Post-Thanksgiving: Turkey Sandwich

Has everyone woken up from them turkey/food coma yet?  I definitely have, and was happy to realize that today is the day after Thanksgiving which can only mean one thing: TURKEY SANDWICHES!  As much as we all enjoy the bird, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, salad, corn and pie, I think you'll agree that one of the best, if not THE best thing about Thanksgiving is the leftovers.  

I love eating the cold turkey right out of the tupperware my parents sent me home with, but my absolute favorite thing in the world to make with leftover Thanksgiving turkey is sandwiches.  There are different variations of the turkey sandwich but I normally chop up the turkey and make it into a turkey salad, with diced onions, celery, pickle relish, kewpie mayo, dijon mustard and lots of black pepper.  Another tradition is to pile some stuffing and turkey between two slices of bread and douse it with gravy, although I guess that's quite a decadent sandwich!  I'll be making both of those very soon, but today I made a sandwich I'd never made before, based on a sandwich I'd had at a restaurant recently that blew my socks off.

Recipe: Healthy Lasagna (made with tofu!)

In my last post, I wrote about tweaking recipes in order to make them lighter and/or healthier. In the comments section, fellow Los Angeles food blogger Diana mentioned she often does the same thing, and was recently thinking about trying out tofu as a substitution for ricotta cheese in lasagna (adding that it might be a "crazy" idea!). Not so crazy, Diana (and PS, great minds think alike).  I’ve used tofu as a substitute for ricotta for about two years now, and I’m not sure what prompted me to try it, but I find it works pretty well in place of cheese and other creamy elements in a dish. I happened to make lasagna last night, so I figured it was the perfect opportunity to finally post about it.

Recipe: Healthy Chicken Parmigiana

 I’m always looking for ways to tweak recipes of my favorite dishes so they're a little bit healthier by reducing the fat or upping the fiber. Don’t get the wrong idea- I’m not going to present some dried-out hockey puck and try and sell you on the merits of how healthy it is. Healthy food has to taste good in order for one to want to eat it, and I do believe that it has to at least resemble the original dish.  I mean, I might like kale chips topped with some chopped tomatoes and garlic but don't even try and tell me they're called 'nachos,' ok?

5 Year Blog Anniversary!

Today marks five years since I first started Tuna Toast.  Wow.  Where did the time go?!  Back in 2005, I stumbled upon a NY-based food blog called The Amateur Gourmet, written by a then new-to-the-kitchen guy named Adam who is now quite big in the food media world and is no longer an amateur but quite an accomplished cook!  His honest and often hilarious stories of his foray into cooking really inspired me to start my own food blog, so on November 11, 2005, Tuna Toast (named after a dish made from a thick slice of bread topped with tuna salad and cheese, then broiled until toasty that is a staple at many cafés throughout Japan) was born.

Pig's Head Bolognese

 

I’ve written about my addiction to cookbooks before, and I’m not lying- if I spy a beautiful, hard-covered cookbook filled with glossy photos of beautiful food, it’s virtually impossible to turn away without buying it.  Ditto if I see one online, especially if it’s won a James Beard Award or is highly recommended by a chef or food personality I admire.  So you can imagine how quickly I grabbed Il Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey as it sat alone on the top shelf of the cookbooks section at Borders.  After all, it was written by Marc Vetri of Philadelphia's Vetri Ristorante, which Mario Batali called, “possibly one of the best Italian restaurants on the East Coast.”  Suzanne Goin once said “I do pretty much whatever Marc [Vetri] tells me to do.”  Yup, count me in.

I’ve never been fortunate enough to dine at one of Marc Vetri’s restaurants, but had heard he makes some of the best pasta in the United States.  After inviting my parents over for a family dinner, I started flipping through the pages, looking to see which fresh pasta I would try and recreate from Vetri’s many recipes.  However, one recipe in particular caught J’s eye, Pig’s Head Bolognese, and although it was one of the few pasta dishes in the book that called for dry, semolina pasta, I couldn’t deny the power of the pig and chose it being my journey into cooking a la Vetri.

SugarFISH, Downtown Los Angeles

As readers of this blog probably know by now, I love sushi. Being half-Japanese, it’s something I grew up eating, whether it was of the roll your own variety that my parents served for dinner when I was a kid, boxed sushi in an eikben (a boxed bento sold at train stations in Japan) or at one of the two or three regular sushi joints J and I frequent around Los Angeles. J is particularly fond of it and 90% of the time I ask him where he wants to go out to eat, he says, “sushi.”

Artisan Cheese Gallery, Studio City

Don’t you find it difficult to answer when people ask you what your ONE favorite food in the world is?  I mean, there are so many delicious options that I’m not sure one can truly name just ONE thing that is their absolute favorite.  It depends on my mood, where I am, even the weather- I love a bowl of rich, deeply-flavored boeuf bourguignon, but it’d be the last thing I’d want to eat in August when stuff like ceviche is more what I’m craving.  Unless you’re an extremely picky eater and are happy eating the same thing every day (how one can live like that is beyond me!), I doubt you could narrow your food love to just one.