Love In The Asylum

There Is A Reasonable Explanation For The Cornstarch

2012-10-03T04:00:19Z

Dinner tonight: whole-grain white cheddar macaroni and cheese, pan roasted broccoli, and chicken thighs in a dijon-beer sauce (made with Newcastle ale - pretty sure this is the first time I've ever bought beer, and now I have to figure out what to do with the other 2/3 of a pint!). It was just about delicious enough to make up for the fact that my entire apartment is covered in cornstarch.

I'm not sure which idea excites me more about the possibility of Hairy Bikers RPF for Yuletide - getting Si and Dave being domestic and married at each other, or getting all kinds of glorious food porn. (And I do mean the kind that goes into loving and luscious detail about cheese, and not the kind that involves chocolate in the bedroom. Only one of those is actually sexy. And it's not the kind with the chocolate)

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Why WOULDN'T I Name My Bike Sleipnir?

2012-06-20T04:23:47Z

Three Things (The Seriously, Only Tuesday? Edition):

1. Pretty sure I passed some kind of ridiculous foodie threshold today, by making my own mustard. I didn't even use a food processor - my mini-chopper didn't do anything to the mustard seeds, so I MacGyvered a rig with a rice bowl and the handle of a bread knife instead (I really need to suck it up and buy a mortar and pestle. It would save me from crushing peppercorns with a frying pan, too).

Setting aside the potential maiming, though, it really was about convenience more than anything! I've already had to make an extra trip to the store this week after an entire bag of carrots mysteriously vanished out of my fridge, and whole-grain mustard is expensive, and for reasons I no longer remember I had a bag of mustard seeds in my pantry...it seemed a lot less trouble making mustard from scratch in my kitchen than biking to the Sunflower Market after work, especially since it is approximately ten million degrees here. I'm just not sure that's the thought process going through everyone's head when they consider the state of their mustard shelf.

Anyway, the pork in whole-grain mustard yogurt sauce was delicious, although my forays into whole-wheat pasta continue to be sorely disappointing. I may have to give up entirely and go back to normal, vaguely unhealthy, actually tasty pasta. Alas.

2. Obsessively watching the Euros, of course. Luckily, I work in an office full of a surprising number of football fans, so not only is my manager sympathetic to me keeping the live feed open on my computer while I'm working, but he and Manager S have taken charge of the TVs in the newsroom so the matches are always on (with the sound off, but still). The break room has been staked out as neutral ground, although we'll see how long that lasts, between my Spain fangirling, Manager J's diehard German loyalty, and Manager S's inexplicable support of Italy. I always hate the moment where I have to stop wanting my German bbs to play well so my Spanish bbs can go through, but it's going to be even harder now that I am surrounded by so many German fans (and Spain haters). At least the whole office can unite in our loathing of Cristiano Ronaldo.

3. My week in summation: Cannot stop singing Les Mis songs in the shower (and I am plotting out an epic Javert-centric crossover crackfic I will post about in more detail later). In my RPG group, my character is currently sneaking into a secret military base while invisible, tied with rope to a drug-addicted psychic and a pansexual starship pilot, and carrying a bag of sentient democratic-socialist cockroaches. I have named my bicycle Sleipnir and I feel that I was one of the better life choices I have made. I think that tells you everything about my life you really need to know. And my week, as well.

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The Booze Might Be Helping

2012-06-08T05:14:03Z

Haven't done a recipe post in a few months, have I?

I've been doing a lot of Korean and Chinese lately - I got a few new Chinese cookbooks from my mom, and when I'm stressed out and tired I tend to default to my comfort tastes, which mostly means loads of garlic and enough heat to take the roof off my mouth. Plus, my wok is the easiest pan in my kitchen to cook with. Today I realized that I should probably eat the potato in my pantry before it started growing new potatoes, though, so I decided to take a short trip back in the general direction of Western Europe. Too hot and tired to bother with following a real recipe, so I came up with this, which I am calling Lazy Twenty-Something Coq Au Vin. Because it is like coq au vin, in that it is chicken cooked in booze, but without all the pain in the ass of having to use a casserole dish, or deal with an entire chicken's worth of leftovers, or buy one of those bags of tiny onions you don't use for anything else.

1 chicken thigh (I use the big boneless skinless thighs you get in 8-packs at the grocery, ymmv on whether this is enough for you)
4 mushrooms (baby bella are good, or plain white, whatever you have on hand
1/2 onion
3-4 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup red wine
1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons chicken stock (you can tweak the percentages of broth and water - I mostly did it this way because I forgot I was adding broth until I was already halfway through)
1 scant tablespoon brown sugar

Thinly slice the mushrooms and onions and mince the garlic. Mix together the wine, water, stock, and sugar. Cut the chicken into strips, you want them to be fairly uniform and thin. Just before cooking, dredge the chicken in flour. Heat a pan (I used my cast iron pan, because I love it) over medium high heat. Add the chicken and cook until browned on both sides. Remove the chicken. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the onions and mushrooms. Cook until the onions are limp and the mushrooms are well browned and soft, about 2-3 minutes. remove the onions and mushrooms. Add the wine mixture to the pan. Reduce over medium heat for 1-2 minutes. Add the chicken pieces and onions and mushrooms back the pan, tossing to coat in the wine sauce. Cover and cook over medium-low to medium heat for 5-10 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the wine sauce is pretty much cooked down. Serve with some hearty sides - I had it with a head of pan-steamed broccoli and some fried potatoes, which was pretty much perfect.

