Cake!!!

I don't do a lot of baking. In fact, my friend, Jonathan, and I decided that if we ever opened a restaurant he would handle the desserts, while I would focus on the savory dishes. However, when I saw this site, the baker deep inside me couldn't help but pay attention. Perhaps you'll be seeing some baking entries in the future. My plan is to take on the cake pops, maybe decorate them like baseballs for a world series viewing party, or the pie pops, just because they are awesome.

For now, enjoy the eye candy: Cake Decorating at Instructables.com

Essential Ingredients for Any College Kitchen

While it would be nice to always have a bottle of truffle oil and pancetta sitting in my cupboard, it is neither practical nor affordable. So I have provided a list of essential ingredients, as well as which of their more expensive cousins that they could substitute for.

Meat:
Chicken Breast
Hamburger Meat (add to your homemade tomato sauce, hamburgers for a quick meal, or a chipotle night at home)
Bacon (love it at breakfast, can use it in place of pancetta in Italian cuisine)

Dairy:
2% Milk (for baking with your flour)
Butter
Large Eggs (great for breakfast, lunch or dinner)
Pizza Dough (for homemade pizza, calzones, stromboli)
Whole Wheat Bread (for toast, cut a circle in the middle and fry an egg for breakfast, or with a salad on the side for lunch)

Produce:
Garlic (an amazing flavor, and it keeps the Ed [ away)
Onion (Julia Childs couldn't imagine a world without them; get one yellow/vidalia and one red if you can)
Baby Spinach (good for salads, mixing into pastas and adding a little green to all entrees)
Basil (one of the most versatile herbs, use in European and Asian cooking)
Mushrooms (use it to top pizzas, put in calzones, mix with pastas, in entrees or just on the side)

Cabinet:
Crushed or Diced or Pureed Tomatoes (make tomato sauce with the garlic, onions, basil and olive oil)
Black Beans (to eat on your chipotle night or with rice and topped with greek yogurt, and guacamole if you splurge)
Jam (for your toast, to mix with green yogurt)
Vanilla and Almond Extract (don't mind getting artificial if it means saving money)
Raw Agave (use it in place of sugar or honey)
lemon (mix a little with milk to make buttermilk for pancakes or biscuits)

Rice (one part rice to two parts water, steam on the stove top; if the rice is still dry add more water)

Pasta

Olive Oil (nectar of the gods)

Balsamic Vinegar (mix with olive oil for a cheap, healthy salad dressing)

Canola Oil (good for frying)

Flour

Baking Powder (add a little more in a recipe to substitute for Baking Soda)

Cornstarch (thickens soups, sauces, etc)

Spices: Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Cayenne Pepper and Red Pepper Flakes (for Spice), Cumin (for Mexican or Indian), Black Pepper (most important)

Frozen:
Green Peas (heat with mushrooms, olive oil and garlic on the stove top; mix with pasta or eat on the side of another meal)
Ravioli (a quick meal for when you don't feel like doing anything other than boil water)

I know I listed a lot, and it maybe be a higher upfront expense upfront, but the cabinet items will last for months, the pizza dough can be frozen for later use, odds are your won't eat a one pound bag of frozen peas in one sitting. And you'll save money making your own tomato sauce, and cooking at home instead of going out for your meals.

Hope this helps you one your way to stocking up your kitchen, this way when you open up your fridge you won't have this guy pop out.

Morning Brew - Coffee for One

Recently I've been waking up extremely early, meaning 5-6am. This means that in order not to pass out before I make it out the door around 8:30-9am I need to get my early morning coffee on. As a college student, your corner coffee brewery is an unavoidable evil. The temptation to walk in like the zombie-of-a-man from the McDonald's commercial who can not even fathom talking to another human being before his morning cup o' joe is unbearable. However, being completely broke is more unbearable, at least in my opinion. So I've made it my duty to replicate our beloved coffee houses' most loved creations. First off, a more elegant take on a simple cup of coffee.

I use a french press to make my coffee. It is cheaper than a coffee maker, whether it's a chefmate or a cuisinart or an espresso maker with a name I can't even pronounce. And often times, the flavor is bolder, deeper and significantly better than anything coming out of one of those overpriced machines. You can get a nice one for $25 and it will last you for your whole college career (validity of that statement pending me graduating next May).

