Seduced by Pinterest

About a year ago, my friend Amy started telling me about Pinterest.  "You'll love it," she said.  "It has tons of great recipes," she promised.  I put off joining until summer, and then Amy got me started and showed me around.  And I was hooked.  I DID love it!  It DID have tons of great recipes!  And so here's what happened...  this blog, that was always my digital storage area for the recipes I planned to use, became redundant.  And I ignored it for a while.  But after 3+ months of blogging hiatus, I'm realizing the other main benefit of this blog for me -- it's not just a place to store recipes I want to try, but it's also a record of the things I did cook -- and when, and how many weeks in a row exactly did I make homemade pizza...

So I still love Pinterest, but I'm trying to give this aspect of my virtual food life another go.  Because this morning, as I scrolled through my vast storehouse of pinned recipes, I realized I've lost track -- did I make this risotto recipe, or that one?  Have I tried that soup yet?  Relying on my memory alone means I have NO idea.

And also, I have way too many pins on that damn thing.  I need a pin board organizer, please.

So it's Thursday, and I don't have a plan for the upcoming week yet, but with a head-nod to the new year, I thought I'd mention our New Year's Day dinner.  We always try to cook something that might be a bit time-comsuming, but not necessarily hard (since we're home all day, but also feeling lazy).  This year's menu was built around the dessert -- I found a great recipe, then decided what food might taste best beforehand.

New Year's Day Dinner

Baked crab wontons with homemade sweet and sour sauce
Firecracker Shrimp
Lucky Stir Fry (from my new Christmas gift cookbook:  The Fresh and Green Table)
Coconut Lime ice cream

We make the wontons in mini muffin tins instead of folding them over -- just put a bit of filling in, and then squeeze all the edges of the wonton together.  It makes 36, so we had some and then tried to freeze the rest.  If they freeze well, we can have those when we get Thai take-out (instead of buying the random fried appetizer crap we love so much!).

My version of Lucky Stir Fry:

Make a sauce with about 2 tsp each of oyster sauce, lime juice, hoisin sauce, and brown sugar.  The recipe calls for 1/4 tsp of chili-garlic sauce, but I just gave a big old squeeze of sriracha instead.

In a big pan, heat some oil, then stir fry shiitake mushrooms, chopped asparagus, about an ear's worth of fresh corn kernels (ours were frozen -- from our corn-storing extravaganza after buying WAY too much at the farmer's market last summer), half a red pepper, half a green pepper, and a whole orange pepper (chopped into thin beautiful strips).  Add a little bit of soy sauce.

Toss in a bit of fresh ginger and garlic (I do way more garlic than ginger, since I like it way more -- but I bet you can adjust those two however you want) and about 3 chopped scallions.  Add the sauce mixture, then stir in some chopped peanuts and chopped mint.

Fantastic.

So let's give this another go.  More soon!