I win'd!

Woo hoo! I have been bestowed with my very first blog award. It was given to me by my dear friend and coworker Amanda. This "Proximidade" honor is awarded to blogs that "...invest and believe in Proximity; Nearness in space, time and relationships. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and to be friends. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to 8 bloggers, who must then chose 8 more and include this text into the body of their award."

I'm verklempt! Talk amongst yourselves...

My only problem moving forward with the latter part of this award is that I really only read 4 other blogs...half of the required 8. And I believe three of these bloggers make up 3/4 of my own readers. I am obviously not spending enough time writing or reading here. Regardless...I will pass the torch along to the best of my ability.

First I would like to return the favor to the one who so graciously gave this award to me. Amanda's blog Me, My Dogs, My Life is what inspired me to begin my own blog in the first place. I enjoy it immensely...even though she feels her blog is filled with misery and woe, I feel as though it's all taken with a very good sense of humor. And it's honest! What promotes nearness is relationships more than honesty?

Next I would like to honor Lisa's Artsy Fartsy blog. This blog is an inspiration to me as well. Lisa's use of photos to narrate is wonderful. She also has a very good sense of humor about the everyday ups and downs of life. And I really like the newly minted "What I Love" entries. They're uplifting. :)

Then there's Alan's blog, formerly I'm Alan, eh? now I'm Alan, eh-l-eh-n?. Alan is just smart. Hands down. And he may not pride himself on his fine and upstanding skills in English grammar, but his intelligence really does come through in his writing. Not to mention he also has a very good sense of humor. Do I sense a theme here?

Finally there is the wondrous Cupcakes Take The Cake, with postings from Rachel, Nichelle, and Stacie. I know none of these people personally but I still really enjoy the blog. Anyone that knows me knows that I have an affinity for this darling confection. Seriously though...what's more charming than a cupcake?

Just Double It

I have a feeling I'm going to have a lot of these cooking/baking blogs considering that my New Year's resolution is to cook more. And, well, when I'm in the kitchen it usually yields some fairly interesting stories.

This weekend's culinary adventure? Chicken pad thai. A dish that both Shane and I like and it seemed a bit more challenging than the other things I've attempted so I decided to just bite the bullet and go for it.

The whole process started off when Shane and I went grocery shopping. We went to an authentic Asian food market (a place called Young's on Park Road in West Hartford) and picked up some of the more unusual ingredients. One of these ingredients was a specific kind of rice noodles. The recipe only called for 8 oz. of the noodles but the store only had 16 oz. packages. Of course we could have just used half of the noodles but, being the smart people that we are, we decided we would make all of the noodles and double everything else. That way we'd have tons of leftovers and we could feed ourselves for days! Genius!

What we failed to think about was the reality of how much food that really was and what would go into making it. The original recipe was supposed to feed 4...so the doubled recipe would feed about 8. That's right, 8. That's all of the octomom's babies...if they could eat solid foods. Two pounds of chicken went into that pad thai. The pictures are dark and a bit blurry (I hate how washed out pictures look with the flash on so I deal with it)...but it looked a little something like this...

This is all of the veggie type stuff (minus the chopped peanuts) that went into our delicious meal. A lot of green, right? What we have here is some bean sprouts, green onion, garlic, cilantro, and grated lime peel. Not pictured is the sauce I had to make. It tasted pretty good but making it was not very appetizing...mostly because there was fish sauce in it. Apparently there's fish sauce in a lot of Asian-type food but the stuff on its own smells disgusting. And on top of that I saw how it was made on TV once. You don't want to know...

Here is the two pounds of chicken that I cut up to put into the pad thai. Cutting up raw chicken is gross.

Here is Shane using the kitchen appliance thing that chops up stuff. Yup. He's chopping up the peanuts for the topping. I believe this is the second attempt. The first attempt sort of resulted in what looked like a grainy sort of peanut butter. He got a little over zealous. Also, judging from the look he's giving me in this picture, one might gather that Shane actually hates me. At this point he may have. I don't think he particularly enjoys having his picture taken.

This is the giant mess o' chicken pad thai we made...and you can even see the mess we made of my stove. At one point we couldn't even contain everything in one skillet...we had to temporarily split the mixture into two separate pans. This was probably the biggest problem we ran into with making the recipe doubled.

Here's me getting the bowls. I feel the need to post at least one picture of myself to prove that I was actually there...cooking.

Finished product! It actually looked kinda nice once it was plated...and it didn't taste half bad either! And this allegedly half-hourish recipe took us a whopping two hours. Aw yea.

And the Academy Award goes to...

Ok...so it's far too late for me to write a real blog right now...but I wanted to assert the fact that I HAVE NOT abandoned my blog. I miss it dearly, actually. There just hasn't been anything interesting to write about! And now there is...but I haven't had time to write...UGH! So hang in there, friends. I WILL make my triumphant return.

In the mean time, in the spirit of the Academy Awards, I think you should all seriously consider seeing best picture winner Slumdog Millionaire if you haven't already. It's stunning.