I also purchase my beans from Trader Joe's. If I lived in New York I would buy all of my coffee beans from Fairway, this awesome grocery store, and probably one of the most famous in the world, on the upper West Side of Manhattan, right next to the Hudson River, but for now, Trader Joe's carries a great variety, ranging from your cheaper Seattle Blends to the decadent $40/pound Jamaica Blue Mountain variety. I've settled for the $6.99 Costa Rican Tarrazu, a medium dark roast bean. There is also a bean grinder in the store, so I grind them up right there (if you decide to go for a french press, get them a little coarser so you don't have to worry about the grinds finding their way through the filter).

Because my boyfriend is not a coffee drinker, I try to brew as little as possible at one time, which is hard as I tend to over estimate how much I'll be drinking. Recently, I've been keeping it to just two tablespoons. On the weekends I'll do a full six and fill it up with boiling water. Feel free to add more or less grinds, more or less water, depending on how strong you like your brew.

Now for the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 French Press
~1-1/2 C boiling water
2 T coarse coffee grinds
1/8 t almond extract
2 T whipped cream
1 T chocolate sauce

Method:
1. Add the coffee grinds to the french press while the water is boiling. Once it has come to a boil, pour  into the french press, stir, and let sit for about 5 minutes (more or less time depending on your preference of the strength of the coffee).
2. pour coffee into a cup, add the almond extract and stir. Top with whipped cream and chocolate sauce.

For Iced Coffee:

1. Stick a glass in the freezer before step 1 and fill it with ice.

2. After the grinds have been soaking in the boiling water in the french press for 5 minutes, stash the french press in the freeze for another 5-10 minutes.

3. Remove the press from the freezer, pour the coffee into another glass to add the extract, and any cream of sugar (I like to use raw agave as it blends better in both hot and especially in cold coffee).

4. Remove the glass from the freezer and pour the coffee blend into the glass, top with whipped cream and chocolate sauce

The extract  adds a nice flavor to the coffee. Any flavor extract can be used, and if you have syrup, even better. The whipped cream and chocolate sauce make it feel more like it's being made my a highly-trained barista, rather than in a tiny apartment kitchen.

Even better so, the combined cost of all of the ingredients, less the investment of the french press, bring the total cost to $0.74*. Moreover, for myself this total cost includes the recipe above, plus a regular, plain cup of coffee. The price of the equivalent at Starbucks would come to about $2.55**. That is a savings for $1.81 in just one day. If you do this 5 days a week for a year that is savings of $470.60.  You can do your own coffee calculations to see how much you could be saving.

Enjoy

*by my calculations:
2 T coffee = $0.54
1/8 t almond extract = $0.04
2 T whipped cream = $0.08
1 T chocolate sauce = $0.08

**
$1.75 for a tall (small) plain coffee
$1.75 + $0.30 (styrup, and I'm being generous by counting this toward the extract and the chocolate syrup on top) + $0.50 = $2.55

Peanut Sauce (for dipping or as a salad dressing or marinade)

Peanut sauce has always been one of my favorite sauces. Peanut is a great flavor and balances that funny, little line reconciling the sweet with the salty. Here is a recipe that I've adapted to the flavors I like, and you can do the same.

1/3 C peanut butter
2 T reduced sodium soy sauce
1/3 C warm water
1-2 garlic cloves, chopped*
1/4 T ginger root, grated**
1 t chili paste***

1. In a small bowl, combine the garlic cloves and ginger root.
2. Add the peanut butter to the bowl and mix.
3. Slowly add water, stirring the mixture as you pour. Do the same for the soy sauce.
4. Finally, add the chili paste.

*I love garlic, but I opted for just one clove. Next time I'll try two and see whether or not the second clove makes the flavor too overwhelming. Adjust according to your personal tastes.
**Ginger can be an acquired taste for some people. The first recipe I looked at only called for 1/8 t of grated ginger root and made it optional, so don't feel obligated to add any. But if it's a flavor you enjoy, the more the merrier.
***I am also a love of all things spicy. I think the 1 teaspoon is just enough to give it a slight kick without taking away from the depth peanut flavor. I might add a little more next time, just to experiment a little.

I put the final product in a salsa jar that Mike and I finished last week. I find that keeping jars like that, particularly the mason jars that tomato sauces come in, are particularly useful for storing leftovers, sauces, marinades and keeping the prep work I do the night before for some recipes fresh.

I roasted asparagus in the oven and dipped it in the peanut sauce. This was along side of all of the green/red curry that I have left over from last night. I also made a simple pepperoni pizza for Mike. I'll give the recipe for that, along with the homemade tomato sauce that I use on the pizza, next time I make one.

