February 28, 2021

We are approaching the conclusion of Lunar New Year celebrations for 2021. Lunar New Year this year was a much smaller celebration with just Kevin and I. We jumpstarted the holiday celebration by joining a family zoom call with Kevin’s family. There were over 20 people popping in and out of the zoom call to share updates and send auspicious wishes to family members across the globe. Kevin and I also made personalized phone calls to members of our families just to wish them a lot of good luck and success in the upcoming year. In between catching up with family, I recreated many of my favorite foods over the last few weeks. We spent some days enjoying my mom’s sweet tang yuan recipe. I whipped up multiple variations of dumplings including our tried-and-true pork and cabbage dumplings. I even made a citrus roasted chicken over a bed of charred greens and served it alongside some steamed jasmine rice. Any leftovers were repurposed into stir-fried noodles (for longevity) and soups (including a pho inspired variation). We ate tons of oranges, mandarins, and tangerines for luck and homemade fortune cookies for added luck. With Lunar New Year celebrations coming to an end this weekend, I took the opportunity to make one more family favorite dish, my mom’s savory tang yuan. Most people know of my mom for her sweet tang yuan. She often makes her sweet tang yuan for special occasions and celebrations. Anyone who has had the opportunity to eat her homemade tang yuan always raves about it. What most people don’t know is my mom makes an equally delicious savory tang yuan. Her version often features thinly sliced pork, dried baby shrimps, thickly sliced radish, sliced scallions, chicken bouillon powder, water, and glutinous rice balls. The soup comes together quickly as she cooks everything in a wok – from the soup to the glutinous rice balls. It was the perfect lucky meal to make over Lunar New Year. Since I didn’t get the opportunity to see my family in person this year, I FaceTimed my mom to learn how to make her savory tang yuan. The hardest part about learning my mom’s recipes is she never measures anything. Every ingredient is approximate. Sometimes, she would say just a couple scoops of this or a heavy pinch of that. Getting exact measurements for anything my mom makes is nearly impossible. A lot of the times when I recreate my mom’s recipes, I rely on memory and taste to help me get the recipes just right. Over the last couple of weeks, I played around with her savory tang yuan recipe and made a few changes based on the ingredients I had on hand. My mom insists on adding dried baby shrimps because the dried baby shrimp adds a distinctly salty, savory flavor to the soup base. The dried baby shrimps work almost like fish sauce in a dish. Its salty, savory flavor adds a punch to a dish. You don’t often know it’s there, but you definitely know something is missing in a dish if it’s omitted. Instead of thinly sliced salted pork, I swapped in sweet, smoky, and savory lap cheung, a Chinese-style sausage. Lap cheung is one of those key ingredients my family always had in stock at home. Kevin and I had to drive to the nearest local Asian grocery store to get our hands on these ingredients. Many of these ingredients keep well in the fridge and pantry, so one trip to the Asian grocery store can usually last us a few months. True to my mom’s original recipe, I picked up a radish from the supermarket to use in the savory tang yuan. I also used this opportunity to restock on the glutinous rice flour as well – the main ingredient necessary for any type of tang yuan. With these ingredients in hand, I set out to make savory tang yuan inspired by my mom’s recipe. The savory tang yuan was super easy to make and was oh so delicious, nostalgic, and comforting. Starting Lunar New Year with sweet tang yuan and ending Lunar New Year with savory tang yuan was a great way to keep our family traditions alive even from afar. Here is to many more traditions and food celebrations!

