Category: food

2014, cooking, food, friends, travel

Paris Vacation – part 4

by casadeberryLeave a Comment on Paris Vacation – part 4

Apologies for the delay in posting the next installment. I am almost 100% recovered from my elbow surgery, don’t have complete range of motion yet but every day is a little better.

While we were in Paris, we found out there was a Christmas Market going on, on the Champs Elysees. It’s like the Art & Wine festivals or Harvest festivals we’ve been to in the US, with lots of vendors from all over selling their wares, many of those were food items that had us drooling!

It was here that I had my first (of only two during the whole trip) Nutella crepes:

One of the vendors was selling these HUGE tiles of chocolate of all percentages – milk, dark, bittersweet, etc.

Several vendors were selling churros. Except they’re called by a different word in French:

So, um, this is a word we Latin people use for uh, something else. Two something elses, in fact. Females have them, and you wear a bra over them. As much as I wanted some churros, I could not muster up the courage — or the straight face — to go and order some.

Speaking of straight face . . .

I did order macarons from a vendor that had just about every flavor you could think of. We were having friends over to cook us a meal and we were providing the dessert.

In that box are salted caramel macarons, vanilla, double chocolate, orange cream, and Nutella. SO GOOD. I think I ate three of them before our friends arrived. MY BAD.

The meal our dear friends F & B cooked for us was a raclette. This is a traditional dish where melted cheese is poured on top of cooked potatoes, meats, and vegetables. In our case, the potatoes were steamed, then sliced, and we had a variety of charcuterie.

It was one of the best meals I’ve had in my life. The cheese was perfectly smooth and you just mix everything and eat it — or at least I did. We do not, as a habit, have huge meals consisting of potatoes, meats, and cheese, but that is changing, my friends, because I plan on trying my best to recreate this dish and making it our splurge meal. Good thing we will soon be somewhere with a reputation for good cheese. (More on that soon, I know you’re getting tired of hearing me say that)

And no, there are no more pictures because I was too busy stuffing myself.

2013, cooking, food, friends

Ukrainian dinner

by casadeberryLeave a Comment on Ukrainian dinner

Steve’s coworker and her friend came over last night to cook a wonderful Ukrainian dinner for us. I had met them a couple of months ago at the appreciation event for Oracle Open World, which Steve’s company attended. There was food galore, drinks for all and some skinny guy singing:

Our new friends decided to share their culinary expertise and make delicious, traditional food for us:

They treated us to borscht and Russian salad – which in Russia/Ukraine they call
Olivier salad, after the Belgian chef who invented it in Moscow. I love hearing about the origins of names of food, in Peru we also have something called “ensalada rusa”, i.e. Russian salad, which was very, very similar to what we enjoyed last night. Also, because you need to know this ;D nutmeg in Ukrainian is muskatnyy̆ horikh and in Spanish it is nuez moscada. Muskatnyy̆ – moscada, similar word roots.

The borscht was, for me, the highlight of dinner. It was so fragrant, so complex in taste, so full of texture, that I’m sorry to say Steve isn’t going to find any of the leftovers when he gets home tonight. We also had some roasted chicken drumsticks made by Steve (our oldest LOVES drumsticks), all-American apple pie, and I made some cupcakes, which we decorated with the colors of the Ukrainian flag in honor of our wonderful guests/cooks.

So thank you, gracias, and spasybi to our Ukrainian friends, for a wonderful evening and amazing food!

2013, food, fruits

Delicious Fruit Salad

by casadeberry1 Comment on Delicious Fruit Salad

We love us a yummy fruit salad. Eating sweet, ripe fruit, each bite a little different, it makes me grateful for the bounty we are able to enjoy. I’ve been wanting to try something I saw on Pinterest a while ago, a little trick from Rachel Schultz to make fruit salad even yummier.

I chose some basic ingredients:

and then added Rachel’s magic ingredient – instant vanilla pudding mix!

