We eat quite a bit of food with a Southeast Asian flare around here. Sometimes I make it; other times I seek it out and purchase it, but either way, we’re no stranger to the flavors or the fantastic smells that cooking with rice wines and vinegars, teeny, tiny chili peppers or lemongrass and ginger bring.

I was recently asked to try out Nakano’s Seasoned Rice Vinegar and to give a lucky reader the chance to do the same. I agreed, seeing that Nakano’s Natural Rice Vinegar was hanging out in my cupboard already. It seemed like a great opportunity to try what else they had to offer, and I decided to give the Red Pepper variety a spin along with some delicious scallops and a bit of lemongrass. Start by chooping up your lemongrass, ginger and peppers (wear gloves to protect yourself from the long-lasting burning that can come from chopping hot peppers).

Start by chopping up a bit of lemongrass, ginger and a Thai pepper or two depending on how hot and spicy you like your scallops.
Add your marinade ingredients to a shallow bowl or plate: rice vinegar, lemongrass, ginger, 1-2 Thai peppers, soy sauce and sesame oil.

Give your sea scallops a bath in the marinade, only 2 minutes per side. Longer marinating times with scallops can make them mushy, so don’t over-marinate.

Over medium-high heat get a bit of canola oil heating in a pan. Place the scallops in and cook for 2-3 minutes until they form a nice crust on one side.

Flip and cook for 2-3 minutes on the second side. Remove the scallops from the pan and set aside.

De-glaze the pan by adding the marinating liquid to the pan. Continue to cook the sauce over medium heat to reduce for 5-7 minutes.

When the sauce is thick and reduced, it’s time to eat.

Serve the scallops on their own or over rice and vegetables, using the reduced sauce to pour over the top. These were delicious and the perfect complement to the red Thai curry we served them alongside (recipe to follow). So, while you’re waiting for me to get going on that recipe, I hope you enjoy this one, and a little giveaway to go along with it.

All in all, I love the idea of the seasoned rice vinegars, but I have to say I’ll stick to the Nakano Natural variety. I’m a purist, and ingredients that read: “rice vinegar, water” are just what I am looking for, no sugar or other sweeteners needed.

Enter the Giveaway:

One winner will receive a $25 Visa Gift Card and bottle of Nakano Seasoned Rice Vinegar to try, along with a coupon and recipe booklet for even more ideas.
1. Tell me what your favorite recipes with rice vinegar are. If you haven’t used it before, tell me which ones you’ve seen that have caught your eye.

2. Follow @FoodforMyFamily on Twitter and tweet the following. Then come back and let me know you’ve tweeted!
Enter to win a $25 Gift Card and bottle of Nakano Seasoned Rice Vinegar from @FoodforMyFamily: http://bit.ly/9E1UUv
3. Join the Food for My Family community on Facebook. I’ve been working on asking reader questions and looking for feedback, so it’d be great to have your input there as well!


Giveaway ends at 11:59 p.m. CT on Friday, 9/10. Winner will be chosen using Random.org and notified by email. In the event that the winner doesn’t respond to the email within 48 hours, I’ll choose a new winner.

Disclosure: I was given the Nakano Seasoned Rice Vinegar for this recipe and compensated for my review. The opinions expressed are my own.

Last week I had the privilege of spending some time in Scottsdale, Arizona with a group of amazing bloggers after being invited to the Thermador Showroom as they released their new Steam & Convection Oven, set to hit the market this fall. Before I even said yes to going, I knew that I was in love with Thermador. I mean, have you seen Thermador’s appliances? Gorgeous with their Star Burner and sapphire lights!

Our trip to the showroom started with a gourmet breakfast offered up by Thermador’s staff chefs: Chef Kyle and Chef Brad. Gluten-free pancakes topped with the best buttermilk syrup (seriously, I am still dreaming of it) and eggs, quinoa fruit salad and more. As a breakfast lover, I was in heaven.

