Diner de samedi

Disclaimer: Contrary to what it may seem (and what my momma claims), I don’t eat out ridiculously much. However, I’ve just been so busy recently that I completely fail to remember to take photos of my normal day-to-day meals. It’s only when I head out to a restaurant that I get excited and remember to bring my camera.

Anyway, so we threw a fat party on Friday, complete with chocolate body shots. Scandalous, right? I would post pictures but I’ve promised certain people *cough* Momma! *cough* that I would censor myself and keep this blog PG-rated.

Instead, teaser photos!

The Usual

New friends

Justin: Too cool to care

What gorgeous girls!

Group mentality

Possibly the most risque photo I'll post, but Preston looks ravishing here so whatevs.

The cool kids

I love how the only thing in focus is Michelle's face

Failed King's cup

Rule #2: Three hot guys to every girl

And Saturday inevitably was spent cleaning the apartment and revitalizing oneself. The best way to do that?

Dinner at La Med. Ah, indeed, it never fails to make me happy, especially when you dine with a cutie like this one:

The best thing about sitting outside was noticing that the pet store next door had a window display of the CUTEST baby bunnies ever. I wanted to take a picture but I had to elbow a few five year olds out of the way first. And then their parents got all mad at me.

Fruit and cheese plate

It’s utterly perfect that Alex is French, because he was able to name all of the cheeses right off the bat. And if I remember them correctly: feta, muenster, chevre, brie, and white cheddar.

Vegetarian Middle Eastern plate

And as always, my happy and stunning plate of salad, hummus, spinach and feta phyllo, levant sandwich, cheese karni, dolma, and more fruit and cheese!

Typically, when I have dinner at La Med, I always head next door to Ici for ice cream, but I was utterly stuffed and couldn’t possibly indulge in even another mini bite of anything. In any case, we managed to digest our food a bit quicker by trying to convince people that Alex was kidnapping me during our walk home.

Needless to say, have you ever heard of the Kitty Genovese case (a.k.a. bystander effect)? It could be accounted to me trying to sniffle laughter instead of enthusiastically crying/screaming, but almost everyone who walked by us and saw Alex holding me in a [fake] chokehold and me frantically fighting to get away quietly averted their gaze… ONE GUY EVEN CROSSED THE STREET!

Jerks. Now I’m scared of Berkeley.

Question: Do you think Bystander Effect exists?

 

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Gado Gado

Everything must always start off with a glass of wine.

Once you have that baby in your hand, you’re good to go. And as I was being treated to dinner made by two of my favorite boys, Preston and Alexandre, wine was fully necessary to survive the evening intact.

The cute thing is that those two dug up a vegetarian cookbook, went through a bunch of the recipes to satisfy both my tastes and their insatiable appetites, did all the grocery shopping, and excitedly stumbled their way through an Indonesian recipe called Gado Gado.

The dish is a sort of Indonesian salad, with raw and/or blanched vegetables, hard-boiled eggs, and yellow rice covered in a peanut sauce.

Alex and Preston's first experience with turmeric! Plus some weird nipple-pinching action.

I had quite a lot of fun just sitting on the sidelines taking photos, and only had to do the occasional garlic mincing or onion dicing.

And of course, always doing the dishes. What else is new?

The recipe calls for a bed of raw spinach leaves, topped with yellow rice, then the veggies, followed by the hard-boiled egg, and finally coated in the peanut sauce.

The Before

The During

The After

What proud papas!

So I admit – I had my doubts that they could pull this dish off. It took about two hours for the boys to go from start to finish, with many endearingly sad/pathetic/cute questions such as how to hard-boil an egg, whether broccoli stalks are edible, what happens with turmeric, what is brown rice vinegar, etc. Surprisingly Still, the meal was incredibly good, with a wicked peanut sauce and plenty of vegetables, and was subjected to raving reviews by all their housemates.

I think the total list of ingredients that went into everything included:

• spinach
• yellow rice
• green beans
• red and yellow bell peppers
• hard-boiled egg
• broccoli
• shredded cabbage
• carrots
• onion
• garlic
• ginger
• turmeric
• peanut butter
• soy sauce
• brown rice vinegar
• brown sugar
• salt & pepper

Good work, boys.

Time-tested fact: making and sharing food with good company is quite possibly the best time spent.

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Here’s to good company

I figured I would start the new blog 2.0 unveiling with a big post – a dinner party! I had my friends Alex, Emma, and Jennie over for dinner and a pleasant evening of good company and good food!

On the menu: quinoa-stuffed peppers, pasta salad, cheesy scalloped potatoes, sourdough bread, and chocolate chip banana bread!

