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Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

If I had it together enough to always blog on schedule, I'd really be a functional adult

The extreme absence without leave is not to be excused.  But I offer these excuses nonetheless, all evidence that I am somehow both closer and farther to faking adulthood than ever.  In the six months of my hiatus, I have done the following:

1.  Bought a house
2.  Due to inability to properly clean said house, caused self to break arm rather horrifically,
3.  Worked at the same job for longer than a year and two weeks,
4.  Forgotten everything I ever promised about never painting a room again, and painted a room again,
5.  Said goodbye to my 20-year-old car,
6.  Built a pretty sick Lego car (no joke - it's really awesome: http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Highway-Speedster-31006?fromListing=listing)

But failing to update your blog for a really long time is not very functional at all.  I guess it's in keeping with the theme.  But as a bizarre attempt at redemption, I promise to write in later posts the tales of all of the above (except maybe the Lego car).  

[update: I'm not a total liar - I have at least begun to fulfill my promises.  Click the links above to see my grand excuses!]

And I give you this banana oat muffin recipe I made this weekend (tweaked from this recipe:  http://allrecipes.com/recipe/banana-oat-muffins/), because it was pretty tasty:

Ingredients:
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup rolled oats (standard Quaker oatmeal here)
1/2 cup white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/5 tsp salt
1 egg
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/3 cup melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 ripe bananas
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (if desired)

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees F and line a 12-cup muffin tin with cupcake papers.

1.  Mash up the two bananas in a bowl using a fork or a potato masher.  
2.  Combine dry ingredients in a bowl.
3.  In a large bowl, beat the egg lightly.  Stir in the buttermilk, melted butter, and vanilla.  Add the mashed banana and combine thoroughly.
4.  Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until just combined.
5.  Using something like a 1/3 measuring cup, scoop the batter into the muffin tin.
6.  Top muffins with chopped walnuts (if desired).
7.  Bake for 18 minutes.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

A Functional Adult at Leisure

I'm between jobs at the moment - by choice; I wasn't fired or anything dramatic like that.  I was instructed by wise peers that true vacations - where you don't have to lie on the beach while keeping on eye on the ol' Blackberry-and-chain - are hard to come by.  So since I'm switching jobs, I thought I'd take a little time off in between.

Folks warned me I would get bored.  To which I respond and submit:  AS IF.  Boredom is for people who do not have games downloaded to their iPhone.  Not working is pretty fantastic, as it turns out.  Not only have I become the most feared pirate on the Spanish main, I am getting all kinds of projects done.  I have gone to the gym - me!  I know!  And I took my shoes to the shoe repair man at long last and made an art project and did the laundry and went to Home Depot regarding to-be-revealed activities.  I returned something at the mall.  I cooked many dinners.  I drove my shopping cart around the Safeway like a boss.  And I made this icebox cake, from this recipe:


At least the plate is pretty.

... though it turned out too spicy even though I cut the cayenne and chili powder in half.  Oh well.

I am also making solid progress on the stack of magazines I've accumulated over the last three months.  I have a real problem with magazines.  Delta told me that all of my miles were going to expire, so I had to spend them.  I tried buying things in their miles-store, since I didn't have enough for a ticket even down the street, but for some reason my miles weren't the kind that worked in their miles-store!  Aaaand the only thing I could get were magazines.  Which means I now subscribe to US Weekly (shut up), Cooking Light, ESPN: The Magazine, and Vogue (in addition to Husband's National Geographic, which I mostly only like to read for the pictures).  


Seriously.  So many.
Cooking Light is great because their recipes are pretty easy and usually tasty; I just eat twice as much of the food as whatever they say one serving is.  ESPN has beautiful photography, but I don't really care what the Devil Rays are up to.  I only read the football articles.  And Vogue makes me feel poorly-dressed and like I ought to be attending Society Functions. 

Which, by the way, if any of you are having a Society Function, I am free to attend.  In case you were wondering.