After a short informative session, we moved into the hands-on activities, literally. Here, Janne is showing us just how low the “extra low” setting on the Thermador burners is with help from Jane from This Week for Dinner.

To further prove the point, there’s a paper plate with melting chocolate chips on the burner.

Lunch was a hands-on affair as well, with everyone in the kitchen crowding Chef Kyle and waiting for him to tell us what else we needed to do. Kyle sears a whole beef tenderloin on the grill.

Once it was seared, the tenderloin was transferred to the Thermador Steam & Convection oven where it steamed and cooked at 125° for 50 minutes. It came out perfect and was served with a tomato jam and horseradish cream.

Also made in the Steam & Convection Oven was the amazingly creamy crème brûlée, caramelized beautifully by my new friend Lindsey from Fresh Clean Start.

Oh, yes. There’s more. Kristen from Dine & Dish was put in charge of this beurre blanc, which started by reducing wine and vinegar with shallots.

Once the sauce had reduced, it was Kristen’s job to whisk in the butter chunk by chunk over low heat until it was all incorporated.

Add in a bit of minced tarragon and lemon juice for good measure, and you have a sauce perfect for, in this case, pouring over a salmon wellington.

Yes, please. I’ll take one of those.

A big thank-you to Todd and Diane for continuing to share so openly all your photography wisdom, and to Todd for pouring the beurre blanc and helping me make the switch to adjusting my white balance in Kelvin. I haven’t looked back.

Thermador has been producing high quality and luxury kitchen appliances since the 1930s, and coming out with the first stainless steel lines in the 1940s they were billed as “The kitchen of the future” at the World’s Fair.

I really appreciated what the new Steam & Convection Oven is capable of. I’ve been trying to convince Ole that we don’t need a microwave, and this is my new ploy to get it out of our house with it’s defrosting and reheating perfection. With three cooking modes (steam, convection or a combination), how can you say no to an appliance that can make bagels without boiling and turns out deliciously crusty artisan breads? And the baked egg possibilities? Note the breakfast obsession…

Photo credit: Thermador

Photo courtesy of White on Rice Couple

Kristen Doyle – Dine & Dish
Tina Haupert – Carrots N’Cake
Katie Goodman – goodLife {eats}
Lindsey Johnson – DesignMom Blog
Maria Lichty – Two Peas & Their Pod
Ciaran Blumenfeld – Momfluential Media
Diane Cu & Todd Porter – White on Rice Couple
Shanna Coady – My Favorite Everything
Brooke McLay – Cheeky Kitchen
Jane Maynard – This Week for Dinner
Jenny Flake – Picky Palate
Jennifer Leal – Savor the Thyme
Russell Warnick – Endless Simmer
Sarah Freymoyer – Classy Mommy
Jenna Weber – Eat Live Run
Tanya Patrice – I Ate a Pie
Becky Bracken – She Knows

This past November I signed up to be adopted by another blogger through Dine and Dish. My blog was still a baby, not even a year old, and I was in need of some focus and direction. The stars aligned, and Michelle from What’s Cooking entered my life. Michelle has been wonderful when I needed someone to bounce ideas off of, and her work teaching kids how to cook and plan meals is nothing short of amazing. Here I was, dreaming of inspiring families to cook, and there she was, actually going out and doing it in her own community on a daily basis.

I am thrilled to pieces to call Michelle my friend. I was also pretty excited when she asked me to write on her blog about some of our kids in the kitchen adventures. We made pineapple-mango salsa together one afternoon, and then we proceeded to put it on everything from pita chips to fish tacos to this grilled salmon.

We started by giving each member of the family a fruit or vegetable to chop or dice. This made everything go faster, and the kids were thrilled to be involved. Mangoes, onions and limes were first, by my ten-year-old and me.

We added peppers, and seeding them was the perfect job for three-year-old fingers.

My five-year-old was happy to both dice and mix in his tomatoes. Ole managed the pineapple.

The scraps all went into our compost bin, which has been coming along nicely. Ole is quite proud of the steam that rises from the center of the pile.

