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Are You Hungry?

Always

Back in 2004-2005 ish, I was an assistant store manager of a Blockbuster in Pittsburgh, PA. My life, to put it lightly, was a mess. I didn’t have very good friends, there was nothing I was passionate about, and I was miserable. One day, I saw we had a new employee who I realized instantly was way overqualified to be working with me at Blockbuster. She was obviously very smart, a ‘go-getter’, and I felt weird telling her what to do because she was obviously going places. She’d come to Pittsburgh to get her master’s degree and Blockbuster was the only job she could transfer into. I was just relieved to have an employee who I didn’t have to hound into working. Anyone who’s ever worked retail knows what a relief it is to have someone hardworking. Eventually we began chatting and I found out that her ethnic background was that she is half Korean. Back in Pittsburgh in 2005, my Asian food options were Americanized Chinese, Japanese, and one or two places I knew of with Indian food. That was it, so when I heard Korean, I was desperate to find out what Korean food was like.

Even though it was against the rules (me being the boss and all), she and I agreed to go to a place she knew to try it out. The day came and I was a little worried and confused as she had me meet her at a well known Chinese food restaurant. We walked into this intensely intimidating restaurant, where I felt far too shabby to be standing in and sat down, debating as to if I should say something about my confusion. A waitress brought out the normal (fancy) menu and, yep, it was for Chinese food. Undeterred, my friend asked for the Korean menu. Now I was completely confused.

Did you know some places have secret menus? Cause I sure didn’t. And here was my new friend, asking for the secret menu that was then brought out by the owner of the place. She was beautiful and elegant and the memory is a bit of a blur, but before I knew it, a metal dome was rolled out on a cart and my friend cooked us food on this dome filled with live coals. I remember later describing the marinated beef as jerky tasting without being dry and wonderfully garlicy.

This surreal experience opened my world to Korean food (which I’ve completely fallen in love with) and became the foundation to one of the best friendships of my life. For the next 6 or 7 years, my amazing friend was busy concurring the world in one way or another, but ever so often I would get (or make) a call or text and it would always start with, “Are you hungry?” If the answer was yes, and we were both free, we’d meet up at some restaurant and catch up on the week or month or 6 months since we’d last seen each other. In recent time, we’ve made our friendship more of a priority and we meet much more often than every 3-6 months, and more importantly, we’ve embraced our friendships food foundation. We go to various restaurants together, cook together and occasionally have food events. It’s these events that inspired this blog as I often get a lot of strange looks when I tell others how we ate our way through Baltimore or had a Asian infusion taco feast.

Independently, my girlfriend and I also have epic food adventures. We’ve been together 2 plus years and she is the best partner in food crime I could wish for. My friend and her fiancé have their own adventures as well, all of which deserve sharing, so we all decided to start a blog to share our stories, recipes, restaurant opinions, and photos of food porn.

As of right now, I will probably be the main contributor of the page, but hopefully they’ll jump in as they are able. Some postings will be of our past adventures from the last 2 years and others will be new as they happen. Please join us, we’d love to hear your stories as well and investigate your recipes. We are FoodFourFriends!

~WITS

F4F Tackles Chopped: Part 4 Dessert

By the time we got to desserts. I was tired, my feet throbbed, I needed lotion for all the dishes I’s washed, and my enthusiasm was leaving me. We’d been cooking and cleaning since somewhere between 1 and 2pm and now it was after 7pm. There was a part of me that considered skipping dessert, but damn it I wanted something sweet to finish off the party! In all that time,the food kept coming consistently that I was never hungry and not too full. I know in the show Chopped, they just take tiny tastes, but I was eating the whole dish. For the final dessert, Annie and Michael had Oreos, bananas, and peach juice for their dessert.

I about died with delight and amusement when I saw her cutting out what looked like snowflakes while they were working on their dessert.

In the end, they made a bananas foster goo with a berry compote from the peach juice and left over berry microwave pie from their entree round. The Oreo’s were turned into a a buttery biscuit and vanilla ice-cream (store bought) was put on top of that. The stencil was used to make a powdered sugar diamond under the biscuit.

It was delightful! Everything was amazing, which is reflected in the scores.

