Yesterday was a gorgeous day outside, but of course, my brother and I spent most of it inside watching Top Chef (best show on TV). It was the episode where the group makes food for a tailgate for a Chicago Bears game, and the winner was Dale, who made ribs for the challenge. That got us talking about how awesome ribs are and how we should fire up the grill. So, Steve went to Costco and bought 7.5 pounds of baby back ribs and I thought of what to do for our first bbq in this house.

We actually have this cute deck in our backyard but we're not out there too much, and we bought this $20 grill for it last year but never used it. Needless to say, I was super excited to break it in. We waited until today to have the bbq, and I kind of wish the weather was a little warmer and sunnier, but at least it didn't rain. Plus, the food was delicious! So, I would count that as a successful first bbq.

Here was the menu:

Ribs!


Corn!



Spinach Salad! With craisins, walnuts, apples, and (totally fat free) strawberry vinegarette!


I marinated the ribs in this amazing sauce that my mom makes. I've grown up eating it, and it is pretty sweet. As a result, I think that is why I don't like the sour vinegary bbq sauces. I mixed about 1/3 cup of ketchup, 1/3 cup of sugar, 3 tbps hoisin sauce, and 2 tbsp soy sauce together, slathered the ribs in them and let them sit in the sauce overnight. After firing up the charcoal, we let the ribs cook in the grill until they were done and the sugars in the sauce carmelized. So good.

 

Here's to many more meals in our cute, red grill! Now I need to wash the charcoal smell out of my hair.

Xanga keeps emailing me telling me that it has been ages since I have posted something and that I should come back. And since I promised Deb a recipe, I figured I'd listen to that voice from the internets and update this stupid blog. But when I logged onto this, everything looks completely different and it took me a while to figure out how to work xanga again. The internets is too much for me. I feel so old.

On to more important topics. Like food.

I've been trying to get my brother (and myself, for that matter) to eat more vegetables lately, so I've been making more salads. I'm not a big salad person, though. I feel as if they are never filling, and I don't really like dressing that much (a little bit goes a long, long way ... unfortunately, most people don't agree with me there). Lately, I've been trying to make more the usual tomato-cucumber-ranch dressing-lettuce kinds of salads and I think I've been pretty successful so far.

Carrot Salad


I remember my dad made a carrot and raisin salad for me once or twice when I was a kid. I've tried recreating what he made, but my dad doesn't cook much, and I really can't remember what exactly he did. I only remember that there were carrots and raisins and the combination was excellent. So, I have played with this salad before and ultimately, I settled with this recipe. It is sweet and light, and actually, it makes a great breakfast when you eat it with granola (which is what I ended up doing). I combined the following ingredients in a bowl (the measurements are very approximate since I made this up on the fly and rarely measure):

5 carrots, shredded
1 apple, cut into little cubes
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
1/4 cup raisins
1/4 cup craisins
plain yogurt, enough to bind everything together

This makes a really, really big batch. It lasted me 4 or 5 days.

Fish Taco Salad


For some reason, I've been on a fish taco kick lately. Fish tacos are the prefect meal. They are light, satisfying, healthy and most importantly, delicious! The first time I made fish tacos, I bought a package of 36 corn tortillas and made a ton of corn relish, so I was pretty much eating tacos for 2 weeks straight. I generally have a habit of making very big portions. Anyway, the salad came a month or so later when I didn't feel like buying 36 corn tortillas and my parents gave me avocados. I realize that I make my "mexican" food in an unorthodox manner by using cumin, but I really like cumin so there.

For the relish:
1 can corn, rinsed
1 can black beans, rinsed
1 green pepper, diced
1/4 red onion, diced
~2 vine tomatoes, diced
1/4 cup cilantro, minced
juice from 1/2 lime
1-2 tsp cumin
1-2 tsp chili powder
cayenne pepper to your liking
salt and pepper to taste
Mix all this stuff together and let it sit for about 10 minutes to get the flavors to blend with each other.

For the guac:
2 ripe avocados
2 vine tomatoes
1/4 red onion, diced
1 big clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup cilantro, minced
juice from 1/2 lime
1-2 tsp cumin
1-2 tsp chili powder
cayenne pepper
salt and pepper to taste
Mash up the avocados and mix everything up. Also let this one sit for a little bit for the flavors to blend.

For the fish:
I used tilapia since that is the cheapest, but I suppose any white fish will do. Or chicken.
Sprinkle salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper on both sides of the fish. Spray a little bit of oil on a hot pan and cook until it flakes easily.

To assemble the salad:

1. Throw some lettuce on a plate. If you have some shredded red cabbage, throw some on there too (it's good and good for you).


