Spontaneous Las Vegas Trip over the Weekends

As spontaneous as it can be.  My hubby came home on Thursday and announced that let's go to Vegas tonight.  I was like how could that be possible since they (hubby and Evy) had to go watch Iron Man 2 at 7:30pm and what about his sleep since he had to drive 12-13 hours to Vegas.  Nevertheless, since the last time we had been to Vegas was 9 years ago, what the heck.  We reserved the hotel room at Circus Circus that night and took off in the morning at 4am.  My girls at one of the gas stops for branch.  Still chilly on the way there.  The last stop at Colorado before we moved on to Utah.

And where did we go when we arrived at Vegas?  China Town baby!  Got to have early dinner and shopped at Ranch 99 for drinks and snacks.  To my surprise, Vegas China Town is getting huge, it used to be a small area and now it occupied the whole street (Spring Mountain).  Any kind of Asian cuisine you can find it there, and it's authentic not Americanize.  One thing I did notice, lots of Koreans settled in Vegas, many Korean BBQ restaurants and supermarkets can be found there as well, not just Chinese and Vietnamese anymore.  One disadvantage about these restaurants, many accept cash only, so if you planned to dine in China Town, remember to bring lots of cash.  For your information, the Penang Malaysian restaurant there only accept cash.

The next day, we walked around a little bit under the scorching sun.  It was hot around 89'F and at time windy but very dry.  As you know, with little girls we couldn't walk very far and they were not interested at the buildings except M&M store.  Vegas has changed a lot too, old casinos were knocked down for the new, it was different from 9 years ago.  The traffic jam was bad, really bad, there was always a traffic jam on the Vegas strip.  We didn't have to wait long but there's always a jam.  Many people were there walking and shopping as well, pretty crowded.

This was one place they wanted to go.  We went in and they each got a bag of M&M to munch on.  Not forgetting to take a picture with yellow and red too.

Spicy and Sour Instant Noodle Soup

I borrowed Iron Chef Chen Kenichi's Knockout Chinese cookbook from the library and couldn't keep my hands off it.  I love the simple recipes with step-by-step pictures and mouth-watering end result to drool on.  This book also introduced me to two new pastes, one is Doubanjiang (Sichuan soy bean paste) and the other is Tianmianjiang (sweet noodle sauce).  He used these two pastes often in the cookbook especially Doubanjiang.  I just bought a bottle of Doubanjiang and couldn't wait to try his recipes.  I am eager to find out how Doubanjiang tastes like, with the new paste, I guess I will have new recipes to share in the future.

For this spicy and sour instant noodle soup, I used his premix sauce (A) but omitted egg and added mini sausages and bean sprouts.  I just wanted to taste the instant noodle the way he had when he was a kid.  It is an easy way to kick the instant noodle up a notch.

Stir Fried Bean Sprouts with Chives

This is my other way of cooking chives.  Stir-fried it with bean sprouts and dried anchovies (as I don't buy salted fish).  Instead of scallion, I substituted it with chives.  I guess most of the dishes that uses scallion before can be substituted with chives.  In this case, I used more chives than scallion called for in this dish.

So, when you buy a bunch of chives from the supermarket, you can split in into 2-3 dishes along the week.  One is this, the other is the fried chives eggs, and the leftover you can fried noodle or fried rice with it.  Just substitute it in a dish that you would normally uses scallion.  We should eat for our health most of the times and occasionally indulge in something that we know is not so good.

Chives Fried Eggs

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to buy more chives from now on as eating chives is good for our body as it said to be mild-antibiotic, anti-inflammation, antioxidant and prevent certain types of cancer.  Just do a search to read more about the benefits of chives.  Sharing with you is another way of enjoying chives the delicious way.  I think this is one pretty common dish for people who eats chives regularly.

This is definitely an easy dish to prepare, even for people who don't normally have chives in their diet, but wanted to eat for prevention, like me who just started.  My girls loved fried eggs and they had a hard time picking out the chives and thus had to eat it.  My elder girl is the worst, she doesn't like green onion, yellow onion (basically onion of any kind), mushrooms (except Enoki), tomato, pieces of ginger and she would just picked it out from the food.  What got me upset was the little one wants to imitate her sister, now she also followed her sister and picked out those food to set aside on her plate (she used to eat everything!). *sigh*

What other delicious way do you cook your chives?  I added it in stir fried noodle, bean sprouts (coming soon), and this fried eggs, what else?

Strawberry Milk Shake

My fridge was fulled of strawberries!  That was what happened when I asked my hubby to do grocery shopping.  Strawberry was on sales for $1/lb and since he was there to get his banana, he asked me whether I needed anything else.  I told him to get me some strawberry and blackberry (which was also on sales) and he returned with 6 lb. of strawberries and two small boxes of blackberries.  How to finish the 6 lb. of strawberries in one week?  Just me and my girls since he doesn't eat strawberry.

Well, I thought milk shake was the quickest way to get rid of 1 lb. of strawberries at one go.  I added zero fat sherbet for extra goodness and of course some syrup to make it sweet.  Edda loved it and she had two glasses at one go.  Sure made a nice refreshing fruit drink for warmer weather! 

Stir Fried Rice Flour & Wheat Starch Noodle

Another easy stir-fried noodle dish.  I fried this noodle before.  This time I just added a little more ingredients.  When I was shopping at my Asian market, I loved to browse through the fresh noodle section and bought few packets of different variety to freeze at home.  I just thawed it the day before and I will have fresh noodle handy for whenever my mood strikes.

My husband loved to buy lots of fried chicken at the supermarket.  I was trying to cook healthier food and he tried to buy unhealthy food home.  He bought so much that I had to freeze portions for later use.  For the one I frozen, I always peeled off the skin, cut off all the fried stuff and just used the meat in my cooking.  I had used it in my chicken noodle soup before, fried rice and all sort of fried noodle.  Leftover for better use huh?

I'm sharing this noodle with Presto Pasta Nights, an event created by Ruth from Once Upon a Feast.  This week host is  Katie of Thyme for Cooking! Check out her delicious round up on April, 30th!