And last but not least, we had our final round. Or ingredients were None juice, vanilla yogurt, and pizelle cookies.

We’d been practicing panna cotta all week! The first practice run, the pomegranate caramel was hard as a rock, but delicious. The second attempt it was too liquid. For our final attempt, the one that really counted, the ratio of pomegranate and panna cotta was off but it was still super tasty.

It was not easy tallying up so many scores and doing the math, but in the end, the winners of the F4F’s first Chopped championship were: Annie & Michael by 1.6%! Congratulations to the winners! I then asked everyone to vote on the MVP food item of the day. The one dish that, gun-to-your-head if you had to eat something again, what would it be. Everyone was now very full and a little reluctant at the idea of eating again, but 3 to 1 everyone chose Steph’s coconut shrimp as the MVP meal of the day. Steph voted for the lobster and corn chowder Annie made for her appetizer.

In the end, this was an amazing experience. Harder and more work than expected, but amazing and we’re all interested in doing it again (once the pandemic ends). Upon reflection, I’m glad we had time to think about our menus and prepare so much in advance. For our next attempt, we’ve discussed everything cooked in teams (instead of appetizers done individually), a smaller budget (ostrich and lobster are expensive), and trying a different theme.

Please check parts 1, 2, & 3 here and let us know if you’ve ever done anything like this as well! We’d love to see your pictures!

Can I Eat This?: Once Upon a Time

When I was little we took a family vacation. Most people I knew went to beaches or amusement parks. Mine went into the woods. My dad loved to camp but my mom was from the Bronx and they had 4 daughters. The compromise was cabining. We’d spend a week during the summer in a cabin, making our own fire on a grill, hiking, swimming, and wishing we had TV, or at least I did. One year we went to Raccoon Creek and the ranger there was giving an edible plant class. As a food motivated individual I signed up. It was a few classes that ended in a party at the end where the ranger invited everyone who’d taken one of her classes to come eat. She made things like sassafras tea and grape leaves stuffed with rice.

Realizing a few of these food items were probably findable in my neighborhood I instantly became obsessed. Once home, I rushed to the library and found the book My Side of the Mountain (the movie sucked) and other books so I could learn more about edible nature. I ate, clover, dandelion, violets, yellow birch, but the one I really wanted to find was sassafras. I walked up and down my suburban neighbor and found a sassafras tree in only one location; right in the middle of a patch of poison ivy.

Maybe because I was determined to get sassafras tea or maybe because I played too many video games, I was decided to get it no matter what. Twice a year I braved the rash and gathered enough twigs to make tea or leaves to dry out in books to eat whenever I wanted. One year I stupidly did it the week of middle school standardized testing. That really sucked.

Ever since then, every time I’ve heard something was edible I’ve had to try it and also had to make other people try it. The looks people give when you hand them a violet for the first time, and tell them to eat it, are priceless. But they always try it! I never did more than eat things raw or make teas as a kid but as I got older I moved on to making simple syrups for cocktails or salads with various greens like wood sorrel, purslane, and dandelion.

Recently, it was time to take my foraging up a notch and I began making jellies and pies with things I’d never heard of or would have never thought of as food! It’s been a tasty time with a few disasters, but I’ll never forget my first rash covered disaster. When I first started dating Steph, it wasn’t hard to share my foraging love with her and together we’ve gone crazy trying to figure out what was edible and where to get it. Sometimes, I get pictures from my girlfriend occasionally asking “Can I Eat This?” and we figure out what to make from it. Can I Eat This will be the title of all foraging blogs going forwards.

What are your favorite things to forage and where (unless it’s ramps, then don’t tell the internet) do you find them? If it’s something we’ve never tried, we’ll go try it and tell you what we think and what we made!!

F4F Tackles Chopped Part 3: Entrees

Entrees. It has been pointed out to me that we weren’t really tackling Chopped because that TV show actually does chop a cook from the competition with each round. We didn’t want to do that and honestly, after the first round, we played in teams anyway. Here is the order and ingredients again. Maybe if we were able to work in a kitchen where more than one person could cook at once, but until then, we were happy with our plan. 40 minutes per team for the entree round and we were ready to go again!

