White on Rice Couple

There are so many food blogging events, but so little time.The small hand full of marvelous events that we already enjoy participating in has us scrambling till the very last wee hours of the night to submit our contribution. Procrastinating might be the evil force hiding behind our 2am post writings, but some minds work better under pressure. In our case, it’s two. But between two very busy jobs and continuous projects in the works, we blog when we can and that means late into the night. And by the way, make that a double cocktail at 1:23 am to alleviate any writers block!

Ironically, as much as we enjoy drinking and pairing our foods with wine, we’ve yet to participate in any event focused on wine. Luckily, there are some mighty fine folks out there in the blogosphere who are looking out for our inebriating interests. They are Denise and Lenny, the power couple behind the beautiful and delicious blog, Chez Us. They informed us of Wine Blogging Wednesday, a great event that has wine lovers finding a wine that is fits the theme for that month, then write about their tasting notes. This month’s theme has everyone reveling in old world Riesling, which is hosted by Tim over at Wine Cast. A monthly event like this that requires drinking wine is too good to pass up, so we’re joining in on the festivities and sharing our riesling notes on a German 2005 Veldenzer Elisenberg Spatlese by Weingut Max Ferd Richter.

Old World Riesling is an exciting theme for us this month because we were planning to pair this old world spatlese with some Vietnamese stuffed squid in spicy fish sauce. Todd has been craving this wickedly delicious, but rather time consuming, squid dish, which has been a staple and favorite on our Viet family side for so many years. But the time in making our pork stuffed Vietnamese squid is worth every slimy, gut cleaning, ink-sac squirting effort. So we headed down the coast San Pedro’s various seafood vendors at the San Pedro Fish Market, searching for fresh, baby squid. A major port town in Los Angeles County, San Pedro is a busy shipping port and harbor that is a great source for fresh, local and international seafood. Here, fresh fish, crab, lobster are brought in daily and to our delight, there was plenty of fresh squid at our stuffing disposal.

This Spatlese was quite tasty! It had a moderate nose of green apple, peach, and a bit of honeysuckle forecasting what was about to be tasted. Upon drinking, those elements were confirmed, along with a moderate sweetness that is typically found in a Spatlese Riesling. The fruit was luscious with juicy peach now dominating the palate, but being complimented by the flora notes as well as the mildly tartness of the green apple characteristics. The wine was delicious on it’s own, but our main intent was to see how it would hold up to the challenging pair of this Viet Stuffed Squid and it’s palette dominating dipping sauce of Nuoc Cham. The Nouc Cham has a collage of salty, sour, spicy and sweet flavors, with the spicy being felt long and hard. With a fish sauce this spicy, it’s sometimes hard to find a wine that isn’t too harsh or clashing, or that just gets buried under the fish sauce’s power.

How did this Riesling do? When we eat the squid, we’ll wrap it in lettuce, fresh Viet herbs, then dip it in the Nuoc Cham. The mouth is left tingling and salivating for more. This Riesling married perfectly. The juicy fruit and sweetness of the wine drew out most all of the heat as well as rounding out the flavors. The fresh herbs were reflected back into the wine and more flora notes were discovered in the mouth. With the spice on the palate nearly extinguished by the wine, each bite and drink became nearly a virginal taste every time, with only subtle remembrances of the passing nibble lingering on the palate. As with any good pairing, both the wine and the food developed new qualities that were heightened in the dining experience.

As mentioned, these stuffed squids never fail to please, so we decided to share our ways of preparing and cooking these Vietnamese delicacies with a video! One of the challenges of cooking stuffed squid is to thoroughly cook the filling, without drying out the squid. We prepared the squid in two ways, grilling it on the pan and deep frying them with the a panko bread crust coating. For the pan method, we suggest covering the pan with a lid for a minute or two to help cook the filling without rubberizing the squid. Deep frying them with the outler layer of egg wash and panko bread crumbs keeps the squid moist during this quicky fry. Both are two great options for you to play with. Also, you don’t have to burn in hell like we did with all these chili’s, just add enough to fit your level of heat and spice!

Video #8 - Watch Todd & Diane’s Vietnamese Stuffed Squid with Spicy dipping sauce.

Mực Nhồi Thịt -Vietnamese Stuffed Squid Recipe Here ( actually, coming soon…need more time to write out the recipe!)

But in the meantime, check out these great Vietnamese squid recipes:

• Andrea Nguyen, author of the cookbook, Into The Vietnamese Kitchen, has a stuffed squid recipe with a delicious ginger dipping sauce. We’re not sharing this recipe because you must go buy the book! If you’re interested in Vietnamese cuisine, this is a must book to have on your shelf. Andrea does have a great fried squid recipe on her website, Viet World Kitchen.
• Christine’s tasty and healthy Vietnamese Squid Salad at Holy Basil.
• Wandering Chopsticks makes a yummy salty, sour, sweet Green Mango Salad with Dried Squid.
• Marvin at Burnt Lumpia has a great squid cleaning VIDEO ! Watch it Here…

View all our VIDEOS Here Cooking & Exploring !

Our first pantry fit into a shoe box. Really, it did. Twelve years ago, our belongings consisted of a beat up twin-size futon mattress as a bed, the futon frame (used as a bookshelf) , an old, unfinished desk from Todd’s youth, our precious REI outdoor gear, a bearded dragon lizard and a small box full of cooking tools that we anxiously moved into our new apartment home of 800 square feet. Although we only took possession of 400 square feet of the small apartment, the other half belonged to our gracious roommates who generously furnished the communal areas of the apartment with their TV, their couch, their dining room table and their better quality kitchen ware. Although we pretty much mooched off of their nice furniture, we tried to make up for our lack of furnishings in other ways. Our contribution to making this tight apartment of 4 occupants more cozy and comfortable was the little shoe box of spices and a love of cooking. When the roomies had parties, we took over the kitchen to feed every poor, hungry and mid-term stressed college students that passed through our apartment doors. We created some wickedly good dishes with just 5 pantry essentials: butter, kosher salt, ground black pepper, soy sauce and fish sauce.