Kitchen luv

Every good dinner prep starts with a clean kitchen, obv.

How pretty!

Manpower!

Making the stuffing

Stuffing!!

And stuffing

Squeezing the lime

The only thing that makes good food better is good company…

Alex looking oh-so pensive

Kenzie and Matt doing the usual

Kayla being cute

And my beautiful guests of honor, Emma and Jennie

The finished product!

Pasta salad

Cheesy scalloped potatoes, courtesy of Jennie

Warm sourdough bread

Chocolate banana bread, courtesy of Emma

Dinner spread

I think I need a box of dinner conversation starters. Talking about classes and emotional problems is weak and well-worn. I’m thinking next time, we should approach topics such as:

1. What the most scandalous genre of pornography is
2. If we could only save one arctic animal from global warming, what would it be
3. How one can die from water overdose (oh wait, we already did that)
4. The political acumen of our current candidates (haha, just kidding)
5. If we were to die in the next 5 hours, what would we accomplish

The guests... doing my dishes

How embarrassing is this? These two crazies took over the kitchen after dinner and not only cleared the table, but they also did my dishes, and packaged and wrapped up all the leftovers. I’m a bad host.

Lady luv!

But no one can complain about a good evening!

Quinoa-stuffed peppers

Ingredients:

• 6-7 bell peppers
• 1 1/2 cups of uncooked quinoa
• 1 can of beans (Alex chose the veggie-chili type which already came seasoned but you can use any type)
• 1 cup of shredded cheese (split into 2 portions)
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp S&P
• 1 tbsp oregano
• 1 8oz. can of tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup of water

Directions:

1. Boil 3 cups of water for the quinoa. When the water boils, pour in quinoa, reduce heat to low, and simmer for 15 minutes.
2. Set oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit.
3. Clean and wash the peppers. Cut the tops off and clean out the insides. (If they don’t stand straight in your casserole dish, you can also slice a thin layer off the bottom to even them out – something which we should have had the foresight to do rather than balance precariously.)
4. Place in an 9 x 13″ casserole dish.
5. Finely chop the tops of the peppers.
6. When the quinoa is cooked, mix in a large bowl with the chopped peppers, 1/2 cup of cheese, egg, beans, and seasoning.
7. Spoon the mixture into the peppers.
8. Mix together the tomato sauce and 1/2 cup of water. Pour into the bottom of the casserole dish around the peppers.
9. Cover dish with aluminum foil.
10. Bake for 40-45 minutes.

Pasta salad

Ingredients:

• 1 box of whole-wheat pasta
• 2 cups blanched peas
• 1 cup of sliced peppers
• 2 cups of sliced radishes
• 2 limes
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp vinegar
• 2 tbsp S&P
• 1 tbsp oregano
• 1 tbsp rosemary

Directions:

1. Cook pasta according to directions on box.
2. Drain and set aside to cool.
3. Thinly slice the radishes.
4. Blanch the peas and sliced peppers, then place in ice water to prevent them from mushing.
5. To make the dressing, squeeze the juice of two limes, and mix with the honey, vinegar, S&P, oregano, and rosemary.
6. When the pasta is cool, toss everything to coat.

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Balls and Bollywood

I’ve been a mess all day today.

I’m not too sure why, though it could be because it’s almost finals week and I’m psyching myself out. But that’s just a sad excuse.

Not sad enough for failed apple-craisin cookies balls, though!

You see, I feel like the only genuinely productive thing I did today was go to the gym. However, my shin splints were decidedly cruel to me and I had to play around on the elliptical instead, which means even my workout wasn’t that productive.

#firstworldproblems

Then, I came back, decided I wasn’t hungry for lunch, and ate an apple instead.

Which of course, inspired me to re-try this recipe on Sweet Tooth, Sweet Life. Courtney makes them look so good, plus I had made them before with relative success…

However, for some reason, everything turns out better when I am not under the pressure of posting something for my blog.

And my cookies (made with different substitutions) came out to be crumbly balls. They still tasted great, though!

#firstworldproblems2.0

I seem to have an inherent fear of recipes, though, so I’ll post the substitutions I made, even though I don’t recommend you following them since, ya know, the recipe didn’t turn out all that great.

(What am I saying? My mind is numb.)

In a small bowl, 2 cups of flour, with 1 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, and a healthy tbsp of pumpkin spice.