Our entree round was the one I was the most worried about. Mostly because, though I had eaten ostrich before, I’d never cooked it. I’d hoped the selection would trip up our opponents but of course we got it instead. Steph was worried about the weird canned hot dogs but I had an idea.

I read everything I could online about cooking ostrich and it all said, medium rare and 2.5 minutes cooking on each side. I’d practiced the marinade I wanted on steaks earlier in the week, it included pineapple juice and sesame seed oil. I let them sit for half the time and then threw them on the griddle. Meanwhile Steph worked on a kale salad and cheese twills. I finished by chopping the Viana sausages tiny and frying them for a salty crunch on the kale sautéed.

The remaining marinade was also cooked down for a sauce. As you can tell, at this point, we were really really tired!

And of course I made a tequila and pineapple juice drink with some grenadine for color. The internet lied to me and the giant-running-bird was too rare for everyone (except me) and I threw it back on the griddle for everyone else.

Next Annie and Michael were raring to go. Since their ingredient only said microwaveable pot pie, they thought extra hard and went for a dessert pot pie. Super smart!

In a stroke of genius they used the pie filling and cranberry sauce to make a delicious berry goo to go with their breaded pork chops and sweet potato/ banana pure and fresh greens salad.

I was a bit nervous about the pot pie sauce but a bite of it with the pork chop was excellent and highly memorable!

We tallied the scores and took a deep sigh. There was definitely a part of me that wanted to call it quits, but I was also very excited about the dessert round. We already knew ours would be tasty as we had tried it out twice before the actual challenge but also because we had a thought that Annie and Michael’s dessert would also be amazing.

Quarantine Foods: Bread Pudding

I love to eat and I love to cook. But there are some foods, I’m completely content to have professionals make for me. For example, Pho. Pho is one of my food obsessions, (we can get into that later,) but it takes 12-16 ingredients for one dish, mostly for the broth. The first time I saw the list needed, I noped out and went to may favorite Pho spot in the Strip District in Pittsburgh, Pho Van…. Of course now I want soup. I wonder if they deliver.

Anyway, there are a few foods that are just easier to eat out. Another one of these is bread pudding. Up until recently, I had a pretty strong aversion to mushy textures and it was only the smell of bread pudding in restaurants that made me finally dare to try dessert mush again. So good! Up until lately, I was completely content to order it at restaurants and never gave making it a second thought; until quarantine happened.

In a effort to maintain our sanities, we’ve made a food plan for ourselves, complete with a few cooking challenges to keep us interested. I’ve never felt more like a real adult as we pondered, bought for and finalized our food plan, until we messed up the first day, (but we’re back on track now).

Ok so bread pudding, someone posted a picture on Facebook and I had to try it. The recipe called for 8 cups of bread so we grabbed 2 loaves. Of course, it only took 2/3rds a large loaf so we have extra bread for all those days with sandwiches listed as lunch.

5 eggs, sugar, nutmeg and we dumped it in the only pan we had with large enough sides, out spring form. We’ve used it a few times for cheese cake with minimal leakage.

Of course it went to hell. at least 50% of the egg goo came out and started to burn before the whole thing was done. Determined, we turned on the fan, took the fire alarm battery out, and kept cooking. We also made a bananas foster type sauce, but I wanted it really banana flavored so I put the in first and they crumbled into a brown goo and we didn’t have enough rum (state liquor stores closed early in the quarantine) to flambé it.

We took everything and mixed the pudding and sauce in a large bowl and crossed our fingers.

It was actually delicious. It was a bit too sweet without the ice cream, but otherwise it was great. Not great enough as to convince me to ever do this again, nope nope, it took 3 soaks and scrapes to clean the cookie sheet properly, but it was tasty and made me truly appreciate restaurants even more. You keep doing what you do best….. When the quarantine is over!

~WSTS

F4F Tackles Chopped Part 2: Appetizers

The biggest round of our competition was appetizers! It was the biggest because for some dumb reason, we decided we each wanted to make our own appetizer. This was a delicious choice but damn that was a lot of work. Here is a reminder of our ingredients and the order in which we were each to cook what.

