We haven’t had a food blog update lately so to catch up, here’s a few more recipes from our food blog, Cooked from the Heart (click on the recipe titles below for the recipes):

Rice Noodles with Beef & Mint

This recipe is one of our latest favorites. We’ve made it a few times more since we realized how good it is with fresh mint! The first time I made it, I served it with rice noodles as noted in the recipe but as we found out on subsequent versions, this is just as good over steamed rice. If you’re not too much into beef, pork and chicken works quite well with the spices and the addition of mint too. You’ll probably agree that this dish is all about the mint!

Pan Fried Tilapia with Miso Curry Sauce

If you love fish, here is an easy and delicious weekday meal. If you don’t have Miso just your favorite curry sauce or sweet and sour sauce will also work nicely with this recipe.

My daughter who does not eat fish only had the vegetables in the sauce over rice and she deemed it delicious! If you’re like her and don’t like fish either, this sauce will probably work over some pan fried chicken too.

Chinese Braised Ribs

I just love ribs cut this way (so much easier to eat) and I love them braised Chinese style like you get at dim sum restaurants. We haven’t been to dim sum lately and I was having a craving so I thought I would make them myself.

Little did I know how much my husband would love them too! He usually does not like messing with dishes that have a small meat to bone ratio. He just doesn’t think the effort to be worth it. lol! But surprisingly, he really loved this dish.

Corn & Egg Drop Soup

This is the accompanying soup when I made with the Chinese braised. Since my daughter eats very little meat and was also feeling under the weather, I knew she would not want any of the braised ribs. She does love soups though and what better for a sore throat than soup, right? So I made her this egg drop soup with corn and this was all she had for dinner. She had a couple of bowls of it, so she was good

With the weekend coming up, I’m scouting for recipes to try this weekend. I have a few in mind already now we’ll just have to see how much energy I have left to actually cook them!  It’s a grey and rainy day here in NC today and I’ve been craving some kind of bean soup. So if nothing else, I just may have me a pot of soup this weekend!

If you’re on a look out for food ideas, here’s a few recipes recently published in our kitchen blog:

Here is a delicious marinade for fajitas. My husband loves his red meat so steak fajitas it is for him but you can also use the same marinade for chicken or whatever meat you choose even shrimps. With shrimps though, just make sure to not marinate it too long as the lime will start breaking down your shrimps. i.e. cook it before you’re ready to put it on the fire.

This would be perfect for that last hurrah on the grill.

How about hamburgers for breakfast? Well why not?

It has all the elements of a good healthy breakfast: starch in the form of bread, your protein in the beef patty and the addition of an egg makes it complete! A great way to start the day.

Try it out!

Here’s another out of time dish if you’re like us and don’t mind eating out of turn once in a while. Grits is usually eaten for breakfast, but this dish is so good, it’s good enough for dinner!

If you’re up for something really delicious, you gotta try out this Mushroom and Shrimps over Cheesy Grits. As Paula Dean would say, this will make you want to smack yo’ momma!

 And if you’re wanting to want to try something exotic and new yet somehow comforting as the weather cools, then you’ll enjoy this chicken stewed in coconut milk. The flavors are not shocking, but they are mildly exotic. Just enough to make you dream you’re sitting somewhere sunny and warm.

Try this out when the weather starts getting too cold and dreary. It’s a perfect thing to keep the SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) away.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

The theme for this week’s bloghop is YOUR FAVORITE RECIPE. It has been a very popular topic and Brent is compiling all the recipes submitted into a book. If you’d like your recipe in the book, make sure to also submit your recipes to http://www.mcklinky.com/recipes.asp.

We have too many favorite recipes to mention, just take a look at our food blog to see some of them so how about the latest favorite that we made? This salad, we only make during the summer when our garden produces the sweet potato leaves used for this salad. Yes, you heard me right, sweet potato tops! My grandmother loved this salad and would always make it for us. Sadly, she passed away earlier this year and me miss her tremendously. It brought tears to my eyes when my daughter Asi asked for this salad earlier this summer and referred to it as “Lola’s Kamote Salad“. Lola means grandmother in Pilipino (the language spoken in the Philippines) and Kamote is the word for sweet potato or yam.

It just made me happy and sad at the same time that we get to remember her this way. I love how we associate so many memories of her with the food we continue to make and eat in her honor. So on to the recipe!
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