Hard to sustain any negative feelings toward the universe when I am full of delicious food. Delicious food that was cooked in booze, even.

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Noms for You

2012-04-14T02:59:23Z

I have been very remiss in posting recipes lately! I haven't given up on my cooking project, but because of my work schedule, I've doing less exciting cooking lately - my dad and I trade off days in the kitchen, and I'm not trying as many new recipes because I don't have as much time to spend looking them up. It's been too easy to just default to pork with kimchi, or miso chicken, or meatballs in tomato sauce, things I've made plenty of times before and know we'll both like. Today I tried something new though! And I didn't quite have the ingredients called for in the recipe I was using, so I ended up improving it into something that turned out quite tasty. Not super complex, just light, slightly spicy and nicely tangy, good for a friday dinner after a long week.

Tamarind-Lime Tofu

1 block of firm/extra-firm tofu
2 tablespoons tamarind water*
2 tablespoons fish sauce (or soy sauce, if you want this to be vegan)
1 teaspoon sugar (I use raw brown sugar)
2 small red chiles
2 kaffir lime leaves (we keep ours in the freezer)
zest from 1 lime
2 cloves garlic
loads of spinach, rinsed

*make the tamarind water by soaking 2-3 tablespoons of tamarind pulp (I don't measure, just grab a reasonable looking chunk off the block) in 1/4 cup of warm water for about 15 minutes, then pushing it through a strainer so you end up with just the brown glop. For this recipe you want it to be pretty thick and pulpy. Or you could just buy it in a jar, I guess.

Drain the tofu for about 15-20 minutes. Chop the lime leaves and chiles up, removing the seeds from the chiles if you want a more mild dish. Combine the leaves, chiles, lime zest, tamarind water, sugar and fish sauce in a bowl. Cut the tofu into cubes and add to tamarind mixture. Stir to mix thoroughly and set aside to marinate for about 15 minutes. Heat up a large frying pan or wok over medium high heat. Add 1 tablespoon of oil, then the garlic, frying until fragrant (about 30 seconds). Fry the tofu in batches until it is crisp and browned on all sides (about 3-4 minutes). Throw all the tofu back into the pan, along with any leftover marinade and the spinach. Toss until the spinach is wilted (about 30 sec. to 1 minute). Serve with rice.

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Why Do I Do This To Myself?

2012-02-13T02:08:06Z

Hahaha so much for my quiet lazy Sunday. This was really an exhausting week - aside from the new job, I had some catastrophic computer problems that finally necessitated wiping my hard drive on Thursday night, fun times - and I had really, earnestly intended to do nothing all weekend but watch silly k-dramas and play video games. But nooooo, somehow I decided that what I actually needed to do was cook ALL THE THINGS. Here is all the things I have made this weekend:

a humongous batch of tomato sauce (using this recipe doubled - I froze most of it so we'll have tomato sauce for weeks)

cranberry-orange scones (because it's not like I could eat toast and eggs for breakfast or anything...)

three loaves of sourdough bread (I've been perfecting this recipe for awhile, but this time I burned the crust. Way to forget to turn the oven back down, me.)

Kimchi (This recipe - I love all her recipes so much! And this is the first time I've had Korean red pepper flakes instead of NM chile powder, so I'm excited to see how it turns out.)

Pork and kimchi dumplings (This recipe. Because I needed to use up the last of the last batch of kimchi left in the crock so I had somewhere to put the new batch. Really delicious, and I have some left to take in my lunch tomorrow, yay.)

Oh, and I also cleaned the bathroom, cleaned and vacuumed my bedroom, did my laundry, did five sinkfuls of dishes (because I kept making more!), and visited my grandma. I had a semi-important project I really wanted to work on tonight, and some best practices guides to go over from work, but eeeeeeeh so not going to happen. Deep Space Nine and cookies seems like a much better option now. AND NOT MOVING.

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Also Dicking Around on Tumblr

2012-01-01T02:24:40Z

Happy Gregorian New Year, internets! I have all the socialization of a particularly reticent wet blanket, so no NYE parties for me. Luckily, I take after my dad in my general refusal to leave the house after 6pm, so I don't have to spend it alone.

Okay, all joking aside I am actually having a good time. The two of us have really perfected our New Year's Dim Sum tradition, and we've been drifting in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, making new things to eat whenever we get hungry. The pork-stuffed tofu was a particular high point. And I'm looking forward to the beef wontons and the pork steamed buns later. Eventually there may be pudding!

In between delicious noms, I've been spending the last day of 2011 doing this and that and a lot of nothing. Reading one of the Miles Vorkosigan novellas (and skimming Brothers in Arms, the book I started with, now that I have a better idea of who the hell these people are and what all the plot points they keep mentioning are). Working on the Urn of Andraste quest in Dragon Age. Contemplating doing some more writing on that Star Wars porn fic, but never actually getting around to it. Watching Arsenal win a match and creep up into the top four of the table (!). I dunno, if this is how I ring in the new year, I can't feel that badly about the start of 2012.

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The Obligatory Holiday Post

2011-12-24T23:51:45Z

Steadily checking things off my last minute holiday checklist. All my presents are bought, wrapped, and ready to go, with the exception of my dad (not a problem, we have an agreement). There are last minute emergency cookies sitting in the fridge, waiting to be baked in the morning before we leave. I've written a note to my aunt and uncle wishing them a Merry Christmas. My Yuletide fic is...well, let's just say it will be done by the time stories go live and leave it at that, okay? (Honestly, I enjoyed writing this fic and I think my recipient will like it, but oh my fucking god PLOT ATE MY BRAIN.)

