Catching Up

Sorry for my lack of posts of late.  My computer stopped cooperating with me Saturday night, so I've since fallen behind.  I'll try to make accomodations to allow myself to continue to post regularly.  I must warn you, though, this post includes me eating out twice over the course of Saturday and Sunday!

On Saturday, I had an amazing hot pastrami sandwich from Cheese 'n Stuff for lunch.  It has some really well-seasoned pastrami, sauerkraut, deli mustard, and thousand island dressing of all things.  It's on a sourdough french roll.  It came together very nicely to make a rich, salty, even sweet sandwich.

For dinner, Amanda decided to make a jazzed-up version of a pizza we had at Cheese Board.  The dough was pre-made from Trader Joe's, and it had olive oil, gorgonzola cheese, figs, caramelized red onions, and prosciutto on top.  Then, she added arugula on after it was baked.  Everyone was impressed by this pizza, especially me.  I've never had a homemade pizza with such a fabulous combination of flavors and textures.  The figs and onions were tender, and since the prosciutto was on top, it crisped.  Delicious.

Sunday's dinner represented the first time I've splurged on a meal while in Berkeley.  Casey, Eddie, and I went to Angeline's Louisiana Kitchen and had a fantastic meal.  They do high-end Southern food (as if the name didn't give it away), and it didn't disappoint.  We each got a cup of gumbo to start, and I had the Cajun mixed grill, which was essentially a plate of barbecue:  an andouille sausage, three baby back ribs, and three grilled shrimp served with potato salad.  I feel a little bad since I didn't get the most refined of dishes, but who cares?  I love meat, and everything was cooked to perfection.  The sausage and ribs were beautifully glazed, and the shrimp had a lime sauce that kept the plate from being too heavy.  The potato salad was even exceptional - a little spicy, a little creamy, and all potato-y.  I spent more than I like to spend on three meals combined, but it was worth it to try once (maybe again if I have the funds).

That was my past two days.  I'm not entirely certain what's going to happen tonight, but I know one thing - no more eating out for a while.

Finally, a hamburger

I don't eat a lot of hamburgers.  I used to, for sure, but I just haven't while I've been here.  It's mostly because I don't often make my own burgers, which is why I'm lucky Amanda does.

This is a teriyaki burger with cheddar cheese, spinach, grilled red onion, and a slice of pineapple.  It's accompanied by some salsa verde Doritos.  At 11 p.m., this is exactly what I was looking for - tasty, kind of unhealthful, and it gave me an excuse to eat chips.  I made the burgers a little rarer than I would have liked.  I'll have to cook them at a lower temperature next time.

I won't belabor this, but I had a McRib yesterday.  I was near McDonald's yesterday while doing some work, and I couldn't help it.  I love it, and I make no apologies for my admittedly unfortunate feelings.

Running out of options

I haven't been to the market for at least two weeks, well before I went to San Francisco over the weekend.  That last trip, I spent more money than I usually do, but I also bought more food than I usually do.  In any case, I don't have a lot of fresh foods with which I can cook, and that was sadly evident in my dinner tonight.  Not that it was bad...

Clam chowder and a grilled bacon and cheese sandwich.  The soup was canned, just like every other soup I have, and the sandwich was the result of me basically just having bacon and cheese with which to cook in the fridge.  I tried something weird when I grilled the sandwich - I drained the oil from when I fried the bacon, but I didn't wipe the pan to clear the rest of the oil and burnt bits.  I thought it might give the bread more flavor, but it just ended up tasting a little burnt.  Also, I need a better pan for grilling sandwiches on this bread.  Not every part of the bread gets grilled when both slices of bread are on there.  Maybe I'll just do one slice at a time from now on.

I'm not 100% certain I'll be able to go to the market tomorrow, either.  If I can't, I really don't know how tomorrow's post is going to look.  It won't be good.  Pray for Safeway.

A South American sandwich

I'm an equal-opportunity sandwich connoisseur.  Pastrami from The Hat, banh mi from Lee's Sandwiches, tortas from Cook's - if it's in sandwich form, chances are pretty good that I'll like it.  Amanda felt like she owed me dinner, so she treated me to a sandwich.

