Maybe I shouldn't be all stressed out about my education and what I'll be doing with the rest of my life. Maybe my newfound obsession with all things cooking and baking, and an enjoyment of household tasks, means that I'm just going to get married and stay at home with my eight million babies and cook and bake and clean and play and that's all. That sounds like a nice life.
This isn't very feminist of me, but I'm gonna need a really rich husband.
Anyways. Let's talk about the food that I actually cooked, and not the stuff that I am dreaming up. I didn't actually prepare three meals like I said I was going to. I already caught you up on my enchilada adventures. The next night I had the staff orientation for my teaching job, and so my mom and brothers got burgers while I was in the meeting. Then I had penne rosa from Noodles. (That's a recipe I should make up myself: a spicy tomato cream sauce, feta cheese, some good chicken or other protein, fresh spinach, maybe some basil...mmm)
We had sausage and peppers the next night, which I played no part in making. Which is silly, because all you have to do is grill the sausages and sauté bell peppers and onions up in a pan for a while.
But the night after that, I had my friend over to help me bake for another friend's graduation party. We made funfetti cookies and cream cheese brownies. All from a box. So nothing really ambitious or challenging, but hey, it's food and it went over great at the party.
Funfetti cookies are amazing. You just make them with Pillsbury Funfetti cake mix. The recipe is on the side of the box, and I know you can find it online. One box makes about 3 dozen, depending on how large you make the balls of dough. We tried the trick where you lay down brown paper bags on the cookie sheets to keep them from sticking (see my chocolate chip cookie post somewhere below), but it didn't seem to work here. :( But they did take well to the whole piece-of-bread-in-the-container thing, which kept them from drying out over three days. And then we got to the party, and our friend's friends (who we didn't know) just took the container and ate them all. Awesome!
I do have a recipe for cream cheese brownies from scratch, but I didn't feel like bugging my parents for another trip to the grocery store for all of the ingredients. You can totally just use regular boxed brownie mix. Find a recipe online for cream cheese brownies, and pretty much all you do is mix up cream cheese with softened butter, sugar, and eggs until it is a liquid. Drop it all over half the brownie batter in the pan. Then pour the rest of the brownie batter on top. Run a knife over it to make it all swirly and pretty.
Mine could have been prettier. Also, softened butter means softened butter! There's really no good way to soften butter (without melting it) besides letting it sit out all day. We did not soften the butter, so I had to resort to my family's Braun hand mixer, which I think was meant to be used to make baby food. It made really gross squishy, slurpy sounds as it mixed that goop together. But it finally worked. Also, we had a lot of extra cream cheese filling. We thought of trying to use it as a frosting, but it had raw eggs in it, and cream cheese frosting (and any frosting, actually) never has raw eggs in it. If I'd had graham crackers, I would have improvised a cheesecake. But alas, we had to throw it down the sink. The brownies were delicious- moist and really fudgy.
Mom went out to dinner with a friend that night, so I cooked for my brothers, my friend and myself. I made linguine with shrimp cooked in garlic and oil. Photo time!
Seen here is the pot of salted water getting ready to boil, and a pan heating up some olive oil. Once the oil was fairly hot, I stuck about three and half teaspoons of minced garlic (equivalent to three cloves) in the oil and let it become ever so slightly golden brown. DO NOT LET THE GARLIC BURN OR GET BROWN: it will be bitter and yucky and gross. I managed to avoid this, thank goodness.
(I'm just a little afraid of overcooking things. And yet I'm also afraid of E. coli and salmonella and cross-contamination. It's a delicate balance.)
Here is the shrimp. I love shrimp. I was terrified of screwing up the shrimp. The stuff cooks really really fast if you have the heat on high. So keep that in mind when you sauté shrimp: all of your junk has to be ready to go once that shrimp is in. I may have overcooked it just a tad, but not so badly that anyone really noticed besides me.
Pasta in the boiling water! I used linguine for this recipe. Set your timer for the recommended time on the box (usually it's less than ten minutes) and check it about a minute or two before it's done. Why? Salting the water doesn't actually make the water boil faster. It actually does the opposite: the addition of a compound with a higher boiling point will make the water boil at a higher temperature than normal. That means that the salted water is hotter than the normal boiling point. So your pasta will probably cook a little faster than the box time. You want it to be tender, but not mushy. That's called al dente, and it is beautiful.
That is the finished shrimp with the garlicky oil from the pan. Shrimp are done when they are pink and just firm. Really, it doesn't take much on high heat.
My plate. Blah presentation. Could have used some color.
The whole table. I set out grapes and baked some frozen garlic bread. My friend and I had Sprite in wine glasses just to feel fancy.
My recipe needs some troubleshooting. I used a mix of recipes and some freestyling to put it all together. The major complaint/suggestion was that it needed more sauce and more garlic. This can be solved very easily by adding more oil and garlic to the pan (duh), maybe tossing in some white wine, and reserving some of the pasta water after the pasta has been drained. Some chopped parsley would have added some nice color and a little more taste to the plate as well. But all in all, not a failure. Very basic and solid and satisfying.
I've been making eggs all the time for lunch lately. Scrambled eggs and wheat toast. Sometimes a fried egg in a sandwich. Or a cheese omelet. This is what a typical lunch of mine looks like:
The fiber from the toast and the protein from the eggs keep me full for quite a while, which helps me to snack less in the afternoon- big plus. It's an awesome breakfast if you plan on going through a pretty tough workout before your lunch, or if you just have a long time between your breakfast and lunch. Eggs are not that hard to cook at all. Don't be afraid of them!
