Catch-Up

I'm leaving for London tomorrow so I figured now was as good a time as any to catch up on some blogging before beginning a series of travel-related entries! If any parts of this entry don't make sense please excuse me...the changing weather is making my head feel all weird. Ew.

My camera was storing some pictures I'd been meaning to blog about for some time so I've decided to toss them all in one entry...here goes...


I don't even remember when I made this meal now...it had to be almost a month ago. Blackened beef stir fry! I think this was the first time I really made something without any help at all from Shane. I'm getting the hang of this cooking thing! Now I need to make sure I keep doing it...


Ah yes...the Mohegan Sun trip in honor of Hillary and Jessica's birthdays. We enjoy making trips to Johnny Rocket's and playing slots. You can tell from these pictures that we obviously had the best table in the house.


Mmmmm....public restrooms are so appetizing.


Being very sneaky...


Here are Hillary and Jess in the brand-spanking-new Casino of the Wind. It was pretty and didn't smell quite as strongly of smoke...yet. The new Margaritaville restaurant is in there too. I have to admit though...I found that place a bit scary. There's this giant spinning monstrosity in the middle of the bar's ceiling above a huge glowing blender. Very strange.


If you look just past me in this picture you can see a giant wall of water...pretty cool. I'm pretty sure we technically weren't supposed to take these pictures....hmmmmmm...


And here is my most recent culinary creation...baked mac and cheese with bacon and caramelized onions. By far my favorite thing so far.

Unfortunately that's all I have the energy right now. This was a painfully boring and pointless entry but now I've at least uploaded the pictures I've been meaning to for a while now.

I hate changing pressure systems and shifting weather. I have serious "barometer head" today. Can't...think....anymore.....must......continue....PACKING! The next time I blog it will be from across the Atlantic Ocean! Woo hoo!

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.

Cupcakes Take the Cake!

Ok...so I borrowed the title of this blog from a cupcake blog that I follow. So sue me.

But anyway, now that I have that off my chest, on with the story! I haven't blogged in far too long so I'm going to make this a good one. Fasten your seat-belts.

This past Wednesday and Thursday night Shane and I were baking up a storm. His boss's 50th birthday was just around the corner and he was charged with making some delicious birthday treats for him. So we picked out a recipe for my brand-spankin'-new cupcake cookbook. We couldn't make just any old box cupcakes for this occasion! We selected the Lemon Coconut Snowballs and got down to business. Here is how the events played out...




Tuesday evening: I had dinner with my aunt (Who just invited me to go to London with her in April! YAY! More blogging on this is sure to follow...) and was telling her about my baking plans for the week. She drew my attention to the fact that I may want to spread my baking over the course of two nights since I hadn't yet gone shopping for the ingredients and we had cake, frosting, and lemon filling to make. This would likely take a bit of time. I could do the grocery shopping and cake part on Wednesday night and the frosting and lemon filling on Thursday to have everything ready to go for Friday. I am sooooo glad I heeded her advice. We would have been up all night on Thursday if we hadn't spread things out.

Wednesday evening: After a day of being stuck in the house because of the snowstorm, I ventured out to Stop and Shop with Shane to pick up the ingredients for our cupcakes. We were able to easily find almost everything...until this stupid little jar proceed to evade us for what seemed like at least 20 minutes...


What the hell is "cream of tartar" anyway??!?! We called both of our mothers (Shane couldn't reach his and mine wasn't completely sure where to find it...we had been staring at the spices section for some time and were insistent that it wasn't there and that was the only place she could think of it being), looked in every imaginable area we could think of, and then Shane discovered, via his handy dandy Blackberry, that McCormick makes it. It had to be in the spices section. Upon returning to that area for the umpteenth time we, of course, found it immediately. Oops...sorry mom.

Then it was time to go to Target. The recipe required the use of a sifter and I didn't have one. So I ran in and got one, along with a double boiler that could be used, optionally, for the frosting (Why not? If I'm going to get into this baking thing I'll use it again and it wasn't all that expensive.) and some little paper cupcake tin liners because they only had foil ones at Stop and Shop and I didn't like those. I'm very particular about these things.

We then returned to my house, made the cake part of the cupcakes, then put them in the refrigerator until we could fill and frost them on Thursday. We were able to complete all of this by around 10 of 9...just in time for LOST. PHEW!

Thursday evening: I had a doctor's appointment after work and Shane was planning on getting dinner with his Dad so we were going to be getting a little bit of a late start on the rest of the cupcake making activities. My doctor's appointment went a little longer than I expected and Shane was going to beat me to my house so, very unintelligently, I was hurrying home. Keep in mind that there was just a snow and ice storm the day before. Just a mile or two away from my house a car stopped abruptly to allow the car in front of it to turn left. I proceeded to almost slide right into the back of said car but opted to run into an icy snow bank on the side of the road instead. And got stuck there. Stupid front wheel drive. Fortunately a couple very nice passers by stopped to help me and, of course, after I called Shane he rushed to my aid as well. A couple shovels and firm shoves later I was out of the snow and back on my way. But not without some battle wounds...



Very luckily it wasn't anything too ugly. That piece leaning against my tire in the first of the two pictures above came off the bottom of the bumper on that side of the car and if you look right under the headlight in the second picture you can see some cracking in the plastic. That yellow signal light on the side there also popped out but, also luckily, I was able to pop it back in pretty easily. Ugh. But I have to keep in mind that this is much better than my car would have looked if I had rammed into the back of that other car. And, most importantly, I wasn't hurt...so I can't really complain.

Back at the house we got to work making the filling and frosting for the cupcakes. Well...Shane mostly got to work while I frantically tried to do dishes and clean up around the kitchen just so we could have some working space. Typically I would have done this earlier but I just didn't have time. I had the camera out this night too so we were able to snap some more pictures...

Here is Shane very expertly grating some lemon zest for the filling.

Here is the freshly blended frosting...mmmmm...I love frosting.

Here is me anal-retentively putting the shredded coconut on top of the cupcakes. I didn't like the way Shane was just dumping the coconut directly from the bag onto the cupcakes. It just wasn't pretty that way.

Here is the obscene amount of frosting we had leftover when we were done.

Here is the obscene amount of lemon filling we had leftover when we were done.

Aaaannnddd...(drum roll please)...THE FINISHED PRODUCT!



Mmmmm...much blood, sweat and tears went into these cupcakes. Anything for Al's big 5-0!