Friday Fill-Ins #165

1. A cup of tea makes me feel all warm inside.
2. Nice-smelling candles and cookies baking in the oven makes a place feel like home.
3. Everything has its beauty, even though sometimes it is hard to see.
4. Do you like the taste of strawberries in the summer?
5. Art makes me stop and appreciate the brush strokes and small little details.
6. LOL I just noticed I forgot to buy my book for Spanish so I can read it this weekend, but now I’m snowed in. Oops.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to trying to get out of my driveway to go to school for sorority recruitment (but I don’t think that’s gonna happen), tomorrow my plans include sorority recruitment (?), and Sunday I want to get ready for Tuesday and the Flogging Molly concert!

From: Friday Fill-Ins

Party!!

Last weekend I helped my friend cook for her mom’s surprise 60th birthday party. The theme was country-inspired – think bandannas, plaid shirts, jeans, cowboy boots, etc. – and the menu had a lot of comfort foods. We cooked for quite a few hours and, with the help of a few friends and relatives, were pretty efficient with getting everything done on time and serving the courses on time. I am going to post the menu with some comments about how the food turned out and a few recipes because I would definitely consider making these again if I had a party with a lot of people. The recipes are very easy to add to, easy to make, and re-heat well. The food was enough to feed about 25-30 people and then-some, and from what she told me she was able to keep the food under $300 or $200- not bad at all.

Drinks
-Assorted beers
-Assorted sodas
-Red wine sangria
-Tropical fruit punch (recipe below)

Appetizers
-Veggies and dip
-Sliced fruit
-Beer bread with dip
-7 layer dip
-Pita triangles with hummus, cucumber, and dill
-Chips and dip

Dinner
-A big green salad with toppings on the side bacon, cheese, dressings, and homemade croutons
-Beef tenderloin use a probe thermometer so it doesn’t overcook!
-Chicken skewers
-Vegetarian chili my own recipe
-Alton Brown’s Stovetop Mac n’ Cheese link & comments below
-Cornbread link & comments below

Dessert
-Vanilla and chocolate sheet cake from Wegmans Highly recommended. Very moist, fresh-tasting, and the icing wasn’t too sweet.
-Assorted sliced fruit
-Coffee

Tropical fruit punch
This is an original recipe made by me and results were surprisingly good. Buy a big bag of frozen fruit because it is cheaper than using several small bags, and try to find Goya juices to use.

Mix one 12oz can of Juicy Juice tropical fruit punch concentrate, one 12oz can of mango juice, one 12oz can of passion fruit juice, one 12oz can of pineapple juice, and one 12oz can of guava juice in a 2.5gal plastic container or punch bowl. Add 12oz of water. Add about half of a big bag of frozen mixed fruit and a few lemons, oranges, limes, apples, and pears cut into slices. (I squeezed some of the juice from the citrus fruits directly into the container, too.) Add a few handfuls of maraschino cherries and about one cup of the cherry juice to the mix.

Next, add the alcohol. I used about 36-48oz of Skyy vodka, about 6oz triple sec, and about 6oz Midori. Seems like a lot, but it is for a crowd and it is going to be balanced out with the addition of soda before drinking. Rum could probably be swapped for the vodka, if you like rum punches, but I didn’t want to add even more sweetness to this mix since it was already sweet enough from the fruit and syrups.

Before serving the punch, add soda and stir. I recommend club soda or seltzer since they won’t add additional sweetness, but ginger ale or lemon-lime soda could also be used. Alternatively, if you are worried about the soda going flat in the punch mix, don’t add the soda to the whole batch. Leave the base mixture in the container and put a bottle of soda next to it with instructions to pour 3oz of the mix and top with 3oz of soda, depending on how strong you want your drink to be and how big your cups are. Believe me, the mix is sweet, so half and half is a decent ratio. DO NOT try to drink the mix BEFORE adding the soda because it will be very sweet and boozy!!!