1 1/2 cups of finely chopped apple and 1/2 cup of craisins

In a separate bowl, 1/2 cup of shortening, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, and 3/4 cups sweetener (like stevia or Splenda)

Creamed together with 2 egg whites

Dump in half of the flour mixture, then the apples and craisins, (and here’s what probably screwed up the recipe…) 1/4 cup of buttermilk, and then the remaining half of the flour mixture

I got really tired of rolling balls in my tablespoon so I ended up patting down the rest of the dough in an 8×8. Yay for laziness!

And coincidentally, by the time the cookies balls were ready (after 15 minutes at 375 degrees), I was hungry and pining for lunch…

And well, what do you know – look what we have here!

Naturally, I ate half of them in one sitting and then had to pass out in a sugar-induced coma.

Since finals are next week after all, I got my butt out of bed for a little bit of studying, but decided I was hungry again… so we rallied the troops and headed out to Indian Flavors for dinner.

What good looking people.

Mmm-hmm.

These things have to happen, you know.

Darling Chini-beanie!

That’s two orders of chicken tikka masala, and one dal, plus three orders of naan.

I went with the aloo gobi and naan.

Which was perfectly satisfying, albeit a little salty and not at all spicy like I had requested. Oh well.

Oh, and their perfectly fluffy, soft, warm naan!

As much as I loooove Indian food, I tend to only get it once in a while since the curries are usually super rich and like the masalas, are cream-based sauces. If you stick with an onion-based or tomato-based curry, it’s not as heavy, which means not leaving the restaurant feeling like a bloated whale.

All that said and done, Indian food + me = tru luv.

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Gimme a pizza that!

Aww yeeee. (Am I the world’s corniest person or what?)

I have a confession to make. I’m actually at my econ review session right now and I may or may not be multitasking by reading some of those super sillyiPhone autocorrect screenshots.

And I may or may not have nearly just peed my pants laughing. Right in the middle of a very somber debate about tax cuts. Oopsies.

Anyway.

I’m a little too easily distracted.

I was supposed to go to Jack London Square in Oakland yesterday, but a series of events skewed those plans, and I compromised with my friend Alex to make pizza instead.

As usual, I supplied the dough (recipe at the bottom – it’s supaaa easy) and Alex went and got the toppings.

What a cute little sous chef he makes! Eh, maybe not so little.

A very unflattering picture of me chilling with an onion and Optimus Prime in the background.

That onion was the only thing I actually sliced; I may or may not have bullied Alex into prepping all the veggies for me.

And while I was slicing the onion, I asked him to spread some red sauce on the pizza dough, only to turn around…

And find him spreading it all on with his fingers. As in, reaching in the jar and glob-globbing it all over.

*siiiigh*

At least I didn’t ask him to caramelize the onions. The horrors of what that may have produced…

The best part of all of this prep was that I only supplied the dough and caramelized some onions! Don’t worry Momma, I said my “please” and “thank you”s.

(I’m not actually a mean person, I promise.)

My veggie-only version with whole wheat crust, red sauce, caramelized onions, potatoes, green bell pepper, mushrooms, low-fat mozzarella cheese, and S&P.

Alex’s version included all of the above, just with turkey breast added on.

How puuuurty.

A little trick of mine: If you put cheese on top of your toppings, it helps to hold them down when you bite into your slice. What a ba-geeenius!

Popped into the oven at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, and these babies were done!

Homemade pizza? No big. *brushes dirt off shoulder*

And of course we had to break out the Two Buck Chuck!

So flattering.

And even though I didn’t do anything to actually “make dinner” (since it was Alex who did all the chopping and the topping… hey! that rhymes!), he volunteered to make me breakfast.

How am I supposed to say no to that?!

Leftover potato, green bell pepper, mushrooms, mozzarella cheese, and eggs all scrambled up nicely with a side of fruit.

Everyone, on a count of three, cue the “awww”!

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

• 2 3/4 cups lukewarm water
• 1 1/2 tbsp granulated yeast
• 3 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 6 1/2 cups unbleached whole wheat flour

1. Mix all of the ingredients together except for the olive oil and the flour. Let sit for about 10 minutes.
2. After 10 minutes, the yeast should have activated, and the mixture should look thick and bubbly.
3. Stir in olive oil.
4. Gradually mix in the flour about 1/2 cup at a time with a wooden spoon or a dough hook.
5. Add more warm water about 1/8 cup at a time if too dry.
6. When the dough is sticky but elastic, and no longer sticks to the side of the bowl, gather into a ball and place in a lightly oiled bowl.
7. Cover the bowl and let rise in a warm, draft-free place (about 2 hours).
8. Punch down the dough and re-gather into a ball.
9. The dough makes about 2 full-size pizzas, and can be refrigerated up to 3 days.

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