Over the last few weeks, Hungry Bear and I have bought a ton of strawberries from Rodriguez Farms, our favorite strawberry vendor at the Serramonte Farmers' Market. The berries were sweet, juicy and a great value, a flat (12 baskets) was only $14. And their organic berries were just a few dollars more.

Needless to say, we've eaten a lot of fresh strawberries lately and needed to make something with them. After pondering what to bake, we decided to turn our amazingly simple blueberry kuchen recipe into a strawberry kuchen. The only changes to the recipe were the substitution of lemon zest and vanilla extract for the cinnamon.

I present to you Hungry Bear's ginormous fruit salad. On Thanksgiving, we had the latest version of her giant fruit salad with cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon, pineapple, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, kiwis, persimmons and mandarin oranges. The fruit selection is usually seasonal, but we are fortunate to get good fruit year round in San Francisco.

Similar to Hungry Bear's Chinese sticky rice, the mega fruit salad is a featured item at our holiday feasts. You maybe asking, "Is it really that big?" Yes, the fruit salad is humongous. We actually weighed it this time and the fruit came in at 20 lbs! The bowl is 6.5 inches deep and has a diameter of 14 inches. That's a lot of fruit capacity... 3.1 gallons!

Why is there so much fruit salad? I often ask this question myself. It's not like she's feeding a football team. At most, there are 15 people at our largest gatherings, with plenty of other food and desserts. The reason why there is so much fruit starts with Hungry Bear's refusal to buy half a melon because it's not as fresh. She typically begins with a whole cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon and pineapple, which is a lot of fruit. Next, to balance the flavors (sweet versus tart) and colors, a lot of berries and tropical fruit are required, which yields a 20 lb fruit salad.

Hungry Bear's love for leftovers is the ultimate reason why all dishes are bear-sized, i.e. quadrupled. On Thanksgiving, the fruit salad was a huge hit as always. It was very refreshing after a heavy meal and a great interlude before the apple, pumpkin and pecan pies. We had a ton of leftover fruit and everyone was more than happy to take some home.

Now you have the story of Hungry Bear's ginormous fruit salad!

This past weekend my buddy, Chad, drove up from LA with his wife, Kristie, and their two young kids, Chelsea and Brooke, ages 2 years and 4 months, respectively. Chad was coming up for our annual Penn State Football weekend in San Francisco. It's just a get together with my two West Coast Penn State friends, Chad and Chuck, to hang out and watch a PSU game. I think we've held this event since 1998. Unfortunately, Chuck from Seattle couldn't make it this time.

After a weekend filled with Korean BBQ, Hawaiian, Chinese and Burmese food, I was wondering what to make for Sunday night dinner. Thankfully, Jane texted me Sunday morning stating that dinner was at her place. Her brother, Garry, was planning on making a slow-roasted pork shoulder and his wife, Karen, was making a strawberry cream cake. We were definitely looking forward to dinner.

Chad and I went on a 50 mile bike ride to Tiburon and afterwards, we were famished. I told Chad that we should snack on something before heading over for dinner, otherwise, everyone would think we were complete pigs if we devoured all the food ourselves. My reputation as a glutton has already been established, but I wanted to protect Chad's image.

Dinner started with a pasta dish that Garry threw together with hot Italian sausages, mushrooms, peas, onions and tomato sauce. As a side dish, we sautéed some Kale with garlic, olive oil, sea salt and a touch of butter. To make the kale more tender, we blanched it first. The pasta was excellent with spicy sausage and sweet peas. The kale was tender and tasty.

Next up was Karen's strawberry cream cake. Karen is a trained pastry chef, so we are always looking forward to eating her beautiful desserts. This time, she was trying out a strawberry cream cake recipe from America's Test Kitchen. The recipe is from the current season of America's Test Kitchen TV show, and it's free if you register for the site. The cake is like strawberry shortcake and consists of white cake, strawberry filling, whipped cream with cream cheese and fresh strawberries. The cake was amazing! It was surprisingly light and not too sweet.

