Avocado Shake

“Avocado shake?” A lot of people look skeptical upon hearing those two words. It’s true that avocados are fruits but they don’t have a typical fruity sweetness to them like bananas or blueberries. No matter; that’s what sugar (or in this case, Splenda) is for 🙂

The ingredients are simple: one avocado, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, some ice chips, and some milk to cover.

Put it in a tall cup, stick in the hand blender, and buzz until smooth. Sweeten with sugar / Splenda to taste.

I love the creaminess that the avocado brings, plus the fresh flavor. Try mixing in some other fruits or flavors if straight avocado is too much for you. Let me know what combinations you come up with!

Aloha.

Grilled Arctic Char

Like a lot of people, we don’t get nearly enough fresh fish in our diet. Fish is so expensive nowadays! Recently, some friends of ours came back from a fishing trip to Alaska. They had almost a hundred pounds of fish that was caught in the wild, cleaned, and packed frozen. Of course, they couldn’t eat it all so we were lucky to get a portion of their haul 🙂

These are four roasts of Arctic Char, a fish similar to trout but is ocean going. I love the cute pink dots going down the side. The fish was unbelievably fresh. It was already cleaned, but somehow were missing the heads (darn it!). I seasoned the inside with s&p and stuffed the cavity with a sprig of rosemary, a few sprigs of thyme, and some thin slices of lemon. Then I secured the cavity with toothpicks.


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Pulled Pork

Fosco had a really long post describing in detail how he made his famous Alabama-style pulled pork for his family. Read it if you want to know everything about the process. If you just want the bare facts, read on.

I took 3 pork shoulders: 1, 9 lb bone-in and 2, 7 lb boneless butts. I prepared a double batch of “Southern Succor” rub from the “Renowned Mr. Brown” recipe to rub on the pork butts. Then I made an injection marinade of apple juice, salt, sugar, water and W sauce plus some of the rub. My pork shoulder injection technique needs serious help. I made a total mess of the kitchen when I sprayed marinade all over as I pulled the needle out of the butts. 😛

After injecting the butts, I rubbed them down then put them in a roasting bag and set them in the fridge to marinate.

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Rasa Malaysian (San Jose)

Malaysian / Singaporean restaurants are becoming more popular here in the South Bay. The most popular one is Banana Leaf in Milpitas. Layang Layang in Cupertino is another well-known one. We used to go to one called Cafe Sochi in Cupertino but that closed down a long time ago. The manager went to Penang Village on Coleman near the San Jose airport and we went a couple of times but hadn’t been back in a long time.

I read in the Metro that there was a new Malaysian restaurant called Rasa Malaysian (no relation to Rasa Malaysia) that was operating in the same space as Penang Village. I thought we’d go check it out to see if it was any good. We arrived around 6:45 and were seated immediately. We heard the manager speaking Hokkien to the cook so we asked if she was from Penang. She said yes. We said we want authentic Penang-style food, not “fixed” to American tastes. She said they would try to accomodate us.
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Making you hungry for the good things in life