Amazing Boyfriend Makes Amazing Meals!

Vermicelli rice noodles, home-made marinated chicken, sliced carrots, sliced green onions (I love slicing with our new Calphalon knives!) nestled on top of baby spinach, drizzled with a rice vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, and salt mixture.



It was delicious. I love having an amazing cook for a boyfriend!

Gooey Caramel Ooey Yum-Yum

Just made caramel. From scritch-scratch. From this recipe except I substituted 1/3 cup whole milk and enough corn syrup to make 1/2 cup mixture for the 1/2 cup cream. Then I split it in half and kept one normal and to the other added 1 tsp cocoa powder for a delicious slightly bitter/sweet caramel dip.

I expected to totally burn the sugar but it didn't! I kept calling "Nick! Come see it now! This is awesome!" as it started melting by itself in the saucepan.

Going to slice three trillion Honeycrisp apples. Will roll my way out tomorrow. Kisses!

OM NOM NOM NOM NOM.


Caramel sauce. Perfect for apples, ice cream, and drizzling.


Cocoa caramel sauce (not fully incorporated) for little bursts of bitter. Delicious.

Growing Up is Hard to Do

Yesterday I was sucker punched with the realization that holy cow, my baby brother is a whole grown up. Even if I knew in my head that he's eighteen, and in college, and working--it hit me in the gut when I was watching him drumming up on stage at the concert at his college that my tall blond brother is an adult. BAM.

Ow.

Seafood Birthday Dinner!

Every year for Nick's dad's birthday we go out to a delicious restaurant. This year we went to Rudy's Hideaway in Sacramento. 

THE BEST. LOBSTER RAVIOLI. IN THE WORLD. 

We started off with escargot and some crab-stuffed mushrooms. Oh, and of course our bread. Then our soup's arrived: a lobster bisque for me and clam chowder for Nick. Mine was mildly spicy and full of lobster, soooo good! Nick's clam chowder was amazing as well. Then there was the noodle course: a delicious red/cinnamon/cocoa? meat sauce spooned over hollow noodles. Then our entrees arrived: I had the lobset ravioli which had huge pieces of lobster stuffed inside with the richest cream sauce imaginable. Nick had crab-stuffed salmon, as did his mom, Clair had the children's prime rib and french fries, and his dad had a 1.5 pound lobster tail. It was all AMAZING. For dessert there was creme brulee and mudpies and chocolate mousse. 

I am so stuffed I cannot move, so stuffed I debated the relief of unbuttoning my pants at the table versus the embarrassment it would cause. 

So delicious, so yummy, thank you Nick's dad! Happy birthday! 

If you happen to be in the area . . .

Lucky Phone Call

I'm feeling very lucky right now!

Yesterday I gave my classmate my contact information so she could pass it along to her boss who is looking for after-school workers to help teach and corral students. I felt so lucky just that the opportunity presented itself, and really appreciated her offer even if it didn't work out.

Today the principal called and invited me to an interview this Monday! If all goes well I will start right after the meeting. It is not a big job, just two to three hours daily for four to five days a week, but I'm so excited to start working again, especially since I will be in a teaching environment! It's even a private school!

Happy happy happy day!

Boy, Interrupted

Title: Boy, Interrupted. Based on a true story.

Date: Today
Time: Approximately 4:30pm
Location: Driving from Bed Bath & Beyond, en route to Target
Driver: Katie, wearing sunglasses, a frown, and shoes that started out comfy but are now painful
Passenger: Nick, general direction-giver, human GPS, and patient boyfriend

Background: Nick has a cold. A bad, bad cold. Being the lovely thoughtful person that I am, I dragged him out to buy a knife block set and spend hours wandering stores. This is us driving out of the parking lot by the mall.

* * *
Katie, peering around to make sure all stupid squishable pedestrians have vacated the vicinity, finally turns attention to sick boyfriend who has been quieter and quieter.