Those cramped apartment and shoebox pantry days are long gone. We’ve progressively moved to bigger spaces and gained extra kitchen cabinet space that don’t have to be shared with any more roommates! Hence, our pantry has expanded over the years with the help of better paying jobs, two self-remodeled kitchens (pull out the crow bar and hammer!) and a fascination of spices, oils, salts and anything else that helps tickle our taste buds beyond our comfort zone. Now our pantry has grown beyond a shoe box and fills much of our current kitchen with colors and aromas reminiscent of cuisines from around the world. Every time we think we’re well stocked with goods, there’s a new ingredient that we read or hear about that gets our radar buzzing again. How many do we actually have? Honestly, we’re afraid to even count. Between our combined ethnic heritages spanning from Germany, Holland, Ireland, Vietnam and China and our interests in world cuisines, we’re pretty much adding to our pantry faster than we can count. Our recent addiction of collecting spices includes those from India (we finally got asfoetida & amchur powder!) and peppercorns (kili and tasmanian bush peppers). Once we feel satisfied with gaining knowledge and comfort with using these spices for cooking and understanding their uses in their native cuisines, we’ll be scouring the world’s cuisine once again in search of more flavor and food products.

It’s our turn to submit our pantry to Lydia’s monthly “Other People’s Pantry” event. Over at her delicious blog, The Perfect Pantry, she shares members of her pantry family and highlights recipes and informative facts about these ingredients and specialty food products. She shares a wealth of information, drooling dishes and breathes new life to ingredients that we might already have and teases us with a new, unique spice that creates a yearning for us to try. We can’t seem to keep up with her!

Aside from the photographs, it was very hard for us to decide how or even if we were going to create a video for this event. We changed our mind a gazillion times. Do PEOPLE really want to see what’s in our pantry? Do WE want to show people what’s really in our pantry? The thought of boring everyone to death (oh look, more noodles! *big yawn*) or the thought of exposing our kitchen cabinets to everyone (no pre-cleaning) was embarrassing and possibly a bad publicity move for our blog (well, we’ve never made more than 23 cents off of blog adds anyways, hence, no more blog adds). Since we don’t depend on our blog for income, nor have we ever had a problem of making fun of ourselves, what did we have to lose? Nada, none, zilch.

So we turned on the video camera, put away our dirty dishes and here is what we came up with…

Video #7 - Todd & Diane’s Pantry

Shrimp & Won Ton Chip Asian Nacho’s Recipe HERE

Crunch! Crunch!

And More Crunch!

BTW- Did you really think Mr.Todd’s joke in the video was funny?

View all our VIDEOS Here Cooking & Exploring !

Limoncello has been around for 100+ years, but it’s become the newly discovered liquor of the last couple. It’s emergence can be attributed to everything from celebrities’ inebriation on the little lemon sipper, to bloggers’ enthusiasm for peeling and macerating lemon rind to make their own. For us, we first discovered limoncello and it’s cousin limoncrema 8 years ago in it’s homeland of Sorrento, Italy. Not long after arriving in town, we were being hailed by restaurateurs offer us their taste of southern Italy. Nothing brings back the memories of that incredible trip like limoncello. Except for maybe seeing our dogs spread out in the sun, like the dogs all along the sidewalks in Sorrento,. We continually torment them, “Where do you think we are, in Italy?”

The memory of Sorrento’s warm sunshine, groves of lemons and limoncello is still fresh in our minds. With a garden of citrus trees, making limoncello was as easy as 1-2-3. Literally, we made 1-2-3 “cello’s”. Aside from using lemons for limoncello, we experimented with a blood orange cello from some of the last of our blood oranges from the tree. Kumquatcello was the third creation from that we bought from the farmers market. As our rinds soak in their alcoholic wombs, we are trying to patiently wait for our batches of limon-, blood orange-, kumquat-cellos to come alive. After they are finished, and we are happy with how they turn out, we’ll put the recipes up on our recipes site. The recipe we are basing our experiments off of came from WhatsCookingAmerica. We are extending the maceration time a bit, because we weren’t able to acquire Everclear, and are using vodka instead. The lower alcohol content usually needs longer maceration. Does anyone have a limoncello recipe that they swear by? Swear by, not at. In the meantime, here is a cocktail we came up with for limoncello. We’re going to call it So Cal Sunrise. It’s based loosely off of a cocktail we had called Sorrento Sunrise, but adjusted ours to be less syrupy sweet and to incorporate more or our garden’s fruit. Hope you enjoy. Also if you have a limoncello cocktail that you love, we are interested to try it. We always love a good drink.

So Cal Sunrise Cocktail Recipe HERE

We’re barely squeezing (no pun intended here) in our photo entry for this months Click photography event, hosted by Bee and Jai at Jugalbandi. This months theme is “Au Natural”, where we highlight “Food in it’s natural state, as it comes from the farm, forest, pasture or the sea.” Our original intention was to submit a photograph of coffee beans from our coffee bean tree, but this month was all about citrus for us. So it seemed appropriate for us to collect some citrus from the trees and create a photograph we call, “Citrus Sunburst”. When sliced, citrus fruit always look so bright, beautiful and like the rays of the sun. So we tried to convey this simply with just slices of cut citrus, along with some lime leaves.

“Citrus Sunburst”

We collected 5 citrus fruits from our garden for this picture. Can you guess what citrus are arranged here?

Answer: Pink grapefruit, Naval Orange, Blood Orange, Meyer Lemon and Bearrs Lime!