February 21, 2021

Valentine’s Day this year landed right in the midst of Lunar New Year. In between enjoying all of my favorite fare during Lunar New Year, I also took a break to make some homemade heart shaped bagels in the spirit of Valentine’s Day. I just had to take the opportunity to make two of my favorite bagel flavors – everything seasoning and asiago cheese. My love for everything bagels go way back to my childhood growing up in Brooklyn. My mom would buy an everything bagel packed with a generous layer of cream cheese for me on my way to school. My older brother, Pete, on the other hand, was a bit more adventurous and would always ask for a cream cheese and grape jelly filled <insert a new flavor every other day> bagel warmed in the microwave for 30 seconds as his breakfast of choice. With our favorite bagels in hand, we went on our merry way to school without complaints. My love for bagels continued to grow as I grew older. In my teens, I continued to order a bagel for breakfast on my way to school. Sometimes, I even order a second bagel on my way home from school. My teenage years were also the years where I discovered my love for scallion cream cheese. Bagel Boy had opened up in Sheepshead Bay and I started seeing lines upon lines of people heading there. Out of curiosity, I stepped inside and saw a whole world of bagel and cream cheese selections. The scallion cream cheese and vegetable cream cheese both caught my eye and the rest is history. Bagel Boy and its endless combo of bagels and cream cheeses became my go-to spot for getting my fix of bagels whenever my cravings struck. My cravings for bagels continued way into my college years. During my college years, I discovered my love for asiago cheese bagels. They were one of the more popular bagel flavors served on café menus around Michigan campus. I would often swing by the undergraduate library on central campus to grab a bagel with a packet of cream cheese in between lectures. No matter how many bagels I ate, I never grew tired of them. I didn’t realize how much I missed the perfectly chewy New York style bagels or nostalgic crispy cheesy Ann Arbor asiago bagels until I moved to Ohio. Shortly after moving to Ohio, I started to miss the beloved foods I would get all the time back home and in college. Flash forward to ten years later and I am still finding ways to recreate all of the foods I loved. Bagels, being one of my absolute favorite foods in the world, was definitely on my list of priority foods I had to learn to recreate in my own kitchen. A couple months ago, I set out to recreate the beloved bagels I remember eating back in Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. When I thought back to those bagels, I remembered a few key characteristics. The bagels in Brooklyn mainly had a golden brown, crispy exterior, and an ultra-chewy dense interior. The asiago bagels in Ann Arbor were softer with a much fluffier interior than the ones in Brooklyn. In my journey to create the ideal bagel, I studied the components of a bagel. Bagels were typically made of a high gluten flour, yeast, salt, malt powder or syrup, and water. I wanted to recreate a bagel with a nice golden brown crispy exterior and a chewy yet fluffy interior. With my mind decided, I set out to test out different ratios of ingredients in my hopes of recreating my ideal bagel. For the flour component, I used bread flour as it had a fairly high protein content and was readily available at the local grocery store nearby. I already had plenty of active dry yeast and instant yeast stocked up (from my many months of pandemic baking). The only ingredient I needed to order to recreate my bagels was malt syrup. Malt syrup was necessary for two reasons. One, it added a distinct flavor to the bagel. Two, it helped the bagel achieve the golden brown crispy exterior when boiled in a malt-water mixture prior to baking. I spent a few weeks (spread out over the course of two months) testing out different variations of bagels until I got to the version I liked the most. When I landed on the ideal combination for the type of bagel I was looking for, I started playing around with topping the bagel with a homemade blend of everything seasoning featuring dried minced garlic, dried minced onion, poppy seeds, a blend of black and white sesame seeds, and some kosher salt. I also picked up a wedge of asiago cheese and grated it to use for topping my version of asiago cheese bagels. Adding asiago cheese alone onto the bagels was definitely not enough. Cheese pairs wonderfully with black pepper, so I added in some freshly cracked black pepper to the asiago cheese bagels for a little something extra. Kevin and I enjoyed bagels for a few solid weeks for breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner during my testing phase. When Valentine’s Day weekend rolled around, I just had to make bagels one more time. This time, I also made a couple heart shaped versions to celebrate Valentine’s Day. We enjoyed the bagels alongside some (you guessed it) scallion cream cheese as we watched the return of Michigan basketball.

December 31, 2020

We are heading towards the end of such an unpredictable 2020. Every year, Kevin and I try to spend time visiting family and reconnecting over good food. This was the first year we skipped our holiday traditions and stayed home instead. Kevin spent all of his time working and squeezing in a few rounds of gaming here and there. I spent almost all of my free time outside of work in the kitchen testing out new treats. I resolved to take the holidays to test, retest, and refine recipes with the goal of creating the best possible versions of some of my favorite foods. During the holidays, the one food Kevin looks forward to the most is xiao long bao, or soup dumplings. It was a dish he grew up eating when he lived in Hong Kong. He would request soup dumplings whenever possible whether or not there was a momentous occasion to celebrate. In the days leading up to the holidays, his anticipation for soup dumplings would build day by day since he knows the destination we eventually head to (either New York City or Hong Kong) would have some form of authentic, truly delicious soup dumplings waiting for him. Since we couldn’t actually travel to New York City or Hong Kong for the holidays this year, I set out to recreate his favorite dish of all time at home. Soup dumplings are a bit tricky to get just right. The dumpling wrapper has to be thin, delicate, and sturdy. The filling has to be savory, juicy, and plump. Most importantly, there has to be soup filled in each and every dumpling. To get the soup into the dumplings, I had to take one of two steps – either cook up some soup filled with tons of pork bones, chicken bones, or a combination of the two or find a way to gel up homemade or store-bought stock. For a truly savory broth, I knew I had to take the extra step of cooking up some savory stock. I had already intended on roasting a whole chicken for dinner over the weekend, so I saved the bones of the chicken to use in creating a wonderful stock. I let the chicken stock cook low and slow for almost 24 hours in the slow cooker. When the stock was ready, I transferred it to a couple containers to use as a base for soup, pho, and noodle soup later in the week. I reserved a few cups to use as the base for my soup dumplings. While the stock was still hot, I dissolved ½ a packet of unflavored gelatin for every 1 cup of chicken stock. Then, I set out to test, retest, and refine my soup dumplings. Seven trials later, I was able to get my desired soupy, plump soup dumplings. The most important taste test was making sure it met or exceeded Kevin’s expectations of a legit soup dumpling. With each trial, I had Kevin provide feedback on the soup dumplings. I had to navigate through too thick dumpling wrappers to not soupy enough dumplings until I got to my sixth trial of soup dumplings. The sixth trial met Kevin’s expectations of a soup dumpling – thin, delicate wrapper, juicy, plump dumpling, and sufficient soup in the dumplings. He described the sixth trial as the most successful trial of the bunch. To make sure I could replicate the same results, I made a couple more batches of soup dumplings following the lessons I learned in the sixth trial. The seventh trial resulted in success once more. By the seventh trial, I was ready to share my findings. These soup dumplings were so good, I added them to my permanent rotation of celebratory meals to make no matter where our holiday adventures take us in the future. Once our bellies were full from all of the food I’ve been recreating over the holidays, we finally made our way to opening the presents we received from family and friends. I kept the gifts in the original packages until I was ready to use them. The sheet pans, baking molds, and cookware were just what I needed to replenish the kitchen tools I’ve been putting into overdrive during the holiday season. This holiday season, while different from all of the prior holiday seasons, still turned out pretty good. Kevin got to enjoy all of his favorite foods (especially soup dumplings). I got to experiment with even more foods in the kitchen. Our 2020 holiday was finally complete.