This baby is from the Brazil Cafe cart that's parked at Telegraph and Bancroft every day.  To get right to the point, I should have tried it a long time ago.  This tri-tip sandwich was fabulous - garlic/cilantro mayo (or something, it was thinner than mayo), tomato, lettuce, and the aforementioned beef with grilled onions.  I wish the bottom bun was sliced a little thicker since it fell apart on the second half of my sandwich, but aside from that, it was perfection.  The whole thing was exploding with savory goodness.  I mean, often times I'm content with minimalist seasoning, but I love it when a combination of spices and sauces comes together perfectly like they did in this sandwich.  I'll be back, that's for sure.

P.S.  I was treated, so I didn't really eat out!  Don't judge me!

Making something out of nothing

Nothing might be a bit of an exaggeration.  Tonight's dinner was, as promised yesterday, a transformation of leftovers into something brand new.  My grandma is a pro at this.  Leftover roast beef is cooked up with potatoes and onions to make hash, picked-over chicken carcasses are used to make soup, and miscellaneous meat and rice are thrown together to make fried rice.

This is spam fried rice done the right way, no shortcuts.  I fried up the eggs, set them aside, browned the spam, set it aside, fried and seasoned the rice with soy and oyster sauces, then threw it all together.  Right before I was done cooking, I mixed in chopped green onions.  I purposely didn't use too much soy sauce since spam is pretty salty, and it was a good call.  There was a lot of spam, so it was feasible to have one piece with every bite of rice so you'd have the balance of salty and mild flavors along with the sharpness of not-too-cooked green onions.  I was pretty pleased with myself.

This is another one of those shout out to grandma posts.  She gave me a significant portion of my cooking acumen, and I'll never be hungry again because of it.  Well, unless I can't afford food to cook.  Let's not think about that prospect...

Care-package benefits

Over the weekend, I got some stuff from my mom sent along with Aimee.  Most of it was unremarkable except for a few things - three cans of Spam (expired in August 2010, but it never actually expires, right?), a package of dried, roasted seaweed (nori), and a spam musubi maker.  Guess what that means?

I made half a can's worth of spam musubi.  I first cooked the spam in teriyaki sauce until it had a glaze, and that was basically all of the cooking except for the rice.  The mold makes it really easy to make this because it's exactly the width of half a sheet of nori, and its area almost exactly fits a slice of spam.  All you do is fill the mold, use the little pusher thing to remove it, take the pusher off the top of the rice (the trickiest part), then fold over the nori.  This made four musubis that I sliced into fours (two are missing from the plate because they fell apart when I sliced them).  This was essentially my dinner, though I didn't need much since I had a late lunch.

I think the other half a can of spam is going to go towards some spam fried rice tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

Quite a spread

So I'm still in San Francisco, and I'm still eating out.  Last night, Suzette, Aimee and I were debating what to eat—it was between Korean barbecue and hot pot.  Long story short, Korean barbecue won.

This place, Muguboka Restaurant, put quite a spread out.  They gave a lot more little sides than my beloved Lee's Tofu, and everything was very tasty (as usually seems to be the case with Korean food).  I got a combination with the tofu soup in the bottom right of the picture and spicy pork not pictured.  Suzette got kalbi, and Aimee got spicy squid and veggies.  All that on top of these sides made for an amazing dinner.

One more day of eating out until I'm back in Berkeley.  Sorry this post is late, by the way!

Delivery

One of the worst inventions in the history of western civilization is food delivery.  I mean, it's convenient, but that's also the problem.  Do we really need that much convenience?  Plus, it usually comes at a cost, one that could very easily be avoided by buying enough food at the market beforehand.  We know this, especially as we place the order by phone or online(!), but we still do it.

 

This pizza is delivery, not DiGiorno.  It's actually from California Pizza Kitchen, which for some reason I consider to be the epitome of chain restaurants.  I try to avoid chains since I think small/local places have so much to offer, but I won't turn it down when it's offered to me.  In particular, this roasted garlic chicken pizza was quite nice since roasted garlic is always good, and the quarter-cooked onions still have enough bite to cut through the mild chicken and nutty garlic.  We also had spinach-artichoke dip as an appetizer, which is one of my favorite dips since it's got both green veggies and is creamy/cheesy.  The meal cost an arm and a leg, and we could have done just as well for half the price had we eaten somewhere on Irving St. in San Francisco, but it was just right for what we wanted: convenience while we watched Green Zone.