Alton Brown’s Stovetop Mac n Cheese
Link to recipe

This is one of the best macaroni and cheese recipes I’ve made. I first made this on Thanksgiving of last year with excellent results, and we decided to make it again for the party. We quadrupled the recipe (2lbs of pasta, 40oz of cheese, 2 cans of evaporated milk, etc.) and made two slightly-different varieties: one that just had a blend of cheddar cheeses in it with elbow pasta, and another made with blue cheese and a blend of cheddar cheeses with penne pasta. Cracker Barrel cheddar cheeses are recommended because they have such an intense flavor, but use any kind of cheddar that will melt nicely.

Cornbread
Link to recipe

We tripled this cornbread recipe with excellent results. It was enough to make one big pan (about 13×9, maybe a little bit bigger), plus a small 8×8 pan. Cornbread was very moist and perfectly cooked. This is probably one of the better cornbread recipes I’ve made from scratch.

Tips for spicing up Chinese takeout

Hey everyone. I thought I’d share some food tips for jazzing up bland Chinese takeout and making Asian-style meals at home. I was inspired to write this because the other night I came home from school around 8:00pm and didn’t feel like cooking- it was just too long of a day. I saw some leftover shrimp lo mein in the fridge that we got from a local Chinese restaurant the other night, but it really lacked flavor. I thought about ways to make it better, so it was actually enjoyable to eat, then the lightbulb went off in my head. I raided my kitchen for the following ingredients:

-A few tablespoons of freshly grated ginger
-A few tablespoons of hoisin sauce
-A dash of rice wine vinegar
-Chili garlic sauce, added to taste
-A few fresh mushrooms, sliced
-A handful of frozen long green beans, broken in half

Since I was kind of in a rush, all of those ingredients were just put into a skillet with the leftover lo mein and a little oil and cooked until heated through. Unfortunately, the noodles kind of got a little sticky because – again – I was in a rush and just threw them in there right from the cold container. I should have waited for them to warm up to room temperature a bit so they’d be easier to get out of the container. Oops.

For the next time, I would mix up the first four ingredients to make the sauce while letting the mushrooms and green beans saute; a smashed and minced garlic clove added to the saute would be good, too, because I like garlicky food. After a few minutes, I’d add the leftover lo mein and the sauce and cook until heated through. I bet this could also be done in a microwave by putting all of the ingredients into a microwavable container, covering the container with a loose fitting lid or plastic wrap, and cooking for a few minutes until the mushrooms are tender and everything is heated through.

Regardless of cooking method, with a few additional ingredients that I had in my refrigerator, leftover lo mein can be transformed into something much tastier. The sauce I made to add to the leftover lo mein could also be used when making a homemade lo mein dish. Just make a little more of it, add it to cooked lo mein noodles (also sold dried in the ethnic foods section, or substitute linguine or spaghetti if they are easier to find) along with some veggies and a protein. I generally use the frozen vegetable medleys, like the sugar snap pea veggie medley that Birds Eye makes, and vegetarian meat, like Morningstar chicken strips, or tofu.

Now, I’ll make some comments about the ingredients because I know for some people they might not be common pantry items. Asian ingredients are pretty easy to find in the supermarket now, as most supermarkets have ethnic/international foods sections, and they are good to have on hand for making sauces, marinades, and quick homemade Asian-style meals that are much healthier than takeout.

-Ginger is sold fresh in the produce section, but can also be available in other forms, like candied or dried whole (they look like little pieces of coral or hands). Dried ginger could be substituted for the fresh in this recipe, but you don’t have to make that substitution if you do what I do: buy a hand of ginger, use what you need, and then stash it in a zip-top bag in the freezer. It’s easy to take the ginger out of the freezer when you need it, grate some off with a Microplane, and stash it again. Ginger is also good for making a quick tea: peel the thin skin off using a spoon or knife, slice off a 1in “knob”, throw it into a hot cup of water, add another herb (if desired), and sweeten to taste (if desired). Ginger tea is good for making upset tummies feel better.

