Indian Food Cooking Class

Clockwise from top: Kerala Shrimp Curry, Basmati Rice, Spring Vegetable Curry, Coconut Green Beans, Red Lentil Dahl, and Carrot Halva. Oh, and there's some beer.

See this shrimp curry? I made it. #BOOM #DONTACTLIKEYOURENOTIMPRESSED

My sister drinks beer now.

My mom, me, and my sister. We're actually really cute when we aren't making these faces.

See?

My Mom, sister, and I took a class on cooking with Indian spices at the Natural Gourmet Institute last night. I made Indian food (with the help of my family and several instructors) and it was delicious.

Peanutty Soba Noodles

I love Asian food of all varieties, particularly noodles (you may find evidence here). On Saturday I picked up some soba noodles at a local health food store and decided I would find a good use for them. I decided to make delicious peanutty noodles! It was so easy. Here's what you do:

Prepare soba noodles as specified on the label.

While the soba is cooking, combine 4 tablespoons of peanut butter, 1/4 teaspoon of garlic powder, and 2 tablespoons each of the following: sesame oil, honey, rice vinegar, sriracha, and soy sauce in a small saucepan on low heat.

Stir. Once the ingredients have combined, pour the sauce into a large bowl.

When soba noodles are done cooking, strain them and run cold water over them. Then let the noodles finish draining before adding them to the bowl with the sauce. Toss ingredients together and let it rest for 20-30 minutes. I would put it in the refrigerator because they taste better cold.

Add sesame seeds as garnish, and then eat! Feel free to include vegetables in this scenario. I just wasn't in the mood to go through the effort. A little crunch would actually make this even better- maybe some carrots or baby corn? Snow peas? Yum!

Check me out, two posts in one day!

Meal of Champions.

Last night, I had Prosecco and cheese for dinner. Hope that's ok.

A Plan. Because I can.

So let's be real. This blog has not been so great lately, and I've been trying to figure out why.
Yes, I am busy, but that has always been the case. I still look at my own blog and read other blogs, but I don't post anything besides quotes. I love love love my quotes, but quotes are not substantial enough alone to make this a worthwhile place to visit.

I thought this blog would be a nice place for me to track some lifestyle changes and potentially actually maybe stick to some of them. Everything is going well lately, but I've always been guilty of not sticking to the healthy habits that I should, such as healthy, mindful eating, and daily exercise. The thing is, I'm not really keeping track of myself in a way that I could be.

Remember that time I made a list of things I had to get done and crossed them out periodically? That worked SO well for me, and even though that was approximately a year ago, I've always thought that I should do it again, and perhaps more consistently. I can't promise that's gonna happen, but my goal is to have a more consistent, purposeful use for this blog that I love so much.

I love exercise and I love food, so I'm not trying to restrict myself in any way. It's not gonna be like that. Don't worry. If anything I hope to find more delicious foods to eat and recipes to make, and more effective and enjoyable workouts to attempt. Anyway, this is just an idea I had, and I'm going to give it a whirl. Maybe, just maybe, I won't be the only person to get something out of this.

Anyway, I think I've been inspired recently by other people in the blogosphere who post delicious recipes and track their workouts. I find these things so interesting. Do I think I am capable of creating my own recipes? No. Do I think I am capable of replicating recipes from other people? Yes. And I will. And I will give credit where credit is due.

(delicious raspberries via thingssheloves)

Foodie Fun: Blue Hill at Stone Barns

We finally made it to Blue Hill at Stone Barns for dinner last night. The restaurant is in Sleepy Hollow, NY on a farm, and the menu is changed daily to highlight the best ingredients of the day. The ingredients are from the farm right on premises, and others in Westchester County. The rest comes from the Barber's family farm in Massachusetts that has been in the chef's family for three generations. I'm not gonna lie, I heard about this place on Top Chef one season. The contestants went to the farm and the challenge was to use the ingredients on the farm to create a family-style feast.

We got the 8 course tasting menu, and everything was really fresh and delicious. There were some very interesting ingredients featured, and they explained a lot of them to us before they were served. It was very elegant, but maybe a little too pretentious. My favorite part was probably when all the servers would make eye contact with each other before presenting our plates to us- they wanted to make sure they did it at the same time! And after the plates were down one of them would explain what we had.

At one point, the waiter was telling us there was an ingredient called "tat soy" in our dish, and my father asks, "There are CATS in this dish?" The waiter responded, "That's funny. I usually laugh louder." It was funny, but a little odd since our waiter was actually being a jerk. Unless he's just really good at keeping a straight face.