I'll put anything in a sandwich

Tonight wasn't one of those nights on which I spent hours preparing and cooking a balanced dinner.  Tonight was one of those nights on which a can of soup and a sandwich sounded perfect.  I only had one problem:  my turkey was too old to eat.  I did, however, have one more egg (which was also kind of old but not inedible yet).

I fried the egg first.  I'm not big on runny yolk, so I broke the yolk and made sure the egg was well-done and nicely browned.  Then I grilled the sandwich with the egg right in the middle.  It was a nice combination because it had a very breakfasty feel, but the cheese is what made it since the sharpness of the cheddar really cut through the richness of the fried egg.  I don't think I could ever go back to making grilled cheese sandwiches without sharp cheddar cheese.  The soup is Progresso light chicken noodle (the light soups were on sale at Safeway), and I microwaved it sometime in the middle of making the sandwich.  It was good enough, not remarkable in any way.

This wasn't entirely a meat-less dinner, but it was pretty close since the soup was just an accompaniment to the sandwich.  I know I could never be a vegetarian, but I could see it being easy with fresh eggs, good cheese, and other tasty ingredients.

Another late night breakfast

If we were to take a tally, I'm almost certain I've had breakfast foods for dinner far more often than I've actually had them for breakfast.  Tonight was one of those breakfast for dinner nights.  Carol, Amanda, and I got back from the Cal Cooking Club meeting pleased but ultimately unsatisfied by the fact that we only each got to have one mini cream puffs despite the bounty they had.  I knew that I had eggs, potatoes, and bacon, and Amanda's adept at making chocolate chip pancakes, so that's what we did.

I'm not going to get into great detail, but a lot of frying took place.  Essentially everything was cooking in a skillet, at separate times of course.  We did the potatoes and pancakes first, then the eggs in the pan the potatoes were fried in and the bacon in the cleaned-out pancake pan.  All in all, it came together quite nicely.  My only regret was that I didn't have salsa to go on the eggs.  Oh well.

The end of the world is supposed to be tomorrow.  Whose time does that happen on?  Today will eventually be tomorrow elsewhere, so does that mean we'll already safe in the Pacific time zone?  The only reason I'm wondering is because I don't know if I should plan for dinner or not.  If the world's going to be over, why should I waste time thinking about defrosting chicken?

Making the most out of eating out

for me, means going to Gypsy's.  By now, you've heard me say a great deal about Gypsy's and how highly I think of their food.  This time, I'll try to let the picture do the talking.

Thomas and I had decided to go out to lunch last night, but we originally intended to go to Zachary's in Oakland, but he didn't get up in time to make it all the way there and back in time for his class.  Instead, we went to Gypsy's because, well, we love it and it's close.  The wait was fairly long since we went right around noon, but we got our food in time for him to eat a good amount of it before having to run off to class.  What I have up there is chicken parmesan over spaghetti with a caesar salad on the side.  Needless to say, I wasn't disappointed.  The breading on the parm was as close to perfect as I've had - it wasn't too heavily breaded, so it didn't slip off the moment I tried to cut it.  Also, look how much mozzarella is on top of that.  Some restaurants clearly put one slice of cheese on top and don't even let it brown.  Not here.  The mozzarella is thick and plentiful and browned to perfection.  I know I've talked about it before, but their garlic bread is amazing in its simplicity.  It's really just toasted french bread with a roasted clove of garlic on top, and that's all you need.  The garlic is roasted so it tastes just the way you want it to - nutty and sweet without the bite that raw garlic has.  Look at me; I said I was going to let the picture do the talking and still ended up waxing poetic about the food.  It's just that good.

The best part about this is that it was too big for one lunch, so I brought back leftovers that became dinner.  It was a Gypsy's kind of day for me, to be certain.  I may not end up cooking tomorrow since I've still got leftover pasta from the night before plus there's a Cal Cooking Club meeting.  I'd hate to disappoint you, though, dear reader.  I'll see what I can do.