-Rice wine vinegar is less acidic than other vinegars that you might be familiar with and neutral tasting. Because of this, it can be used to cut the tastes of stronger vinegars in salad dressings and pickling recipes. In a pinch, lime juice could be used a good substitution in the sauce I made above.

-Hoisin sauce tastes kind of like BBQ sauce in the sense that it has those sweet and spicy notes, but it has different spices in it that sort of change the flavor profile so it’s a different kind of sweet and spicy. It’s hard to explain, so just try it.

-Chili garlic sauce looks and tastes exactly what it sounds like, but it is SPICY, so be careful how much you use if you are sensitive to spice. I generally get the kind where you can see the seeds of the chilis and pieces of garlic. There is also Sirracha, which is essentially the same stuff, but it is smoother without those visible seeds and pieces of garlic.

Friday Fill-Ins #163

1. Pickles are good, but I like the garlic kind the best.
2. I hate being stuck at home when there is a snow storm, like there was for the better part of this week.
3. The snow is cold, wet, and unpleasant.
4. Wild animals are found in nature.
5. It’s 5:16 PM; that means I’m probably preparing to make dinner sometime soon, or I’m driving home from school. It depends on the day.
6. A good friend is hard to find.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to relaxing, tomorrow my plans include studying for a million tests (because that is fun, right?) and Sunday, I want to pile the snow back across my driveway so I have an excuse not to go to classes on Monday.

From: Friday Fill-Ins

New laptop!!!

The brand new laptop that I ordered last week should be here today! I was contemplating buying it for a few days and by the time I ordered it last Friday, it was already backordered with an expected ship date of 5-14 days. Thankfully, I got an email last night that said that the order was shipped yesterday from a location about an hour away from where I live, and the UPS shipment is out for delivery today. Awesome!!!

I got a deal on it, too: $499 with free shipping, so it came to $530 after tax. I see on the Officemax.com website that it is already back up to $599, so I just squeaked by on getting that deal. Some of the reviews I read were mixed, but since I am going to be using this laptop primarily for basic work, performance wasn’t too big of an issue for me. It has a DVD burner, which is awesome since I only have a CD burner in my computer and my dad’s DVD/Lightscribe burner does not work in his HP Desktop (it’s the second drive that broke after limited use, so I’d be cautious of buying an HP computer!), and DDR3 memory. A lot of the other laptops I looked at only had DDR2 and were the same price, if not more expensive. The rest of the specs can be found on that link above, but yeah- it sounded like an awfully good deal for what I’m going to be using it for.

My first laptop was actually a Toshiba Satellite. It was purchased in 2000 for my 11th birthday at Circuit City for… well, a hefty amount of money, since we didn’t “price shop” back then and I was too young to know better. It had problems over the years, but it took a beating overall. The backlight burnt out at one point and when it was replaced there was a line of dead pixels on the screen; nobody had a clue what happened and it was simply too much to replace so it stayed like that. (It still would cost about $200-300 to replace with a new screen, even though it is a 10 year old laptop. Go figure!!) The battery also died and the power jack is screwed up, which causes the computer to shut off at random points, but by the time those problems finally happened the computer was on it’s way out and I had a new desktop PC set up by 2005. Otherwise, the computer was pretty reliable. It still runs, actually, but because of the problem with the power jack and dead battery, it is very annoying to use for extended periods of time and heavy to tote around.

My desktop is 5 years old and still running well from having been maintained over the years. It could continue to run well with a few minor fixes, but I needed something more portable for school and this deal on the laptop came at the right time. I figure in another few years I’ll do a complete upgrade on my desktop, and keep rotating off that way between laptops and desktops if needed.

Update: Well no sooner did I write this post did I receive a knock on the door, and guess who it was? The UPS man with a box for me that looked about the size of a computer…! I’m actually using it right now to finish writing this, and I was surprised with the size of the screen. It has a widescreen monitor that is about 17″ and a full keyboard with a number pad. It weighs about 6lbs, which is a little hefty but not too unmanageable. I’ll write more about it soon.