Pumpkin Tortellini with Brussel Sprouts--so freakin delicious!
mangoes and other creative things
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Tasty for a bit, unless you order Shepherd's Pie that same week!
Apparently, this is very similar to what you get if you ordered a Shepherd's Pie, which is what I did that Wednesday (even though I had a lot of left over ground meat and peas). Pam and I went to the premiere of the Munch exhibit that Wednesday and then went to eat at Vynl where I got a good Shepherd's Pie, though not exciting, since I essentially made it the other night. The Munch exhibit was fantastic! I'm sorry it has to leave so soon.
Buttery Mushroom Sauce and Other Food
One weekday night, I felt ambitious and made mashed potatoes, steak with onions, and a mushroom sauce to go over it. It was really good--and I felt accomplished. The mushrooms tasted so good. Unfortunately, I burned my hand on the pan when I was seeing if the steak was done--good thing I had lots of Flavor Ice leftover from the summer!
Potato Soup
Potato Soup chez Sam Zien. I had to make a copy for something and came across this recipe for potato soup. They should bring Sam to the East coast--and if he's on air here already, they should air him as frequently as Lidia! This was an awesome potato soup--and for some reason came out perfect even though we didn't have enough chicken broth on hand.
Steak Pizzaiola
Grandma made this for me with some really good instructions, so I made it later that week for Jon. It's beef with onions and tomatoes. She had frozen fresh parsely though. She made it with veal the next day. Veal Pizzaiola.
C is for Cookie
Jen from work made this for me--ain't it cute? The day she gave it to me, I was dying from the Cold that Pam Had. But funnily enough, was wearing a similar outfit to go out to the Christmas party. Well, minus the yellow star broach, but I did have my pink shoes on! Note: the cookie melted which is why it looks kind of strange. Also, Pam at work broke my arm--funnily too that event happened when I was given a huge project that was about to haunt the beginning of the year.
Shoe Rainbow
My Hollywould rainbow shoes o' fun! And two pairs are actually not shown. And yes, those are Odor Eaters, but seriously, velvet is not a breathing friendly material for naked feet. I should probably retake this with my full collection and without the OE.
Eggs and macaroni
My egg macaroni salad: a bunch of boiled eggs, macaroni, a bit of mayo, Indian relish, dill--combine and season to one's liking. It's a great dish to eat over the course of a week because it tastes soo good.
New Year's Eve: MOST AWESOME CAKE EVER!
Isn't this the most awesome cake you've ever seen that someone actually made? Frank made this himself AND carried it all the way from the Bronx through Times Square craziness! This was the best cake EVER.
New Year's Eve: Surprises...
Um, haha, didn't even notice Lakshmi sneaking into this picture...sparkling wine, Kat's brownies, and Mystery Date...
New Year's Eve: When we're old...
Part of the party on New Year's Eve...more guests came later: Jerry and Jen, Randi, Shane, Melanie, and Frank! So much fun! Oh, and for the main course, pumpkin and butternut squash tortellini with a bit of sage and olive oil.
New Year's Eve: One shellfish, two shellfish...
So Jon got a couple of packs of phyllo dough and we also made these nifty little treats--frozen shrimp, cut down to size (no rock shrimp at Whole Foods as far as we checked), plum tomato, dill, and extra virgin olive oil.
New Year's Eve: Oh the drama of little pigs!
Would you believe that Whole Foods doesn't carry little wiener dogs? The kind that you'd put in a pigs in a blanket? We had to improvise with their fancy hot dogs and cut them down to size. Of course, Jon being Jon, only allowed me to make a few...but we had other food to make...(fancy hotdogs aren't as good as the suburban supermarket kind)...
Booger, baby!
Massimo putting his finger up Dom's nose--or is Dom putting his nose on Massimo's finger?
A Hawaiian license plate...
Yes, that's Wee in front of a BMW with a Hawaii license plate. (Hence, winners of the license plate game.) The question is, why would someone from Hawaii bring their car over to New Jersey and drive it to the top deck by the Nordstroms at the Garden State Plaza?
Rachel Ray food
Okay, so I think Rachel Ray should stop taking speed/crack/antidepressants to keep up with the demanding schedule the Food Network demands of her, but when Will & Grace is on what else is there to watch if Bernie Mac is a rerun? Well for someone who only has TBS and FoodNetwork as cable stations, it's 30-Minute Meals with Rachel Ray. Also, since Pam is such a huge fan, I thought I'd try to find what could be appealing about her food at least.
One episode actually made me want to try cooking a dish she made--her Cream of Mushroom Casserole. Of course, this isn't a casserole by any means. It's just egg noodles with the cream of mushroom sauce minus the nutmeg--where the hell is one supposed to get nutmeg? and then do what with it? Still, it was so good. Egg noodles and creamy mushrooms rock!
Maybe, maybe, maybe next time I make it I'll follow the entire recipe.
Not so good eats
This is Jon's and my attempt to braise something. I think it's a short rib. We didn't cook it immediately, and it tasted kind of like old meat when we did. Very gristly, chewy old meat. The asparugus tasted old too--stringy and gristly. The thing is that I think we only waited a day to cook it--however, it very well could have been a week. This dinner was a dud.
Mushroom Soup sans Campbell's Can
Wee came over the day I fried myself on the roof. We went through the Pepin book and went to Whole Foods in Columbus Circle to pick up the ingredients. When we got back, we were a bit tired, but determined not to eat anymore reheated hot wings. This here is the cream of mushroom soup. I think I made it wrong, or it wasn't as good as I'd imagine. Have to try it again sometime.
