CATTY KITCHEN EP. 1

Angel Zheng — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 23:05:05 +0000

Here’s to the start of a new series that Vernice and I decided to start on our Youtube channels ! We are both lovers of food so we thought of this great idea to add cooking videos to our channels. They aren’t going to be weekly videos because of the amount of time we need to prepare and set aside to film and edit these videos (pretty much an entire day) and we are both busy with school, work, and social media. BUT hopefully we can do this at least once a month as a special video that’s a little (or actually A LOT) different from the content we usually produce.

For our first Catty Kitchen episode, we made roasted chicken, potatoes, and an avocado dish for dinner. We looked for recipes online and we found this one (roasted chicken) and this one (avocado). As for the baked potatoes, I took used an easy recipe that I thought of myself.

[yumprint-recipe id=’2′]

And voila! If you want to just recreate the dishes yourselves, all the recipes are included in this post. Or you could follow along with us in our video. Hope you guys enjoy watching this video as much as we enjoy creating it! I would definitely recommend doing this with a friend so you can share the cooking load as well as food after (:

I’ll also leave you guys with Vernice’s links incase you wanted to check her out on Youtube and Instagram. She’s got an awesome feed.

Youtube

Instagram

Twitter

If you guys have any recommendations or recipes you want to see made, leave us a comment on this post or on the video! OR go ahead and tweet me.

Until next time,

11PM DINNERS + recipes and pictures !

Angel Zheng — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:00:46 +0000

One thing that most people don’t know about me, is that I really enjoy cooking. I find that it’s fun, and it definitely is something I do to de-stress or to cheer me up.. because honestly, cooking is very rewarding to me. I don’t get to cook too often when I’m at home, simply because I live with my parents, and my mom likes to buy all the groceries. She usually cooks for the whole family. My family is pretty Asian, and so it’s just easier for her to cook because 1. She’s way better at it, and 2. She cooks food that everyone in the family will enjoy. I very rarely make any Asian dishes, partially because I’ve never learnt, and partially because I eat it every day at home anyways, so sometimes the food I make doesn’t always match up to the tastes of each one of my family members. Once in a while, I will either go out and buy groceries for myself , or make a meal at a friend’s place. It’s a win win situation for both of us, because my friends will get dinner, and I get to cook !

Which is pretty much what happened last night ! I went over to Ryan’s place, and we decided to make dinner together. After looking at pages after pages, and links after links of recipes, we decided to make something simple (since it was already about 9 pm when we finally decided); A creamy caprese pasta, and Lettuce Wraps !

Our pasta doesn’t look as good as the website that we found the recipe on, but we changed the recipe up a little and gave it our own little twist soooooo that’ll just be our excuse. Plus when does food ever turn out exactly like what they look in pictures anyways. #impossible.

If you want OUR recipe, with the slight tweaks that we made to it, along with a quick and easy lettuce wrap that you can make, then keep on reading !

So let me start out with the Caprese Pasta recipe. Our version.

INGREDIENTS

pipe rigate pasta or shell pasta. (we used shell)
butter
grape tomatoes, halved
chorizo sausage
onions, diced
tomato paste
milk
cheese, grated
mint leaves
garlic, chopped
garlic powder
onion powder

Notice that I didn’t put measurements of how much of the ingredients you need? you can refer to the original recipe, or you can read my instructions and see how much I used. But the reason I didn’t leave exact measurements, is because I really didn’t follow exact measurements as I was making this dish. I kind of just used as much and as little of each ingredient as I wanted. YOLO.

INSTRUCTIONS

Cook the pasta according to the package, or until it is the chewiness that you like, and then drain it. I cooked half a box of pasta, which serves about…. 4 large plates of pasta, and 6 small plates? I always just sort of estimate how much pasta to cook. BUT never cook the entire box unless you’re having a dinner party or something. It never ends up well.
Heat your butter in a large pan over medium heat. I used just enough butter to coat the pan lightly with it. Depending on the size of your pan, obviously you’ll need a different amount of butter.
Add in garlic and onions, and saute until slightly browned and the garlic is super fragrant. I used about 4 cloves of garlic, and half a white onion.
Next throw in your sliced chorizo, and saute it for about 2-3 minutes.
Throw in your grape tomatoes and tomato paste. I used an entire box of grape tomatoes, that I halved, and 2 mini cans of tomato paste. I know the original recipe said to only use 2 tablespoons or something, but I wanted my sauce to be quite… well, thick and saucey ! So I used 2 of those miniature cans that tomato paste sometimes comes in.
Once the tomato paste has started to simmer a bit, pour in your milk and stir. I usually let the milk mix in with the tomato paste properly (for maybe a minute?) before I judge whether or not I want to add more. This is purely preference, if you want your sauce to be more creamy, add in more milk.
Turn your stove to low, and put the pasta that’s been drained in to the pan. Add in your grated cheese (as much as you’d like!) and let them melt in the pan for a minute or two. Once it’s melted, you can add in a little bit of garlic and onion powders to give it that extra flavour and toss the pasta up to mix it in.
Garnish with fresh mint leaves and serve hot or warm.

Our sliced up chorizo !

And our halved grape tomatoes ! Sorry that I didn’t take better pictures of all the ingredients needed for the pasta dish. We started cooking at around 10, so we were in a bit of rush to get it all done and start eating !

Moving on to our lettuce wraps !

INGREDIENTS

Roma tomatoes
iceberg lettuce
avocado
chicken breast
cajun spice
olive oil
lemons
black pepper and salt, if you’d like
and anything else you’d like to put in your lettuce wraps !

INSTRUCTIONS

So this dish is all about the prep. So here we go.

wash the iceberg lettuce and separate each leaf. I actually separate the leaves, which added an extra step when it came to eating it.
dice the tomatoes, and drain them in a colliander
cut your avocado into little cubes
cut your lemons into wedges
coat your chicken breast in olive oil and then marinade it in cajun spice. Make sure the breasts are generously coated in cajun spice.
Heat up your pan on high heat, and fry your chicken until slightly blackened on the outside. Make sure they are cooked all the way through.

One thing I always forget, is how important the prep part of cooking is ! It makes your life SO much easier if you just spend a little time before you begin the cooking to just chop up and prepare all your ingredients first so that you are not flustered and running around trying to get them ready.

DAT AVOCADO DOE.

All of our ingredients read to go !

Frying our chicken breast

This was probably a few minutes before I took the chicken out of the pan. They could be a little bit more blackened than this.

And VOILA ! Dinner is served. We ended up eating at 11 pm (hence the title of the post) but it was well worth it ! We left the lettuce wrap ingredients separate like you see in the picture so we could put in as much or as little of each ingredient as we’d like ! oh and the lemons that were cut into wedges from the recipe? those are for you to squeeze onto your lettuce wrap creations before you eat it ! Same with the salt and pepper. Sprinkle as you please !

I hope you guys enjoyed my first food post ! Hopefully I will be doing more soon, and HOPEFULLY I will actually have proper pictures of all the ingredients and the prep and the cooking next time !

If you try out any of these two recipes, let me know ! I would love to see pictures on any of your social medias or blogs ! OR even if you just wanted to send me them!

Comment down below and let me know whether you like to cook, and if you do, what your favourite dishes to make are !

Until next time

chicken – SPEAKOFTHEANGEL

CATTY KITCHEN EP. 1

11PM DINNERS + recipes and pictures !