The New Chef's Journal

For Valentine's Day I decided to make one of my girlfriend's favorite dishes - shrimp fra diavolo. This shrimp dish has a little bit of a kick thanks to the crushed red pepper. I've done this dish over both pasta and creamy polenta. My preference is to mix it with thin spaghetti, which is what I did this time. The recipe I'm using for this comes from the Food Network's Giada DiLaurentiis. Of all the chef's on the food network I've had the most success using Giada's recipes, though Tyler Florence, Rachel Ray, Ina Garten, Emeril and the Neeley's have some great stuff too. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/shrimp-fra-diavolo-recipe/index.html The original recipe calls for fresh herbs, which because of time constraints I didn't have available. This recipe still works well with dried herbs. The rule for converting from fresh to dried is that 1 tablespoon fresh herbs = 1 teaspoon dried herbs. Or in this case 3 tablespoons fres...

Mee goreng is one of my absolute favorite dishes to get at Thai restaurants, but I've never made it myself before.  There are tons of varieties of this recipe floating around on the internet. I'm going to combine a couple of them and also wing it a little bit. This recipe can be cooked with just about any protein, so feel free to substitute whatever you want. I'm going with shrimp and chicken, mostly because I happen to have them at my apartment already. The first recipe I'm basing my version off of comes from Cooking Light magazine by way of MyRecipes.com, which is a really good resource for food ideas:  http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=10000001924714 The second recipe comes from myasiankitchenny.com, which I discovered purely through the magic of google, but it looks tasty. They have plenty of other recipes which I may have to explore later.  http://www.myasiankitchenny.com/2009/04/mee-goreng-mamak-pedas-fried-s...