Global Cuisine

Sometimes a huge craving for Chinese food can be settled with a simple bowl of fried rice.

But before you even think about pulling over for any belt busting take-out Chinese like Panda Express, you need to know that a mere cup and a quarter of their fried rice, even with no meat, has 570 calories!!! That’s one third of the calories my 5’5 self should have in a whole day!!

Instead, make this skinny fried rice–loaded with veg and protein– in just minutes, at home.

By skipping almost all of the oil, using Egg Beaters instead of whole eggs, and using a mix of Cauliflower Rice and Brown Rice, you can have the full taste of take out…but for only 120 calories a cup! If this delish dish doesn’t convince you that learning how to make Cauliflower Rice and Magic Rice is worth the wee bit of effort,  nothing will!

My love affair with food began in the dim dark ages of the glorious 1990’s, when neon was king and it was cool to rock a mullet while listening to Marky Mark and his Funky Bunch.  Born in San Diego and being brought up by a Hawaiian family from beautiful Kaneohe, greatly impacted my palate, and brought me to the culinary forefront well before my time.

The Hawaiian family unit is a large extended conglomeration made up of relatives and friends of the family, which basically makes dinnertime feel like riding ‘It’s a Small World’ at Disneyland, where everyone I’m not related to is either an ‘aunt,’ ‘uncle,’ or a ‘cousin.’ So in other words, it made finding a prom date that wasn’t a cousin, quite difficult. (That’s my excuse)

This just screams summer and Mexico! Doesn't a tropical Mexican Riviera vacation sound good about now? A few margaritas, a couple of these salads....I'm in...who wants to go?

My oldest boy loves shrimp, I mean, really loves shrimp. And he loves taco salad. In fact, I'm not sure which one he loves more. So I decided to combine these two loves and make something summery and delicious. I think I succeeded, since he gobbled this up in no time at all. It was an epic gobbling, let me tell you.

I love watching people eat and enjoy the things I make....it's like a weird voyeur thing, but I can't help it.

I first cook the shrimp in this buttery-lime-cilantro sauce. I slice the shrimp lengthwise before cooking because it doubles the amount of shrimp bites in your salad. And, the shrimp cooks a little faster so there is a less chance of overcooking it.

I cannot go to a Thai restaurant without ordering green curry. It is by far my most favorite Thai dish and I've eaten so many versions that I can almost say I'm an expert in its flavor. Something about the creamy coconut sauce with slight sweetness, the hot chiles, the green color, and verdant flavor makes me crave this dish very often. Curry, a generic term for dishes in South Asian cuisine, is known for its use of distinctive spices combined to form unique flavor. Most Westerners assume that curry is a single spice or a mixture of them. Although this is somewhat true, the word curry, an Anglicization of the Tamil word khari, references the nature of the dish: a stew, sauce, or gravy; not the spices. The colonizing English happened to call all saucy South Asian foods by the name curry, and the name stuck.

The most well-known curries are Indian and Thai, but the combination of ingredients differ greatly. Thai curries use a vast array of fresh herbs and vegetables such as cilantro, kaffir lime leaves, and lemongrass to lend incomparable aroma. The base of the green curry comes from the all-important paste, which combines lemongrass, lime leaves, shallots, garlic, ginger, cilantro, chiles, and the spices coriander and cumin along with the particularly Thai ingredients: fish sauce and shrimp paste. All of the Thai curries begin with a similar flavorful paste, but of course a red curry will begin with a red paste, and a yellow with a yellow. The "green" ingredients create the unforgettable fresh flavor that is the base for green curry.