This week I was literally cutting and gluing handmade cards for my mom and mother-in-law, like a little kid. This year, we didn’t have much of a budget to spend on them, so instead of buying them generic cards and picking out another kitchen tool to send them for Mother’s Day, I decided to bust out my inner child and go nuts with the arts and crafts instead. We ended up sending them each one of our kitchen art prints along with my handmade card. It’s a shame they don’t live close by, because if they did, I would’ve made them pancakes.

Pancakes actually remind me of my mom. On certain mornings when she had more time before work, she would wake up early and make us pancakes…the Bisquick kind, but that was fine by me. I still felt the love.

When you want to make pancakes for your loved ones (or yourself), but there’s no Bisquick in sight, you can easily whip up the batter from scratch, as long as your pantry is supplied with a few basic baking ingredients. The key to making pancakes is that you have to not overcook them. It’s just like baking a cake. If a cake is baked right, it’s moist and tender. If it’s baked for too long, it’s dry.

Now eating pancakes with just maple syrup is great. But if you want to make things a little more special, try topping them with maple syrup AND balsamic strawberries! [...]

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Can I just be truthful and tell you that it feels FANTASTIC to be missed? I haven’t had throngs of people flooding me with emails or tweets about how they miss my very existence, but I DID have a handful of friends, acquaintances, and even a stranger or two tap me on the shoulder and tell me that they missed my blog entries! Aw shucks. Sometimes it’s nice to be encouraged, because seriously being a blogger has its ups and downs. Sometimes you post something so frivolous or “trivial” in your eyes, and you get tons of comments and reactions. And other times, you pour your heart out and spend hours on making a video or creating a recipe and you get crickets. It just goes to show, you never know what will perk people’s interests.

But I digress. Like I was saying, it felt nice to be missed by the small handful of people who took the time to come up to me and say, “hey…you haven’t been blogging for a while.” Just because they noticed, I feel truly thankful. And just for that, I decided to blog again today and keep you in the loop. [...]

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Back when I was a working single gal and living with my parents in Pennsylvania, my aunt and grandmother came to visit from Korea. My aunt would wake up really early in the morning and prepare breakfast for everyone. She’d force us all to eat a hearty helping of whatever she could find in the house, such as toast or bagels, as well as a huge platter of cut up fruit. No one could escape off to work until we had our fill. The selection of pastries varied, as well as the fruit, but the one thing that she consistently fed us were kiwis. [...]

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I don’t have much of a sweet tooth because even in the mornings, rather than cereal, pancakes, or a muffin, I’d rather eat something savory, like eggs, a breakfast sandwich, or toast with butter. At a party, instead of grabbing a cookie, I’d probably go for the vegetables or a bowl of chips. You get the idea. Maybe that’s why I’m such a fan of desserts that are both sweet and salty.

Lucky for me, this is quite the trend lately. I see things on menus like “sea salt caramel latte,” or “maple bacon cupcakes” everywhere. So maybe eating pretzels on brownies isn’t something new, but I find this recipe worthy of posting because it’s just good old fashioned scratch-baking at it’s simplest form. You just dump everything into one pot, stir it up, and pour it in the pan. This means, no fussing with room temperature butter, checking to see if you have baking powder in the pantry, or dealing with sifting your flour and cocoa powder. So let’s get baking. [...]

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I should probably win an award for “blogger who can go the longest without blogging.” We’ve been traveling quite a bit for family obligations, but we’re finally back in California now. Once all the traveling was done, it took me a while to regain focus and discipline to blog again, so I let days and days go by without even thinking of my next entry. Thanks for bearing with me while I rested and got over my writer’s block.

While we were in Philadelphia, of course we ate cheesesteaks. We also had some awesome Chinese food, pizza, salmon salad…you name it. But I’d say the most memorable meals were probably with my sister and brother-in-law, the last two days we were there. [...]

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When I was a newly graduated young adult, and my friend Yong Mi was still in college, she made me a delicious and memorable meal from her dorm apartment. The thing that impressed me the most was the fact that she didn’t have a real kitchen. But that didn’t stop her from making me a complete dinner with one little rice cooker! Did you know that you could saute things inside your rice cooker? I never knew that until she did it in front of me. But I guess it makes sense. It’s kind of like a small electric griddle. To this day, I still remember exactly what she made me: buttered rice with sauteed chicken breasts and tomato salad.

Years and years later, we are now both married, Yong Mi has two kids, and we live across the country from one another. During my recent trip to Philly, I had to make time to see her and guess what she decided to make me…rice and tomato salad, but this time we had it with steak. Hey, we’re not in college anymore. We gotta get fancy now!

The meal brought be back to her dorm room days and when I got home, I had to make a twist on that recipe. I could’ve made buttered rice, but I find that there’s enough flavor in the tomato salad to complement plain rice. So if you want to eat it over rice, just cook up a batch like I did. Otherwise, this meal would be tasty with some crusty garlic bread or roasted potatoes. It’s really up to you. [...]

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