P.S.  Yes, I know, pasta again.  If this blog has taught me anything, it's that I love to cook pasta and Mexican food.  This is not to say that I don't appreciate other kinds of food; I just seem to gravitate to these foods when I cook.  I promise I'll make my grandma's chicken rice once I get a hold of some black mushrooms.

It's a process

Disclaimer:  This post features a dish I've already made before.  HOWEVER, as similar as it may have looked to the one previously shown here, it was different.  I'll explain after you have a look.

Chicken, broccoli, and garlic alfredo over spaghetti.  You and I have both seen it before (me more than you, I'm willing to bet), but I'm telling you, it was different.  The reason?  Salt.  I've said so before, but salt is sooooo important in making food taste good.  I thoroughly seasoned the chicken with garlic salt and pepper, and I added a bit more garlic salt when I threw the broccoli in (more of my frozen broccoli, microwaved a bit so they wouldn't be completely frozen).  Needless to say, I also salted my pasta water (Is your pasta bland?  The water probably just needs a couple pinches of salt).  The difference in flavor was noticeable from first taste, but it probably showed best in the broccoli.  Broccoli is, by nature, bland in an earthy way, so the fact that this broccoli tasted almost as good as the chicken is telling.

Another thing I did this time was not cook the crap out of the chicken.  I browned it, but I didn't cook it until I was certain the middles were done.  I let the sauce get close to boiling and covered it with the heat on low to let the chicken and broccoli heat through that way.  The chicken was really tender, and I think I owe it to letting the chicken finish cooking in the natural course of heating the sauce and broccoli.

I've never really been good about experimenting with cooking since I can't stand the thought of possibly ruining food, but it's been very refreshing trying different things to improve my food.  I need to break out of my recipe-slave mentality.

Plum good

I don't know if I adequately described my experience looking at produce at the farmer's market in Oakland on Friday.  If there's anything I like, it's looking at fresh produce to find the best of the best.  It just so happened that I found the best of the best at the first stand I walked up to.  

I can't remember exactly which kind of plum this is, but it's one of three I bought at that stand.  As usual with farmer's market fruit stands, they had samples available to entice people to buy.  I don't usually like plums, so I decided I'd try a piece to see if these could change my mind, and they did.  They really did.  They have relatively soft skin, nice firm texture, and are sweet as could be.  Not candy sweet, but sweet, a perfect dessert after I had my beef stroganoff leftovers (not pictured since it wasn't even nice to look at the first time).

I feel good about buying fruit that's not grapes.  I think I settled on grapes too easily before since they're easy to buy cheap in large quantities.  My three plums for $1.50 total has made me realize that I shouldn't just settle for what Safeway has on sale.  I also realized I need to become acquainted with Berkeley's farmer's market.  All in due time.

It's going to get better, I promise...

just not yet.  I'm going to get back to making stuff mostly from scratch.  It's just easier to do things semi-homemade (or mostly not homemade).  For instance:

This, friends, is Hamburger Helper beef stroganoff and some microwaved frozen broccoli.  I used to love that stroganoff as a kid because it was so rich, creamy and beefy and had noodles.  I bought the frozen broccoli a while ago so I wouldn't have an excuse not to have green veggies.  I can't feel too lazy to make veggies since all I have to do is microwave them for a few minutes.  The only problem is that they just don't taste as good as fresh broccoli.  That's the price of convenience, I guess.

Really late-night tacos

Okay, so a bunch of us went to the Cal/Washington State women's volleyball match, and after it ended around 8:30 p.m., Amanda wanted tacos.  Pork tacos.  She had a recipe but no pork, so we went to Safeway.  Once we came back, other distractions kept prep work from starting until like 10 p.m. at the earliest.  It all went somewhat according to plan, but that meant eating at like 11 p.m.  The end result was pretty good, though.

I feel bad because this picture is mostly lettuce and cheese, but there's so much more there.  The pork was salted/peppered and sauteed with onions, jalapeno, garlic, and lime juice with cilantro thrown in toward the very end.  I chopped up the pork into little pieces and loaded the tacos up just as seen here.  They were pretty darn tasty, but the recipe called for tomato, and we didn't have any.  It was good for a first try at the recipe, though.