"How are you feeling?" I ask, glancing over.

"Crappy," sick boyfriend starts, turning towards me. "I'm pretty sure I have a fever, my throat hurts, I keep sneezing, and my nose is a faucet."

"You poor thing!" I nod sympathetically, patting his knee.

He continues, "I'm pretty sure my leg fell off back in the cutlery section of Bed Bath & Beyond, I'm seeing quadruple, and --"

"CRAP! NICK, DO I TURN RIGHT? Shit! I'm turning right. Was that right? Should I have gone straight?"

Nick gives me a calm, patient stare. The way you would look at someone who has traumatically lost their sanity and you feel pity and compassion for them, and no matter what they do you will never lose your temper because that would be like shouting at a dumb dog.

"Katie, open your eyes." He waits while I comply. "Turn left here. Now go straight. Move into the left lane. Good. Go straight again. Now left, straight, then turn right here and now you should know where we are."

I wipe the sweat off my forehead dramatically. "Phew! Good thing I have you!"

You can practically hear his eyes rolling.

I glance hopefully towards sick boyfriend. "So, sweetie, what were you saying about how you were feeling?"

"Nope. Forget it. I'm not gonna talk to you anymore. You don't listen anyways."

* * *

The End

Grammar Rant

I've noticed recently that I'm getting more and more easily incensed over other people's misspelled words. When I'm on facebook and someone says "Im not sure weather or not im going but will definatly rite u rite away!!!" . . . my head falls off in disbelief that this person actually graduated high school.

Common Misspellings that make me roll my eyes so hard they are stuck staring at my brain:

by vs. buy
wierd,
weather vs. whether
definately

. . . I have to stop. I was looking on facebook for ideas and I became waaaaay too frustrated with some people's ideas on proper spelling.

Here. Go read this blog post on a way to turn murderous feelings into happy ones by picturing the Alot, courtesy of Hyperbole and a Half, who sums this situation up much more eloquently than I am able.

I need some chocolate.

A Series of Serendipitous Events

This morning it was only a happy accident that prevented me from missing my very important phone call from the EDD; an interview that would (hopefully) reinstate my unemployment paycheck since it stopped when I started school.

I had completely forgotten about the window of time--10 to 12-- during which I was going to be called. If I missed the call I would have to reschedule which could take a long time. At a quarter to 10 I was heading out to grab my bike so I could meet Nick at the end of his class and bike home with him, and if I had I would have missed the call.

Luckily I had forgotten I had a flat tire! I headed back in, intent on walking as far as I could to meet him, and heard my phone ringing. By the time I bolted into the bedroom and grabbed my phone I thought I had missed whoever it was, but fortunately made it just in the nickel dime! When the person said they were from the EDD you could have knocked me over with a feather. I could not believe I had forgotten what I had been talking about all weekend! (That just goes to show how slow I am in the mornings.)

Even better is that my paycheck is reinstated! After finding out that I had only ever worked part-time, that my school schedule is only four hours a week, and that I was indeed looking for work--a conversation that took all of four minutes and contained no scary questions--she said there were no problems and that they would continue my unemployment! Yay!

What's so scary is how darn close I came to missing that phone call. I am so happy to have a flat tire right now--even if it means spending five bucks for a new tube. After all that I still had time to get a few hundred yards before Nick ran me over with his bike. Happy happy day!

Delicious Japanese Dinner: Miso, Onigiri, Char Siu Bao & Adventures in the Asian Supermarket

Early this morning I discovered a terrible craving for Japanese cuisine. After scouring the internet for the most delicious looking and doable recipes I settled on the amazing website of Just Hungry which I had explored before. (Nick and I are . . . kind of obsessed with food. And we love Asian cuisine. I know I've mentioned before what sushi freaks we are.)

A few hours of obsessive clicking later and I dragged Nick away from his videogames, proclaiming, "We have to go spend lots of money! I need this food to ensure my happiness!" He was smart enough to go along.

