I successfully take on the challenge of making this classic Persian dish for the first time.

We’ve been here in Kuching for over a year now, and we’ve settled in nicely.  We’ve even had a chance to throw a few parties at our house, doing a Japanese dinner for our friends one night, and inviting friends over for Esther’s birthday in August.  But I’ve been meaning to invite my boss to dinner. My boss is based in San Jose, but he works here half the time.  He lives out of his hotel room and eats out for every meal, so I was sure he’d appreciate some home-cooked food.

So I invited him over to our house for dinner this past Saturday. My boss was born in Iran, so I thought it would be nice to make him some Persian food.  I started researching dishes and recipes, and decided to make the classic Persian dish, chelow kabab koobideh – rice with mince meat kebab.

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Delicious Thai flavors infuse this dish of long beans and pork.

We’ve been eating a lot of yard-long beans at house of Annie lately. They are a hardy bean and are full of protein and vitamins. We eat them almost once a week in this house.

One of the reasons I love them is that they keep very well in the fridge. I find that now that I live in very hot, humid Kuching, a lot of my green leafy vegetables spoil faster than when we lived in California. And now that I’m working, I have less time to shop for groceries—this means I have to buy most of my veggies on the weekend when I have time to market. Being hardy, the long beans are my go-to vegetable near the end of the week when I’ve cooked up all the leafy vegetables.

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Tarako – also known as salted cod roe – spaghetti is a super easy, super fast Japanese recipe that you can use to get lunch or dinner on the table quickly.

Updated 19 Sept 2010
Originally posted 14 Dec 2006

Sometimes in our busy lives, there isn’t much time between getting home from work and then heading back out to an evening activity. We hate to eat on the run, or even worse stop in at some fast food joint to pick up something we’re going to regret later. Tarako spaghetti is a dish that is so quick to prepare, and is so tasty that it’s consumed in even less time than it took to make it!
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After the success of our Pandan Spiral Mooncakes, we wanted to try our hand at making another kind of mooncake – the ping pei or “snowskin” mooncake.

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