If you're like me, you probably have some last of the season cucumbers creeping out of your garden, right? Well, if you don't, this is a great salad to celebrate the waning of the summer months. This salad will make it pop right back up. Really!

I had a few pre-cooked shrimps left (the kind you get in a bag from the grocery store) that needed to be used up so I thought this would be a perfect way to use them up. Not only did we use cucumbers from the garden, all the herbs were too. It was delicious!

Click here for the recipe for Cucumber Shrimp Salad.



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While I was away to be with my family in California, my husband was left with three teens. Luckily, Jade likes to cook so he didn't have to worry about cooking. We have been obsessed with rice noodles lately so these wide rice noodles were in the pantry just waiting to be cooked. Jade decided to make an easy pad thai and she decided to base her recipe on Chez Pim's Pad Thai recipe. Jade said she thinks she's finally cracked the secret to cooking pad thai noodles by using Chez Pim's technique of having the cooking sauce prepared and ready to go. I have never had anything against using ketchup in my pad thai sauce, but after reading Pim's recipe, Jade made me swear to never again use ketchup. LOL!

We'll post our version my Pad Thai soon. Maybe Jade will post her version too.

Oh, in case you noticed and are wondering, yeah, we have a bad habit of eating our noodles with rice.


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I am proud to say that I came up with this recipe all on my own, by accident and out of necessity, but still originally my own :)

This was a very easy and delicious dish that my daughter just love. We've made it several times since, and it's a hit every time even when we change up the ingredients a bit.

Here's the recipe for these Thai Noodles.


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Found Not Lost - about all the things we 'find' worth talking about

The yard long beans from our garden have been bountiful, and I wanted to try a new recipe using them. Sometime ago I saw a recipe for long beans pecel and I had been wanting to try it. This was my chance. Pecel is an Indonesian peanut butter based sauce usually served over boiled vegetables. One of the cookbooks I bought called New Asian Cooking (published by Bay Books) has an Indonesian recipe called Gado Gado, and it has a peanut sauce recipe on it too, but I found another version here that I thought might be a tad better, and has the ingredients that I have on hand. I changed the proportions some, and made a couple of additions. I think my version was not so bad. My husband loved it, and we almost ate the whole thing!

Start by preparing all the ingredients:

About a pound of Yard Long Beans - I decided to leave the beans long, as I thought it looked prettier this way than cut up. If the kids had been home, I may have cut it up to more manageable size.
5 cloves of garlic, crushed
1/2 Onion, chopped
1 teaspoon Ginger, minced
1 fresh, red cayenne pepper, chopped (about 1 tsp)
2 tablespoons Oyster Sauce
1 teaspoon Fish Sauce
1/4 cup Coconut Milk
1/4 cup Creamy Peanut Butter
1 tablespoon Brown Sugar
Juice of 1/2 lime or about 1 tablespoon.
1 teapoon chopped basil leaves

Blanch the beans for about 5 minutes or until tender, and drain. In a pan, heat 1 tablespoon of oil and saute garlic, ginger and onions until fragrant and tender. Add the cayenne pepper, oyster sauce, fish sauce, coconut milk, peanut butter, brown sugar and heat through. Add the basil leaves and remove from the heat. Pour the sauce over the beans and enjoy!