Mixed everything well, and then the vanilla pudding powder began mixing with the juices from the fruit. So good! I don’t think I will ever make fruit salad without pudding mix – thank you Rachel for this awesome tip!

2013, cooking, food

Yummy doughy goodness

by casadeberry1 Comment on Yummy doughy goodness

My husband sent me a recipe he found online, a couple of weeks ago, to make pretzels just like the ones sold at the Auntie Anne’s stores. We had everything at hand and gave it a try:

Steve kneads the dough:

The lovely things in the oven

The lovely things out of the oven:

The lovely things ready to be eaten

I have to say this is one of the rare copycat recipes that I have tried, that actually gives you a product resembling the original. These pretzels are DE-LI-CIOUS!!! This is actually the second time we have made them in the past month because they turned out so yummy the first time. The biggest “tip” we can offer is the one in the recipe itself, to roll out the dough super thin because after you shape it into a pretzel, it will puff back up, but either way the pretzels taste so good.

Given that neither of us is a baking or a breadmaking expert, and that we’ve made this twice with delicious results both times, I’m going to vouch for this recipe as a good one, so if you’ve been wanting to make pretzels at home, I’d give this one a try.

2013, cooking, food

The “Chopped” Project

by casadeberryLeave a Comment on The “Chopped” Project

I love competitive cooking shows. My favorite is MasterChef; it is one of the few shows my husband and I make a point to watch together, but sometimes I’ll catch a few episodes of Chopped. If you haven’t watched it, the premise is that you compete by making the best use out of a mystery box of ingredients. I decided to have my own little Chopped project, competing against no one but myself, in order to use up some ingredients in my pantry.



The list included: Rolled oats, au gratin potatoes, quinoa, lentils, Italian style bread crumbs, tikka masala curry sauce, mango nectar, and Moroccan spice mix (ras el hanout). Nothing earth-shattering, but I wanted to use some things that had been sitting in the pantry for a few weeks and add some variety to my usual meal rotation.

Next week I will share the meals I made to use up my ingredients – I hope your weekend is a wonderful one!

Weekend Bloggy Reading

2012, flowers, food, fruits, gardening, plum, veggies

Garden Update: First Week of May

by casadeberryLeave a Comment on Garden Update: First Week of May

There has been a lot of growing going on in our backyard — I can’t wait for harvest time to start enjoying our veggies and fruits, do some canning with friends and family, and feed my family lots of wonderful, homegrown food!


Imagine about 40 of these babies and you’ll get an approximation of what we have in the backyard. From the original 72 plants I grew from seed, I gave some away and donated some to my youngest’s school. I figure a few are not going to make it, but the truth is, I need to buy more cages — eek!


We grow some of our strawberries on the top of those upside-down hanging tomato planters. Last year we got lots of berries and lots of tomatoes, so we’re going for it again. A friend gave me another planter so hopefully they both do well.


My roses make me smile every time I go out to the backyard. I think some of them are going to decorate our home this week.


Our plum tree will give us lots of sweet, juicy plums this year. Plum jam is a pain to make but just so good!


There are hundreds (thousands?) of tiny grapes, the size of a pin’s head, all clustered and green right now. They’re Concord grapes, and once they’re ripe, my boys love to run around the backyard, scooping up a few each time they pass the grapevine.


I had never heard of Swiss Chard until I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — and no wonder Barbara Kingsolver likes it so much! We bought the plants once, three years ago. It just comes back on its own. I did get some Chard seeds for my 40th, so I’ve added to Chard Row.


One of my favorite fruits to eat as I’m working in the backyard are blueberries. I’ll be weeding for half an hour or pulling tomatoes off their plants and run over to grab a few blueberries. Then the boys see me and pretty much empty the plant of its fruits within 10 minutes. And hey, that’s why I grow stuff, right?

I have lots more to show you in the next Garden Update – peas, broccoli, corn, carrots, beans, etc. Stay tuned!