Cooking first was Michael. He loves having his picture taken. Having always seen him before as Annie’s assistant in the kitchen, I was thrilled to see him grabbing the frying pans. Of all the ingredients, he was the most upset about the can spray cheese. He was actually very, very upset about it (Steph is still laughing to herself about that ingredient choice.)

Once the clock started (30 min), the loudest sound was Annie laughing with joy, this was exciting and hilarious and a lot of work. We had trouble (especially Annie) staying out of the kitchen to watch everything he did.

The 30 minutes came and went, but it was unanimously decided we’d rather try a finished meal than half done. The results were a lobster quesadilla with pineapple salsa and a chipotle crema.

His scores are as follows from each of us. It was a consistent trend that people always give themselves the lowest scores. The spray cheese, corn and lobster went into the quesadilla while the pineapple juice went into the salsa. The crema didn’t have a basket ingredient but it was super tasty.

Next up, Steph. From our trial run she was not looking forward to the pre-made dumplings.

She finished in time but looks a little hot.

Steph made amazing coconut shrimp, a zesty slaw and a coffee liquor and pineapple dipping sauce. She ended up using the covering of the dumplings, toasted and chopped up in her coconut dredge on the shrimp. It also seems to be a trend that I score everyone higher than everyone else.

Annie with the same ingredients as Michael dove into cooking with the highest energy level and gusto. She was also not excited by the spray cheese and admitted to only figuring out what to do with it the night before.

After 2 previous cooks, some of our energy was waining and we sat back chilling as Annie threw her appetizer together.

We were all delighted to see her lobster tail and cheesy corn chowder app. The pineapple, spray cheese and corn all went into the chowder. The lobster was sautéed in the shell with Old Bay and a few other tasty seasonings.

Finally it’s my turn. Initially I wasn’t too worried about the pre-made dumplings, until I opened up the bag for my turn. Having been thawed out already, the uncooked dough was a sticky, gloopy mess. I had a very hard time collecting enough of the the exterior to fry for a crunchy element in my tacos. In an attempt to bribe the judges, I also made a rum beverage with the pineapple juice and coffee liquor. It was weird but tasty.

In true chopped fashion, I forgot the wedge of lime for everyone’s dish, they were right in front of me in the pile of ingredients, but I did get done 5 minutes early. The coffee liquor also was used when I cooked the shrimp and the fresh salsa on top had pineapple in it.

The whole thing took maybe 2 hours because we cleaned the entire kitchen between each plate and all the cooking utensils. Sometimes cleanup was easy, but most of the time we had to dump and reboil water and get the oven to temperature. All the food was delicious and I was a little worried I was too full going into the entree round, but we were all too excited and having a blast. Check out Part 1 and stay tuned for Part 3 & Part 4!

Baby Time Food Adventures

My exposure to interesting food as a child was surprisingly minimal for my multicultural family (Mexican & White mixed)–as far back as I can remember the standard meals in rotation were spaghetti and bolognese, frozen corn, mac & cheese, pizza, occasional Chinese takeout, and the same singular salad recipe (shredded carrots, sliced radishes and cucumber, diced tomatoes, and iceberg lettuce–with the eventual addition of butter leaf and arugula). The only truly unusual things we kept in the pantry were chamoy (spicy chili sauce) and tajín (chili powder), kept for fruits and spicy dessert. For a while, we took once-weekly trips to the local Mexican restaurant where I was exposed to a standard slew of Mexican ingredients my mom didn’t usually keep at home. I grew up primarily split between rural Georgia, and rural Germany.

Of course, now that I’m older and out of the house, my mother has expanded her cooking repertoire to slightly more interesting (and tasty!) foods. But growing up she fed my younger sister and me “traditional” American food, only really interspersed with three or four Mexican dishes. Like most children I knew, I was particularly treat motivated and my earliest recollection of knowing that food could come from somewhere other than a box mix/frozen meal or readymade snacks was when I lived with my grandmother for a year so she wouldn’t be alone immediately after my grandfather passed. Most things my grandmother made were from scratch, due to her upbringing during the Great Depression. That year was full of fresh food from her garden and freshly baked treats like cookies, pies, chocolate chip banana bread, and my grandma’s signature blueberry muffin. My mom likes to tell the story of how indignant I was as a four year old, arguing with my grandmother that “blueberry muffins come from boxes” that she agreed to try them my way. Eventually, after seeing them made both ways, I decided grandma’s way was better.

