Seeking Food - By Ketojinic

Merrrrrrrrrrry Christmas! What did I cook today you ask? HAM cooked in pineapple juice and rubbed down with brown sugar. and a whole lot of cookies - chocolate chip, sugar cookies, peppermint chocolate chocolate chip, rice crispy treats with fruity pebbles, peanut butter cookies, and a carrot cake. Yesterday I made a 7 up bundt cake. It was lemony and not too sweet cuz I only used half of the sugar the recipe asked for. I bought these items to a potluck where the main dish was dok man doo guk, which is a Korean dumpling and sliced rice cake soup with egg, dried seaweed, and beef as garnishes. Pretty delish. I'm glad I missed out on the pizza and the korean fried chicken they were feasting on throughout the day (as I was busy with my own oven). After dinner with the fam, I brought the leftover ham home and made ham soup. Tomorrow, I'm going to try to make a ham and spinach and cheese quiche. I love fattening people up for the holidays!

I just bought $10 gift certificates for $0.60 (that's sixty cents, people... yes, cheaper than a can of diet coke) on www.restaurants.com. Just type in "GIVE" for the promo code and you get 80% slashed off of an already reduced $3 (for a $10 coupon) for a mere $0.60. What I bought: Item Name: O'Mamamia Item Number: $10 Quantity: 1 Total: $0.60 USD Item Name: Pitfire Pizza Company Item Number: $10 Quantity: 4 Total: $2.40 USD Item Name: Soleil Westwood Item Number: $10 Quantity: 2 Total: $1.20 USD Item Name: La Bruschetta Ristorante Item Number: $10 Quantity: 1 Total: $0.60 USD Cart Subtotal: $4.80 USD Sales Tax: Cart Total: $4.80 USD Payment details Transaction ID: Item Price: $4.80 USD Total: $4.80 USD I paid $4.80 for $80 worth of food at the 3 places I frequent the most and one new place (la bruschetta) which I always pass and always wanted to try. suh-weet!

Every year, I pretend Christmas isn't really happening and then freak out last minute and go on a ridiculously un-thought-out shopping spree where I inevitably end up buying more shizz for myself than anyone else. Not this year. This year I plan on buying presents only for my family. Sorry if you're a victim of this downturn but this girl will not have a job come January (when I start school) so I get to be cheap for once. However, I am still baking cookies like I always do because it's cheap(er), fun, and it gets me into the Holiday spirit. What is Christmas without cookies? It's almost as bad as Christmas without Jesus. So last night I baked two batches of gingerbread cookies with my new awesome 12 piece cookie cutters with details! I love it. I bought it at vons for $12.99 and came home to research it online to see if I got jipped. My plan was to return it if I found something online for cheaper but after using it, I loved it so much that I decided not to look it up ...

Man! These took forever to upload. I had to cut it down and then make them into two parts for it to upload without a problem. In this first video, you will see all the things I did after brining the turkey overnight, and before putting it into the oven. I basically stuffed a stick of butter cut into slices between the skin and the muscles. I also stuffed the turkey with apples, and the neck cavity was stuffed with onions, carrots, and celery. Last but not least, I poured 2/3 bottle of champagne inside and outside of the turkey (inside the oven bag though). This vid shows how the turkey turned out, and some side dishes I made that I was able to catch on vid before people started destroying my masterpiece:

A quick video of how I brined the turkey. Still in the process of uploading the final product!

The drunken judy bird. This year, I tried the dry brine (1 tablespoon of kosher salt per 5 pounds of turkey) because it's economical and less of a hassle. Plus my curiosity was piqued. Really? Salt is all you need to keep the juice in the turkey? After brining the turkey for a few days, the turkey was prepared by inserting butter slices between the skin and the meat, stuffed with cored and halved apples, and some veggies, and then I poured champagne inside and outside of the turkey to cook in it for a few hours. The result - a juicy turkey with less hassle and for a lot cheaper. However, the sacrifice not having as much crispy skin and it was still not AS juicy as last year's cranberry zinfandel turkey. Next year, I will most likely have to go with either having a crispy turkey or a fully juicy one. I know most people don't have a problem with the dryness of the turkey but my family is really sensitive to it - they're not big turkey people and this is the best ...

