I got home from work last night, ate dinner, tried to help clean up the dishes (got in trouble for doing things wrong), and realized that I was still hungry.

Not hungry hungry, like I didn’t eat enough for dinner.  Hungry as in I wanted a muffin, and I wanted that muffin now…or then…immediately….whichever one it was.

I dug through my pantry: no muffin mix.  My mom even helped me search: we unearthed mixes for brownies and nut bread.  But they wouldn’t do.  I wanted a muffin and I was going to have a muffin gosh darn it.  Preferably one with fruit in it.

After getting in trouble with the dishes, (apparently I don’t stack them properly in the dish drainer after rinsing…and yes, apparently there IS a right way) I really didn’t want to make something completely from scratch that was going to require a whole lot of clean up.  I would have done it had there been no other option, but the bigger mess was not my first choice.

So I stared at the pantry.  Gave it the old once over, and then a twice over, and after the fifteenth over (or so) a spark of insight hit me: someone out there in the universe somewhere has probably come up with a way to make Bisquick into muffins. Continue reading →

I got Michael a wok for Christmas.  It’s a nice 14” carbon steel wok with one really long handle and a shorter one.

The wok in question. Note how new and shiny it looks.

Between being busy because of the holidays and catching what we’re pretty certain was the flu last week we hadn’t had a chance until last night to try it out.  We picked a recipe out of Grace Young’s Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge (a really beautiful book if you’re interested at all in cooking in a wok), drove to Super H Mart (and then Walmart because pre-cooked ham was a bit too obscurely American for H Mart–no grand surprise there), and headed back to the apartment.

We thought our biggest challenge was going to be peeling and de-veining the shrimp we bought (although, considering I often find H Mart’s fish section to be a bit like a tiny aquarium, I feel really fortunate that the shrimp were already dead when the guy scooped them into the bag for us).  Michael was skeptical despite my optimism; I believe his words were, “We’re agreeing now that if this doesn’t work we’re ordering pizza.”

Oh, fateful, fateful words. Continue reading →