Whole wheat bacon waffles with baked pears

Ugh, I hate it that summer is officially over 🙁
One of the reasons is that I have to miss all this delicious summer fruit like strawberries (they’re my favorite!), nectarines and raspberries.

The weather in LA is still great, it still feels like summer to me. But the nights are cooler and the wind gets colder sometimes. Also the light is getting more blue, another sign of the change of the season. But that’s photographer-Ellen speaking.

Whole wheat bacon waffles with baked pears

I wanted to do a recipe for fall. Different ingrediënts and hello fall fruit!!

Vietnamese spring rolls with black pepper tofu

I love these fresh Vietnamese spring rolls. Sure, I also love them fried but a fresh one is healthier and quicker to make.

Springrolls p

If you go to a Dutch market you will definitely find a food truck that sells fried Vietnamese spring rolls. It was always a treat if my mom bought these for us on the market on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays you have the afternoon off at elementary school, so when we came home at 12.30pm my mom sometimes bought us fried spring rolls and fresh steamed baozi for lunch.

And still, every time I eat a fried spring roll

Baozi – Chinese steamed buns

I was about to give you this recipe for delicious Baozi last week but something came up. I already wrote a text about the old food photos on my Dutch blog when I saw there were quite some photos missing on my Dutch blog.

Oh no! How could that happen?

Well, that was my own stupid fault.

Baozi with pulled pork P2

I started blogging on inmyredkitchen.wordpress.com in May last year, but after a few months

review: Palmilla Cocina y Tequila

With just four months of living in LA there is still so much of this city to discover, so many beautiful places and interesting restaurants to check out.

So when Palmilla | Cocina y Tequila in Hermosa Beach invited the LA Foodbloggers for a brunch on a Saturday I knew I couldn’t say no. I’d never been to Hermosa Beach before and you can always wake me up for Mexican food so that made me go jump in the car on an early Saturday morning two weeks ago. OK, 11am doesn’t sound early at all but to me it meant I had to leave around 10.30am and beat traffic… on a Saturday!

If you go there you have (!!) to order the avocado plate with plantain chips, it’s yummy!

Palmilla is located at the Hermosa Beach Pier and that area is really popular with tourists. You’ll find a lot of boutiques and eateries around there and I was surprised that Palmilla is so much different than the other restaurants.

Chinese Pulled Pork

I had a dream.

Well, not actually a dream, it was more like a day dream. I was day dreaming of a soft steamed Chinese bun filled with tender pulled pork.

I had the dream about this delicious meal after having lunch at Take A Bao in the Century City Mall. I had a bao with hoisin pork and it was good! After my bao lunch I went to see the Jennifer Aniston movie We’re the Millers, the lens of my camera was ‘kaput’ so I decided to take a day off. And I knew P didn’t need to see that movie so if I wanted to see it I had to go alone. And I could do that during the day!

chinese pulled pork

I liked the movie, I was laughing my ass off but all I could think of was baozi and Chinese pulled pork.

Bali meatballs

– Click here to read this recipe in Dutch -> Oma’s Baliballetjes

This recipe is a winner. You will make friends with it.

This recipe is one of my grandma’s recipes to start with.
My grandma is 81 years old and she is a tough cookie. She lives with my 82-years old grandpa in an apartment building with really nice neighbors. They like living there and that makes me happy.

Bali balletjes

At their birthday parties in the Summer we sit on the balcony. But the balcony is small so we expand easily to the corridor.
The neighbors don’t mind 🙂

review: Mama Lu’s Dumpling House

I’m on a quest. Yes, just like those little hobbits. But I don’t have to endure scary things to throw a golden ring in the fire in order to save our world.
No, my quest is different, my quest contains Chinese food!

In Amsterdam I loved to go out for dim sum, I did that at least once a month. So in the first week after arriving in Los Angeles friends took us to Empress Pavilion in Chinatown, to have some dim sum. I liked the big chaotic dining hall with noisy Chinese people and waitresses with push carts. It reminded me of China, although I didn’t had dim sum during the month I was there three years ago.

I thought I was done, I found my new favorite dim sum place which served delicious food.

But unfortunately Empress Pavilion suddenly closed a month later, at the beginning of June 🙁

So now I’m on a quest to find the best dim sum in the Los Angeles area.

Different lists direct me to the East, so yesterday Christine from Feed My Sole and I went out for dim sum at Mama Lu’s Dumpling House, in Monterey Park.

Mama Lu's

No push carts here, but a menu in Chinese ánd English.

Dutch egg cakes

– Click here for this recipe in Dutch -> Heerlijke luchtiger eierkoeken

Those egg cakes (“eierkoeken“) are very popular in the Netherlands. Especially since a famous weight loss guru prescribed them in her menu’s. This woman is also known as Sonja Bakker, she is blond and always smiling (of course, she has to sell her diet!) and she is from West-Friesland, an area North of Amsterdam known for its huge greenhouses. So she also has an accent which I find very annoying.

Egg cakes p2

I’ve never followed her diet, I mean… it is a crash diet! I don’t believe in that! Sonja wrote books with weekly menus and she sold a lot of those books. For some reason these Dutch egg cakes where part of the diet.

Bean and prosciutto salad

Last week I went to Downtown to meet Christine of Feed My Sole. I met her at the dinner at Hinoki & The Bird a few weeks ago, Christine is the organizor of the Meetup group for Los Angeles Food Bloggers.

deviled eggs
Christine made some deviled eggs, they where great! The recipe will be on her blog soon, make sure to check it out!

Christine lives in an amazing loft appartment Downtown. I loved it, it has brick walls and her kitchen is great – it has a concrete counter. Beautiful! Especially for taking pictures 😉

Also that part of DTLA looked great, with hip eateries and boutiques. I have to come back for sure!

It was a great day: we cooked, made photos, ate, talked and had a nice time. All my favorites in one day!

The results of a day full of food blog cooking

I decided to make a salad with beans and prosciutto.

Dutch Potato Salad – Huzarensalade

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on the balcony, with my laptop working on a blogpost. Suddenly I heard somebody calling:
“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“Heeelllooooohooo!”

I sat still and looked around. There was nobody I could see from where I sat. So it sure wasn’t for me. I wasn’t expecting visitors and nobody could see me from down the street because we have an enclosed balcony.
So I ignored it.

But then, a week later it was the same voice:

“Hello!”

“Helloooohooo!”

“You, on the balcony!”

From where I sat I couldn’t see any other neighbors on their balconies, so maybe this person wás calling me after all? But how could he see me? Strange!

Huzarensalade P

 

So I got up and looked down.