While the salsa was resting, we prepared the salmon.

A few fresh herbs from the garden, lime juice and salt were all in order.

Spray the fish first to avoid sticking to the grill and place flesh side down.


When both sides have been cooked, it’s time to eat.

A large spoonful of the pineapple-mango salsa is exactly what this fish needed to add some color and flavor to the party, and the kids couldn’t help but be excited to be eating something they helped make for dinner.

I mentioned last week that one way to get in your own kitchen more often and away from the takeout containers was to make extra meat or extra ingredients that can be repurposed later and used in different meals. Following my own advice, fish tacos were born!

We had quite a bit of fish left from our tilapia meal because we had started with over three pounds of fish. Because tilapia is firm fish and they had been baked in nothing but a bit of seasoning and milk, the leftover fillets were perfect for using as a base for another recipe. I froze them and then went about working them into my next week’s menu. Fish tacos seemed to lend themselves naturally to the tilapia. A bit of mango salsa, a squeeze of lime, a dusting of cumin and we were nearly finished. NOTE: You can make this recipe with raw fish! If you’re making this recipe without leftover precooked fish, simply marinate the fish in the lime juice and spices for 30 minutes and bake at 400° F for 15 minutes.

Start by thawing your leftover fish. I did this by placing it in a single layer on a plate and placing it in the fridge for a few hours.

Squeeze the juice of one lime all over the surface area of the fish.

Sprinkle with a mixture of cumin, a very small amount of salt and black pepper.

Place fish in a single layer on a cookie sheet and broil on high for 3 to 4 minutes. We are only trying to reheat the fish, not cook it.

When the fish is heated through, flake it using your fingers and place it into a warmed tortilla.

A smear of guacamole will hold the fixings in place.

And some cheese for me. Probably unnecessary, but I like it.

Mango salsa is a must and maybe a few extra tomatoes cut up in there. I’m in love with tomatoes.

Then add the lettuce and, in my case, a healthy sprinkle of freshly chopped cilantro (optional for those of you who hate cilantro) and hit it again with a small squeeze of a lime wedge.

It only took about 10 minutes to pull this meal together, and everyone left the table with an empty plate and a full belly.

As a family we try to eat a variety of food each week, straying from the meat and potatoes that Ole grew up on or the spaghetti with meat sauce that could be found on my childhood dinner table on a weekly basis. We strive to make our food life interesting, nutritious and diverse. However, it can be hard when you are a family of six balancing work, volunteering, homework, music lessons, sporting events and everything else that comes with daily life with young children to branch out and experiment, to try new things. That may explain why when it comes to beef and chicken alternatives, we seem to get stuck at salmon, as evidenced here, here and here.

While we venture into the realm of tuna, trout, crab and shrimp and scallops on occasion, our fish option, more often than not, lands on salmon. With wild salmon harder to find during these gray winter months, we ventured out of the box and picked up tilapia this week, what some may call the budget fish. In the realm of eco-friendly fish, U.S.-farmed tilapia usually makes the grade. Tilapia is easily farmed, eats oxygen-depleting plants, thereby cleaning the waters they live in without harmful chemicals, and is generally low in mercury. Ole’s complaint is that they are boring as far as fish varietals go, so we set about on a journey to undo some of the ho-hum of tilapia.

Squeeze half a lemon over the tops of the fish, covering as much surface area as possible.

Sprinkle some kosher salt and pepper over the tops of the fish.

Melt a tablespoon of butter and combine with ½ cup of milk. Pour into the baking around the fish. I pour it off to the side so that the fish remain covered with the lemon, salt and pepper during baking. I suppose you could just do this step first to avoid worrying about that. Regardless, add it in there.

And it’s ready for the oven. Just 15 minutes at 400º F should get you to doneness.

When the fish is done, remove it from the oven and pour off the sauce into a measuring cup. At this point, I place the fish on a heat-safe dish and cover. Once the oven has cooled but is still slightly warm, place them back in to stay warm while you finish the sauce.