In any case, it's way too many magazines for a working human being to read. But I'm too... cheap? to throw them away.  So they pile up on top of the TV.  As it turns out, however, it's the right number of magazines for a non-working person!  So if you'd like to know my thoughts on Calvin Johnson of the Detroit Lions or cap-toed shoes or spice-encrusted tilapia tacos, you may ask.  Because I have acquired said thoughts through the reading of magazines.

So as you can see, I am not bored at all.  And may I mention again?  Gym.  Twice.  IN ONE WEEK.  It's statistically miraculous.  Though I did pull something so hard doing yoga a few days ago that I was convinced I was dying of multiple blood clots in my legs and back.  Apparently all this healthiness isn't agreeing with me - I should stick to being a virtual pirate.  

Thursday, May 17, 2012

A Functional Adult Cooks Vegan

I decided to cook vegan tonight.  Actually, I decided to cook vegetarian, but I accidentally ended up cooking vegan, which is like leveled-up turbo status vegetarian!  INFINITY BONUS POINTS!

But cooking vegan was harder than I thought it would be.  I'm a major meat eater, mostly because meat is delicious.  It's so easy to cheat when cooking meat - if you just cook a sausage, and put it in a crappy Costco hotdog bun, it will be delicious because IT IS A SAUSAGE.  Cf. beef hamburger in a crappy hamburger bun (also delicious); see also that's what she said.

There is no cheating with veganism.  Here is the secret to cooking vegan, as stated by someone who has now cooked at least one vegan meal:  you cook a crapton of vegetables.  

Shocking, yes.  And surprisingly DIRTY - but more on that later.  I decided to make lentils and rice, which is a pretty doable recipe I got from a very inspiring NY Times article about eating sustainably.  It's also easily vegan, though I usually make it with sausage.  This time, though, I decided to mix it up by using beets instead!

I thought at first I'd just chop up the beets and throw them in the pan with the onions and garlic I cook at the beginning. But when I went to my trusty friend Google to inquire "cook beets" (Google is an efficient friend who doesn't need pleasantries or extra words), all the hits strenuously insisted that I had to ROAST the beets in the OVEN or they would be GROSS. Unfortunately for my plan, that vaguely recalled that I had read something in one of my many cookbooks about beets being gross unless roasted. I hadn't actually read how to cook beets, but I'd read that, because I read cookbooks like hermits read travel guides - the pictures and the stories are good enough for me!

So I guessed I had to roast the beets in the oven. The recipe just said to roll them in oil and bang some salt on there (I'm paraphrasing), but I looked at the beets and thought I'd give them a rinse first. Which was when I was reminded that beets grow in the dirt and do not just appear fully formed in the produce aisle of Safeway. Those beets were DIR-TAY. I scrubbed them for what felt like forever to get all the dirt off, and the sink looked like I had spilled a post-apocalyptic ant farm in it.

And then I had the dripping wet leaves to contend with. At first I tried to rinse all of the grit off of them before I set them on a wad of paper towels, but then I didn't have enough room so I set the wet but still dirty ones on top of the ones I'd already cleaned, so I had to start a new wad of paper towels only for clean ones, but the only place to put that was across the kitchen (kind of on the stove) and so I dripped water on the floor after every gritty leaf I washed.

I finally got the beets in the oven and the greens clean in a pile. I made the lentils and rice pretty easily; I've made it several times before and then only obstacle was CRISIS THERE IS NO BROWN RICE HUSBAND WHY DIDN'T YOU BUY BROWN RICE oh I guess it's okay the recipe says I can use white.


Beets.  Yup.
So then it was time to deal with the beets.  Internet told me that I could peel the beets just by kind of rubbing it and bam, peeled.  But here's the deal, INTERNET, beets are REALLY HOT when they have just come out of a 400 degree OVEN.  Not to mention SO MESSY.  I tried to do this and mostly ended up hurting my fingers and also looking like I had committed purple murder in the kitchen.


Getting my Lady MacBeth on
My ah-ha moment came when I realized that Husband has a stash of latex gloves for working on his old car, which might provide some insulation against burning beet finger death.  So I popped those on, but the stupid beets still weren't peeling, so I had to bust out a peeler and just sort of push it at them.  It took forever.


