Farfalle with Asparagus, Spinach, Mushrooms and Sausage

I was having a meal with friends a while ago at Pasta Pomodoro. My girlfriend ordered their Penne Portobello and told me it was one of her favorite dishes. I asked for a taste and decided that I could probably make this at home.
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Gong Xi Fa Cai – Happy New Year!

A few weeks back, Foodbuzz put out a call for proposals for another one of their "24, 24, 24" meals. Since the date would be very close to Chinese New Year this year, Annie and I submitted a proposal, focusing on a Chinese New Year theme. We were surprised and honored to have been chosen as one of the food blogs featured this month.

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Sweet and sour dishes are probably some of the most popular dishes in Chinese American restaurants. Sweet sour pork especially seem to have become very much a staple of any Chinese restaurant here. My mom used to make sweet sour dishes at home a lot too. And the color is nothing like anything I’ve seen at the Chinese restaurants here.

Here, most sweet sour dishes are BRIGHT RED and the sauce tends to run more sweet than it does sour. I have never quite got used to that red coloring when I eat sweet sour dishes at restaurants here.

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Growing up in Malaysia, crab was considered a special treat.  We hardly ever cooked it at home, preferring to visit a seafood restaurant specializing in cooking crabs and other seafoody things.  And the crabs we normally got there were mud crabs.  Mud crabs have very big, meaty claws, smaller bodies, and extremely hard shells.  They were very sweet but require so much work for very little gain.

Over here, we don’t get mud crabs, but Dungeness crabs are even better.  I love that we get so much more meat from the Dungeness, plus the shell is not as hard so it’s easier to get to the meat.  I actually love Dungeness so much that I don’t crave or ask for crab as much when I go home to Malaysia.

The Malaysian sweet-sour style of cooking crab, though, that I do miss.

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