Half-Chinese Braised BBQ Ribs

Half, hapa, whatever you want to call it – The reason I gave this recipe its name is because I combined traditional ingredients with American BBQ sauce to obtain the same taste as my mom’s recipe. There are two versions of this recipe so you can customize it to your taste. One uses big sliced…

Braised Tilapia with Celery

Most tilapia recipes call for frying and baking. Usually I wouldn’t question those two methods of cooking because they are lazy-approved. Today, however, I had a bunch of sad looking and wilting celery that needed to be cooked since they were far past the point of being edible in their raw form. I also had…

Peri Peri Lamb Naanwich

Guilt is an emotion I struggle with on a constant basis. I ask myself…am I being too lazy…shouldn’t I be making more FRESH food because it is better for the body? When that guilt sets in, I pull out one of my half-half cooking tricks. This involves buying a protein that is fresh, but pre-seasoned…

Instant Butter Chicken Curry

Curry is one of the few dishes I have not attempted to make from scratch for two main reasons. I am not particularly picky about curry and store-bought curry is pretty darn good. For Indian curry, there are a couple brands that make ready-to-eat curry in a jar. I used the Kroger brand from Fred…

Seafood Hot Pot (Soup)

Happy Chinese New Year! Festivities usually include a very large feast of multi-courses either at a restaurant, at home or both with family, extended family, and those cousins you didn’t know existed. Since most of my relatives lived far away from us, my family had a more low key celebration. My mother would plan the…

Vegetarian Japchae (Stir Fried Glass Noodles)

When I first moved into my neighborhood in North Seattle, the closest grocery store featured mostly Chinese ingredients. Over the years, they began to emphasize other cuisines such as Korean, Indian, Russian etc in order to compete with another nearby asian store. I was not happy at first. Many of the items were unfamiliar. Last…

One-Pot Mapo Tofu with Sausage

The best thing about ground sausage is that it is versatile and pre-seasoned. When I returned home from the holidays, I went into my fridge and examined what needed to be cooked. There was a package of unopened tofu. I knew that I had plenty of ground pork in the freezer so it made sense…

Jimmy Dean Fried Rice

Costco is dangerous. My husband bought more Jimmy Dean sausages than I knew what to do with. One lazy night, I decided to try making fried rice with Jimmy Dean. It’s pork, it’s  pre-seasoned, and most importantly it’s filling, so I didn’t see a downside. I tossed and crumbled a pound of Jimmy Dean sausage…