Ching Ohana Home Cooking Journal

Tonight we had lobster ravioli from Costco with some creamy vodka pasta sauce. Side of caesar salad. No picture though because we ate it all up before I remembered. It's super fast because the ravioli cooks in like 5 minutes and the pasta sauce can just go on top to heat through.

My daughter kept asking about beef luau (deconstructed lau lau as she calls it). This time I blanched the 2 lbs of luau leaf on the stove to fit them in the Instant Pot. I used 2 cups chicken broth and only 1 can coconut milk, a little less than the recipe called for. 

No bake noodles, this one with a ton of ricotta. Some parts of the noodles came out a little more than al dente but the flavor was good.

A double yolk! Portuguese sausage. A friend showed me to score the sides and they won't curl up into cups on the frying pan. Sauteed baby spinach

We had leftover Oreos and pudding from a chemistry lab that my wife taught. She put them together to make this Oreo pudding pie. It came out great! Recipe from All Recipes .

We came home late and I wanted to make something fast. Chicken long rice has been on the Aloha Instant Pot group a few times lately so I tried out one of the recipes.  Ingredients: 3 cans chicken broth 4 chicken thighs, boneless skinless 2 slices ginger green onion garlic long rice I put the broth and thighs on the stove and brought them to a boil. I tossed in the ginger then put them in the Instant Pot for 15 minutes with 5 minutes NPR. The frozen chicken shredded very nicely.  While the thighs were cooking I soaked the long rice in some hot water. I drained the noodles and put them into the broth along with the shredded chicken. Garnish with green onion. Overall it came out soupy and not that flavorful. I think next time I would use bone in thighs and less broth, maybe only 2 cans. 

Tonight's beef stew recipe was a little different. This one was from the America's Test Kitchen cookbook  Pressure Cooker Perfection . It seems very similar to the one in their slow cooker cookbook, only with flour for thickener instead of tapioca starch. It came out good even though I forgot to add the peas and soy sauce. Total time was close to 2 hours between the browning of the meat, cooking the onions, reducing the wine, and pressure cooking for 45 minutes with 15 minutes NPR. 

I never knew how easy it was to make lau lau until I went camping with my daughter's preschool 6 years ago. That time they steamed it for 4 hours. This time, it was 1 hour in the Instant Pot with natural pressure release. I only bought one bag (1 lb) of taro leaf but they were big leaves so I only used 2 per luau. That and 3 big chunks of pork made 4 lau lau. Came out ono!

Tonight's dinner was Colombian chicken stew after a recipe by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Somehow it didn't come out as brown as his recipe but it still was delicious. Potatoes simmered in the fat of chicken legs? Delish!  I was a little chicken to make it without any liquid on the bottom. I put half a cup of water to make myself feel better. I might have skipped it though because when I opened it, the pot was almost full of the cooking liquid that had come out of the veggies and chicken! Next time it could use some spices. Maybe curry? Maybe coconut milk?  Total time was actually probably a little more than an hour since it took almost half an hour for the pot to come to pressure.

Coworkers are having a Valentine's Day/Chinese New Year potluck this week so I experimented with making gau in the Instant Pot. I "followed" the recipe from Jay Chung on the Aloha Instant Pot Facebook group. I didn't have everything on the list so I modified it by using brown sugar.  I also used these mini loaf pans since I didn't have the little round popup pans. The loaf pans are 5 inches long and two fit in one layer on the trivet. The way I made it resulted in a gau that was very dark but tasted like I thought it should. It came out sticky and chewy. The height was a little flat. I probably could have put the full recipe into one loaf pan, but I didn't feel lucky enough to experiment with the time! Here's the recipe as I made it with weights to help measure: Instant Pot Mini Gau (after Jay Chung ) water, 6 oz/180 g brown sugar, 6 oz/180 g mochiko, 5 oz/150 g non-stick spray Prepare pans with non-stick spray. Boil

Hamburger curry. Just regular Japanese curry but in the Instant Pot! The wife made this and she appreciated how she didn't have to watch or stir it. From start to finish was about half an hour so she even had time to exercise while it was cooking. The recipe is  here .

This soup is another Instant Pot miracle. How can you go from dried beans to this soup in about an hour? The recipe was from Serious Eats . Cook for one hour and natural pressure release for about half an hour.