Also, I ate out again today.  McDonald's.  Since we didn't get it the other night, I was determined to have it today since I was nearby.  It was gloriously unhealthful.

A brownie a day keeps the madness away

I haven't been baking.  Actually, the only times I've baked sweets while here was when I had that tub of already made cookie dough.  I took a step forward by making brownies tonight.

Of course, I made these from a mix, but that process was more involved than scooping dough out of a tub, so I felt a slight sense of accomplishment.  These are Ghirardelli double chocolate brownies (with chocolate chips inside!).  I didn't have any powdered sugar to top them with, and that's the only thing that could have made them better.  They're dense, rich, and intensely chocolatey, so much that it's more or less inconceivable for one person to eat half a pan in one sitting as one would normally be tempted to do.  A glass of milk or vanilla ice cream could have improved the eating experience, but I had neither, so I enjoyed the brownies as-is and shared with a few privileged people from my building.  If you ever want someone to owe you, give them a good brownie.

I actually came into this post feeling like my food was on the upswing from junk to swank, but I quickly realized while writing that this is just as bad as anything I've eaten in the last week.  The worst part about all of this is that I really don't feel guilty for eating bad and eating out.  Rehab, here I come.

Devolution

I think that as the semester rolls on, I'm becoming less and less picky about what I eat.  I mentioned peanut butter and jelly previously, and that's what I had for lunch yesterday.

Do you see the pieces of peanut resting atop my wheat toast?  That's Jif extra crunchy for you.  It was on sale (I think most people like smooth peanut butter), and I think it was a worthwhile investment.  You get the real peanut experience in butter form.  The strawberry preserves are generic; I'm not one to look down on the store brand.  All in all, I'm very satisfied by being able to have PB&J at any given time.

Sorry this post is so late, by the way; I went to the Cal/USC football game last night and did not return with enough energy to write anything up.  Plus, Kurt was already asleep.  Also, I ate out last night, twice essentially.  I had some chicken strips and Gordon Biersch garlic fries at AT&T Park (enemy territory, I know), and a few of us went out to eat at The Original Mel's after since everything else appeared to close right as we'd get to the doors.  I'm going to count it as one, though, since it was all in one night!

Someone else cooked for me!

Okay, maybe not just for me, other people were invited to eat, but I didn't really have to cook!  I almost didn't know what to do with myself.  Well, that's not entirely true, either - I had to hack off a pound of ground beef from a two-pound block I had frozen a while ago - but that was it.  A lovely girl named Akina did the rest.

The beef was for meat sauce - ground beef, bell pepper, onions, garlic with Prego tomato sauce over rigatoni.    The garlic bread was a gift from Kristin, who was trying to get rid of some pre-made garlic bread she had bought long ago.  This was perfect for tonight since I had class at 7 p.m., so having dinner already ready at 6 p.m. made my life that much easier.

I sort of ate out after, but I only treated my friend, Thomas, to an ice cream sandwich from Cream since he gave me his ticket to tomorrow's Cal/USC football game.  Sandwiches are $2 each, so I'm going to consider this one a freebie.  In all fairness, there's nothing quite like sharing the experience of eating a scoop of ice cream between two freshly-baked cookies.  Believe me.

Midnight Snack

My meals were fairly uninspired today:  chili rice leftovers for lunch and canned soup and a turkey sandwich for dinner.  Nothing really worth taking a picture of, and nothing you haven't seen before.  It just so happened that my mother smuggled away a pleasant pack of snacks in my luggage the last time I was home.

Okay, so she didn't stow away the bowl, the spoon, the rice, or the water.  What she gave me was packets with the components to make ochazuke - green tea over rice dressed up with other little goodies.  In this case, the goodies are bits of nori - dried seaweed - and crunchy bits of rice cracker.  It's meant to be a way to get rid of old tea and old rice, but since the mix comes with tea powder in it, it really just helps get rid of leftover rice.  All I did was microwave the rice in some water.  I poured the mix on top and mixed a bit, and that was that.  The smell isn't great since, well, seasoned seaweed never smells that great, but it tastes good and made for a nice little snack.

