christmas

Hope everyone had a great Christmas/holidays! instead of putting up our usual christmas tree, paper crafts is the theme. found everything to decorate our construction paper trees lying around the house. now how is that for recession holiday fun!

the fam's all home and since it's a big holiday that means food! so we started off in the early morning making some monkey bread- not too bad, the brown sugar made the biscuits stick to the bundt pan. decreased the sugar and butter to make the "healthier" version. the brown sugar could be decreased even more. plus, some walnuts or something would add a nice touch.

then of course the main part of the christmas meal-simple baked tilapia (salt, pepper, olive oil, lemon, threw in a garlic clove while it baked) then a side of roasted parsley potatoes and butter roasted asparagus and brussel sprouts. first time trying brussel sprouts, not bad drowning in a garlicky butter sauce, however, if u can tell, we sort of forgot to check the vegetables and our green veggies sort of died...
of course there always needs to be dessert...it's a oreo cheesecake cupcake. it has an oreo at the bottom, then regular cheesecake with oreo crumble on top. the cookie doesn't really soften in the oven, so next time only putting in half the cookie might work out just as well

Belated Thanksgiving

Now that it's less than 2 weeks until Christmas, I've decided it's high time to talk about the past holiday (ahem, my favorite holiday) Thanksgiving. The usual was made and devoured, although the one that was different and I wanted to talk about my sweet potato pie-Korean style.I got the recipe off of the foodnetwork site and it was really simple. But then, being frazzled shopping at Lotte and cornered by my mother to use the Korean sweet potato (not the American yam/sweet potato, which I've realized no one labels as both!). So instead of an orangey kind of pie, it was more yellow. It looked down right frightening before it was baked, but the resulting flavor tasted like a dense Korean sweet potato with a crust. Yum. Happy eating.