2012, boys, food, friends, lunch, peru

A Peruvian St. Patrick’s Day

by casadeberry2 Comments on A Peruvian St. Patrick’s Day

I know, weird, right? But let me tell you how it happened.

Recently, I saw on Facebook that my brother was a fan of a Peruvian food truck called Sanguchon. The main locations are up in San Francisco, but, much to my delight, I saw that they were also in various places around the bay area. My husband, his parents and our oldest had business to attend to on Saturday – they would be gone the whole morning and part of the afternoon, so I decided to take my youngest to try a bit of Peruvian food. Our good friends J&M were free for lunch and live super close to where the food trucks would be, so we met up there.


The menu looked pretty good, many Peruvian dishes made into sandwiches or wraps, and lovely side dishes, dessert and drinks were also available.



The first offering on the picture above is Pan con Chicharron – a sandwich that includes the ingredients for the traditional weekend breakfast in Peru. The bread was crunchy but not hard, made specially for Sanguchon, and the meat inside was flavorful and moist. At home we would serve this on a plate instead of as a sandwich, the meat alongside the fried yams, with some red onion and spicy yellow pepper sauce. I was happy that the flavors worked all together in the sandwich, and my friends seemed to enjoy theirs as well.


My friend M holding up her Pan con Chicharron. Yum!

The next picture is of Lomo Saltado, which, again, we serve as a meal, but next time I would love to try it as a sandwich. It’s stir-fried pork or beef with fries, tomatoes and onions. My husband learned to make this for me 😀

Next are Yuca Fries, which, I will be totally honest, are not my thing. I find Yuca to be too dry and am happier with sweet potatoes or yams as a side dish.

Inca Kola is the national soda of Peru – back there we love to drink it with anything, but for some reason it really seems to work with Chinese/Peruvian food. Every Chifa (Chinese restaurant in Peru) says that their food goes great with some Inca Kola, and it’s true. It’s very sweet and crisp and I love it. They now sell it at my local Target (???) and I do my best to avoid it because there is no Diet Inca Kola.

The last item in the picture is Chicha Morada. Peru has many varieties of corn, including a purple corn that we use to make this sweet drink and a sweet pudding called Mazamorra. My dear friend K loves Mazamorra and calls it “purple stuff” ;D I’ve discovered that Whole Foods carries Purple Corn flour from Peru so I’m going to try and make some Mazamorra.

Our favorite part of lunch, however, were the Alfajores:

I love alfajores. Alfajores are so bad for me, because I can’t eat just one. My little man was chowing down on these and kept asking for more. Shortbread cookies with dulce de leche (or manjarblanco, as we call it in Peru) in between, dusted with powdered sugar. So good. These were excellent. The cookies were very tender and the filling just right.


A good friend of my family has a killer Alfajor recipe, and now I need to get it from her because I didn’t realize how much I had missed them! Who knew a dessert of Arabic origins, brought from Spain to South America, would become such an integral part of our cuisine?

And what on earth does Sanguchon mean? Well, in Spanish, the word “sandwich” became “sanguche” (SAN-goo-che) and a Sanguchon means a big sandwich. I ate only half of mine and saved the rest for later. It was a nice surprise to find Peruvian food and be able to share it with our friends. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, check out Sanguchon’s schedule to see if there a food truck near you!

Oh, and if you’re going to try the alfajores, please don’t wear black pants like I did – the powdered sugar went everywhere! ;D

2012, food, organizing, pantry

Pantry re-org 2012

by casadeberry3 Comments on Pantry re-org 2012

I try to go through my pantry every couple of months,  but who am I kidding, two months becomes three and four and by the time I get to it, the poor shelves have become a mess. To begin the year with a clean slate, I took everything out and grouped things on my dining room table before putting them back.

