This Little Piggy

It feels like summer in Qingdao. With the sun high in the sky by 8am and the temperature nearing 80 degrees by midmorning, I have less desire to cook than when the weather is cold and dreary. I don't want to spend hours in the kitchen when it's perfect weather to be outside. Nor do I want to stand over a hot wok or leave the oven on for hours.

I knew it was time to cook something though. It had been a few days since I had blogged about food, and I was tired of eating out at restaurants. Yesterday, I went grocery shopping for the first time in over a week. With no plan in mind, I just wandered the store trying to find something to spark my interest. I bought a chicken to cook this weekend, but knew I wouldn't have time for that yesterday because Turner wanted to play frisbee when he got home from work. Glancing over the meat case, I spied some pork ribs that looks perfect for a quick bake in the oven with barbecue sauce. We gave away our little Weber grill when we moved apartments last year, otherwise I would have grilled them outside for that extra flavor only charcoal can impart.

I made some brownies when I got home from shopping because it's always good to have something chocolatey on hand.


Then I made a quick barbecue sauce with soy sauce, ketchup, molasses, honey, a little rice vinegar, cumin, salt, and chili powder. Any combination of flavors like these, be it tomato paste and brown sugar also, make a wonderful sauce, and much healthier than anything out of a bottle.


I poured half the sauce on the ribs in the baking dish and put them in a 400 degree oven covered in foil for 30 minutes. After that, the foil came off and the rest of the sauce poured over the top to bake for another 30 minutes. The ribs are done when they have a nice dark crust and the meat has shrunk a little on the bone. We had Mexican rice (which I now love, maybe because of the MSG in the chicken boullion) and green beans alongside. The ribs were sticky and dee-licious.


On another note, I bought a container of dried peach chunks and this morning was craving some scones to go with my coffee. What to do when you crave scones? Make scones of course! I quickly threw the ingrediants together and started to cut the dough into triangles when I remembered that I forgot the sugar! It had already been a long morning because I went for a run before having coffee--what a really, really bad idea. I dumped the unbaked scones back in the mixing bowl and quickly mixed in the sugar, reformed them into triangles, and put them in the oven. The cardinal rule of scones is not to overmix, so I thought these might be too tough due to the extra mixing.

They weren't photogenic by any means, but man did they hit the spot. They actually came out pretty well!


This is a good morning for me... coffee, scone, and food blogging. Now I just have to get off the couch.

Here's the recipe should you want to whip up a batch yourself. It's super easy.

Buttermilk Scones with Dried Fruit

2 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons basking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup butter, cut into small cubes
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup chopped dried fruit (apricots, peaches, craisins, raisins...)
1 large egg
1/2 buttermilk (I cheat and use 1/2 cup of milk and a bit of lemon juice or white vinegar)
1 tablespoon lemon zest (optional but really nice)

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Prepare "buttermilk" so acid can react while you get everything else ready.

2. Mix flour, baking powder, and baking soda in mixing bowl. Add the butter and mix with hands, pastry cutter, or mixer until it's in small pieces. Add fruit and sugar (and zest). Beat egg into milk and then add to dry ingredients. Mix quickly until just combined into a rouch dough and turn out onto floured surface. Pat into 9-inch circle and cut into wedges. (I usually make about six, but they're big so adjust for your preference.)

3. Bake 12-15 minutes until tops are golden brown. Enjoy warm from the oven (with jam if you prefer).

All the World's an Egg

So simple, yet so perfect in its infinite forms. Eggs have represented so much throughout history, as a luxury, as a staple, as a microcosmic image of the world around us. Life is contained within a single egg.


Over the weekend, Turner and I ate a lot of Chinese food. Much of it oily and salty. For all their cuisine's fame, the Chinese rarely serve food that actually tastes only of that food. There is a sauce for everything. A few times, we have had people over for dinner and served a simple steamed vegetable, like green beans, and they are amazed at how sweet they are. Usually, beans are stir-fried in oil and garlic and sauce. And hence taste like oil and garlic and sauce.

For our first meal back home, we wanted something familiar. I did not have much in the refrigerator but a bag of eggs, so I thought that omelets would be heaven. I bought some spinach and an onion, which were subsequently softened in some olive oil to use as filling along with some mozzarella cheese (the only kind we had on hand).

When people asks who cooks in our household, I always say that I do but Turner makes the coffee. He also makes a killer omelet. It's one of the dishes I always leave up to him.

He whisks two eggs and two tablespoons of water together, adds some salt and pepper, and pours it into a lightly oiled, preheated frying pan. This much I can muster. It's the actually "omeletting" that evades me. As far as I can tell, he scrapes the outside in to the center until it starts to set, then when it's almost done he adds the fillings and flips one side over the other. We had fresh bread with jam and butter on the side. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the finished product because I wolfed mine down in a couple minutes.