2. Put some corn and black bean relish on top.


3. Add the fish.
 

4. Top it off with some guacamole and enjoy!  



I feel like I should write a food blog now. Ha!

My parents came by to celebrate Thanksgiving in the new house.  I made the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  My parents made the hot pot.  Yes, we had hot pot.  We usually have some kind of Taiwanese food during Thanksgiving, but we also always have a turkey.  This year, we had the hot pot for lunch and the turkey for dinner.  We are all big eaters in my family, so we spent Thanksgiving literally eating all day.  We are awesome like that. 



My family does hot pot old school with the raw egg.  We are strong and can handle it.


I think this is the very beginning of the meal when we just started putting stuff in the stock.  My mom makes the best soup stock.  I have to figure out how she does it someday.
 

My turkey!  I brined it in this salt, brown sugar, grapefruit mixture overnight.  It kind of made the outside salty, but the meat was moist and yummy. 


Right out of the oven.  Someone obviously couldn't wait to dig in and there are chunks missing already.


This is probably half the dinner table.  I also made mashed potatoes, but they looked like normal mashed potatoes so they aren't anything interesting to see.  They were delicious, however, like all of my cooking.

A week or so before Thanksgiving, things started getting really hectic at school.  It's been a pretty rough month and a half, and I am so grateful that the semester is over.  I thought grad school was hard in the beginning of the semester, but that was nothing.  Everything came crashing down like a pile of bricks during the second half of the semester.  Not only was I getting more homework, I also had exams and projects due.  And the material was harder.  So I am kind of impressed that despite all that, I still managed to get good grades.  I am actually pretty surprised at how well I did.  My worst grade was in engineering math, and I still managed to get a B+ which is slightly above average (we are graded on B curves). 

To reward myself for getting through the semester, I took a trip up to Jersey to catch up with Deb, Ben ad the rest of the Merck people and some college people.  It was great to see everyone again.  For three years, I have had a solid group of friends who I could always count on to go out and do stuff with.  Now, I'm not completely alone or anything, but I don't have the posse that I had in Jersey and I missed that.  This weekend reminded me what I was missing out on.   I think I am doing something better for my career by going to school, but it is not nearly as much fun as when I was at Merck.  But it is all for the best anyway since pretty soon, everyone else will be leaving the company as well. 

Saturday night, I dragged Deb and Ben out to AShah's birthday party.  Funny story that happened on the PATH on the way into the city.  Deb proudly told Ben that I got some of my grades back and that I did very well.  She said very loudly, "Reenie did great.  Her lowest grade was a B+ in engineering math!" 
We laughed, but then heard the meatheat behind us say, "Engineering math?  Math is just really hard, it doesn't matter if it is engineering math or anything else.  Math is really hard."
At that point, Deb and I just look at each other and laugh. 
Later, the meatheat was talking about some girl and he said, "...she couldn't put two and two together."  I said to Deb, "That's because math is really hard."
I think the meatheat was saying all that stuff to get Deb's attention and do be an obnoxious meatheat because all meatheats are obnoxious.  But I noticed that when we exited the train, I looked behind me to see if Deb was following and noticed that he was looking her up and down.  That girl really has a way with men.  It must be the dimple.

We went to Via in the Flatiron district.  It is a trendy spot with good music and great people watching.  There were a ton of characters there.  Lots of bad 80s fashion (unfortunately, it is making a comeback).  One girl wore bright red leggings with grey leg warmers.  And she was a big girl too and had a big trunk so the red leggings really accentuated the (ahem) junk in her trunk.  The place was also really diverse ... a lot of Asians, Indians, black people ... not too many white people.  Definitely not enough white bootie for JGo.  In any case, it was still a good time and I was happy to see a drunk AShah ripping it up on the dance floor.

All in all, an awesome weekend, even though I got sick.  Thanks to Eugene for being a great driving buddy and for letting me nap.  When I got home, I slept for like 15 hours.  It was worth it because today I feel much better.

So much better, in fact, that I went on a rampage in the kitchen.  I made jambalaya and sweet potato fries.  I realized that I probably shoudln't have cooked while I was sick because my germs could get all over the food, but heat kills everything, so hopefully, they also kill sick germs. 

I was dying to try out my deep fryer, which I've actually had for months but haven't used until now.  I used this recipe from Emeril that turned out pretty well.

Sweet potato fries!


A before shot with the deep fryer.
 

The jambalaya turned out ok, except that it made a ton of food.  That normally wouldn't be so bad, but I couldn't mix very effectively since I was afraid of spilling out of the pot.  So all the rice kind of clumped in one corner and the jambalaya sort of has a gruel look to it.  It's still tasty, though, and I'll probably eat it for t every meal this week.

