Holt Cuisine

Aioli is a lime and garlic flavored mayonnaise and is frequently found on restaurant menus as a topping or drizzle over all kinds of savory dishes.  At our house my kids will stand around in the kitchen and go through and entire loaf of French bread smeared with aioli while they talk. But recently my youngest has developed an allergy to eggs. This sent me to the internet to see what the answer was.  Not surprisingly, there was lots of advice. Most of the places were creating a vegan mayonnaise. That wasn’t my goal, but if it was also vegan… cool. Nothing I made tasted awful because really, it’s garlic, lime and salt… how can you go wrong?  There was lots of information about Toum , a Lebanese garlic sauce. This is made with just garlic, lemon juice, salt and oil. I made some and it is delicious. It is creamy, but not really the consistency of Aioli. I can definitely see using it as a spread or dip on all sorts of things.  I continued in my search by trying an avocado...

When we lived in California, one of our favorite things to do was to drive into San Francisco (yes you could still find parking back then) and eat Dim Sum, a sort of brunch. The Asian restaurants in Chinatown would put delicious bites on steamer carts and push them around. You could just point at what you wanted off the cart. It was always a little risky because you were never quite sure what might be in the wrapper. The staff might be able to explain the dish but probably not. Here is a picture I found on the internet, just to show what it might look like.  Our first experience was with someone who spoke the language, so she explained the food. It was a fairly inexpensive restaurant meal back in the 80’s, so we went back by ourselves several times.  One of my favorite dumplings has always been the Shrimp Shumai. This is a round, open topped dumpling filled with a shrimp based filling.  You can buy them ready-made in the freezer section of your local Asian Market. You jus...