I was looking through my pictures and found the origins of my big Thanksgiving extravaganza. I've basically become the Turkey master in my family. Every year, my family comes over to my house to get a taste of my awesomeness. My first turkey was in 2005. Look how happy I look that I didn't burn the apartment down. As you can see, the turkey was the traditional type, and needless to say, it wasn't that popular. As soon as this Thanksgiving was over, my family members came forward to tell me how dry the turkey tasted. I did some research and found that stuffing a turkey takes away all the juice, plus it's not that sanitary. So I vowed that the following year, I'd make the juiciest turkey ever. This got me started on a quest. The internet was full of tips from all over the world to make the most tender, juicy turkey. Everyone thought their idea was the best. So, I combined everything I read into my own special "Juicy turkey" recipe. For Thanksgiving ...

If you've been keeping up with my entries, you know that I've been obsessing over hummus lately. Not just ANY hummus, but the kind that usually has other shizz on it. I'm not about the plain hummus - whatever, I can make that at home. When I go out and pay for hummus, I want them to be worth my money. That usually means I want some meat with it. When I first discovered the hommos kawarma at Sunnins Lebanese Cafe in Westwood, I had hope that this might be something that is served elsewhere. After the last trip to Sunnin, I told myself I needed to find myself a better Lebanese place preferably closer to me, that is more spacious and has better service. I yelped about this and of course within an hour, someone messages me and tells me to check out Skaf's Lebanese Cuisine. I actually heard of this place before but I had thought it was in N. Hollywood. Apparently, a second location opened up in Glendale. YES! That's like, off my uncrowded freeway on my way home! This is...

Mi Bolivia (says "International Restaurant" outside) Neighborhood: Queens/Sunnyside 44-10 48th Ave Woodside, NY 11377 vs. Tutto Bene Italian Restaurant (Bolivian food served on the weekends) 501 N Randolph St Arlington, VA 22203 (703) 522-1005 vs. My Bakery (always Bolivian, all the time) 3508 Courtland Dr Falls Church, VA 22041 (703) 933-7332 One of the most important things on my east coast trip was to be able to hit some Bolivian restaurants. Sadly, there aren't any Bolivian restaurants in Los Angeles (the closest being Peruvian if they don't specialize in seafood - like Pollo Inka, etc).   *edit* There are a couple Bolivian restaurants in Los Angeles but most of them serve food traditional to La Paz, the capital, and not so much the foods I get homesick for, the food from the low lands. However, they are still great in a pinch and I know I can get some salteñas in when I am in dire need of them. When my best friend told me that she found a Bol...

The LA Int'l Tamale Festival on Sat, Nov 1. The Jalapeno-cheese tamale with salsa from Mama's Int'l Tamale The elote (sweet corn tamale) The sweet corn (top) and the chilean humo (bottom), undressed. The best thing about going to this festival twice (Sat Nov 1 & Sun Nov 2) in sketchy MacArthur Park area is finding out that there is an official name to my favorite sweet corn tamale. It's called " Elote ". The reason why I love Elote so much is because this is the only kind of tamale available in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where I grew up. Of course, the ones I had in Bolivia were much better, containing not only ground sweet corn, but ground hominy as well as bits of Menonite cheese to give the masa some stretch. It's the best balance of sweet and salty. In Bolivia, they just called this "tamale". They also had tamale del horno, which was a drier version wrapped in banana leaf. The other tamales were okay. I was never a fan of tamales with meat. I...

Behold the hummus as an entree: (Hummus Place: mushrooms in the middle) (Hummus Place: classic) I admit that I didn't try that hard to find the best hummus in LA county. All I really wanted was a hummus that was on par with the hummus I had at Hummus Place in NYC (pictured above). If I even found hummus that was considerably better than the supermarket-bought Sabra brand that I have sitting in my fridge, I would have been okay with that. One of the most annoying things about me is that I will search for something until I find the exact ingredient or taste I was craving for, and then eat it continuously, almost like an addict, until I get sick of it. I've been eating hummus non-stop since I got back from NYC and I couldn't stop because I was still searching for a hummus that beat out the ones I had in NYC. So I asked some yelpers and researched chow hound for a place where they served hummus as more of an entree than as a side. I didn't feel like driving all the way to G...