New Theme: Spanish French Toast, Green Curry and Hot Dogs

So after lots of deliberation over the direction that my blog has been heading in, I've decided to change the theme from a radio/travel blog to a food blog. This also lines up with my new found hobby, that being cooking and researching all things related to food. At my university we only have one dining hall for a couple thousand students and the food quality is less than satisfactory. Because of this I decided to purchase the smallest meal plan and then supplement that with cooking my own meals. It has been going very well and I would like to be able to use this as a way to show college students, and others, that it is possible to cook quality food with limited times, limited funds and limitless creativity and resolve. We'll see how long I'll be able to keep this up.


I guess the best way to start this would be to explain what I cooked today.

In my humble opinion, Sunday breakfast is one of the most important meals of the week. Usually it is pancakes day in my apartment but I decided to try something different. While creating my recipes binder (a collection of about 100 recipes, and growing) I came across a recipe for torrijas, spanish french toast made with a stale french baguette. Luckily enough I had a quickly-hardening baguette on the top of my fridge, and so I went about making the torrijas topped with powdered sugar and a side of bacon.

Then for dinner I decided to make a green curry with this paste that had been sitting in the cupboard for an amount of time that I can't publish in good conscience. Because of what I think believe is a result of all of the chili paste and soy sauce, my green curry became a red one, but the flavor is so good that I think I could put Bangkok Bistro out of business. It would also be terrible for me to forget to mention the hot dogs (for the picky-eating boyfriend), tomato-basil-mozzarella antipasto and sundried tomato and basil focaccia that humbly sat beside the curry at the dinner table.

That's all for now. I'll post the recipes and pictures of the results sometime tomorrow, as soon as I get them from my boyfriend's camera.

And just when I thought there was enough sin in this world...

This Is Why You're Fat, hold on to your asses. This one is so grotesque that I've been inspired to re-enter the blogosphere. Never have I experienced anything so offensive, at least since my trip to Lafashan, somewhere in Liaoning province a.k.a. bumblefuck, China.

Last night I was watching t.v. when a commercial came on for a sandwich, at least that is what it is called. "That just can't be," I exclaimed when the picture of the "food" was displayed across the screen. "Never in my life have I seen such a thing. Perhaps KFC is a little late on the April Fool's uptake." And just as suddenly as it appeared it disppeared and I dismissed it in the same way I dismiss my roommate's attempts to go to Yates1.

Then as I was reading the Huffington's Posts new food section, it appeared, just as suddenly, as frighteningly as it had the night before. This is no mere by-product of the KFC research and development dungeons. It's much more than that, a food phenomenon spitting in the face of Michelle Obama's campaign against Americans becoming by and large (pun most definitely intended) the worlds fattest fatties. I am so offended by this that I am considering writing a letter to KFC. I'm not sure who specifically right now, but it will be strongly worded, with lots of capitalized letters and exclamation points, because in the face of the unknown (this so-called sandwich), we as a society become fearful and angry. And right now, this sandwich scares me and makes me angry.

There is a phrase in Chinese that goes 苛政猛于虎, meaning a severe government is more ferocious than a tiger. In present times that phrase often goes 网毒猛于虎, meaning that the "internet drug" is more ferocious than a tiger, relating to the pervasiveness of internet addiction in modern Chinese society. I think in America the phrase, 食毒猛于虎, or the "food drug" is more ferocious than a tiger, is very applicable in these times and we are now experience one of its most ferocious manifestations.

End Notes:
1. Yates Field House is the gym at Georgetown University. My roommate has not cast as much as a shadow there since 2008.

For Further Reading

The KFC Double Down: One Sandwich to Kill You All

Michelle Obama's Obesity Plan: in the Nick of Time

Trends in Obesity in the US from 1999-2008

Obesity Trends by State and Race, 1999-2008

临行之前的看法 : Thoughts upon Leaving China

In a little less than one hour I will be checking out of the hotel, in 3 I will be heading off to Beijing International Airport and in 6 hours and 20 minutes my plane will be taking off.

China has been an interesting experience. I spent most of my time in Harbin complaining about the food at the cafeteria, the unkempt-ness of the city, the ignorance of the people, the lack of real Chinese culture and the coldness of the weather. But upon arriving in Beijing, I feel like I've been exposed to the kind of China I've been longing for: clean streets, large buildings, relatively friendly people, with a touch of Westernization.

As I said earlier, Harbin was a let down and I plan on making a pact with myself to never go back to that city, but Beijing has given made me more excited about the prospect of coming back here and I'm glad that I got to end my study abroad experience this way.

