What does Asian Fusion even mean?

I love stir-fry. It's possibly my favorite way to cook--you don't really need a recipe or even much of a plan, just a stocked refrigerator and some sort of sauce or marinade. When there's no food in the house and I have no idea what to cook, I tend to go to the store and stare at the sauces or marinades until something seems like a good idea, and I build from there--what meat makes sense with this? vegetables? Awesome. Dinner is planned. And, when I get home and start actually cooking, I always end up finding more little things to toss in. It's so much fun.

This dinner was inspired by my favorite restaurant (or, one of them): Fire and Ice. It has six locations over the country--two in Massachusetts, one in Rhode Island, one in New York and two in California. If you live near one, you should definitely try it out. They call it an improvisational grill. Every meal is completely personalized because you pretty much make it yourself. You get a table and order drinks, then you go up to the bars. At the bars, you grab a bowl and fill it with whatever you think sounds good--one bar has bunches of fresh vegetables and different kinds of noodles (from bowties to udon noodles), another has the raw meat (pretty much any kind you'd want). There's a hamburger bar, with bacon and sliced tomatoes and pieces of lettuce and anything else you'd put on a burger; there's also a salad bar (which I usually use as a vegetable bar part 2). You put everything into a bowl, pick a sauce, and bring it to this HUGE circular grill where they cook it right in front of you. Sometimes the chefs try to entertain the hordes of people standing around waiting for their food--it's great (but busy!) on weekends. Then you get to go back to your table. Your drinks are there, along with plain white rice and some tortillas, and you eat your creation. It's also all-you-can-eat, so if you want to try a few different things, you can make as many trips up as possible.

ANYWAY. I love that place. If you live near one, join their email list--they send out coupons with great deals sometimes, and you get free dinner on your birthday!

So when Mike and I went to make a stir fry a while back, I thought of Fire and Ice for inspiration. We got an orange ginger sauce/glaze, some chicken, three(?) red peppers, two onions, and a pound of green beans. By random luck, we found udon noodles in the grocery store--I learned to love Udon from Fire and Ice, so it seemed appropriate. And, honestly? I'm not sure I can write a recipe for a stir-fry, because I'm not sure I want other people following the recipe exactly--the whole point is to play around with it and add things that you think would be great.

I chopped up the vegetables while Mike chopped up the chicken and got it cooking. There were so many vegetables we had to use two huge frying pans, but that means it's HEALTHY! Yay! We mixed up the sauce in another bowl with some lime juice and soy sauce. I like to think it added to the flavor, but I didn't taste it without them, so I don't know--I just know it tasted good! When everything was almost done cooking I noticed we had a few mandarin oranges left. And I don't mean the canned ones in juice. I mean legit you-have-to-peel-this mandarin oranges. We saw them in the store and bought them once and haven't found them again (or if we see something that claims to be mandarin oranges, they usually look much bigger than what we got that time so we assume they're mislabeled clementines).

Once everything cooked and the vegetables had shrunken a bit, we condensed everything into one pan, making sure there was still some sauce in the other one, and fried the udon noodles for a few minutes until they were nice and soft.

Now...I think this is Asian Fusion food. (I'm not going to call it 'cuisine' even though I think that's what people usually say with 'Asian Fusion' because it seems pretentious to call a stir-fry that you cooked yourself cuisine.) I'm not entirely sure, though, because I don't really know what it means. I think it means something along the lines of "uses ingredients that remind you of things you might order at an Asian restaurant," which this definitely did--the orange ginger sauce seemed like a typical "Chinese" food ingredient, and I'm pretty sure Udon noodles are a Japanese invention (though I could be completely making that up) and, well, there was soy sauce. Oh! We also cooked (half of) it in a wok! That must count for something.

Believe it or not, we froze this and just ate the remains last night (with new Udon because we'd only bought enough for about three servings). It had never occurred to me to freeze stir fry before, but it was just as delicious the next time! We re-fried it in the pan again, and this time we added the little spice packets that came with the Udon noodles ("Oriental" flavor--even more Asian Fusion!) and some teriyaki sauce. (Side note--why does my spell check not know the word 'teriyaki' but suggests 'sukiyaki'?)