This is a 12-quart Dutch oven.  And the stuff is still spilling over.




I can't find the recipe on the food network website anymore, unfortunately, so I can't post a link to it. 

My favorite song right now is The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance.  It has a Queen feel to it and it is melodramatic and awesome.  Actually, the whole album is pretty good, but that one is my favorite.

An entry that is well overdue ...

For those of you who have been wondering what I have been up to and only keep tabs on me through xanga (you stalkers!), a lot has happened since I last posted, namely that I quit my job, bought a house in Delaware, and moved down there to go to grad school for a PhD in chemical engineering.  Needless to say, a lot has been going on, and I am still adjusting.

I finally had my first really successful culinary experience in my new kitchen, so I had to share.

Voila!

 Fish chowder:


I didn't add onion (the onion that I had in the house actually went bad.  I never seen an onion go bad, but this one was all brown and mushy in the middle.  Really gross) or the smoked cod (I am on a grad student stipend ... buying the fresh cod was expensive enough).  I thought the soup still came out really good, though.  Only thing I did was cook it a little long, since the fish disintegrated a little, but at least the potatoes were nice and soft.  Of course, the soup is better with tons and tons of fresh ground pepper.

And zesty three-bean and corn salad:



This one reminded me of the corn and black bean salsas that Deb used to make.  I miss living with someone who cooks (my brother really only cooks with the Foreman grill)!!   Anyway, this recipe confirmed that cumin + chili powder = dericious and (a lot of cumin) + (a lot of chili powder) = reeeeealy deeeee-ricious!  Major modifications that I made to this salad were the substitution of chick peas for white beans, canned corn kernels for fresh corn, and the omittance of parsley.  Still good (because of the cumin and chili powder). 

Other things that got me riled up ... this article in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/science/03comm.html?em&ex=1160107200&en=4e5ffb0adabea9ec&ei=5070

I admit, I am a little of a feminist.  Maybe not a little.  So being a woman in science and engineering, it bothers me that woman are still such a minority, and the ones that are in it don't get recognized.  Case in point, this year, all three of the science Nobel prizes (medicine, physics, and chemistry) went to Americans (yay!), all men (eh).  I know that there are women out there doing exciting research, but how it is it that I rarely hear of them?  I think what really gets me is that the male dominance is ingrained ... it's been enforced since the dawn of time and it seems to be carrying through to now.  I would like to see a woman get big ups for something that doesn't have anything to do with fashion or art/music/acting.  Because even though we have some women who are well known in politics or corporate America, they are usually thought of as being she-devils (think Hillary Clinton, Condeliza Rice (well, I think she really is the devil), Patricia Dunn).   Maureen Dowd (herself described as a she-devil) has some good columns about this, so read them if you want to know any more details of my opinion.  I'm just going to stop here before my head explodes.

It just struck me as ironic that I started this post with cooking, something that is a very female recreation, and ended it with a liberal feminist rant on not advancing in the modern world. 

It is quite apparent that I am obsessed with food.  So obsessed that I spend hours at my computer scouring the internet reading food blogs: food blogs about making food (those are the best), food blogs about restaurants (I only read the NY ones), even food blogs about the food network (which is my favorite channel, obvi).  I stumbled upon this one food blog, http://onceuponafeast.blogspot.com/, where Ruth, the author is writing her own cookbook.  She had one entry where she talked about it and asked for volunteers to try some recipes and respond back to her with a critique of the recipe.  Of course, I signed up.

I got 5 recipes from Ruth.  So far, I have made four for weekly dinner this week.  They are:

(From upper right hand corner) Tabbouleh, Basil rice noodles with spinach, chickpeas, and sweet potato, asparagus with gremolata, and horseradish crusted tilapia. 

All in all, the food came out pretty good!  The tilapia was a really big hit.  It was cooked perfectly and flavored with a good horseradish kick.  I thoguht the noodles had a little too much going on ... it was lemony sour and sweet and spicy all at once.  Deb seemed to really like it though.  Also, I accidentally overcooked the noodles so they came out a little gummy and hard to mix.  The tabbouleh was really new for me, but it came out great.  There is a lot of mint, which really makes the dish awesome.   And finally, the asparagus was pretty good, but there was nothing really special to the dish.  Good basic side.

For dinner, we had chocolate mousse pie.  Super easy.  The pie crust was store bought, the mousse was made from a box, and the whipped cream was just Cool Whip.


The only recipe I have left is flank steak with honey chipotle glaze.  Very much looking forward to that one.