, I used a dinner roll recipe from the bread machine book Kimi gave me as part of my Christmas present last year. The dough was kind of a pain to roll and cut into little triangles, but we managed. Unfortunately, something I ate in the last 24 hours didn’t agree with me, and I only got through 1/3rd of batch before going over to the couch and crashing in discomfort. Thankfully, Kelvin finished the rest of the batch for me. We had both accidentally napped after dinner, so it was like 1AM at this point. As much as I like the lack of store-bought dough flavor my dinner roll blankets had, next time I do these things last second, I’m just gonna buy the pre-made crescent roll dough. I did this for the Rock Band party, and it was SO MUCH faster and easier.

Kelvin ran out of dough for the last two weiners and
made some mutant-looking pigs-sharing-a-blanket

Christmas morning, we headed over to Kelvin’s aunt’s house for Christmas brunch with his mom’s side of the family. The mini-pigs-in-blankets were well-received, thankfully, and they tasted pretty good with sauces (mustard, ketchup, and some sort of wasabi mayo his aunt had). Kelvin’s aunt always offers up an impressive meal, and this brunch was no exception. Unfortunately, my appetite was still bad from the night before, and I think Pepto-Bismol ruined my taste buds because stuff was tasting strange (i.e. the nonalcoholic sparkling apple cider tasted alcoholic and yucky). I ate very little. After brunch and presents, we went straight home to nap and recover.

New Year’s had its share of events, too.New Year’s Eve, we went to Chris and Yoko’s for their party. I spent most of my time trying to beat Mario & Luigi 3, while everyone else partook in Rock Band and Words with Friends (yes, people were playing Words with Friends). We counted down the new year with an iPhone app and listen to Auld Lang Syne on Youtube (yes, we are this nerdy).

Words with Friends is like a disease

On New Year’s day, we went to my mom’s place for a hot pot dinner. I can always count on my mom for the least complicated of holiday events. We even got to say wish my grandparents in Taiwan a happy new year via Skype with webcams.

New thing I learned today: Skype makes money by charging for connections to landlines and mobile phones.