I'm not going to call this a recipe, because it's not. The most I'm hoping for is inspiration. Maybe you'll read this and one or two things will stick out at you and you'll think, wow, that sounds like it would be really good with this other thing. And maybe you'll try to recreate this exactly, but you'll have a hard time as I didn't include amounts for ANYTHING. Because I don't know. I just tossed some of one thing in, a dash of another, probably some cumin. The whole point was to have fun and eat something delicious, and it worked out perfectly.

Is Pretty Important?

I've never made a bundt cake before in my life. I don't even own a bundt pan. However, whenever I see a recipe for a bundt cake, they look so pretty and delicious that I get sad about not owning a bundt pan. When I saw a recipe for Orange Chocolate Chunk Bundt Cake on eat me, delicious, I complained to Mike about my lack of a bundt pan, and he said that he had one--problem solved! So when it was his mom's birthday, we thought it would be a good time to try out this recipe. The picture looked so pretty, with ganache dripping down the side, and it just seemed like the perfect idea. We got some oranges and chocolate chips and made sure we had everything we needed.

I haven't zested anything for years. Last time I did, it was to make key lime pie (which I really want to do again, perhaps when it feels more like summer) and I don't think I've ever zested oranges. We got huge oranges, though, and ended up with enough zest after only two of them.

We now have a basic progression of cake. First the batter goes into the pan (making the batter wasn't all that interesting).

Then the pan goes into the oven. And then it comes out of the oven, and sits and cools for a long time so that it doesn't fall apart.

And then the cake falls apart anyway when we try to remove it from the pan.

I don't get it. Mike buttered and floured the pan, which he's usually very good at, and he even thought he did so in excess this time. And, with a normal cake, you can sorta stick a knife around the edges and a spatula of some sort under it and get it out and piece it together so it looks slightly reasonable, and it'll look okay anyway because you're frosting the thing. But with all the curves and weird edges in a bundt pan, we had to pry slowly and basically ended up crumbling half of what was stuck in the pan. And, let's be honest, I'm female and it's my boyfriend's mom's birthday and I suggest making a cake and it falls apart and I flip out. I'm not entirely sure how much Mike noticed that I was flipping out, because he managed to keep his cool and attempt to piece the cake together correctly (it was like one of those weird 3D puzzles but missing some pieces). There was a little ring of 'not done' on the bottom of the cake, and I'd say maybe that's why it fell apart, but that's not the part that fell apart at all. And we could have kept it in the oven longer to fix that, but perhaps it fell apart because the rest of it was overdone and really we should have looked at the positioning in the oven before we started, but you'd think that it having been on the top rack would mean the top (well, bottom) would be the part that came out overdone, right? And I probably stopped making any sense a while ago but the point is I'm really, really glad the recipe for the ganache made way more than originally pictured and we were able to cover the whole thing and it still tasted delicious. And looked, if nothing else, acceptable.

I don't go for pretty when I bake. It's not really the point. It's wonderful when it happens, but I'm usually in a rush and don't have time to care if the pie crust cracks when I put it on top of everything else, so I just hope it cracks in an artistic way instead of a messy, ugly way. And I guess it's the same with cakes--if I can get the thing to stick together, isn't it enough that it tastes good? I mean, if I were at a bakery and wanted a cake and there was one that looked really pretty and another one that had sorta fallen apart or they'd screwed up the food coloring in the frosting or something, well, the second one would probably be discounted and still taste exactly the same, so I'd get that. What do you think? Is pretty important when it comes to food?

And, besides, when you're making a cake that tastes like a Terry's Chocolate Orange, shouldn't it be okay for it to look like someone whacked it?

(Click here to go to the recipe. The only thing I changed was to leave the instant coffee granules out of the ganache and put in some almond extract. And next time I embark on this adventure [and it tasted good enough that there will be a next time] I'll substitute almond extract for the vanilla in the cake, too.)