We've also enacted the annual ritual of tamale-making, with the addition this year of me taking copious notes. My grandma is a very sprightly 84, but she has some problems with her feet and spine that make it painful for her to be on her feet very long, and since tamales are kind of labor-intensive, the past few years she's been handing more and more of the responsibility over to me, my dad, and my aunt, and next year she said she just wants to sit back and let us do everything by ourselves with no supervision. Which is fine, but the family tamale recipe is, uh...well, it's a handed-down-from-my-great-great-grandmother kind of recipe, which means it's big on the history and the nostalgic memories and the unquestionability, and not so big on things like temperatures or cooking times or descriptions that make any sense to a person who hasn't already made it. And I'm actually lucky, because it at least has measurements - my great-grandmother just cooked it by intuition, and my grandma worked out all the measurements when she got the recipe from her by watching and writing down every time she added something. But now I have my own recipe for it written down, and I know what the masa is supposed to look like and how long to cook the pork and which chile peppers to use, and I guess next year I'll make tamales. What a thing.

My internet access is going to be a bit spotty until after Christmas is over because I'll be staying over at my mom's, but I hope you are having a happy holiday if you are doing holiday-type things, and a nice weekend off if you aren't!

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Also, Wynne is Awesome

2011-12-09T06:30:56Z

In retrospect, buying myself a copy of Dragon Age in the middle of Yuletide season was not the best idea ever. I've stayed on top of the chores and the cooking, but other than that all my time this week has been devoted to killing darkspawn. I've almost mastered the complex art of walking without running into things, a skill that has often eluded me in my previous attempts to become a gamer. And I want Alistair to be my hapless dorky sword-swinging BFF. *hearts*

We are gearing up for epic amounts of Yule-related cooking here. Next week is the traditional (three years counts as a tradition, right?) week for baking ALL THE COOKIES, which will then be boxed up to give away to all and sundry. I have also been informed today that, since my aunt is having a bunch of dental work done and my other aunt hurt her arm - and since we apparently did such a good job on Thanksgiving - my dad and I are now In Charge Of Tamale-Making. A weighty obligation indeed, since we not only have to meet the very high expectations of my grandma, but all the far-flung relatives who expect to be gifted with frozen tamales to enjoy the rest of the year. But no pressure! At least my mom only wants me to help her make jambalaya.

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Business as Usual

2011-11-09T02:10:44Z

I am dedicating this week to the doing of responsible adult things, like getting my ID renewed and dealing with my bank accounts. I've had a checking account with Bank of America since I left for school, and while I've never had any trouble dealing with them, I've been getting increasingly fed up with the crap they pull on their customer base. And now that I'm more or less settled in the area for the near future, it seemed like a good time to switch over to a local bank or a credit union, because seriously, fuck big banking. So my dad offered to take me around while we were out grocery shopping this afternoon, and now I have an account with the Bank of Albuquerque, and as soon as I get my debit card and make sure everything is working right, I'm going to transfer the rest of my money and close the other account. I also split some money off and put it into a 14-month CD - it won't be a huge return, but it still makes me feel weirdly grown-up to even have it.

This link from the Move Your Money project, incidentally, was really helpful in figuring out what I needed to do to get everything sorted out in changing banks.

I also have a recipe to share today! The weather here has been cold and grey and nasty (not as bad as the east coast, of course, but still pretty ugly for us, and we almost got snow last night!), so I've been experimenting with lots of spicy, hearty dishes to warm things up - I am really developing my braising, stewing, and curry skills a lot. This is a kind of amalgamation of a few different recipes I found for daeji bulgogi, using this recipe as a base. Don't be intimidated by how much chili paste it calls for! It's pretty spicy, but the pork is so rich you are only eating a little bit at a time, so it's not as hot as you'd think.

Braised Daeji Bulgogi

( tasty food under the cut )

Now that that's done with, I have opera to listen to. Thank you, livecast stream from the Met!

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I Apologize For The Mental Image

2011-10-24T03:37:05Z

Wow, did not expect a weekend with my family to be quite this exhausting. In a fun way, of course. My aunt from Vancouver was in town for a short visit and I wanted to see her, so I went over to my grandma's yesterday and we spent the whole afternoon in the kitchen. I have now graduated in my potsticker technique to making my own wrappers - it is kind of a pain in the ass to roll it out and I wouldn't do it every time, but it was really fun doing it with my aunt and my grandma. And the chicken-shrimp-lemongrass dumplings turned out sooo good. Then they dropped me off at my mom's and I spent the night there cuddling the kitties and the rabbit and talking about serial killers with my mom. It's so nice to share interests with your family, isn't it?

This afternoon we went with my grandpa over to my aunt's house to hang out and have lunch - not a big family event like it usually is, just the four of us. We discussed aircraft carriers and canned meat products, fed charcoal bricks to the pigs, and it was once again affirmed that I am by far the most mature person in this family. Also, I learned that my great-grandma used to work for the Pentagon and my grandma worked for the CIA.

