Artichoke Butter Recipe

This butter is delicious on a piece of toasted bread, but would go wonderfully with pasta, fish or grilled veggies. 

After making sweet potato tarte amandine and purple potato lavender white chocolate torte for my first cooking demonstration in front of a live audience recently, I had a lot of leftover high quality butter, so I decided to make a batch.

I prepared the flavored butter with artichoke hearts, a bit of sea salt, fresh basil leaves and lemon. It has a brightness to it that works well in almost any savory application. I'm planning on using the butter with a simple salt and pepper crusted steak. 

Lemon Butter Garlic Sauce Recipe

Lemon butter garlic sauce is a tasty accompaniment to artichokes.  Butter is used generously, in contrast to the low calorie and healthy artichoke.

If you want a healthier variant, check out my tofu vinaigrette I made a few weeks ago.

Ground Beef Stuffing Recipe

If you're Vietnamese, you've probably heard your mom say "tội chết" ("dreadfully sinful" in Vietnamese) in regards to wasting food. The lesson was definitely hammered into me, and now that I'm an adult, I intend to follow in my mom's footsteps and teach the same values to my daughter.

I love Acme brand green onion slab bread. It's very flavorful, moist and delicious. I went a little over-board buying 4 loaves at Costco. I made panini sandwiches the day before and had one left-over on the kitchen counter. Today, my goal was to come up with a creative way to use it all. I made stuffing using the onion bread with ground beef, artichoke hearts, tomato paste and mozzarella cheese. I moistened the bread with beef stock I had stored in the freezer. It makes a wonderful one-dish meal once the little casserole dish is heated and broiled in the oven. And if the slightly stale bread didn't have green onion in it, I could have made pain perdu (french toast) as well!