Add enough milk to the reserved liquid to bring it to 1 ¼ cups. This should be about ¾ of a cup. Keep it near you. We’ll be using it momentarily.

In a saucepan, melt the butter. Then add a bit of flour while whisking. Continue to cook for at least one minute to make a roux. After a minute, whisk in the milk. This is a basic Béchamel sauce.

To finish the Béchamel/white sauce, add the juice from the other half of the lemon and simmer for 5 minutes until sauce thickens. Season with dill, salt and pepper.

Then go and grab your fish from where it has been patiently waiting in the oven. We’re going to plop it down, perhaps, on a pile of steamed rice.

Give it a generous amount of sauce right on top.

And serve it with an extra lemon wedge or two and maybe a salad and you have a meal, a meal for 6, in our case, all within a half hour, start to finish.

It’s here. The last week of the summer is in full swing, and I am over my head in work and events and activities and last-minute to-do lists that just may very well not get done. Throw in a couple phone calls about the school book fair (remind me again why I am the chairperson for that) and three open houses for the kids, I’m starting to feel like summer is already gone. Still, determined to stretch those warm summer nights and days as long as possible, this pasta’s fresh taste will make you think you’re in the midst of it rather than running at a full on sprint towards brisk breezes and fall-colored leaves.

I realize that I’ve been using a lot of capers recently. Both here and here. This also features capers. Let’s say, however, that you are opposed to the little dots of salty joy. For both this recipes and the ones previous, consider them optional. No need to pick them out of anything if you don’t like them, and surely no need for you to forgo entire culinary experiences just because it includes something like capers. That’s the beauty of cooking, the ability to cook what you want how you want. (Don’t ask me where the wine was in this picture. In the fridge so I could drink it with the meal perhaps.)


Raw shrimp is essential here. The precooked stuff just isn’t the same, and because it’s precooked, I feel that even the lightest bit of heating tends to overcook them into something tough and rubbery, and that is definitely not what we’re looking for.


Before you do anything else, start your pasta going. I like to add a teaspoon or two of olive oil and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt to my water. The pasta absorbs some of the salt while it cooks, but not enough to make it salty, just to bring the flavor up a little, and the olive oil helps prevent stickage to both pot and other pasta strands.


To prepare your scallops, start by pulling this tiny little muscle off the side. Just give them a once over, and you should be able to find it stuck there. A little tug should be all it needs to separate itself.


Be sure to use enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan and heat until it starts to crackle if hit with a drop of water over medium-high heat.


While your oil is heating, sprinkle your scallops lightly and evenly with salt and pepper. Add your scallops to the hot oil and sear 2 to 3 minutes per side until they get this nice crust on them.


When the scallops are done, remove them to a warm plate covered in foil (because it holds the heat better) and set aside while you prepare the sauce. Over medium-high heat, add your chopped garlic and capers (if you so choose to use) to the pan and cook for 30 seconds. Next, deglaze the pan by adding the wine and lemon juice.


When the liquid starts to reduce (read = there is less of it), add your mushrooms and shrimp, cooking shrimp just until they are pink on both sides, which ends up as about a minute per side. Add your cream and continue to stir until it thickens. How will you know it’s thick? It will start coating your spoon and holding together around the mushrooms and the shrimp rather than slipping off the sides.


I like to turn the heat off and introduce the pasta to the sauce rather than the other way around. In serving-sized bunches, I run the noodles through the sauce, pull and allow excess sauce to drip off and place them on the plate. Then I top with a few more pieces of shrimp and mushrooms from the sauce. Most people have a tendency to overindulge in their pasta sauce, drowning the noodles. This way it is easier to toss lightly in the sauce in large batches.


Topped off with a sprinkle of parsley and a seared scallop or two, it is the perfect way to be forgetful and pretend the days of summer really are endless.