Anyways. I didn't make burgers like I'd planned. We'd just had them recently and I didn't want to bore anyone. I helped cook beer can chicken, but I did not do it myself nor did I get pictures. Super easy, though: butter up a whole chicken, season it (including its cavity) with salt, pepper, and chicken rub, and stand it up on a beer can with about a quarter to a third of the beer poured out (so 2/3-3/4 full), and holes pierced near the top. Stand them up on indirect heat on a grill for about an hour. And voila: juicy, tender chicken with crispy, delicious skin. The leftovers also make for great chicken salad.
Here's some of the music I listened to during my cooking adventures:
Judas, Lady Gaga
You've Got the Love, Florence + the Machine (and other selections from Florence; my friend needed to be introduced)
I'm in Love (I Wanna Do It), Alex Gaudino
Back to Where I Was, Eric Hutchinson
Run and Tell That, Elijah Kelly (from the Hairspray film soundtrack)
I know this is a long post, but stick with me; it's been like a week since I've posted and I've had "blog" on my to-do list every day since, but I just keep getting caught up with other things. I've picked up again a lot better with working out. I have run 3.1 miles for two consecutive days now- a big thing for me, since my regular running routine in years past has never gone further than about 2.7 miles, excluding benefit races. So I think I'll be in a good place for racing this summer! Our first one of the season may be this Saturday morning- so if we register, I'll let you know how it goes!
I'm also trying to stay on board with core work and weights/resistance bands. I just want to get toned. That's all! Oh, and I did the Plyometrics workout from the P90X video series. Holy crap. I've been doing the yoga video every few days, and I really like it. It is definitely a good workout for anyone who wants something not too heart-pounding, but that still gets the job done. So then I figured, I'm in decent cardio shape- let's try Plyo! I don't know if I've ever sweated that much indoors...ever. Certainly not without the use of a machine. Plyometrics is all jumping and squatting and dancing around like a crazy person. It is intense. I made it through everything but the very last sequence of exercises because I could feel my sugar crashing and I didn't want to pass out. And then of course the next day I was very very sore- right in my quads, up by my knees (it's a very high-impact workout. Not recommended if you have knee or lower back problems.). And that's when I decided to run 3.1 miles. If my father can do it, so can I. If I could do Plyo, I'm definitely ready for a 5K. And I did it! Just keep telling yourself to run a little bit farther, to do one more rep. You'll be surprised- unless you have underlying health problems, your body likes to be pushed. That's how you really get results- at least that's what I keep reading...we'll see how I look in a few weeks or so!
In other news, I have actually been reading, which is always a plus. I finished Jonathan Franzen's ginormous and incredibly complex novel The Corrections, which I had started over last winter break. It is mind-boggling and depressing and discouraging, but an admirable work of writing nonetheless. I do not recommend it if you are looking for something frou-frou, uplifting, and mindless. Not at all. I also plowed through Maeve Binchy's Tara Road...not because I was so enthralled with the characters and the story and the writing, but because I had had it sitting by my bed for a while and I wanted to read it and finish it. Seriously? That was an Oprah's Book Club selection?? The writing was clumsy, sometimes abrupt, and rarely poetic, and the characters were often one-dimensional and fairly pathetic, or at least incomprehensible in their dependence, blindness, and simplicity. So now that that's over with, I'm going to start Franzen's next novel, Freedom, followed by John Steinbeck's East of Eden, and hopefully Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead if I can get my hands on a copy.
I served at a meal program for the St. Vincent dePaul Society this evening. Service is always such a moving experience, especially when it's direct interaction with a poor and vulnerable population, like the one served at this meal program. First, you learn a lot of lessons about race and poverty, especially in a segregated city like my own. Second, you see that a notable number are mentally ill or disabled- which I know to be a truth in my city because its public mental health system was largely dissembled a decade or more ago. Third, you realize that the people coming through are certainly not bad people. Au contraire. I think that the criminals (who are a minority, of course) people associate with the inner city make their money somehow and don't need meal programs. Good people, on the other hand, are actively looking for work, trying to get promoted, and trying to feed their kids, and just cannot scrape together enough for a meal. (Side note: want to learn more about that? Read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. Yeah, she's a little biased to the left. But she's not lying.) Everyone I served was friendly and thankful. Get out there and get in it- that is the only way you can really learn about the realities of poverty and urban America. At the very least, give thanks for what you have- that you have the resources to access the Internet and read this blog, that you ate a couple meals today, that you have a place to sleep and shower every day.
Almost done, guys. Thanks for sticking around! This is what's coming up: a very good friend's birthday is this Wednesday. Tuesday I may be helping her bake healthy chocolate and peanut butter cookies for her to bring into work as a birthday treat. Then on Wednesday I will be joining her for dinner, cake, and bingo at the local casino. I'm supposed to bake brownies with a dear elderly friend of our family later this week. I would like to make pizza, tomato sauce and meatballs, and apple crisp/pie/crumble soon. The apple pie is actually slightly urgent, because ideally I will bake an apple pie for the Fourth of July, and I don't want that one to be my first time with it. Oh, and Father's Day is Sunday, and my dad's favorite cake is a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I will be attempting it from scratch! :) More grad parties are coming up as well, so we'll see if I can put any of my foodgawker bookmarks to use there.
Blessings on you and yours. Hope that the weather is satisfactorily summery out your way. As always, please comment and contact me with regards to the blog. I really appreciate and need your feedback.
Love,
Imara
US writer (1962 - )
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