I wanted to make Onigiri (rice balls with a center of your choosing, we had chicken teriyaki), Miso soup, and Char Siu Bao (steamed pork buns). If any of those sound amazing, click on the one you want and it will take you to that recipe on the JustHungry website.

We needed wakame, kombu, and nori seaweeds, and some shaved bonito flakes, and then some miso and sushi rice. At the online asian market which would ship what we needed that added up to maybe fifteen bucks. At Whole Foods it was fifty.

Needless to say we didn't end up with the things I wanted. I just could not justify spending that much money on things that could be found for so much less. We did purchase enough to make a non-traditional miso soup and seaweedless onigiri, and started to drive home without all we wanted. But then Nick had a brilliant idea! He searched "Asian markets" on his GPS and found one! We quickly made our way there.

Once we arrived at our destination, courtesy of "Shut UP, Woman" (our affectionate nickname for our chatty GPS, our jaws hit the floor. We had found a huge Asian center! Florists and restaurants, and in the middle of it all a HUGE supermarket!

This supermarket was unlike our traditional American ones. As you enter you practically trip over a large glass display case full of dust-catches and knick-knacks, "ON SALE!!!", kind of like what you would expect to find in Chinatown. To the right was the vegetables, but it was full of bok choy and all kinds of mushrooms and weird fruits! We were fascinated and didn't have enough eyeballs to see all we wanted. We walked around the entire store. Most of it was in Japanese characters with English printed on the side. We passed chicken hearts, tripe, testicles, ducks, quail eggs, oysters, every type of noodle imaginable, and so many more different things!

We purchased chilled steamed buns with a lotus center and frozen pork buns, one of which we shared tonight. It was delicious. I didn't take a picture because we ate it too quickly. We got pocky (chocolate dipped biscuit sticks) and peanut mochi and noodles and all the types of seaweed that we needed plus some instant dachi (integral part of miso soup; made from seaweed, sardines, and fish flakes).

Exhausted, we ate some pocky on the way back home and quickly started our dinner.

The Miso was very good. After simmering the dachi in some water (it was stinky!) I added the miso, tofu, scallions, and wakame seaweed. We enjoyed it but it was a little fishier than we like so next time I will simmer the dachi for half the amount of time.

We steamed the pork bun in our makeshift steamer (saucepan and a sieve covered in tinfoil) that worked surprisingly well! We did steam it about seven minutes longer than it said because some of the steam was escaping. It tasted so good, even though the pork was really more of a pork sausage than the char siu (seasoned pulled pork) I wanted. Keep in mind that it was a frozen bun and not the amazing looking one on the website. Someday when I have a lot of free time and the necessary ingredients I will make them.

The Onigiri was deeelicious! Nick made the rice (short-grained sushi rice but not made in the sushi style where you add rice vinegar) because I am a total fail at making it edible. I had made chicken teriyaki and chopped it up and put that in the center before squishing it and then wrapping it in nori (seaweed typically found around sushi). We decided it needed more salt. We have two left for snacks, yummy!

Here are my onigiri wrapped with sliced nori. You can make them look really cute with faces and shapes but since it was my first time I decided to stick with what was easiest. Each onigiri had about 1/2-1 tablespoon of chicken teriyaki.


Nick is taking the first bite. We were both nervous--me if it came out well and him if it tasted good!


It was good! Here you can see the chicken teriyaki. Sorry it's blurry--I had to take the picture quickly because Nick was trying to eat it!


We still have our peanut mochi to have for dessert but we are so full now I don't know if we will taste it tonight!

Everything was very good and it was so much fun to go to the Asian supermarket and find things for much less than we would have paid elsewhere. We have a new favorite place to shop! Also, I suspect we will be asking Santa Claus for a steamer and a rice cooker this year! At least we will if this fascination with Japanese cuisine continues. And with how delicious everything is so far, how can it not?