The New Chef's Journal

Egg drop soup is a personal favorite of mine, so I wanted to see how challenging it would be to make at home. It turns out that it's actually very simple to make, but hard to get perfect. The version I made was pretty good, but could have been a bit better. The recipe I used comes from Simplerecipes.com . I'd recommend it, but with a couple of tweaks, which I describe below. Ingredients: 3 eggs, lightly beaten 4 cups of chicken stock 1 tablespoon of corn starch 1/2 teaspoon grated ginger 1 tablespoon of soy sauce 3 green onions, chopped 1/4 teaspoon of white pepper 3/4 cup of straw, enoki, or sliced shitaki mushrooms Directions: 1. Reserve 1/2 cup of the stock and mix with the cornstarch until dissolved. 2. Place the chicken stock, ginger, soy sauce, green onions, mushrooms and white pepper in a pot and bring to a boil. 3. Add the cornstarch and stock mixture and stir. Reduce heat to a simmer. 4. Slowly pour in the beaten eggs while stirring the soup. The egg w...

This week's recipe is very simple and easy, but it's still delicious. For a recent dinner party I decided to make some dark chocolate covered fruit for dessert. There's not much too this recipe, but it was a big hit. Start out by preparing whatever fruit you want to use. I decided to go with strawberries, raspberries, pineapple and banana. I used the same chocolate ganache recipe for this as I did for the chocolate cake I made a couple of weeks ago, but in a slightly reduced quantity. Simply bring 2/3 of a cup of heavy cream to a boil and pour it over 6 ounces of chopped dark chocolate.  After that, simply dip the fruit in the chocolate and lay it down on parchment paper to cool. Use what ever method works best for you to do this. I used skewers to coat the banana and raspberries and just dunked the strawberries and pineapple by hand. You could also serve the fruit and warm chocolate as fondue if you wanted. I chose to chill it, just to cut down and the mess and beca...

Pad see ew is a traditional Thai street food which has become popular in America. It's one of my personal favorite Thai dishes. It's surprisingly easy to make at home, so I thought I'd share the recipe for anyone who is interested. The key to really good pad see ew is the fresh rice noodles. You should be able to find them in most Asian markets and they are a big upgrade over dried noodles. In the DC area I usually go to the Bangkok 54 market for the noodles and Chinese broccoli. Bangkok 54 is a great spot to pick up items you might not be able to get at your regular supermarket, like Chinese broccoli or bok choy. I'm making this version with chicken, but you can just as easily make it with beef, pork, shrimp or tofu if you want. For this recipe you'll need both light and dark soy sauce. Light soy sauce similar to the standard soy sauce you'll find at sushi restaurants. Dark soy sauce is much thicker and has a molasses-like texture to it. I've experi...

I really didn't intend for this to be a dessert blog, but this is the third consecutive dessert entry I've done. This weeks entry is a birthday cake that I made for my girlfriend. She requested a very chocolately cake and this one definitely meets that standard. This cake is based loosely on a recipe by Sara Campbell on foodnetwork.com . Her recipe looks incredible, but it makes a giant cake and there seem to be some issues with the directions for the buttercream. My version combines separate recipes for the cake, the buttercream frosting and the dark chocolate ganache glaze. The chocolate cake is from a recipe by  Cathy Lowe on foodnetwork.com. The buttercream frosting is based on a recipe from Wilton.com. The dark chocolate ganache is based on a recipe from  allrecipes.com Ingredients: For the cake: 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour 2 cups sugar 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 cup milk...

After my last dessert recipe turned out so be so popular I decided to try out another one. This recipe is a bit simpler than the chocolate peanut butter middles, but it's still delicious. These dark chocolate coconut clusters are essentially a no-bake version of macaroons. I'm a huge dark chocolate fan, so expect a lot of these desert recipes to be popping up on the blog. For this recipe I'm using some Green & Blacks Organic 70 percent cacao dark chocolate. You can use a higher percent cacao chocolate if you want for this recipe. The recipe I'm basing this on from 101 Cookbooks used a 70 percent cacao chocolate. I just recently got into coconut so this is the first recipe I've tried using it. The original ingredients are below with my notes in italics. The directions are slightly modified from the original, again with my notes in italics. Ingredients: 2 1/2 cups finely shredded unsweetened coconut, lightly toasted and cooled (I initially toasted the coc...