Inspiration

This week I went to my trusty on-line bookstore, Amazon.com, and purchased two new cookbooks for my collection.  These particular books are special to me as I bought them to serve as inspiration.  Both cookbooks were written by women who, like me, starting a cooking blog on a whim.  What they have done though is take their blogs one giant step further and created beautiful cookbooks from their entries. Maybe someday for me???

The book I am cooking out of today is called The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook by Jaden Hair.  It is absolutely gorgeous.  The picures are beautiful, the recipes look very easy to follow and Ms. Hair covers a wide variety of Asian cooking throughout the book.  I love Asian food...Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, all delicious.  Sometimes when I have wanted to try cooking one of my favorite Asian restaurant meals I have found it somewhat daunting with huge lists of ingredients, many of them hard to find in my town.

This cookbook has simple lists of ingredients and it appears that most of them can be found at  the local supermarket.  No need to search out an Asian market, though that is a good excuse to take a trip to the big city!  I look forward to trying many of the recipes in this lovely cookbook and it appears that all of them are as easy and straight forward to prepare as was this Shrimp Fried Rice recipe.  I added a few additional ingredients to mine such as bamboo shoots, bean sprouts and some diced barbecued pork but that's one of the beauties of fried rice, it's very adaptable to what you have on hand.

No recipe posted today, but what I am going to do is direct you to Jaden Hairs' Steamy Kitchen blog so you can not only get this recipe, but also puruse a great blog on your own.  Enjoy.