My childhood rotation of foods became slightly more exciting when we were moved to Germany, (“a family adventure”) stationed there for two tours of duty. I’m incredibly fortunate that my parents put me in the German public schools, and that we lived off-post. My relatively plain palate was expanded by early trips to the butcher and cheese trucks that parked off a dirt road that ran behind the church in the village. Before I learned German, they spoke to my mother, sister, and me in broken English, and cut off slivers of their products for us to try. Between fresh animal products and the supply of cheap, fresh, bread, we easily integrated German breakfasts into our lifestyle. I was sent to school with slightly Americanized versions of the Butterbrot in my Brotbox (literally: bread-box) that all students were sent to school with to munch on during breaks. Although my never really adjusted to having lunch as the main meal of the day, we transitioned from fabric lunch boxes filled with snacks to the hard plastic containers with Naschen to be eaten throughout the day.

No photo description available. — Photo from a big fat walk, fall 2008. View of the village I grew up in the Rhein valley, church is the yellow building.

Image may contain: sky and outdoor — Photo from a 2009 “family adventure” to the ruins of Burg Nanstein.

To assist with motivating my sister and me in exploration, my mom took advantage of our treat motivation to get us to walk and explore the villages and towns we went to. My sister, to this day, hates “big fat walks” but I’ve maintained a healthy German appreciation of the outdoors and “pointless walks,” as my girlfriend now likes to call them. At the end of most excursions where we were made to explore old churches, winding cobbled roads and dirt paths through fields or woods or towns older than the US government, there was always a treat. Sometimes that treat was an ice-cream, or a baked good. My favorites were the Quark-Kissen (“pillow” pastries made with fresh cheese) with various jellies and fruits on them.

Blätterteig-Pfirsich-Kissen — Image from here showing a peach-kissen, I was a fan of these because they looked like eggs. The recipe linked is in German, but should be understandable with a little Google-translate!

When we moved back to Georgia in 2011, it felt like I was bumped into a future where everyone had smartphones and television 24/7. Our television access had been fairly limited (Air Force Network) and never set up a few times when we moved between houses so movies and tv were a treat. I quickly adjusted to this change and the Food Network became my preferred backdrop for most activities. I watched everything from America’s Worst Cooks to Good Eats, and yet it still hadn’t fully occurred to me that I could make meals more interesting. My mom and her close friend decided to implement “Fend for yourself Fridays” around this time, which became the most time I’d had in a kitchen outside of the occasional baking project or recipe I’d attempted. Even with a limited pantry of the same things I grew up eating (frozen/canned food, easy box mix meals), I began experimenting and improving on the easy dinners to come up with something I thought was tastier. Substitution in recipes and additions became a game, and I became the resident mac-and-cheese expert.

The move to college severely limited my cooking abilities, with a shared stove and fridge space for the whole floor. Living in a city for the first time in my life probably should have been my food-awakening, but my close friends at the time weren’t the most adventurous eaters. This meant that my exposure to interesting food was fairly limited, and mostly came from family trips to Mexico where, now craving more variety in my diet, I got to learn how to cook and eat some of the staples my mother grew up on. Cooking shows remained my preferred background noise for homework and it wasn’t until I moved into an apartment that I started to have real fun with cooking (and the unfortunate cleanup of the no-dishwasher lifestyle afterwards).

When I first started seeing Jill (WITS & Founding member of F4F), we went to the local botanical gardens. While walking through one of the outdoor displays, she stopped and picked a flower (oxalis, wood sorrel), and urged me to eat it. I was a little confused, but this was nowhere near the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me. It was fresh, citrusy, soft, and who doesn’t like the idea of eating a flower? A childhood of romping though fields and woods pretending to eat “meals” of moss and mud, and exposure to gardening and farmland did not make the leap to falling into Jill’s obsession with edible greenery difficult.

Tiny wood sorrel snack, gathered from a greenhouse.

Of course, now that means I’m a horrible influence and also feed friends (and sometimes curious strangers) samples of the food I snack on outdoors now.