Possibly related to the above, I spent most of the drive home plotting out a story based on "The Bagman's Gambit" where a Secret Agent and a Spy are in love, and the Secret Agent is trading information (mostly useless stuff or things they would inevitably find out anyway, so he doesn't feel like a traitor) to the Spy because if he fails or tries to defect his people will have him killed. The Secret Agent finally gets caught by his people, and he promises to tell them everything as long as they swear to keep Spy safe and not arrest him or send him home or let him be killed. I love a good tragic love story.

colourofsaying introduced me to Scandinavia and the World on Friday, and I now ship Norway/Denmark to a completely stupid degree. It is just so sweet and fond and full of cuddling and affectionate make-outs and hand-holding, right up until Norway picks Denmark up and fucks him through the wall.

On the football front, I am so insanely proud of Arsenal right now, I can't even say. They are still struggling, and there is a lot of work to be done, but I am starting to see some faint signs of hope for their season, and I'm really glad they are starting to turn it around. I love my Vantastic captain so much. I'm slightly less happy with Barcelona this week (what was that match against Sevilla, lads?). But I still have a lot of opinions about Pep Guardiola's sex life.

masterofmidgets: (sometimes he wonders if he's the only coach who is this close to his players. And then he has to go scrub his brain until he stops thinking about Mou and Cristiano making out)
masterofmidgets: that's when he has to call Figo
colourofsaying: Figo talks him down.
masterofmidgets: "come over and fuck me until I can't see it in my head anymore"
colourofsaying: you owed me a nice image for that horrible one.
masterofmidgets: Figo's one of the only ones who can really take him out of his head
masterofmidgets: with Xavi or Cesc, it's fun, but in the back of his mind he's still thinking about making sure he doesn't do anything to make them not match-fit
colourofsaying: and with Leo he's thinking about fucking him so stupid he'll stop thinking about football long enough to sleep
masterofmidgets: and with Raul there were a lot of complicated emotions
colourofsaying: so many emotions
masterofmidgets: but with Figo, everything is so intense and in the moment that most of the time he can't even talk
masterofmidgets: he's just getting properly /fucked/
masterofmidgets: (which is fascinating, because Figo is probably the closest to a romance/friendship out of the people he sleeps with. I picture them spending a lot of time hanging out after sex and talking about clothes.)
colourofsaying: they go shopping together!
masterofmidgets: Pep has better taste, but Figo is a bit more adventurous

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Grabbag

2011-10-14T03:43:30Z

Three Things (The Lazy Thursday Edition)

1. Monday my dad went to the Asian grocery and got me gochujang, so I have been making awesome Korean food for dinner this week. The spicy squid was pretty much amazing, and I suspect that I will be asked to make kimchi on a regular basis now. Even if I slightly overdid it on the pepper flakes. He also got me miso, so next week might be Japanese food week. Or Italian week, since I got two new Italian cookbooks from my mom and grandma and have recently discovered that I actually like tomato sauce.

2. The last couple of weeks I have been marathoning Criminal Minds, and you guys, this show. It is like someone made it just for me. It is full of wonderful ladies, including Garcia, who is the character of my soul. Reid is basically the distilled essence of the woobie. Morgan is amazing and gorgeous. And the plots are all about fucked-up serial killers. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. colourofsaying and I are plotting out a story where Reid awkwardly hits on Rossi and Hotch has to tell him that Reid does that with everyone because he is bad at healthy emotional boundaries, and then Morgan sadfaces disapprovingly a lot until finally they get together, and then it is all cuddles and domesticity and hurt/comfort shenanigans. Because yeah.

3. I am beginning to think that BBC Radio is psychic. It happens with distressing frequency that, just as I am reading or talking about a book, it shows up on my iplayer as a radio drama. I don't know what the odds are that Radio 4 would have a Marlowe marathon the same week I'm reading Chandler for the first time in a year, but it's a little creepy. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is just what I needed to get me into a proper Halloween mood though.

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I Watch For The Strategy

2011-09-30T05:39:55Z

If my life were a video game, I totally would have leveled up my cooking skill today. Or unlocked a new cooking-related limit break. Kitchen Knife Omnislash! Frying Pan Ace! (I bet there is a character in the Final Fantasy universe who is really, really bitter that all of his limit breaks occur in the kitchen, making him totally useless for saving the world purposes). Not only did I make two recipes that I've never tried before - for potato gnocchi and balsamic-glazed pork chops - but I proved capable of cooking two different sauces and a vegetable side all at the same time. I didn't even set anything on fire! I actually haven't set the smoke alarms off in over a week, I'm very proud of myself. Especially since the garlic-parsley brown butter sauce was delicious.

I'm kind of glad that all I have to do tomorrow is make tacos though. Time for a filler episode!

Gaming group continues to be awesome. Since the GM is still getting everything ready for our cyberpunk campaign, this week we did a living room mini-LARP where the six of us were quarantined together in a nanovirus-infected space shuttle. I got to wear a fish hat! And we had a four-way Mexican stand-off that ended when I knocked the bad guys out with a sonic alarm clock. Very fun. And I think next time we might start actually playing - so I need to think up a reason why my mercenary is on a scumbarge heading to Mars.

So proud of all of my football boys right now. The thought of the North London Derby this weekend is a bit terrifying - ignoring that we need the points rather badly, I don't want to think about what kind of blow a loss would be to Arsenal's rather shaky self-esteem right now. But they are coming off of two well-earned wins, the mid-field and the front is getting stronger and more cohesive, hopefully most of our broken players will be back...idk, I think they've got a decent shot at it. I'm trying to think optimistically. Barcelona at least is a balm to my poor, Arsenal-beleaguered heart. I will never get sick of Cesc getting all handsy with Messi. Or David Villa making angry-yet-soulful faces. Or Pep Guardiola's, you know, general existence.