Also, I don't post a lot of Asian stuff, so it's also nice to get some Japanese in here.

Re-run!

Through sheer luck and a bit of pressure I put on myself out of dedication to the blog, I haven't really repeated entire dinners I've eaten so far.  I wanted to show the breadth of dishes I know how to make directly from memory.  Well, it finally happened tonight.

It's chili rice.  Again.  I wanted to make something quick and easy, and I think I made this is record time (like 20 minutes total, I'd say).  I bought a different brand of hot dogs, Ballpark, and I think it paid off.  They added that extra bit of salty protein with a very pleasing, plump texture.  Anyway, I wouldn't want to wax poetic about hot dogs for too long.  Suffice to say, it was good.

What I should have taken a picture of since it was different was the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had for lunch today.  It won't be the last I eat, so it may yet get a feature here.

Will work for food

Bartering is a time-honored tradition among tradespeople, a group of people I associate myself with.  Okay, so I'm not a carpenter or cooper or cobbler, but I have appreciable skills!  Anyway, I've recently been editing essays for people in my building, and this time I received compensation in the form of food.

These are peanut butter cookies made my Michelle.  I don't know that my feedback was what she needed since she apparently has a professor with crazy demands, but I did what I could.  Anyway, the cookies were lovely, especially since I have a fondness for peanut butter (I actually bought some over the weekend since I had a hankering for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich).  I would've looked at Michelle's essay for free, but I'm happy she chose to sweeten the deal.

P.S.  I had lunch at Pepe's Pizza today.  They have a pizza buffet, which I got for $3.75 on a site called Munch on Me.  Again, this was my third day in a row having pizza, and while the pizza at Pepe's wasn't as good as the ones I'd had previously, it was sufficient for lunch.  I had a slice of combination, pepperoni, Hawaiian, and two of buffalo chicken as well as a bit of green salad and some nachos.  The greasy pastas and who-knows-how-old prepared salads and soups did not appeal to me.  I'd have taken a picture, but I don't think you'd be interested.  It's Shakey's Bunch-a-Lunch but not as good.

In short, I ate out, but it was really cheap, and I actually spent the money a week ago when the deal first appeared on the site.

Pizza, Day 2

I had pizza for dinner for a second night in a row, but this time in the form of a Hawaiian pizza made by Amanda.

It started with a Boboli pizza crust and Ragu spaghetti sauce.  On top is ham, cheddar cheese, pineapple chunks, green onions, and sweet chili sauce.  All in all, it was a very tasty pizza that made for a good dinner.  By the way, sorry this post is coming so late.  I needed sleep badly last night, and I had a very important lunch today (which, by the way, involved pizza, but more to come on that tonight).

Saved by pizza

I was in trouble tonight.  Dinner time was fast upon me, and I had no idea what I was going to eat.  What little energy I had, I wasted getting excited earlier during the Los Angeles Kings' win over the New York Rangers, so I was really not in the mood to cook.  Pretty much the only easy meal I could make was chili rice, and I wasn't even looking forward to having to make that.  Then, divine intervention solved my problem.

Amanda, the professional artist, was relatively close to Cheese Board this afternoon, and she decided to stop by.  Remembering her poor, ailing friend, she bought me some pizza, and let me tell you, it was amazing:  crimini mushrooms, onions, Montalban and mozzarella cheeses, and arugula with lemon vinaigrette.  What's best is that was a little cold (she microwaved it a bit, but it was in foil, so she had to stop it before she burned our building down), which made it have that awesome toothsome texture that I adore so much.  Pizza isn't exactly the normal food you take to a sick person, but I'll take this in any state of health.

Special Post: You're Awesome

This was such a momentous occasion for me that I commissioned a professional artist to draw this on my whiteboard.  Overnight, we reached 1,000 page views!  Thanks so much for reading, everyone.  I promise not to get mushy every 500 views accrued, but I feel like 500 and 1,000 are milestones.  Essentially, it means that I haven't bored everyone to death yet, which I'm pretty pleased about.  I definitely plan to keep going, and I may even start reviewing the restaurants I go to if there's any interest.  In any case, I wouldn't care so much about this if you didn't, so from the bottom of my heart, thanks.