Again, I didn’t spend a cent on this – I had most of the bins already in the pantry and found a few others throughout the house.  I made the labels and hung them with some denim-stitching thread.  Easy peasy, simple, and it makes me happy to open the pantry doors – btw, they are old cabinets that my husband repurposed so we’d have more food storage.


Here is where I store many prized items from Peru – a powder mix for lucuma ice cream, mazamorra mix packets, and various others. I’ll tell you more about Peruvian food soon.


The soups and broths bin, plus a rogue tub of french fried onions. We love miso soup, it makes for such a comforting meal, or snack, depending on what you put in it.


Potatoes and rice. And lentils, apparently.


A veritable cornucopia (ha) of sauces. Pasta sauces, white sauces, Indian cuisine, etc. We do love our sauces. What I like a lot is that I can cook two pieces of chicken and put spicy sauce on my husband’s plate and not on mine. Spicy hot food and my esophagus do not get along.


The most often used bin in the pantry. My oldest boy eats pasta every single day, and lots of it. I buy pasta at Trader Joe’s, where it’s still 99 cents/lb., cheaper than anywhere else. I also buy plain marinara sauce at TJ’s, and then doctor it up with spices.


Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. We have a ton of jams and jellies, and pancake and crepe batters. Yum yum.

That’s my pantry as of two days ago – I can find anything I need easily and it’s also easy to see how much I have left of various items. There is another shelf at the bottom where the bulk items go, i.e. flour, coffee, etc. At some point I do plan on making the pantry prettier, but “organized” will have to do for now 😀

2011, boys, food, holiday, home, parties

Our Christmas

by casadeberry2 Comments on Our Christmas

My oldest decided to use a whole jar of sprinkles for Santa’s cookies ;D

it was all about quality, not quantity because the rest of the batch was deemed not worthy of decoration.

The key words this year were “super hero” for my oldest, and “Godzilla” for my youngest, so most of their considerable loot was in one of those two camps.

I love little-boy bedhead!

My husband did an outstanding job with dinner, again, with a few dishes made by mom and me. We made the little Santa hats that were all over pinterest.

All too soon, the festivities ended, mom went back home, and we got some much-needed sleep. In a few days we will host the last of our holiday season events, a New Year’s Day brunch. We are doing it potluck-style, with us providing coffee/tea and pancakes/waffles, and everyone else bringing other items. So far, our response list is looking scrumptious!

2011, autumn, baking, boys, candle, cooking, dining room, entertaining, family, food, home, husband, kitchen, love, lunch, november, thanksgiving, wine

Our 2011 Thanksgiving

by casadeberryLeave a Comment on Our 2011 Thanksgiving

Our thanksgiving lunch went beautifully; Steve and I planned, made lists, set up a schedule, and with some help from our family, we had a great time.  I printed the menu and set it up in the dining room:

My father-in-law showed up early — he was in charge of the turkey — and also helped out with the rest of the cooking. He and my oldest had a blast peeling potatoes:

Soon my boy was a potato peeling expert!

I had told my husband that I’d seen (can’t remember where!) an idea to use a wreath as a centerpiece and he came up with this:

Isn’t that cool?

Soon the rest of the family showed up and we started doing the oven-revolving-door dance. Dishes would go in, in twos and threes, and something yummy would come out. Soon our dining room table looked like this:

This was about half of the food we made. The wine took up one of the hutches ;D and the desserts people brought took up another.

Here is some of my wonderful family.

The little cups hold the butternut squash bisque, which was DELICIOUS – Steve made it from scratch and I am so happy there is some left over, because I’m having some of it for lunch!

One of my favorite moments was when we all shared what we were grateful for and my oldest said he was grateful for “the colors of autumn”, I thought that was so unusual and sweet.

I hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful, and if you don’t celebrate it, then I hope today is a great Friday and I wish a wonderful weekend for everyone! I’m going to leave you with the menu we had for our Thanksgiving Lunch.

Weekend Bloggy Reading