Bok, bok, beCAWK!!
Jon helped me make this meal sometime in August I'm guessing. It's fried breaded chicken and roasted vegetables. We haven't bought chicken since then until last week. Let's just say we had lots of leftover fried chicken. The vegetables weren't hard to pack away though. They were easy to make in the convection oven too--vegetables, oil, salt, and pepper. Over time we found that lining the convection oven tray with aluminum foil made cleaning up a lot easier.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Super fun at Joy's B-day party! (and a side-trip to White Castle)
Doris has the same picture up on her blog--and it's from her camera, but I thought I'd post it here too--because there can never be enough of this picture on the internet dammit!
Joy's the sexy woman on the far left, Doris is the sexy woman to my left, Jon is the sexy man to my right, and Eva's the sexy woman to my far right. How I ended up in the middle--freak of the nature of things I guess.
Jon and I had a delicious dinner at Starwich while watching the menu of Finding Nemo. I must have been starving though because Jon didn't find the dinner all that amazing--then again, he probably gets take out from there from his office more often that I have ever eaten there. Anyway--it was so good.
Then took the L to Brooklyn, and Brooklyn gave me the same impression of Jersey City--Jon agreed. Really imagined that all of Brooklyn were brownstones and stuff, I mean you hear enough about it when people say that their dream is to move to Brooklyn--that it's hard not to imagine that since the best place in NYC to raise children is in Brooklyn, so it SHOULD look like Sesame Street--there are brownstones on Sesame Street, but not all of Brooklyn. And duh, I've been to Brooklyn before to go to the cemetery, so I've seen the houses and apartments that are Jersey City-ish. I guess going there by car and going there by foot, I thought it'd be different.
And so we got to the party--one of the few parties where the music was quite awesome and there was no beer pong. Strange thing about Jon's beer however was that it kept foaming up when it was being poured. Probably was over shaken in my bag--poor guy wanted to bring his backpack--as if we were still young and that were stylish. It was nice to socialize, and it was nice that it was still cool enough outside where it was a relief to step out for a bit. So after some party-talking (I'm trying to refer to the kind of loud, staccato kind of conversations one has to carry when the music is louder than footsteps of a handful of tens of feet), we decided to make a run for White Castle food. I got a chocolate shake (supposedly a medium, but in the pic you can see it's kind of large), and Jon got us a few cheeseburgers, mozzarella sticks, and fries. We returned to Joy's with her promised cheeseburger.
And it was a nice night, and it was a long way home from Brooklyn--so I ended up finishing the shake--the WHOLE shake. We took a cab home when we popped out of the subway on 8th.
Stunted Resuming
So Jon configured stuff so that all of my pictures from my laptop--including my wallpaper--was saved to our backup server thing and deleted from my laptop. And because he's working, bothering him to map the X drive to my laptop would probably not be the best of ideas.
Anyway, let me see what else I can scrounge up from my email for the time being.
Anyway, let me see what else I can scrounge up from my email for the time being.
Let them eat cake!
Sour Cream Chocolate Cake with Mascarpone Whipped Cream (from Tish Boyle's wonderful and totally awesome The Cake Book), Blueberry Coulis Thing, and a Fresh Strawberry
Wee and I made this sometime in March when it was one of those really nice Saturdays. The Sour Cream Chocolate Cake came out nearly perfect. Had to buy expensive butter since we unfortunately ran short. Note: the bodega downstairs carries only whipped butter, and the "gourmet" bodega by the stand-up MRI is very expensive for food staples. We didn't want to make frosting, but something lighter and with ingredients we had on hand--like mascarpone. So impatient as I was, we assembled the cake, still warm; that didn't bode well for the cake or the whipped cream in between the layers though. The bottom sort of fell apart, so I pulled out the blueberry coulis thing I make for adding to yogurt (frozen blueberries, sugar, water--but now realize that water is unnecessary) and threw it on top to make the bottom layer soak and recongeal (I hoped). (Chocolate cake and blueberries didn't seem like a bad idea--but the water in the coulis made the coulis a lot thinner than I thought, and the cake absorbed it like a sponge.) Anyway, the top layer got there somehow with lots of help from Lisa, and I used what was left of the mascarpone to coat the top. We had fresh strawberries to really clean up the mascarpone whipped cream bowl. We also saved one to decorate the top--to make the cake look sexy. The layers of goodness weren't as defined as I wished, but the blueberries did add a nice surprise texture, and though it was whipped cream, it was mistaken for frosting as it hardened in the fridge into a taut kind of shell. But it was mistaken for a very light, not overly sugary frosting, which I guess is a neat trick.
I forgot how big whole cakes were--especially double layers. It lasted for about a week--giving about half to our family, an eighth to the Chins, and the rest for me. I think that week was when my waist-line expanded and never contracted like it used to. Crud.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
It's been awhile hasn't it?
Okay, so to resume the online posting of my life, I'm going to post a bunch of pictures that may best illustrate what's been going on since November 2005. But first, to note what's going on at this very second: Jon's at work; tomorrow's Easter; I sort of cleaned up the apartment; I've gained quite a few skin cells since November; my plants are still alive; it's beautiful out, though I've not been out, but with the windows open, it's a beautiful thing; I made Jon and Wee hats; I made a few scarves; I've yet to finish my blanket.
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