Appetite: check

I'm still sick, but since my fever is just about gone, I've got my appetite back.  Thanks to Kurt, I had more of that Chinese food for lunch (I won't subject you to another picture of it), but it wasn't actually enough to tide me over for both lunch and dinner today, so I whipped up a little something that wouldn't require me to expend much energy to make.

You can't tell, but there's leftover rotisserie chicken in those quesadillas.  Also, the cheese inside is leftover from someone who got too much on taco night at one of the dining halls.  Oh, the tortillas are also the ones I used for tacos.  All in all, this was a pretty resourceful meal.  All I did was put everything together and heat on a hot frying pan.  In the metal measuring cup (I couldn't find anything else the right size) is Tapatio sour cream, the perfect complement to my quesadillas, especially since I didn't have any salsa on hand.

We're about to hit a precipice in page views, but I'm going to wait till tomorrow to post about it.  I need to get some rest.

Desperate times

I woke up today feeling pretty lousy, and having been sent an email from the school at midnight warning about a mumps outbreak didn't make me feel any better.  I'm pretty sure I don't have mumps, but I've got something, and it's not pretty.  Suffice to say that I wasn't really up to making myself anything to eat, so I was blessed to have Kurt to get me take out from the Chinese place on the ground floor of our building.

He actually got this for me for lunch, but all I could do was drink half the soup.  I don't know why, but I didn't take any Advil.  I just slept.  When I woke up in the afternoon, I finally gave in, and my appetite returned like nothing had happened.  I polished off everything here:  egg flower soup with tofu, cabbage, peas, and carrots, chow mein, lemon chicken (that seemed pretty much like orange chicken), black pepper string beans with chicken, and white rice.  I'm feeling better, and even though this is pretty cheap Chinese food, I think it helped.

My own meat sauce

I don't know why, but I haven't made meat sauce for pasta this semester.  When I had it the other time, Eddie made it.  The other times I had red sauce with pasta, it was with mushrooms, not meat.  This time, I was determined to make meat sauce.

So I browned and seasoned the beef, threw in onion and bell pepper, and I threw in this Ragu Italian sausage and roasted garlic tomato sauce.  It all came together very nicely.  I to use rotini pasta with meat sauce since the bits of beef get caught up in the spirals.  Anyway, it was really good (my friend, Nathan, said so!), and it came together in like half an hour.

On a negative note, I ate three (!!!) Krispy Kreme doughnuts today.  Kurt bought a dozen from a club selling them for a fundraiser, and he saved me three.  Sort of to my credit, at least I spread out when I ate them - one in the morning, one after lunch, and one after dinner.  I must have worked them off while walking back and forth to campus, right???

Premade, Leftover, Homemade

This meal was a little of all of the above.  Instead of rambling, I'll just show you:

This is the Tyson already made roast pork that I bought cheap like two weeks ago, the roasted red potatoes from the other night, and some string beans that I braised.  The pork was nice and tender (as can be expected of something coming out of a vacuum-sealed bag), and the gravy was tasty, very close to being a beef gravy.  The potatoes were still pretty good.  I reheated them in the oven, and I think that kept them from getting really mushy in the microwave.  I have a few regrets about the beans - they were kind of old, and I didn't have fresh garlic to cook with the beans.  All in all, though, this made for a good, easy dinner on a night when I came back at 7 p.m. after a relatively grueling work day.

Here's a nickel's worth of free advice:  Get more than four hours of sleep.  Okay, that's a command, but I had good intentions.

P.S.  Thomas had another pound of ground beef, so we had tacos again for lunch and ate up the rice and beans.  It was a glorious lunch.  I'm certain that I could never get tired of tacos, soft or fried, guac or no guac, chicken, beef, carnitas, asada, al pastor, shrimp, or scallops.  Heaven must have a guilt-free all-you-can-eat taco bar.