Anyway, the food was really good, and eventually I stopped taking pictures because I got more involved in the eating aspect of things. But I'll say my favorite dishes were the fish dish, an egg dish, and a beet salad. And my very favorite was a "red fife" brioche with fresh ricotta cheese from the "19 cows on the Barber's family farm" and a green pesto-y tasting marmade. The desserts were also pretty fabulous. Also there was a potato and onion bread with dehydrated vegetable salts made from tomato and fennel.

Sorry the pictures are a little blurry, no flash photography is allowed in the dining room, and the room was pretty dark. You pretty much can't see on your way to the bathroom. Our next plan is to visit the farm during the day and go to the Blue Hill Cafe that is also on premises- its much more casual and probably a little less pricey. Also, our dinner was 3 and a half hours long, but it went pretty fast surprisingly!

1) Fresh vegetables from the garden.
2) Jess, Me, Melina.
3) Beet sliders and some potato sticks (foodie fries) wrapped with pancetta and sesame seeds
4) Beet salad
5) Dad with his beet slider. hated it.
6) red fife brioche with black repper, ricotta, and green marmalade.
7) last course: apples (that look like the ones my dogs take off our tree in the backyard) and maple fudge.

Ben Kweller

My sister and I are huge Ben Kweller fans. Any time he's in town, whether we are living in Boston or New York, we go see him perform. This time, he was opening for Barenaked Ladies at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. Now I must tell you, Barenaked Ladies were awful so we only stayed for like 2.5 songs. Just couldn't take it any more. But Ben was brilliant as always. I really really missed seeing him be the headliner, because that's truly what he deserves. He's so great, and seeing him in intimate venues before like The Paradise and The Avalon and Somerville Theatre, seeing him up in the nosebleed seats of radio city was just not the same. But regardless, I am huge supporter and will always see him when possible. I was going to buy a t-shirt of his or something, but it turns out I already owned everything they had for sale in the BK merch tent. It's love.

ps. that stick is a light up stick they put in my glass of wine so they could charge me ten dollars for it. I made Jess do silly things with it. And we had a delicious dinner, too.

Cauliflower Gratin

So if you love cauliflower, and you love cheese, life doesn't get much better than this. It's essentailly steamed cauliflower that you cover in cheese sauce made of the following:

1/2 cup gruyere

some parm

2 cups milk

3 tablespoons flour

salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste

and then you bake 25-30 minutes.

bingo bango!

this is my dinner tonight, there's too many calories in this to really eat much more, or so i would suspect...

I added a lot more cheese than I was supposed to.

Delicious Creations

While I have the time before the craziness of the semester kicks in, I decided to go on a little trip to Whole Foods, and I came back with a hell of a lot of fruits and veggies.

For Christmas, my mom made me a really cute gift. It was a homemade cookbook of all of my mom's favorite recipes, as well as the really basic recipes for things that I often call her asking her how to do correctly. I decided to look through it today and try out a few of the recipes, here's what happened...

This dish is called ceviche. It's a South American dish that can be made in a variety of ways. My best friend's mom is from Ecuador and she makes the most AMAZING ceviche, which I try to replicate. My mom made her own version, inspired from Maria's ceviche and Ina Garten's. This is my first time making it myself, but I'd say it was a success! You can put whatever you want in it, but I chose to keep it simple for the first time and just stick with shrimp instead of fish or squid or anything else. Maria's secret ingredient is to add a couple tablespoons of Heinz ketchup! It sound's weird, but it totally makes a huge difference.

Here, we have the yummy guacamole. In my opinion, gaucamole simply isn't worth it unless it's fresh. And when it's fresh, it is my all time favorite food. This is also a recipe my mom gave me, but guacamole is truly something that needs to be tasted, tested, and tweaked in order to achieve perfection.

So. Good.

Both are served cold and eaten with an entire bag of tortilla chips.

Let me know if you want recipes!

Whoopie Pies!

Today, I made Whoopie Pies!
They are delicious.

here is the recipe.



(photo taken with my iphone ShakeIt app).

The World's Largest Gummy Bear

So, I am a big fan of gummy bears.
Without even looking, I stumbled across this beauty.
It is the world's largest gummy bear.
5 pounds. 12,600 calories of pure gummy.
And the best part is that it comes in blue raspberrry.
As much as I love gummy bears, the thought of ingesting this entire thing makes me kind of queasy. Maybe if I could eat it over a long period of time it would be ok?
How long do you think it would take you to eat a gummy bear of this size?

It's just ridiculous!

A Day in France...sorta

So I came up with this wonderful idea.
It is what I will call a Fake Day in France.
I will start off the day with french coffee and pastries.

from there, i will get cozy and watch my three favorite French movies:

L'Auberge Espagnole
Amelie
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

While doing so, I will drink chocolat chaud out of a bowl
and will feast on brie and french bread.

Then I will look at all the pictures I took in Paris and I will pretend that I am still there.

I haven't figured out when I am going to do this, but I will.