Rescued purslane and wood sorrel from Jill’s work–and future salad!

Jill–and her other food friends have encouraged my enthusiasm for food by participating in crazy multi-course cooking adventures, food excursions, and my introduction to real Korean food. I’ve gotten to eat foods that I probably wouldn’t have tried for a long time–living on a college budget and all. This coming spring and summer I’m looking forward to more food foraging and expanding my map (yes– I’m making my own map with pins) of edible plants in the urban landscape. Anyone interested in a start in urban foraging should check out Falling Fruit! Their listings were a little difficult for me to search through on the mobile end, but it was cool to get a sense of what kinds of edible plants–and how many there are hiding in urban areas. Stay tuned for more tasty food adventures!

-Steph (Founding member of F4F)

F4F Tackles Chopped: Part 1

2 months ago I was complaining. “I wish there was a cooking show where the contestants were given weird ingredients and a time limit to make amazing dishes.”

Up to this point, I’d watched Master Chef, Top Chef, Great British baking, and a ton of other shows, but nothing fitting these parameters. In near perfect unison, my girlfriend and Annie both said:

“That’s what Chopped is!”

Gobsmacked, I started watching…. Which became binging…. Which became obsessing. And of course, I had to challenge everyone to our own rendition of a Chopped inspired challenge.

As the dust settled from Taco Party 2020, we got out pen and paper to decide what to do. We began by each picking 2 proteins, 2 fruit/veg, 2 jam/juice/liquor, 2 dessert ingredients, and 2 pre-made things. These picks were put on note cards and put into hats (yes I’m that gay and have many jaunty hats) and we chose what our opponents were to cook for each.

For the appetizers and entrees, we chose one from each of the non-dessert hats and for the dessert, we chose 2 from the dessert hat and one from the jam/juice/liquor hat. The results are as follows. Don’t mind my terrible handwriting!

Knowing what each ingredient was ahead of time was a huge divergence from the original program. We also decided to give each cook 30/40/40 for each dish as opposed to 20/30/30 on the show. We also decided upon a theme of bbq.

As we all prepared for the contest, Steph and I decided to do a dry run of our ingredients and to really sort out the logistics. We tried our dessert twice. Neither time did we come anywhere near to time allotted, but the taste was incredible, (you’ll find out what later what it was.) When we decided to test out the appetizers with other friends as judges, we learned a few valuable lessons: No more than one dish could be made at a time. We’re all competing against each other for appetizers and there was no way 2 people could cook that way. We did realize we could cook something together (entree and dessert) at the same time, but only with a lot of pre-planning. Finally, our friends gave us a few tweaks for our recipes as all of them were new to us.

Steph’s coconut shrimp for the trial run

2 weeks went by after the initial planning day and it was time to get started. Some items were difficult to find (like currant jelly) and no one could get the notion of BBQ to work, but finally it was time to get started! We drew names for the order of march and then dove into the most epic food experience of my life!

This is a lot of pictures and food so we’ll break it into segments. Stay tuned for Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Hopefully our preparations can help others to do their own challenges. Feel free to ask questions!

Home Made Dumplings

When I was little, my mother’s best friend was from China. Absolutely fascinated by such a different type of food, we asked if we could learn how to make dumpling. Before then, our food was mostly white-poor-man’s food and Puerto Rican. The dumplings were an exciting and tasty addition to our unusual mix of food. I especially loved that we all had to work together to stuff 100 dumpling wrappers for family dinner.

Some 20+ years later I still keep up the tradition, but the original recipe is long gone. I recall ground chicken or turkey, frozen peas and little else.

These days, I intentionally change the recipe every time. Last night, we got together with some friends and made a large batch. We decided on ground pork, mushrooms, red onions, bok choi, and leeks. The veggies were cooked down together, pulverized, allowed to cool and then mixed with the raw pork and peas. There were 4 adults and two children helping, but it still took a little while. About halfway through the mix we added rice noodles for a texture change and tossed everything into the fryer.

Finally, we experimented with dipping sauces. Some people liked the sweet chili mixed with traditional dumpling dipping sauce and ponzu sou sauce. My favorite was regular, store bought teriyaki sauce. We also had general tso sauce and regular soy.

