Category Appetizers/Hors d’oeuvres

It was chicken wings night in our family the other night. When I make hot chicken wings, I usually make another kind for the kids or just to try another flavor. These are either Honey-Mustard wings or just leave the breaded wings as is. When I’m on my experimenting mode, I’ve come up with new recipes namely Hot-Key Lime-Pepper Chicken Wings, and Garlic-Parmesan Chicken Wings.

This time around I made sweet chili chicken wings to go along with the hot wings. These are sooooooooooo good. I mean “finger-lickin’ I wish there were more, I need to make these again soon and more often” good. You’d be surprised how easy it is to make it. All you need is a really good kind of sweet chili sauce which you could purchase from any Asian store or at the Asian aisle of your grocery store. I actually bought mine at Wal-Mart.

Here’s the bottle of sweet chili s...

Everyone is posting holiday stuff on Facebook everyday and I’m just loving each and everyone of them. Christmas trees, children’s pictures, family gathering pictures, lovely messages, holiday recipes, etc. One of the pictures I LIKED recently is the one my sister-in-law posted where they’re playing poker. It made me think about the year my husband was deployed in Korea so we spent the holidays without him, and he spent his without us. My in-laws celebrated that Christmas with us so  my son and I weren’t that lonely. Then days after that was my birthday (Dec 31st). My friends in that small Army community made sure I spent my birthday with some kind of party. It was a small gathering with drinks, food, and Texas Hold ‘Em Poker. It was actually that year when I learned how to play that card game. It was fun learning the history of card games along with tips on how to bluff. I became so good at doing the latter actually. It was fun listening to my friends teasing me how I’ve  managed to bluff them all. Our poker nights continued when my husband got back from Korea. I really miss those days.

Get together with friends of course always involves food. I remember making lumpias and wings during our poker nights. Those 2, plus chips with  dips are definitely the best finger food to serve during Poker night. If and when my husband and I get to play a round of poker sometime in the future I’d definitely serve these baked lumpias.

The process of making baked lumpias is not that different from making any kind of lumpias or egg rolls. The only thing that’s changed is how to cook them. Instead of frying ‘em up in oil, you bake them in the oven. That means healthier, and no greasy splatters everywhere. I reckon’ that’s a welcome thing for any of us who are trying to live healthy but still would love to enjoy the food we love. Hey, guilty as charged!

I’ve already posted an easy to follow recipe for a cheese con carne dip among the party ideas compilation for super bowl time but the picture attached to it is very old so figured I’d share a more updated version. New pictures with step-by-steps as well just to make the archives prettier, sort of.

I had such a craving for corned beef & potatoes earlier last week. When I said corned beef, I don’t mean the corned beef brisket cooked in crock pot for hours with whole potatoes and cabbage to serve as the main entree during Irish Day. Although after typing all that I’m certainly craving that right now, Hah! Anyhooo, I’m talking about the corned beef in can, like the Libby’s kind, sauteed in a little bit of oil, with tomatoes, and small potato cubes. Give me a bowl of that with rice and I’m good for the day.

I bought all the stuff I needed but then I figured since I love eating the sauteed corned beef with rice anyway, why not turn it into sushi rolls? That would be something new to blog about for sure. My husband thought it was weird. My son thought it was cool. I kept saying it’s something new. My husband was right. the corned beef & potatoes rolls were weird. I mean they’re edible and we ate them but I was missing the seafood flavor of sushi rolls.

This is pretty much a learning curve. I’m posting the recipe here which in all honesty is really easy to figure out just with what I’ve already written about it, just to show you how I made the rolls. Perhaps, you want to try to make them so you can decide for yourselves.

Sometimes when I use smoked salmon for a sushi roll, I just lay the smoked salmon on top of the rice, then add omelet and either avocado or cucumber. Sometimes, I chop up the smoked salmon, mixed it with chopped slightly ripe mango and chopped scallions, then sprinkle some seasoning before spreading the mixture on top of the rice then roll it all up tight and snug. They’re really good.

It’s the last week of the month so I have been checking folders of food pictures in my computer to see if there are any dishes I’ve neglected to blog about. See, I’d take pictures while cooking, store information in my memory which by the way is slowly diminishing hence I’ve been reminding myself to write down ingredients and step-by-steps so I can refer to it once I start blogging, then I get lazy resizing and putting watermark, then I’d procrastinate for a couple of days, until I completely forget about a dish while working on a new one. Still with me?

So anyway, one of the neglected dishes I found in the folders is this Hot-Key Lime-Pepper Chicken Wings. A citrus-y, and peppery twist to the regular hot chicken wings.