Gluttony, and 9 o'clock Tacos

A rare two-meal post!  It felt important because I had a sort of rude awakening at lunch.  My friend, Justin, swiped me in at Crossroads, one of the college dining halls, after we played soccer in the morning, and was I ever in for a shock.  I've eaten in dining halls before, but they weren't all-you-can-eat.  They were all-you-can-get-in-one-trip, which is decidedly different.  This is the difference:

Maybe I'd have the stuff on the tray if I only got one go of it, but I clearly have more than that.  On the tray is breakfast - sausage, eggs, and potato wedges - and rigatoni with pesto and garlic bread.  The third plate has broccoli beef with rice.  Sadly, after I consumed the majority of this food, I also ate a slice of pepperoni pizza and a couple of sausage patties (which came out after I had gotten breakfast the first time).  I felt extremely guilty after this meal, and I wonder why more students don't.  Whose idea was it in the first place to offer all-you-can-eat dining?  Why would that be a good thing to offer impressionable young students?  Eating like this, kids can go well beyond gaining the freshman 15.

Anyway, I was full until well into dinner time, and I had wanted to make tomato beef to eat over rice, but I found that the flank steak I had bought a day before was already spoiled because our fridge wasn't cold enough for some reason.  Luckily for me, Thomas, another friend, wanted to go to Trader Joe's to get stuff for tacos.  I had most of what we needed, but we went to get the essentials - beef and taco seasoning.  This was the resulting dinner made at 9 p.m.:

Ground beef soft tacos with lettuce, cheddar cheese, sour cream, and guacamole (pre-made from TJ's).  Thomas made the beef and chopped the lettuce while I cooked Spanish rice, heated up a can of Cuban-style black beans (99 cents at TJ's!), and shredded the cheese.  It was one of the most successful late-night dinners I've ever had.  It amazes me that a few hours before, I had been so disappointed that my flank steak was spoiled that I had no idea what I was going to eat.  It's a blessing to be surprised by good food, although I don't really know how I can be surprised when I helped make it.

P.S.  I'm not counting the dining hall stuff as "ATE OUT" since I was treated to the meal.  Tough luck if you feel I should count it!

The dinner I promised

I actually wasn't entirely certain I was going to be able to come through on my promise from last night.  At that time, I had every intention of making a proper dinner, but the circumstances of the day left me in doubt.  First, I played some two-hand touch football, then I came back and failed to actually get any sleep during a nap, after that I watched Moneyball (which I'd definitely recommend to any baseball or, oddly enough, Aaron Sorkin fans), and finally I watched the women's volleyball team beat Arizona State University.  Dinner would have definitely gone on as planned if I hadn't been peer pressured into going to the game, but the 7 p.m. start time made me wonder if I wouldn't just buy a little something on the way home.  Regardless, we got back around 9:15 p.m., and somehow I still had it in me to put this together:

Okay, so I didn't actually make the biggest part of this dish - the rotisserie chicken.  The whole chicken was on sale at Safeway for $5, which meant I had no choice but to buy it.  I did, however, saute the zucchini and roast the potatoes.  Actually, I intended to roast those red potatoes a while ago.  I bought them from Whole Foods a week and a half ago, and they were starting to produce life on their own, so it was definitely time to use them.  A little olive oil, some garlic salt and pepper, and they were good to go.  Waiting for them was difficult (40 minutes meant I got to eat at 10 p.m.), but it was worth it in the end.  After all, good food is worth waiting for.  Don't let anyone - especially McDonald's and the like - convince you otherwise.

Yes, I'm in college

I eat pretty well for a college student.  For the most part, I avoid fried and instant foods, and I've been making something of a push to eat more veggies.  Tonight was one of a growing number of unfortunate exceptions.  I was so tired from working on my essay the night before and then going to the market after class today, so this was all I could muster:

Yeah, it's Kraft mac and cheese with sliced hot dogs.  Actually, this might look a little funny because it's the rich and creamy mac and cheese.  For some reason, this iteration was cheaper than the regular one.  It mustn't be selling well, but it was actually really good.  I often have to let my mac and cheese sit a bit so the cheese sauce can thicken, but this one was thick from the get go.  I had some Ballpark hot dogs from the last time I made chili rice, and they're predictably good.  I bought some off-brand hot dogs in the first week I was here, and suffice to say that that's not going to happen ever again.

Oh well.  It satisfied my hunger and didn't wear me out even further.  Tomorrow's another day, though.  I'm thinking roast pork, oven-roasted red potatoes, and zucchini.  We'll see if it happens.