Lumpia is a gift from God

For whoever is reading this, I'll give you a little background info. I'm 3/4 Filipino and 1/4 white. I love all kinds of Filipino foods: adobo, pancit, pan de sal, and especially LUMPIA. Lumpia is one of the best things on earth. It's probably the most iconic Filipino food out there. I've loved lumpia since I was little but my best friend, Ian, had never eaten lumpia until this past June. That's really surprising since he went to a high school with mostly Filipinos. He even had a Filipino best friend when he was younger. But his first time trying lumpia was at my sister's bridal shower this summer. He immediately fell in love with them and couldn't stop raving about them. I told my mom how strongly he felt about them and she offered to teach both of us how to make them from scratch. Of course he was interested. So my mom went online and looked for recipes and there even were videos on YouTube on how to make them. She found a recipe, we made them, and they were AMAZING. Better than anything you could get in a store or restaurant.

Super Moist Pound Cake

People have a tendency to ask me to make things since they know I have a passing for cooking and baking. So my dad's request was pound cake. But there was a stipulation to his request. It had to be moist. He doesn't like dry pound cake. So I was on a search for a moist pound cake recipe. I looked in my America's Test Kitchen cookbook to see if the recipe description had the word "moist" in it. It didn't, so I continued my search. I remembered I bought a cookbook written by a food scientist figuring it must be good because food scientists are awesome =). And to my luck I found a recipe that the author, Shirley Corriher, came up with and she said it was moister than the original. Food scientists FTW! So here are some pics of the pound cake from Shirley Corriher's book Bakewise.

Paula Deen's Apple Pie

So we had some apples from our apple tree. My mom and I kept saying, "We should make a pie. We should make apple crisp." blah blah. So finally I decided to make an apple pie. I wanted to make one that was easy, and one that I wouldn't have to buy a bunch of ingredients for and I came across Paula Deen's recipe. That was the one. I had everything and it seemed simple enough. But I bought some back up apples, just in case our apples were too sour or too icky. I ended up using two of our apples and the rest were store bought. I made the whole thing from scratch and baked it in our new Le Creuset pie dish. I did learn a lesson from this baking endeavor: put a foil cuff around the crust so it doesn't burn too badly. But other than that, it was delicious =)

So I was told to make a blog...

Hello world. My sister has been on my case about making a blog about all the food that I like to make. She, you see, is a blog-a-holic. A certified, self-proclaimed, proud blog-a-holic. She's very religious when it comes to posting on her blog. So here I am, blogging. Not something I'm particularly good at; I'm not much of a writer. So if there are grammatical errors or sentences that never seem to end, my bad.. I don't mean to. I have a science based brain, not an English based one. So take me as I am: a food scientist, a wannabe cook/baker, and an overall foodie. I hope you enjoy reading about and seeing all the goodies I make as much as I love making them. =)