The combination of flavors worked well together, a successful dinner! Those interested in giving home made dumpling a try, the secret ingredient is fish sauce in the mix along with some powdered ginger and garlic. The dumpling wrappers are available at your local Asian market in the frozen section and thaw on the counter easily,

Cheese Cake 3 Ways

I’m going to start this by saying, I don’t bake.

I don’t like relying on recipes, I don’t have the patience to wait as a lump of goo has to rise twice, and probably more importantly, something always goes horribly wrong.

Thankfully for this food adventure, I had a lot of help (basically they did everything and I helped). It all started with one of those videos floating around online about which is better, American style cheese cake or the all-the-rage fluffy Japanese style cheese cake. We watched the video entranced, unable to look away from the fluffy goodness, but still stubbornly loyal to what we grew up with.

Of course this is where my girlfriend (who grew up partially in Germany) protested that the German cheese cake she grew up with was pretty damn amazing too.

We were having this discussion in front of our friend Laura (yes we have more than 2 friends who love food, it’s kind of a requirement for us) who blinked once and then offered to host the competition. No one knew what we were getting into!

We wrote down the recipes from the video for the Japanese and American style cheese cakes while Steph dove into websites looking for the German version. I was able to find bulk quark on eBay for it and we planned the day for the following week. The pile of ingredients was staggering (as seen above). It took hours to make all three cakes. That Japanese was mostly eggs and ended up like an odd blend between an omelet and a soufflé. The German style included lemon which added a good accent. The American style was a disaster, I’ve made cheese cake before and it was amazing, the recipe we found did not do it justice.

Laura’s family and a few friends volunteered to be taste testers and we all dove into the 3 cakes. And just because we’re all a little extra, we also made ganache and raspberry compote as a flexible topping.

I liked them all equally, tho I was a bit disappointed by the American style recipe, knowing I’d had better. In the end, the general consensus was the German style was the best of the 3 on the table.

Not convinced the recipe for the Japanese style was the best available, I ordered one from Goldbelly (a bit pricey but worth it) and realized that recipe hadn’t done that cake justice either. There has been talk to a redo, but we’re all taking a break for now. I’m pretty sure the sugar high from that much cake will last me another week!

Anyone have ideas for other similar competitions we could do?

~WITS

The Infamous Taco Party of 2019

When we have a themed party, we go hardcore. One of the best examples of that was our famous, or infamous taco party of 2019. My girlfriend is half Mexican, I’m half Puerto Rican and Annie is half Korean (Michael is a Classic southern gent), together we combined our backgrounds to make the most epic taco party ever. We made fresh corn tortillas (yellow and blue), bugolgi beef, Chinese steamed buns, Puerto Rican inspired salsa, mango fish, pickled veggies, slow cooked beer pork roast, and two pounds of cartelized onions. That doesn’t include the fresh veg, kimchi, and other pre-bought ingredients (like flour tortillas).

The hardest part for me was figuring out how to make the steamed buns. We thought the recipe wouldn’t be enough so we doubled it, huge mistake! The dough fluffed up and we had millions, even after we ate our weight in buns. They ended up thicker than I’m used to in restaurants and because we used a brand new steamer basket, tasted a bit like the bamboo basket, but everything was delicious.

We had so much food it covered the table and the counter, the leftovers made for interesting omelets the next day. We should have invited more people to eat with us, but we’ve learned not everyone goes as hardcore as we do, which sometimes puts a damper on our fun. It was such a great experiment, by popular demand, we’ve decided we’re doing another this year, but instead of Hispanic/Asian infusion, we’re just going pure Mexican.

Other themed parties have included the gnocchi party, the cheese cake party, the if-you-get-better-I’ll-make-you-food party, and the soup party. Eventually there will be posts and links to all these parties.

Meanwhile: Slow cooked beer pork

In a crock pot combine, 2 sliced up onions, desired hunk of pork, wheat beer (2 bottles), and a generous amount of Goya Adobo, simmer all day. Shred and eat in tacos. Goes best with corn tortillas, cartelized onions and bugolgi sauce. Be warned, the smell will attract hungry neighbors.