Most of you have probably seen the alternate form of tuna over at the meat counter at your local super mart.  A bright red thick steak labeled tuna but bearing absolutely no resemblance to the canned version we know so well.  And most of us avoid that steak because it is so unfamiliar to us, not to mention expensive.  But maybe today I can change your mind.

Last week our local grocer was offering a great deal on Ahi tuna – 6.99/lb.  Usually this stuff is at least $13 or more dollars per pound which causes us to pass it up.  In fact I don’t think we’ve had tuna steaks for well over a year now so when we saw the circular we immediately put tuna on the menu.  Since we planned it for Friday however, we didn’t run out and buy any until Thursday night.  It is imperative to keep your fish for as short a time as possible before cooking it.

Now I had been sitting on a recipe that we wanted to try for some time but we were either going to have to wait for a special occasion or hope for a sale.  Well as luck would have it the sale came first.  It’s tuna time.

Side note: I do need to give credit to the author of this one.  Usually I start with a dish that I have had before and want to copy, then I scour the web, read about five or six different variations of the dish, and then make my own recipe based on what I have in the cupboard or to suit my personal tastes.  This recipe needed no alterations.  It is the easiest recipe I have seen, and the flavor is nothing short of perfect.  I saw this on an episode of Good Eats, so I give full credit to Alton Brown.  And to him also I say “Thank you”.

In addition to a red hot grill, you will need five ingredients (yup, that’s it).

2 lbs Ahi Tuna steaks

¼ cup soy sauce

¼ cup honey

¼ cup wasabi powder

Sesame seeds

That is it.

Mix the soy sauce, honey and wasabi in a zip top bag and set aside half of it for a dipping sauce.  Place the steaks into the bag with the other half of the sauce and allow them to soak for an hour or more.

I didn’t really measure the wasabi powder.  I just assumed the can I bought was a quarter cup.  Yep, I just dumped in the whole can.

After the hour is up, light your grill and crank it up to high, what we want is a good sear on the steaks and that is all.  I removed one grate from my grill and turned the other one sideways and set it right on top of the pumice rocks.  The closer you can get to the fire with this one the better.

Ok, with the grill going, remove your tuna steaks from the marinade and roll them in sesame seeds.  You want complete coverage here because you will lose some on the grill.  Pat them gently to make them stick.

Go check your grill.  My temperature needle was off the charts, and if I had to guess, I would say the temperature at the grill surface was 800 degrees.  Once you reach this point.  Stop.  Make sure you have everything close by.  Good tongs, a clean plate, some foil, and some cooking spray.  Also you should have everything else that you are eating with the tuna already prepared and waiting for you.  This is going to go fast.

Ready?  Ready.

Oil up the grate with spray, careful, you will get flames, which I think is the best part.  Quickly transfer the tuna to the grill.  Don’t worry about the lid for this one, leave it open.  Count to 40 and flip.  40?  Yes, 40, 40 seconds.  Ok maybe not 40 exactly, but trust your senses.  You should smell the sesame seeds starting to toast releasing their hidden flavors – when you smell this, it is time to flip.  Once flip repeat the same counting or sniffing routine.  When the seeds start toasting, you’re done.  Remove from the heat to a foil lined plate, cover and let them rest for five minutes (this is very important).

During the resting period retrieve the sauce that you set aside and bring it to the table for dipping.

Once the steaks have had their five minute nap it is time to eat.  Cut the fish into thin slices and serve, dip, and devour.

The simple sauce really packs a punch in the flavor department.  Sweet honey plays perfectly with the salty soy sauce but both are swiftly enhanced by the spicy kick from the wasabi, truly a perfect balance.  Just be careful not to use too much sauce or you will over power the subtle flavor of the tuna and toasted sesame seeds.

This dish is perfect for entertaining your more adventurous friends.  The fish is rare, the sauce is spicy, but the complete package, which only takes ten minutes to prepare, is a total show stopper.  Plus, if you shop the sales, you can feed a group of four for under $20.  Although this is so good, I might not wait for the sale next time.