Also, it is good to see my favorite Zlatan back and putting the moves on his Milan teammates. Never change, dear.

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But What About Voyeuristic Roast Beef?

2011-09-20T01:40:15Z

You know, I think it's time for a recipe post! I haven't done one of those in ages. Not for lack of cooking, either - I'm doing all the cooking in the week for me and my dad, and I've been having fun with my two concurrent experiments, Project Make Dad Eat Vegetables Every Night and Project Cook More Non-Chinese Asian Food. We still like Chinese a lot, but trying out different Korean/Thai/Vietnamese/Japanese recipes has been pretty neat too, and I'm learning more cooking techniques along with it. This week I poached a chicken breast for the first time ever, go me.

Anyway, this recipe is not Asian, but it is easy and very tasty, and it is called Fucking Pork Chops. Why is it called Fucking Pork Chops? ~~Because I'm twelve~~ Because this afternoon, while I was looking for something to do with the pork chops in the fridge, I found a recipe for pork chops with mushrooms that looked delicious, but that was written in Bulgarian. I ran it through Google Translate and ended up with the following instructions:

"Preparation: Put saci be pretty warm on the stove. Fuck chops, salt them and sprinkle with pepper. saci nice Spread with half the amount of lard. chops bake until golden on both sides."

Oh, Google Translate. Is there anything you can't do?

So. Original recipe here, modified slightly by me for personal taste.

( Fucking Pork Chops )

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With Dimes Upon Your Eyes

2011-08-03T03:01:44Z

Three Things (The Lazy Tuesday Edition)

1. luzula made a podfic of my Yuletide story, "Lefty Sings the Blues." You should definitely check it out, she did an awesome job. It's really neat hearing my words in someone else's voice. :)

2. Today I made empanadas for the first time ever. Christmas-time tamales and homemade tortillas aside, we don't really do a lot of Mexican/New Mexican/Guatemalan food around here - I just don't like it that much, even though my dad makes great enchiladas and my mom's posole and green chile stew are infamous. But we had some pastry dough to use up and no particular desire to make pies, so empanadas it was. Filled with ground beef, potato, and onions, and an improvised variation of my general spice mix (smoked paprika, chile powder, salt, pepper, optional cumin, garlic). And they turned out pretty good! Better than I was expecting, honestly. Which is good, since we have enough left over to last through a short war.

3. I'm currently in the kind of mood where I have to force myself to stop listening to the same Decemberists songs over and over on repeat, because they are lovely songs but I know if I don't rein myself in I will be up at 4 in the morning foolishly enraptured by the perfect tragedy of You'll Not Feel the Drowning and The Engine Driver and I Was Born For the Stage and Oh Valencia and Yankee Bayonet, which I realized for the first time this week is a Zack Fair song and now I can't get it out of my head. It's not an unpleasant mood, this wallowing in poetic misery that isn't mine, but it isn't conducive to getting anything done.

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Look At His Little Face!

2011-05-14T05:11:59Z

Tonight for dinner I made rosemary-crusted lamb chops, spicy sweet potato fries, and sauteed broccoli, and for about five minutes felt like an actual sophisticated grown-up person.

And then I ate brownie batter out of a bowl with my fingers and got over myself. But come on, given a choice between maturity and potentially poisonous chocolate, why would I ever choose maturity?

And in my defense, I need the chocolate, because my project for tonight is betaing Freshman Guy's rough-draft short story for his Intro Fiction class. OMG does not even begin to cover it. I'm glad to help him out, and I think somewhere very very deep are the seeds of a well-written, decently compelling story, but...yeeeeah. We'll see how much I can do to beat his purple prose into submission.

PS: FRIGHT NIGHT TRAILER OMG I just want to ruffle Anton's curls and give him a hug. So precious! Also, wow, this is already way more homoerotic than I was expecting. ♥

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I Like It Hot

2011-04-30T03:53:31Z

Fact #1: Chile sauce (/paste/oil/powder/fresh chiles/whateverIlikechileokay?) is my most favorite of all kitchen condiments. I put it in everything. I am damned well determined to get through this entire bottle of sriracha by the end of term, and the way I'm going so far it just might happen. Because everything is better when it's hot.

Fact #2: I might have overdone it tonight. I feel like my face is going to melt off. It was totally worth it though. As it always is. And so you all can share in my chile-related suffering, here are some recipes! The recipe for wings is slightly modified from a recipe from Stonewall Kitchen Favorites; the recipe for fries is a basic technique I've picked up from the internet, along with whatever I felt like throwing into the bowl. Both make one generous serving for me. And since our smoke alarm goes off at the drop of a hat and I don't like cooking with hot oil, they are both oven-friendly. Enjoy!

( Not as good as my dad's wings, but getting there )

Soooo much cleaning to do tonight. My aunt is coming by tomorrow, and I don't want her to see my apartment how it usually looks, aka a complete mess. Luckily I did some big chores last week (scrubbing out the tub, clearing off the living room table) and I am for once mostly on top of the dishes (and roommate hasn't even left a mess this week, amazing), but I still have to do all my laundry and wash the dishes from tonight and mop the floor. Bah! I just want to stay in and watch tv (still haven't seen Doctor Who, too much stuff going on this week), but alas, it's not in the program.