This is how the purplocalypse began
I finally got them peeled, and wilted the greens in a pan, and put them on top of the lentil mixture, and check THIS out, fools:


Full five points for presentation, AMIRIGHT?
SUPER PLATED vegan dinner!  Hoo-ah!  That's right, I am a modern lady able to make sustainable vegetable-based dinners for myself and my modern husband.  And it was ACTUALLY TASTY.  The Internets may be on to something in re roasting beets in the oven.

Of course, the kitchen is still full of purple CSI evidence.  

And it's only two hours since I ate dinner and I am somehow starving.  Are Jelly Belly jelly beans vegan?  I think I need a second course.


Tuesday, April 24, 2012

A Functional Adult Uses Social Networking

As a functional adult, I don’t use Facebook in the way I once did when I was a callow youth.  Facebook launched at my college a few weeks before I attended admitted students weekend as a senior in high school.  The girl whose dorm room I stayed in showed it to me, pointing out its most excellent use - for looking up sundry cute boys one might encounter in one’s classes.


This was the primary use to which I put Facebook for two years.  And then it launched the photo feature - a miraculous online photo album where I could see all of my own pictures and also all the ones my friends took that they always forgot to e-mail to me.  The photo feature has also had the promising side effect of ensuring that presidential elections 20 years hence will involve infinitely more salacious photographic evidence of ill-advised youthful decisions involving .  It’s a wonderful world we live in - less than a century ago, many people didn’t even know FDR was in a wheelchair.  By the 100-year anniversary of FDR’s election, we will have seen every trashy Halloween costume of both major candidates:

Reporter:  Ms. Finkelwurst, do you recognize this photo of you at Halloween in 2007?
Candidate Finkelwurst: Candidly, I don’t think I’d recognize anything from that night.
Reporter 2:  Ms. Finkelwurst, what was your thought process in deciding to dress up as a “sexy Finding Nemo fish”?
Candidate Finkelwurst:  Well, Mr. Finkelwurst and I had just started dating and he mentioned that he really liked that mov...
Finkelwurst Chief of Staff:  We’re out of time.  Thank you all SO MUCH for coming today.

So that was and is clearly an amazing feature.  On top of, of course, looking at the profiles of whoever was cute in my classes.  

But no longer being an energetic youth full of too much free time and singleness, my use of Facebook has changed.  Now, it consists of:

1)  Using my phone to check in to places where I am at any given time
2)  Posting pictures of food I am eating
3)  Not getting Facebook messages people send me

I suspect the reason I do the first so often is that I’m so proud of actually going places when I do.  I actually spend most of my time rotating between three places:  work, my couch, and my bed.  Go to work in the morning, leave and proceed directly to couch, then slowly drag myself off the couch on to the bed.  Rinse and repeat.

So I get SO EXCITED when I am somewhere else I feel the need to notify all my friends, family, family friends, friends’ families, friends’ ex-boyfriends, ex-boyfriends’ friends, people I took an English seminar with once, people from two years ahead of me at law school, and a few former professors.  Hey, look everyone!  I don’t just live on my couch and get unhappy that my friends don’t have any funny new gchat statuses!  I WENT SOMEWHERE!  I BOUGHT SUSHI THERE!

Which leads into my second Facebook activity: posting pictures of food.  I love food.  Eating it, cooking it, awesome.  It is also one of the few non-horribly-boring skills I have.  No one wants to look at a really cool supply and demand graph I drew showing where a monopolist would set their price given a certain production function and a certain demand curve (leading to an easy derivation of the marginal revenue curve).


Trust me, I've tried.

But I feel like people might want to see when I made a really cool brunch:


Egg...
Or baked a cupcake into an ice cream cone:


That is my real hand.
Because other people like food too!  And might actually be impressed that I can make tasty foods - because even though it’s not that hard, people sometimes think it is.  Plus, even if I didn’t make the food, I do just get really excited about eating it.  Not unlike my grandma’s dog, now that I think about it.

And the third thing, well, Facebook, that’s not really my fault, is it?


So I suppose I use Facebook ultimately in bald attempts to attempt to convince people that I'm cooler than I am. Which hasn't changed that much since before I was a functional adult trying to impress the fellas in Econ 102(a).