taste of home

There are two types of salads: appetizer salads that make you excited for the meal to come and meal salads filled with robust and filling ingredients. This is the former but just because a salad is an appetizer salad doesn't mean it can't be delicious. In this one we have romaine lettuce, carrots, mini pink turnips, cucumbers, Manchego cheese and homemade basalmic vinaigrette. Light, crisp and refreshing and just enough to make me more hungry for the steak to come :)

As I sat in an airplane waiting for take-off in Mexico, I decided to spend my last night of break at home in our spacious kitchen on a Saturday night instead of my dorm back at Penn. Dinner tonight was an oldie but a goodie of steak and potatoes. In the process of cooking with my dad and cutting some Manchego cheese, I started pondering over my foodblog and decided to spend this post doing a little bit of reflection and story-telling (sprinkled with the usual food pictures...I really don't like the phrase food porn for some reason so I always just say food pictures).
   

I absolutely love potatoes. In case you haven't noticed. I only blog about foods I like. What's the point of trying to figure out how to make beets if I don't want to eat it when I'm done? My secret ingredient to making potatoes is paprika. It's not very spicy but the smokiness adds a really enjoyable element to the dish.



From time to time people will ask me what the purpose of my food blog is, which always puzzles me because I never know how to answer it. Truth is, I'm not really sure. I've always been obsessed with food. From the time I was eight and I learned how to make tomato and eggs from my mom, I found myself in the kitchen alost everyday of the week helping my mom make dinner. When I was younger, I dreamed about having my own cooking show and owning a restaurant. Then the restaurant turned into a chocolate shop, then a cafe and then a bakery. After a while it was all about becoming a pastry chef so I could make really pretty desserts. Of course, evading college and making chocolates for the rest of my life isn't the most practical of life choices (Now my dream is to be the next Stephen Starr). Last summer, I was inspired by a very cool sorority sister in my lineage to start a food blog.

Left the meat cooking to my dad but I did catch him marinading the meat: montreal steak seasoning, chilli peppers, garlic vodka (more on this later), salt pepper and garlic salt. Cooked the New York Strip for 20 minutes until the internal temperature reached 140 degrees and the color was a nice medium red.

Usually we cook the steak on the grill but since the weather still hasn't gotten warmer, we used the handy grill pan instead.

For me, the food blog is an outlet which allows me to ramble about my obsession and passion for food and eating. If other people get something out of it as I go about snapping pictures and experimenting with cooking, then all the better.

Watch out for a post on Mexico and brunch tomorrow :)