All posts by Nate

Nate is the Techie / Barbecue-y half of the House of Annie team. Born in Hawaii, his favorite hobby is surfing...WEB surfing that is. Visit my Google+ Profile

Braised Squash with Lemongrass

Simple ingredients, combined in a delicious, easy to make dish for weekday meals.

braised squash with lemongrass house of annie

Now that Annie and I are both working, we have a helper, Jessie, who picks the kids up after school a few days a week, brings them home, and tidies up the house a bit before we come back from work. She has been a real blessing to us! Jessie was recommended to us by one of our friends, who buys lunch dishes from her. It turns out that she is also a pretty good cook!

One evening, Jessie let us try a sample of her braised squash with lemongrass. It was so delicious! When she told us how easy it was to make, we decided we would have to try to make it ourselves.

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Chinese Chicken Salad

This isn’t your grandfather’s Chinese Chicken Salad recipe…

chinese chicken salad 2010

…probably because your grandfather never heard of Chinese chicken salad in his hey day. The Chinese chicken salad that we’re familiar with – shredded chicken, raw lettuce, crispy fried noodles, and a sweet, sesame-based dressing – wasn’t popular until the 1970’s.

The Chinese in Asia typically don’t eat raw-leaf lettuce salads. They prefer their greens cooked. Chinese chicken salad as we know it was probably invented in California as a “fusion” of Oriental flavors with Western ingredients.

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Chocolate Haupia Pie Recipe

You deserve a ∏ (Pi) today. So how about a Chocolate Haupia Pie?

chocolate haupia pie slice

Today is March 14: 3.14. If you remember your Geometry, 3.14 is a very significant number. ∏, or “Pi” is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Science and Math geeks like to celebrate the number on March 14. And since it sounds like the word “pie”, Science and Math geeks who bake will make pies on that day as well!

Last year, we threw a big, Hawaiian-themed party at our house. Our Ultimate Hawaiian Backyard Lu’au featured many popular Hawaiian dishes as well as desserts. Our friend Melissa, who is a great baker, prepared this Chocolate Haupia pie for us. (“Haupia”, by the way, is a Hawaiian-style, coconut milk-based pudding.) It was the best!

Thankfully, Melissa and her husband Pat had photographed the pie-making process in their kitchen, and had emailed us their pics. We hadn’t posted the recipe before, so I figured Pi Day would be the perfect time to do it.

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Hosed

Dear Readers,

I hosed myself. Twice. I am a double self-hoser!

A couple of months back, I found out that there was a scraper site (http://asianfood.aqimg.com/) stealing the House of Annie’s (and several other food blogs’) content. With no contact info on the owner, there was little I could do to get them to stop. It wasn’t like the other scraper site I dealt with, who was hosted on Blogspot.

But I tried to file a DMCA report anyway, to see if the mighty Google could help.

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