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I Am Easily Entertained

2011-04-09T04:51:14Z

OMG, dinner tonight. I didn't even realize how badly I've been craving fish until I had it on my plate. It wasn't even supposed to be on the menu - I've been kind of vaguely jonesing for pizza all week, and frozen pizza is always nice and easy - but when I got to the grocery they had a couple of yellowfin steaks still out that were within my budget, and, well, I yielded to temptation. With no regrets at all, it was a lovely piece of fish. Seared with cracked pepper and lemon juice, and a side of fresh snap peas and pasta with garlic and olive oil? To die for. It's a good thing I eat alone, because my enjoyment of this meal was positively indecent. :)

To Do This Weekend:

- clean the bathroom (oh god, our bathtub, don't even get me started)
- laundry
- things of a breadly nature
- get a listing up to sell my fridge (incidentally, anyone looking to buy a mini-fridge?)
- reading for short story class/remix class
- watch kabuki film for ghost class
- football!
- get my mom a list of hotels in the area
- work on my Sherlock project (so excited about this!)

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Seriously, They're Tiny Little Cabbages, WTF

2011-03-06T03:57:39Z

I just had brussels sprouts for the first time in my life.

Is that weird? It seems weird to me, but then I sometimes feel like my culinary childhood, especially when it comes to vegetables, was kind of odd. My dad is a fantastic cook, but his skills do not lie with plant products (he's gotten a lot better the last couple of years, mostly at my urging), so when I was a kid and he did a lot of the cooking, we had excellent roasts and stir-fries...accompanied by canned green beans. Ugh. And then when it was just me and my mom, she was too tired to do a lot of cooking, plus we were broke as hell, so very few fresh veggies ever made it onto my plate. Add that to the fact that I was an extremely picky child (due to a traumatic hot sauce incident and in retrospect what is probably a lot of undiagnosed food sensitivities) and the list of veggies I'd eaten and liked before I came to college was...short. Now that I'm cooking for myself and making a conscious effort to a) eat fruits and/or veggies at most meals and b) try foods I've never had before, I feel like a three-year-old eating this stuff for the first time.

It's...I don't know, kind of fun? I mean, I like eating things that taste good, obviously (who doesn't?), so that's a plus, because as it turns out there are many vegetables that I like. Green beans that don't come out of a can? Totally fucking awesome. Along with broccoli and carrots and napa cabbage and bok choi and bean sprouts and raw baby spinach. There's also something to be said for letting myself have tastes without bullshit power struggles getting in the way. I can let myself say, I don't like tomatoes and eggplant and I'm not going to buy them and I'm not going to eat them and it doesn't have to be a big thing, it doesn't have to be about me proving something or trying to get away with something or fighting over it or trying to rationalize it to people who think I'm just trying to be difficult. I just...don't eat it. I think, oddly enough, it's made me a more adventurous eater, because I'm not as afraid of not liking things.

But every once in a while, I'm just like, holy shit, how did I get to be 21 without ever having eaten brussels sprouts before? That is insane.

The brussels sprouts were okay. Not great, but I think part of that was that they cooked faster that I expected them to (I was sauteeing them in bacon fat left over from breakfast this morning), and ended up getting a bit scorched while I was waiting for everything else to be ready. They probably would have been better if it weren't for that. And the texture reminded me of cooked spinach not in the sense that they were in any way similar but in that there was a very abrupt and noticeable switch from 'this is pretty good' to 'one more bite is going to make me gag.' I may try making them again. Or I may not! I can do that, because I am a grown-up person who eats vegetables because I like them, not out of a sense of masochistic obligation.

...look, I'm procrastinating on working on edits for one of my short stories, and it was either this or talk about this morning's match against Sunderland, which was just depressing. Or DragonFable, which has taken over my weekend to a probably unhealthy degree. I promise in a couple of weeks, when finals are over and I have free time again, I will start talking about ridiculous j-dramas and how everyone in Barcelona is after Bojan's ass and how many people Oscar Wilde has had a one-night stand with in the Big Bandverse AU (the answer, of course, is all the people. Come on, it's Oscar fucking Wilde, what were you expecting?).

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I Has A Hobby

2011-02-27T04:38:41Z

You know what I haven't done in a while? A picspam post! Time to fix that.

Now that I'm finally (and for an all too brief time, because I have drafts due this week and then finals start, alas) caught up with my work, I thought I'd take the day off to do stuff around the apartment. And by do stuff, I mostly mean cook. And bake. I made this sourdough recipe from KAF a few weeks ago and really liked how it turned it out, but there were a few things that needed tweaking, so I thought I'd try it again. I'm glad I did, because it was even better this time.

( Let's bake some bread )

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Appropriate Icon Is Appropriate

2011-01-22T04:45:33Z

It's Friday, and that means it's Fun Cooking Day!

Okay, for the record, I am very pro-quick and pro-easy when it comes to cooking, since I am both busy and incredibly lazy. If it takes more than an hour to make, or I'm going to have to use more than one or two pans, it doesn't matter how awesome it sounds, I'm going to say fuck that and just make stir-fry again (I...make a lot of stir-fry). I feel like it's a decent trade-off - the food I make is mostly easy, simple recipes, but it's also mostly made-from-scratch, and I don't eat a lot of processed stuff. Occasionally I am jealous of the many awesome food bloggers making five-tier cakes and six-course French dinners in their afternoons off! But then I weigh how much I wish I cooked like they did against how much I don't want to do that much work or wash that many dishes and think...fuck that, I'm making stir-fry.