Since we were home for lunch and I didn't want to eat leftovers, I thought I'd throw together this shrimp curry dish I found in the Indian Instant Pot book . The recipe is called Jhinga Nariyal Wala , shrimp coconut curry.  I couldn't believe that it said only 3 minutes with quick release. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out. The shrimp were still very raw after only 3 minutes. It could be that it called for 26-30 count and I bought 16-20 or something like that, but the cooking liquid wasn't that hot either.  I dumped the bowl into a pot and simmered it for a few minutes on the stove until it was done. The flavor was excellent, perhaps a little salty. Next time I'll just make this on the stove since 3 minutes Instant Pot doesn't seem to save any time or dirty dishes over a stovetop. Note to self--next time a dish is meant to be cooked in a bowl inside the Instant Pot, I need some kind of sling to get it out easily. Something like this or t

The Old Wailuku Inn is a wonderful bed and breakfast on Maui, and I had an amazingly light and tasty scone with breakfast when I stayed there this week. I decided I would try to make some at home. My go to baking book is Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food . I used his dried cherry recipe (substituting craisins). The dough was too wet to fold and cut into wedges so I just ended up plopping lumps on the parchment and prodding them roughly into a scone shape. They went into a 375 convection oven to bake x 23 minutes.  The scones ended up rising a little, and the frozen butter evened out the little imperfections from this technique. They tasted great. Buttery with a little crunch on the outside. Total time is probably about an hour or so from start to finish including all the time rubbing the frozen butter into the flour...

We made this one pot lau lau recipe tonight. It was pretty hard to fit 2 lb of taro leaves in the cooker (each bag from Safeway has 1 lb).  I think some of the leaf got caught in the seal so it kind of hissed softly for the entire cooking time. I made it for 45 minutes, and the pork wasn't fork tender so back in it went for 10 more minutes and it was perfect. I wonder if the hissing affected the temperature and pressure but my family didn't have itchy throats. In any case, next time I'll do 60 minutes. The total time for the recipe took about 1 1/2 hours including the time to wash and trim the leaf and cut up the pork. 

The family is feeling under the weather so tonight was chicken jook (congee/rice porridge). Rice 1.5 japanese cups, ginger, 4 C chicken stock, 2 C water, 2 bone in thighs. Cook for 30 minutes in the Instant Pot under pressure with the porridge program, natural pressure release 10 minutes. Came out thick and delicious!

This weekend I got to try out my new sous vide rig. It's a Coleman cooler with a hole that I cut in the lid using a utility knife. Into the hole went my new Anova sous vide circulator. I put in tri tip roasts for 24 hours at 131 degrees F. Tri tip roasts are my family's favorite cut from Costco.  Here's one after it spent a little time on the grill to brown. I used a rub but it didn't really come out. Maybe it got washed off during the sous vide process. I think maybe next time rub after sous vide. The roast cut up was tender, marbly goodness, with a nice beefy taste. It was enough for 7 of us for our post Super Bowl dinner.

My dad used to make pizza from scratch while I was growing up. I remember a rectangular dough, with toppings like cheddar cheese and Portuguese sausage, covered with corn meal.  We've made it many times ourselves over the years, but I can't remember when was the last time we made it. Because we've been watching the Great British Baking Show on Netflix, the kids decided to try it again. Recipe for the pizza dough came from the Art and Soul of Baking . After the rise Finished products here. The kids decided to roll their crust up to see if they could make stuffed crust. It didn't really work... The wife also made focaccia, some recipe off the internet. It was different because she baked it in our cast iron dutch oven. Here it is after the rise and out of the oven. Tasted better than it looked. It was salty and crusty. Next time we'll try with parmesan on top.

So I'm teaching our 12 year old how to cook a little. He helped to make these today. Onsen eggs on toast. He added the sriracha happy faces. Onsen eggs are cooked sous vide at 167 degrees F for 13 minutes. The yolk comes out nice and gooey but not runny.

One of the kids' favorite dishes is edamame rice. It's just a mixture of edamame, furikake, nametake mushrooms, and rice. That's all! I don't know what recipe my wife uses but here's one that's looks about right.