While the strawberry cream cake was great, it was only a palate cleanser for the slow-roasted pork shoulder. Actually, Garry and Karen were tied up and couldn't get the pork in the oven early enough. Since it takes a few hours to roast, the pork wasn't ready until after dessert. And none of us were leaving without trying the pork!

Garry based the pork roast off of this slow-roasted pork shoulder with melted apples recipe. He omitted the apples and onions and cut the cooking time. Without the apples and onions, there was less braising and more roasting. Garry thought the pork shoulder was too dry, but everyone at dinner thoroughly enjoyed it. The pork had a crispy, caramelized crust and the meat was full of flavor. The two big carnivores of the group, Jane and I, couldn't stop grabbing more pieces of pork shoulder. I definitely want to make this dish again with the melted apples.

Dinner was very fun and scrumptious. It was also great sharing Sunday night dinner with Chad and his family. As we were all leaving with full bellies, two year old, Chelsea, yelled, "tanks for da cake!" 

SNDsters: Chad, Kristie, Chelsea, Brooke, Garry, Karen, Mark, Jane, Hungry Bear, Chuck

While in New York City last month, we upheld our Sunday Nite Dinner tradition at our friends', Jeff and Aimee's, place. After a long weekend of non-stop eating festivities and a Sunday morning bike ride to Piermont, I just wanted to curl up for a extended nap instead of dinner planning. We were cooking for several meat-and-potatoes people, so we tossed around making skirt steak or meat loaf. We settled on good old reliable spaghetti bolognese. The rest of the menu was...

Heirloom Tomato and Butter Leaf Lettuce Salad
with avocados, medium boiled eggs, bacon lardons and Dijon vinaigrette

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Vietnamese Green Papaya Salad
with basil, beef jerky and nuoc cham

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Spaghetti Bolognese
topped by basil and shaved Parmigiano Reggiano

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Lemon Pound Cake
accompanied by fresh strawberries

Why the green papaya salad? Well, Jeff invited his cycling club friend, Maggie, who volunteered to make the papaya salad if it fit into the menu. At that point, the menu was "fluid" and we neglected to tell Maggie what we were making. That's how you end up with a tasty and refreshing green papaya salad with spaghetti bolognese. The salad was made with green papaya, basil, shredded beef jerky and topped with nuoc cham (Vietnamese dipping sauce).

Recently, Hungry Bear and I have had a penchant for making salads with avocados and medium boiled eggs. I lost track of the time when boiling the eggs, and as you'll see in the slideshow, they turned into hard boiled eggs. For extra flavor and to complement the creamy avocados, we fried up some bacon lardons. Coupled with heirloom tomatoes and lightly dressed greens, this salad rocks.

Jeff made the spaghetti bolognese and used this simple bolognese sauce recipe by Giada De Laurentiis. It's an easy recipe that requires minimal prep time and ingredients. Compared to Michael Chiarello's bolognese sauce that Hungry Bear made in August, Giada's recipe uses more tomatoes and produces a meaty marina sauce, whereas, Michael's recipe makes a meat sauce with a touch of tomatoes. Both sauces are simple to make and delicious.

We ended dinner with a lemon pound cake and fresh strawberries. I used a classic pound cake recipe found in The New Best Recipe cookbook. The recipe can also be found on Kat on Thyme, a friend of a friend's blog. The cake was turned into a lemon pound cake by adding the zest of two lemons. The pound cake was light, buttery, moist and delightful.

Overall, dinner was a little eclectic and very enjoyable. It was quite a challenge for four people to prepare a meal in a small kitchen (a very nice, recently remodeled kitchen). In the end, we succeeded in making a great Sunday night meal to share with our New York City friends.