But once in a while something is worth the effort. Like today! I have been really craving pot stickers lately. Which shouldn't surprise anyone, because pot stickers are fucking awesome. And I could just get a bag of frozen pot stickers, but I've never found a brand that taste the way I want them to; I am very picky when it comes to dumplings, I guess. So I decided to get some ground pork and pot sticker wrappers at the grocery and make my own for Friday dinner, which I normally reserve for special treats anyway.

I think I may have horribly underestimated a) how many pot stickers my recipe makes and b) how many pot stickers I am capable of eating. But it's hard to be sad about that when it means that I have enough extra pot stickers left to last the rest of the weekend.

And since I'm nice, here is the recipe, in case you feel similarly inspired and not-lazy. Not the most complicated, but it's been a family stand-by for ages.

( Martin Yan's Pot Stickers+Bonus Awesome Sauce )

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Allas! Whi nil min hert breke!

2011-01-20T05:13:24Z

Three Things About Wednesday:

1. Now that I can look at food again without wanting to curl up and die, I've been making good use of my kitchen. So far this week: pan-fried steak and fried polenta, Tofu With Three Sauces (and no cilantro), sweet-and-sour pork with smashed potatoes (not the bad take-out sweet and sour, more of a western kind of thing with mirin standing in for the white wine and rice vinegar for the white wine vinegar), and tonight, Asian-ish Tofu and baby bok choy, my most favorite of vegetables. I feel like it's worth noting that I am on my third bottle of soy sauce and my second jar of chile paste since I moved in here, but the red wine vinegar and the barbecue sauce are still largely untouched. Also, I have given up on ever getting caught up with the dishes. I shall console myself with homemade sourdough bread.

2. Did anyone else watch the pilot of the US remake of Being Human? SO UNIMPRESSED. Look, people, I can throw a rock and hit fifteen other sci fi/fantasy series in which conventionally attractive twenty-five-year-olds have are portentiously, melodramatically miserable about their plight in front of grey-toned scenery. I don't really need another one when I can just go watch Supernatural again instead. I'll give it one more episode to not suck, but with the new series of the UK version starting this weekend, I think I'll probably just be a BBC-snob and stick with that. (Besides, fake!Mitchell is not nearly as cute as real!Mitchell. DNW.)

3. Apropos of absolutely nothing, have some Middle English. Because this section of Sir Orfeo is kind of wonderful.

(context: Orfeo, the harper-king, is wandering in the forest when he encounters a group of fairy-women out hawking. When he follows them, one of the women turns out to be his wife, who has been a captive of the fair folk for ten years and whose abduction was the impetus for Orfeo's self-imposed exile.)

Yern he biheld hir, and sche him eke,
Ac noither to other a word no speke;
For messais that sche on him seighe,
That had ben so riche and so heighe,
The teres fel out of her eighe.
The other levedis this y-seighe
And maked hir oway to ride -
Sche most with him no lenger abide.
"Allas!" quath he, "now me is wo!"
Whi nil deth now me slo?
Allas, wreche, that y no might
Dye now after this sight!
Allas! to long last mi liif,
When y no dar nought with mi wiif,
No hye to me, o word speke.
Allas! Whi nil min hert breke!

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Crepes! Yay Crepes!

2011-01-08T04:25:55Z

In the process of making dinner tonight, I burned my arm, set off the smoke detector in Apartment Roomie's bedroom, and set one of my pot holders on fire. Not my most elegant of moments. But oh wow, the ribs with black bean sauce and the garlic-braised baby bok choy was totally worth it. SO GOOD. I've been a bit hit or miss in the kitchen this week (we aren't talking about the honey-mustard chicken, okay?), and it was nice to have something turn out this good. I'm really glad I brought a bag of fermented black beans back from home with me, I'm already coming up with a whole list of recipes that I've been dying to make but couldn't because I didn't have them.

To Do List for this weekend:

make crepes
make sourdough bread
read the next four letters out of Abelard and Heloise (oh my god, more Abelard The Unceasingly Arrogant, I love it)
buy a ridiculously expensive course reader
work on coming up with a syllabus for my Levinthal (btw, if anyone has any good recs for short story collections that are a) set in the American Southwest, especially NM and/or b) written by Latino or Chicano authors, I would love to know)
clean my unbelievably disgusting kitchen
dye my hair purple (the best thing about the purple, as opposed to the blue or red, is that it fades out really pretty and as natural looking as purple can be, but still, it's been months, wtf self)
finish season two of Being Human in time for the new American series and the third BBC season, which is sad but actually unusually timely for me, Slowest Television Watcher In The Universe

I live the most exciting and dangerous college life ever, y/y?

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I'm Also Not Doing The Dishes

2010-10-18T02:43:52Z

This weekend was a cooking weekend! Because I'll grab onto anything that will distract me from having to do actual schoolwork. Mostly successful kitchen experiments, with a few exceptions.

The Good:

Sweet Potato Ginger Muffins - I made these because I was craving muffins and I had half a sweet potato left over from making sweet potato fries that I couldn't figure out what to do with, but they turned out quite good. I doctored the original recipe from Joy of Cooking up by using honey instead of sugar and adding in some chopped candied ginger my aunt gave me. Chopped nuts would probably also have been a good addition, if I didn't hate nuts in things. But they were tender and just a little sweet and reminded me of the pumpkin bread my favorite teacher in middle school used to make.

