Ive been craving thai flavors every day for the past 2 weeks.  The problem is the thai place here is very limited.  It is so awesome, but there isn't a ton to choose from.  In a totally unrelated note, I've been seeing grilling on food network and on the blogs every day.  This time of year, grilling is the hot topic.  I love grilling, but I am always seeking out things that aren't the normal grilling fare.  I decided to marinate some steaks in a green curry paste, grill and serve them with a thai style basil fried rice.  Searching on google for basil fried rice, I found this awesome video of two women making a great fried rice exactly how I wanted.  We used the Jamie Oliver green curry recipe we usually use for thai recipes to marinate the steaks.  I had really wanted to use a flank steak for this meal, but apparently Bermuda was out of flanks steaks and I had to settle for the more expensive and, IMO, less delicious tenderloin.

We made Persian food this week.  Neither of us are Persian or have ever been to the area, and I have never even tried this type of food so I don’t even know if it came out authentic tasting, but I do know it was delicious.  Mandi has had Persian once before.  she was at her friend Nooshin’s house.  Her mom made some delicious Persian dishes for dinner when we all lived in Boston.  Now Noosh has moved to LA and we have moved here.  The reason we cooked this meal, is because Mandi is going to visit Nooshin in LA next week and wants to cook her something to remind her of home.  What a nice girl.

Oh chicken tikka, like spaghetti with meatballs and general Tso before you, you have no cultural reference.  The California roll of Indian cuisine.  Created by an Indian expat in Britain to help western palates adapt to Middle Eastern flavors, Chicken Tikka Masala is the most popular “Indian” food around.  Since we hadn’t cooked Indian before, we thought it would be a good starting point.  We didn’t have much time to cook that night, but this recipe seemed so simple, what I had overlooked was resting and marinating times.  Because of this, our final product was slightly on the bland side but still really delicious. Click below for more

These last two days of "happy chicken week" are just to show a couple different, interesting uses for the stored up chicken stock.  Our idea this past weekend was to cook something that looked like a totally different food than it actually was.

A few weeks ago at the Grillin and Chillin event we had a dish by Chef Shaker Estephane where the Mango was cut into what looked like stringy little noodles. This gave Mandi the idea that she wanted to make an entire dish where everything was shaped like noodles. I had also been thinking about it when reading Morimoto’s cookbook that I got for Christmas. He loves what he calls “visual food puns”.  So we first thought of a food we have often, spaghetti and meatballs. It got us thinking... what if the meat was the noodles, and the pasta was the meatballs? What we ended up with was pretty awesome. Click below for more.