My close friend, Ada, introduced me to the delicious combination of sun dried tomatoes and cream cheese almost fifteen years ago. Back then, I was definitely not as adventurous of an eater as I am now. She had purchased a jar of sun dried tomatoes at Costco and started playing around with flavors. When our other close friend, Colleen and I went over to her house one day, she insisted we try these appetizers she had quickly whipped up in the kitchen.

My family made rice for dinner every night throughout my entire childhood. The only exception was pizza night on Friday nights. My dad would pick up a large cheese pie from N&D’s Pizza every Friday to bring home for dinner. We all anxiously waited for my dad to come home on Fridays so we could all gather around the dinner table and devour the fresh out of the oven pizza. On days other than pizza nights, my family’s go-to dinner is almost always rice with a variety of sides.

If you ever ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant with my family, the one dish you will always find at the dinner table is walnut shrimp. It is a classic dish served during special occasions including birthdays, holidays, and weddings. Walnut shrimp is my dad’s favorite dish so we can always count on him ordering the dish. Whenever my family went to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate a special occasion, each member of our family gets to pick a dish for dinner.

When I lived in Chicago, I would frequent the restaurants in Chinatown at least once every other week. Chi Café was one of the restaurants I ordered from fairly often (other than Joy Yee’s). Whenever I made the trip to Chi Café, I always ordered beef chow fun and hand shredded chicken. Beef chow fun is one of my favorite Chinese noodle dishes. It may be my second favorite dish just after Yang Chow fried rice. Other than those two dishes, hand shredded chicken (手撕雞) is a third dish I often order to round out my meal. Hand shredded chicken isn’t the prettiest dish, but it is very good.

Thanksgiving is coming up in less than a month. I’ve already started brainstorming side dishes to make for Thanksgiving. One of the vegetables I am hoping to incorporate into Thanksgiving this year is Brussels sprouts. Earlier this week, I was at an education conference and had some Brussels sprouts for lunch. I don’t typically cook Brussels sprouts and did not eat much of it growing up. When I was at the grocery store shopping for groceries this week, I saw some Brussels sprouts on sale and decided to pick up a package to cook for dinner.