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Happy Valentines Day! In honor of the holiday, I figured I should take advantage of the bottle of pink food coloring in my baking cabinet (it's actually the only color of food coloring I have). This recipe is inspired by hanami dango, which is one of the cutest desserts ever, in my opinion. I love dango it is so simple, not too sweet, and so chewy. Traditionally hanami dango are pink, white, and green, but I made it with just pink and white for Valentines Day.

Who else loves broccoli cheddar soup? I adored it as a kid, and for me, the quintessential benchmark was Panera Bread's rendition -- comfort in a bread bowl. Unfortunately, I’ve had also quite a few bad broccoli cheddar soups in my life (school cafeteria, anyone?) — floury, bland, watery, and sometimes the broccoli inside would still be crunchy (yikes). But, in pursuit of the Panera Bread dreams of my childhood, I took to experimenting with making it at home.

This is a festive dish that looks fancy, tastes amazing, and is actually very simple to make! It's a riff on Baked Brie, which is a common holiday appetizer, but reimagined to be in individual pastry form. It makes a great appetizer.

This fall, I got introduced to Korean egg toast from a restaurant that opened up in a nearby mall, and I'm pretty sure I've had it at least eight times this month. It's so good -- the softest, fluffiest egg ever, folded into sweet brioche bread and topped with the perfect sweet-and-savory sauce. I also like it topped with cheese and avocado. Of course I had to try to figure out how to make it at home, so here is what I came up with.

Pumpkin pie was one of the first things I ever learned how to bake! I originally used the Libby’s pumpkin pie recipe, but after a while, I got sick of baking the same recipe again and again. So I started to tinker with the recipe, and I came up with the idea of using Chinese five spice instead of pumpkin pie spice. It gives the pie so much more depth of flavor.

Creamy, spicy, savory, coconutty…this soup is possibly one of the best things I’ve ever made. My family definitely agrees – whenever I make this, it’s gone in a day! It’s a great comfort food for winter and also great to make in the summer, since I always crave spicy food in the summer. I love this soup so much!

My dad's favorite food is probably jian bing, a Chinese street food that usually consists of a crispy buckwheat or whole-wheat crepe filled with egg, black bean sauce, scallions, sometimes lettuce, and a crispy cracker or fried dough piece. As a little bit of fun, this Father's Day I made a version using French crepe batter, which produces a different result than the traditional Chinese Version -- but still really good. I don't have the crepe pan that street vendors typically use to make jian bing, but I made do with what I had. This dish is essentially my recreation of a jian bing, just a little bit simpler and quicker to make at home.

I love pasta alla vodka, but it does require two pots – one to boil the water, and one to make the sauce. I was craving a good tomatoey pasta the other night, and I happened to have the idea to try a one-pot version, where the pasta cooks in the sauce (please don’t come for me, Italians.) The pasta turned out delicious, and it was so easy to make that I knew I had to put it in a recipe!

Peanut butter cookies are usually a big disappointment for me. Peanut butter cookies tend to bake up very dry because of the way that the extra fat in the peanut butter affects the cookie texture. And that's a huge shame, because peanut butter flavored cookies sound like such a good idea in your head.

My family sometimes likes to make sushi at home. Granted, it's probably not very authentic, but it still tastes pretty good. We usually make it with surimi, cucumber, and avocado; sometimes we swap surimi for smoked salmon. So, how did this recipe come about? A few weeks ago I was grocery shopping and bought some rice paper, mostly because I've seen it being used a ton of ways on Instagram and wanted to give it a try. When my family was making sushi together later that weekend, I looked at the rice paper and came up with a neat idea -- why not use it in sushi?

I love jambalaya. It’s traditionally not pescetarian, so I swapped chicken for mushrooms and used vegetarian sausage to make my version. I also used brown rice instead of white rice, since that’s my family’s favorite type of rice. It also adds body to the jambalaya, so I prefer using it, even though it isn’t traditional. Since I don’t usually have the patience to cook the rice on a stovetop, I used my instant pot instead to make it.

When I was young, we used to get takeout from this one place in Chinatown (I don’t remember the name, much to my sadness.) But I specifically remember this one dish I loved: their stir-fried shrimp and eggs.