Thursday, November 29, 2012

Pan de Sal and Longanisa Stuffing

Pan de Sal and Longanisa Stuffing

At our store, we are always trying to come up with a twist on celebrating the holiday festive season. Carrying mainly ethnic foods and ingredients, we tend to fuse [always] ingredients together. For example, stuffing for a turkey or in this case, a whole chicken. In the past, it has always been the usual stuffing with breadcrumbs and some spices or the random boxed stuffing mix. This year, we have decided to use an ethnic bread, Pan de Sal, which is a Filipino version of bread rolls, for our bread crumbs, and toss that in with some ethnic seasoned meat, longanisa. Longanisa is usually found in a sausage form, here with the stuffing, we will remove the casing and use just the meat. Longanisa has been a staple for the Filipino's, at home and also those living and working abroad. The seasoned meats go pretty fast off our shelves ... BUT we continually keep it well stocked! Especially for the holiday season now! We found an amazing recipe and pictures [since I totally forgot to take some while I was trying out the recipe] from Burnt Lumpia Blog! So are you ready to try a different take on your stuffing?!?!
What you need:
1/2 pound Pan de Sal rolls (about 4-5 rolls), cut into 1/2-inch cubes and left out to dry overnight
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 pound longanisa sausage, casings removed
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 oz. dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in hot water for 30 mins then drained and chopped
1-inch piece of fresh ginger, chopped fine
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup homemade turkey stock (or storebought chicken stock)
2 eggs, beaten
Salt and pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Add the pan de sal to a large mixing bowl.
Heat the vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add the longanisa to the pan and cook until golden brown.  Using a slotted spoon, remove longanisa from pan and add to mixing bowl with the pan de sal.

yummy!

Add all of the vegetables to the pan and saute until onions become translucent, about 5 minutes.  Transfer vegetables to mixing bowl with pan de sal and longanisa.
Return saute pan to the heat and add the 1/2 cup of wine to deglaze, making sure to scrape the brown bits from the pan.  Turn heat off, and transfer deglazed pan liquid to the mixing bowl.  Add the turkey stock to the mixing bowl and gently mix contents (try not to break up the bread cubes).
Add the eggs and salt and pepper to the mixing bowl and continue to mix contents until eggs are incorporated, use your hands to mix if necessary.  Place the stuffing mixture into a 9x9 baking dish and cover dish with foil.  Place baking dish in oven and bake for 1 hour.  After an hour, remove foil and continue to bake for 15 minutes or until top of stuffing has browned nicely.
yummier!

serving suggestion by Burnt Lumpia!

recipe and pictures taken from Burnt Lumpia
Enjoy and let us know and share with us your stuffing recipes!

-Patricia

Friday, November 23, 2012

The Wait is Over: The First Round of Food Story

For all the lovely individuals who would like to create more happiness, just with your creativity and a bit of baking or cooking, decorating, and crafting ;)... the time is here!

After a few tweets (by wonderful supporters!) and Facebook updates, we would like to share with you our Food Story Action- as it gets colder and colder outside and warmer and warmer inside our homes- with a theme that fills your heart. And perhaps adding a few pounds may not be such a bad idea for this winter! 

Just in time for the holiday season and all the gift giving, we have our Food Story Theme as:








"Let's Start the New Year with Chocolate Happiness"- cookies, fudge, cupcakes-galore, and many holiday goodies are waiting to be sent away and enjoyed!


Registration opens today until December 16th, 2012 here.

Let's join in creating chocolate happiness

Each happiness creator has until December 16th, 2012 to register to be apart of our Food Story Action.

Everyone will receive on December 25th, 2012 the Address from their Exchange Partner, where you will contact each other for the exchange; which will occur between January 04 - 15th, 2013.
This means: During this time, the packaged goodies along with the recipe should be mail-posted for your partner to receive!
Once the package is received, please email (max 1MB) or notify us with the blog or link to the photo you have snapped of the goodies!

crafted personally for happiness


Looking forward to our first ever Food Story Action!

Keep warm and can't wait for all the wonderful goodies to be exchanged and to see more happiness!

-Patricia
Your Food Story Action-er!


p.s. If you are looking for creative ideas on how to decorate and pack your goodies, check out some ideas here!

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Food Story Registration Begins Nov 23 until Dec 16


enjoying Portuguese natas


The Idea! 

What would it be like, if all the little goodies, that we create in our lovely kitchen, could be shared with others? What if the scrumptuous homemade pralines, marmelade, cupcakes, or spicemix were to be remarkably decoratively packed for a trip, a few kilometers away, so that it would create happiness for someone?!
Our thoughts: It would be amazing!
And by paying it forward, by sharing with others, we, at the Asian Supermarket World Foods and Imports, want to create and foster this happiness: The idea to share and to connect us!
How it works: Every 3 months, a theme will be announced on our blog. Everyone who would like to create [more] happiness, can register per Email, and you will receive an Exchange Partner at a fixed date. And so, the creation of happiness begins: cook, bake, stir, steam, and what ever your heart desires, snap a photo from your creation and send it away decoratively packed. And please post your photos on your blogs, if you don't have one, send us your photo and we will post it on our blog! And through our happiness creation, we could collect all our photos on Pinterest.
Join us in creating happiness? We would love to connect with you!

How does it all work?
Register here!

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Welcome! Bhutanese Community


We would like to extend our warm welcome to the ever growing Bhutanese Community in Lethbridge, AB. We have had the fortunate opportunity to carry a selection of food that the Bhutanese have requested and we continue to expand on this, over the past couple of years. 

Our father Louis Luu, the owner and founder of the Asian Supermarket, along with our mother Thao; had initially opened the business solely because there was a lack of a food selection from our own country, Vietnam, back in the 1980's, where an influx of Vietnamese Boat People came to Canada and were resettled all over. We understand and believe that ethnic food is important no matter where we are: food connects and comforts individuals near and far.

We are happy to continue to support the Bhutanese Community, and please feel free to let us know what other selections that are important for the Bhutanese diet. 

Thank you!
Patricia