SNDsters: Craig, Nicole, Maggie, Ava, Aimee, Jeff, Hungry Bear, Chuck

Vietnamese banh cuon are soft rice-flour crepes typically filled with pork and mushrooms. The crepes are traditionally served for breakfast/brunch but we enjoy it any time we can. Hungry Bear and I made banh cuon this past Lunar New Year, and they were a big hit with our friends. If you skip the cha lua (Vietnamese ham) and put a lot of herbs and vegetables on banh cuon, it can be a light and refreshing dish.

Several Sundays ago, Hungry Bear and I hosted Sunday Nite Dinner (SND) and decided banh cuon would be the main attraction. We had nine people coming to SND, so we decided to make two other Vietnamese dishes for dinner. Otherwise, we would have been rolling banh cuon all day. The menu was...

Goi Bap Cai Ga (Spicy Cabbage and Chicken Salad)
Cabbage, red onion, carrots, Thai chilies and chicken with a lemon vinaigrette

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Banh Cuon (Rice Crepe Rolls)
Pork or Shrimp, garlic, wood ear mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms
with fresh greens, mint, basil and nuoc cham (dipping sauce)

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Canh Chua Ca (Sour Fish Soup)
Tamarind, pineapple, tomatoes, taro stem, bean sprouts
and sea bass with jasmine rice

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Apple-Strawberry Crisp a La Mode
Granny Smith and McIntosh apples with organic strawberries

The first course was goi ga, a light and simple cabbage and chicken salad. Most Vietnamese restaurants serve goi ga but the ingredients aren't the freshest and it's usually drowned in fish sauce. Since it's such a simple salad, fresh ingredients and a light vinaigrette are essential. Most importantly, a must have ingredient is rau ram (Vietnamese mint), which can be found at a good Asian grocery store. Instead of boiling a chicken ourselves, we took a short cut and bought a roast chicken (thanks Brennan and Deb!) from the market to save prep time.

The second dish, and star of the evening, was the banh cuon. The filling is extremely easy to make since it's just stir fried pork, garlic, onions and mushrooms with a little fish sauce. The hard part to banh cuon is making the rice crepe. You can buy steamed sheets of banh cuon at Vietnamese stores but they tend to be on the greasy side for me. Instead, we make our own rice-flour crepes using a packaged banh cuon mix that requires just water and a good non-stick skillet. Once you master making the crepes, it's easy but time consuming to produce banh cuon. We ended up making thirty nine crepes at two minutes per crepe.

The third course was canh chua ca, which is a very traditional Vietnamese soup. The picture in the site header above is a bowl of canh chua ca that Hungry Bear and I had in Geneva, Switzerland. The tamarind and pineapple provide a sweet and sour flavor and the bac ha (taro stem) and bean sprouts add a crunchy texture. Most canh chua ca recipes call for catfish but I'm not a big fan of it. Any flaky white fish will do, but my parents recommend grouper, and we chose sea bass because it was on sale.

Dessert was clearly not Vietnamese. We wanted to make a relatively light dessert with fruit, and we had recently purchased organic strawberries. So we took an apple-raspberry crisp recipe and substituted strawberries for the raspberries. My oven temp seems to be out of whack because the crisp baked much faster than expected. The crisp was a little over baked with the apples a little mushier and the crisp browner than planned, but it still tasted good with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I know Brennan really enjoyed it, since he had three or four servings.

In the end, it was very hectic preparing food for eleven people in a kitchen with no counter space. But the food turned out great, and everyone loved the banh cuon once again. As always, it was nice hanging out and sharing a good meal with new and old friends.

Note: I provided recipe links for the Vietnamese dishes, although we didn't use them. We made the dishes mainly by memory and used tips from my mom. However, I tried to find recipes that were close as possible in preparation and ingredients. I would recommend Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen as a good Vietnamese cookbook.

Likewise, for the apple-raspberry crisp recipe, I used a Cook's Illustrated recipe but the site requires a subscription to view. The Food Network recipe is close, just don't use the butter or liquor in the filling and add lemon zest.

SNDsters: Ed, Julie, Deb, Brennan, Howie, Garry, Karen, Mark, Jane, Hungry Bear, Chuck