Polenta - I've never made polenta before! I'm not even sure I've ever eaten it before. But I am toying around with the idea of starch-based sides that aren't steamed rice or potatoes, so this seemed like a good avenue to pursue. Even after I cut the recipe in half it made a lot more than I was expecting. Good last night plain with some grilled beef. Better this morning fried in olive oil with some honey and fruit.

Teriyaki Chicken - I should make Japanese more often, this was good! I think I need to buy a broiler pan though. In fact, I just need more pans in general. And more kitchen knives. Not that I have a place to put any of this stuff in The World's Smallest Kitchen, but still.

The Not-So-Good:

Steamed broccoli - I...I don't get it! Steamed broccoli is not a complicated concept! I get how it works! But I can't seem to find the perfect medium between practically-raw and mushily overdone. I like broccoli a lot though, so I shall soldier on and keep trying.

Stir-Fried Bok Choy - edible, but I should have considered that soy sauce and oyster sauce are both already pretty salty condiments and left the extra salt out, no matter what the recipe said. Apparently my taste for salt in my food has gone a lot. How weird.

Toasted Flour Bread- this was mostly shaping fail. The bread tastes fine, but the loaves aren't as big as I'd like, and really too small for sandwiches. Probably I should just stick to round loaves until I have a little more time to practice shaping some more. And I guess this week I'll just...eat very tiny sandwiches?

And now that I've bored you all to tears with my tales of minor cooking mishaps, it is back to not working on my presentation and not writing about soccer and not reading poetry. So much work to not do!

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Tomorrow: Baking and Cleaning and David Tennant

2010-10-09T02:59:48Z

Things Wot I Have Done Today:

sat through the MOST AWKWARD discussion section ever for poetry. I felt so bad for my TA - he was trying really hard, and we were just not clicking. Hopefully next week will go a little better. I shall certainly make an effort to be more articulate the next time around.

gone to the library and gotten some books to add to Project Wodehouse. This may be foolish of me, given my current workload. I do not care.

gone to the post office! My grandma sent me a package full of dried herbs. I now have nutmeg! And paprika, most wonderful of all spices. And rooooooosemaaaary.

gone grocery shopping. I stayed within my food budget for the third week in a row! And that includes several things I didn't strictly need to buy but got anyway, like cornmeal and conditioner and oyster sauce. Most everything else was produce, go me. As a reward to myself, I'm going to Trader Joe's this week and buying myself a couple treats.

made pasta and garlic shrimp for dinner. That turned out well - the garlic shrimp were delicious on their own, and I used enough olive oil that it made a great sauce for the pasta, too. I am also learning that there is no dish, ever, that cannot be improved by the addition of chili garlic paste. It is my favorite condiment EVER.

Dusted the oven. DON'T EVEN ASK. IT WAS SO DISGUSTING. I just - honestly, that had never even occurred to me as a thing that would need to be done? WTF OVEN.

Things Left to Do

Read Cold Comfort Farm (definitely need to be most of the way through this tonight, so I can get started on Rebecca. AUGH READING.)

Read The Adderall Diaries. I guess you could call this supplemental reading - it isn't strictly on the syllabus, but our prof is making us read it because the author is coming in to talk to us on Thursday. Whatever, it's pretty interesting. But MORE READING.

Watch the Doctor Who DVDs I got at the library today. I got one episode of Four (the one written by Douglas Adams), and all of Ten's first season, which somehow I have never seen. I smell a marathon! Gonna have to be, because I've got to give them back tomorrow.

Smashing some orcs in DDO. I am back to playing my Paladin character, which is pretty fun - I'm certainly making more progress than I did before with a cleric or a bard. And his backstory is getting increasingly elaborate, I'm starting to really like him.

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Thank God It's Thursday

2010-10-01T03:30:20Z

Hey, I keep meaning to mention this and then totally forgetting, but I have a new blog: strangerfiction! This is the one I had to create for my Creative Non-Fiction class, so I'll be using it for all my writing exercises and essays. I don't expect most of the off-the-cuff stuff to be any good, but feel free to check it out.

As part of my not-a-diet, I've been trying to eat more veggies in general, and more vegetarian meals in particular. I still love meat (oh bacon, what would I ever do without you?), but a little variety is nice too. The results have been...mixed, but leaning toward the positive. I'm still trying to find more recipes for tofu that give me both the flavor and the texture I want from it. Today was an experiment: I crumbled up some tofu I had left from earlier in the week, added some grated carrot and shredded cabbage along with a tablespoon each of soy sauce and vinegar, a teaspoon of sesame oil, and some chili paste, and then stir-fried the whole mess until it was well-browned. It turned out not quite like I was expecting, but really good all the same, and a nice protein addition to the salad I was eating. Yay for successful kitchen witchery!

This week I discovered that I love hard-boiled detective novels. Like, really a lot. Philip Marlowe is apparently my happy place. It's, I don't know, some combination of the rain on the LA streets at night and the gangsters and racketeers and jazz club toughs and the buzzing neon lights and the cigarette smoke and the whiskey and the trench coats makes me come over all faint and infatuated. I guess I'm going to have to move that genderqueer noir novel I want to write closer to the top of the list.

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