Now, just 24 hours and I will be in Newark airport praying my parents don't forget to pick me up.

Beijing's Second Impression

When my plane landed in Beijing it was smoggy and cloudy and gray. I thought it had been raining but it was just the humidity of the city mixed with severe pollution, topped with my disappointment. Now, however, it might be the anxiousness of sitting in Beijing International Airport 24 hours from now or the clarity that you get from studying for a semester in China and coming to the realization that both you and your cab driver understand each other, but while I'm in Beijing I'm liking it more and more.

I was not happy while I was in Harbin but I have no regrets about studying abroad there I have tried not to let that influence my entire impression of China. But, upon leaving Harbin, I thought that I would not be able to live here at any point in my life. But so far, a light is beginning to shine again on that possibility, though only in Beijing (and Shanghai). At the very least, I will try to come back here if I have the chance.

When I get back to the US I know I will have lots of people asking me what I thought of my time abroad and I still haven't decided if I will lie about whether I liked it more not, but coming to Beijing and having this time to contemplate being in China has allowed me to begin to pick out the good moments of this experience.

Classes are Over!

After 15 weeks of whining, moaning, fighting through what seemed like an army's worth of Chinese students/random old people digging through garbage cans for bottles, and baring temperatures up to -20 degrees Fahrenheit (or should I say down to, it just doesn't seem to have the same ring), I am done with classes.

There is something satisfying in be able to say that I'm done with classes, but I was really hoping more for a sense of closure and the feeling that the end is near. But in all honesty, I don't see what at this point should be an extremely bright light at the end of the tunnel. So for now I'll just lower my head and push through the last barrier, 2 finals tomorrow, 1 final Thursday, and 1 final Friday.

It's also hard to imagine myself a week from now waking up 7000 miles away from this place. And that is a little unfortunate because it's thoughts like that that have gotten me through this semester.

Hopefully, upon completing my finals, I can get, and should get, the kind of closure about the program really being over that I can't get through posting on a blog. For now I'll just revel in this temporary joy.

9 Days and Counting...

After finishing my last full week of classes I figure it is time to begin reflecting on my semester her at CET Harbin.

Academically, I am satisfied with the program and I feel like the rigor of the classes, without any overwhelming sense of stress or anxiety, along with the benefits of studying standard Mandarin in Northeast China has gotten my Chinese to a level that it would not have been able to reach by studying in the States alone. I think it's also important to keep in mind that upon coming here I had a good Chinese language foundation thanks to Georgetown having a good Chinese department as well as relatively good study skills and personal motivation and those were also factors in my improvement.

Administratively, the program is lacking and I am currently working on a letter to send to CET headquarters in DC. The resident director, Li Laoshi, and that guy that was always in her office and for some reason was on CET payroll, Xuan Laoshi, and the resident advisor, Connie, are all nice people. Unfortunately, they are also utterly ineffective, unreachable and opaque in terms of what it is that they do, if it is the case that they are doing anything. Basically, I think that there needs to be a trimming down of resident staff, more responsibility on them to plan more cultural events for us, and for them to be a visible, transparently-operating, knowledgeable contact who not only lets us reach out to them but makes an effort to reach out to us.

In terms of Harbin, this is a terrible city. Whoever did the city planning must have been on crack, the infrastructure is in terrible condition, and for a place called the "ice city" there is not one plow in the city. They just let it snow, let people walk all over it and pack it down, wait a day or two for it to completely freeze over, then hit it with a shovel and scratch at the ground til they get it up and throw it into a truck so they can ship all of the frozen snow out of the city. And then the process happens again the next time it snows. And it snows a lot here. And I think this instance is a good analogy for not just how Harbin handles things, but how China handles things. They let the problem exist and watch the situation compress under the stress of a billion people until they have to deal with it and then scrape away at it and cart it out of the city, only for it to be followed by another issue.

As far as the end of the semester, I have "classes" on Monday and Tuesday but they are more review sessions and are kind of half-assed so that is not an issues. Then two finals Wednesday, one Thursday (incidentally my 20th birthday), and one on Friday (Jarrett's, a Georgetown classmate here in Harbin, 21st Birthday). Then Saturday is graduation/train to Beijing, chill on Sunday, then a Monday evening, Beijing time, flight to Chicago, followed by a Monday evening, freedom/eastern standard time, flight to Newark.

Lots to look forward to, as in looking forward to getting out of this place.