What's in the freezer?

Okay, if you're reading this at home, you have to play along. Get a pen and paper. Go to your freezer. With the exception of ice cubes, write down EVERYTHING that's in your freezer at this very moment. Nonedibles included. Now post your contents in the comments section. Ready... set... GO!

The devil's in the details, apparently, and not in my coffee.

This morning I smashed open a bunch of cardamom pods and then pried them open so I could grind the seeds with my mortar and pestle. The problem with having a marble mortar and pestle is that I need to add a bit of salt for friction. If I don't, the seeds stay whole and it's harder to break them down. I don't know if that's just my lack of physical prowess or if it's the fault of the material. Anyway, I didn't think twice about adding the salt to the cardamom because I've been mainly using it when roasting eggplant. But then -- THEN!!! -- as I was transfering the ground cardamom into a jar (oh my gosh, it smelled SO GOOD), I said, "Shit, I can't believe I did that again!" See, I've been wanting to add cardamom to my coffee for the longest time. I figure if I can't afford the trip to Morocco, I'll bring Morocco to me. Foiled again! So my solution will be to brew the coffee with whole pods, rather than sprinkling some of the ground seeds into the cup post-brew. To be continued.

Sometimes bland is good. . . ?

This was dinner the other night. I don't know. Sometimes bland is good. I started the rice first, because I learned that lesson recently. . . it's always going to take longer than the vegetables (at least for me it does). So the rice was just plain old jasmine, that I cooked in water and added just a little bit of salt to.

I took out my large saute pan (which by the way I LOVE and use all the time) for the vegetables. I used a combination of canola and toasted sesame oil. As I sauted the onion and multiple cloves of garlic with salt and pepper, I microwaved the broccoli and chopped spinach. It's just been easier for me to keep (and afford) frozen vegetables in the house than fresh. Don't get me wrong though, I d still buy fresh vegetables -- I guess I'm just using more of a mix lately. I accidentally let the onion and garlic go a little too long, but it ended up adding some good, sweet flavor to the otherwise ridiculously boring dish. I then added some chopped green bell pepper and celery. It was supposed to be red bell pepper, you know, so my whole dinner wasn't green and white, but I cut into that pepper and it just wasn't happening on the inside. I hate when that happens. It was from Whole Foods too! Whatever. So once the frozen vegetables were mostly warmed through, I added them to the pan, along with some frozen edamame (that I first ran under some hot water in a small mesh strainer).

Okay, I'm not going to lie. I tried to make my own sweet and sour sauce. . . with organic ketchup, soy sauce, brown sugar, and a little orange marmalade. Sounds gross? It was AWFUL. I luckily tasted it before adding it to all of the vegetables. Instead, I had just about a teaspoon maybe of soy sauce left, so I used that. It added just enough flavor. And that was my quick weeknight meal. I did it all in under thirty minutes, and you know who would be proud of that.

New post, old news

So it's been a while, no? I have no excuse. At all. It's not like I've been in Australia for the past two weeks like SOME people. . . though I only wish that were the case.

Anyway, here you go. I know some of you have seen this, but it's a picture of the very large and heavy cake I made for one of my students. It was my favorite white cake recipe, care of Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook. The frosting was also a favorite -- that swiss meringue butter cream from Cake Art. For the filling, I made the same concoction as I did for the anniversary cakes. I just took part of the swiss meringue and mixed in some strawberry jam. Yum! It was good -- not too strawberry-y. It kind of tasted like strawberry mousse.

Now that husky was quite a challenge! It caused me much stress, but I think in the end turned out okay. Hey, it was the best I could do. The "woot woot" instead of the expected "woof woof" coming out of the husky's mouth, was taken from Rachel's graduation party invitation. It said something like, "I'm graduating, can I get a woot woot?!" You know, in that old Arsenio Hall Show kind of way. At least that was how I interpreted it.

In the absence of a real post, I decided to change around the layout a bit. We need a picture for the top, yo. Oh, and here's a video I was thinking about apropos of nothing this afternoon: