By Wednesday things were in full gear. I had to cancel my weekly dinner with Melanie just so that I could get everything done. After going to the grocery store, I made a fresh salsa that was spicy and addicting just like my first recipe I concocted in Troy. The grocery store didn't have habanero peppers so this time I used serranos and added some onion. I think I might actually enjoy this recipe a little more than the first salsa recipe I made.
Spicy Salsa #2
2 28oz cans diced tomato
7 serrano peppers, seeded and minced
1 small red onion, diced
1 head garlic
salt to taste
In blender mix serranos, onion, and garlic until finely chopped. Add diced tomato and salt. Blend until desired consistency is achieved. (I like mine chunky)
I also made a copycat Old Spaghetti Factory Creamy Pesto salad dressing that tastes pretty much just like the real stuff. I knew that I wanted to have a salad for the bbq I was having for Nick's birthday, but I couldn't decide on what kind I wanted. After going through loads of salad recipes on Allrecipes a little light bulb came on. Nick's favorite dressing is the creamy pesto from Spaghetti Factory so why not make that? We had actually looked up the recipe a while back just to see if there was one out there and sure enough, there were a bunch. I picked the top hit on google and it turned out marvelously with the simple garden salad that I made. I wasn't able to find Romano cheese at Food Maxx, but I substituted it with Parmesan that I had at home and it worked well. I also grated my garlic instead of mincing it because I didn't want people biting into little chunks of garlic. I also made a second batch just for us to have at home using Best Foods instead of the store brand and it came out a lot thicker and had a better texture. Anyway, not many people ate the actual salad, but they used the dressing on their ribs and sausages. I have a feeling that our friends don't enjoy salad as much when there's good old meat being grilled up. Hahah I wouldn't either!
Thursday was the hardest day for me. After work we went out to Costco to buy all the meat and sausages. Originally I was going to make short ribs, but then when we got to Costco, they were about $5/lb compared to the $2.50/lb for regular baby back ribs. So baby back it was. The packages were huge too. There were three racks per package and I got about five servings per rack compared to five slices of short ribs per package. Yikes! With two packages of ribs, we had plenty to feed everyone and had to force them to take some home. I also bought chicken apple sausage and habanero and cheese sausage. Yummy! I still prefer chicken apple sausage over the habanero, but it was nice to change it up a bit. I probably won't buy them again though.
What is a birthday barbecue without some cake? One of Nick's favorite flavors is Mint Chocolate Chip so I went and scoured the web for a good recipe and found one on Epicurious.com. I find that usually recipes on this site are a little more involved than the ones I find on Allrecipes, but the Chocolate Mint Layer cake looked doable. Since it was for a party I decided that it would be easier to make cupcakes instead of a multi-layered cake. My mom had me look at a boxed cake box to see about how long to bake them and it turned out great. What a good idea! The temperature was the same so I didn't have to try to do funky conversions or guesswork. I was fine until it came to filling the cups. As some of the reviews said, the batter was really liquidy, which made the cupcake flutes really difficult to fill without making a giant mess. Since I'm kind of a neat freak getting the chocolate batter everywhere was really frustrating me. After my mom said that she usually holds each cup and fills it over the bowl and then gingerly puts it into the pan I started doing that instead of bringing my ladle over the already lined pan. It was just a complete mess. Filling the cups before they hit the pan worked pretty well, but since they were quite liquidy it made it a little difficult to get the cups into the pan without spilling. I had contemplated putting my crushed Andes in the batter, which would have thickened it up a bit, but the recipe specifically called for the candies to be put on top. I thought that maybe since the batter was so soft that all the candy would sink to the bottom. Not the case. I think that if I make these again then I will remember to mix the candies into the batter. Dropping the candies on top made the cupcakes look messy and ugly. Everyone seemed to like the actual cake so I will probably make it again sometime. The only thing that had me boggled was that there were no eggs in the mixture. I had never seen such a thing.
Mint Chocolate Chip cupcakes
Along with the cupcakes Nick had suggested that we make s'mores for dessert since we were going to be lighting the fire pit. These were a hit! I think everyone liked these more than they liked the rest of the food. I'm glad that they are easy bunch to please (this will help me refine future bbqs). I think everyone just enjoys s'mores. It brings out the kid in us all. Sometimes in Riverside my roommates and I would make s'mores using the flame of our gas stove. If you turn the flame high enough you can have s'mores all year long! This time we used soaked bbq skewers to roast the marshmallows so that we didn't actually have to do it camping style and forage for sticks in our back yard. With the left over ingredients I have from the s'mores I think I will be making some S'mores Crumb Bars for Nick and Linda. I will probably do this for next week's baking excursion. I'm taking a break this week since I'm a little burnt out from the bbq.
Smores!
I really liked the strawberry plate that we made for Jen Jen's baby shower so I wanted to do one for Nick's bbq. Costco only had black berries, so I had to settle with those. I really enjoy having these platters that are really pretty to look at and they're so easy! It makes for a nice table and it keeps my stress levels low. It seems that no matter how small or large my dinner parties/bbqs are, I get stressed. I think it just comes with the territory. "Why do I continue to have them?" you may ask. It is quite simple, really. I love to see happy people enjoying my food and knowing that they are having a good time. I've never met any people who don't enjoy being fed (I don't have any friends, that I know of, with eating disorders) so it seems natural that to please myself I cook for others, right? Right. The water was inspired by all those spa day trips to Burke Williams with the family. The water was pretty tasty and looked pretty in the new jug that I got my mom from Costco. It reminds me of all those times at the spa...ahh those were the days.
Nick hard at work at the grill.
I don't grill. For some reason I just never learned how. I probably should because it doesn't really look that hard. I've always just relied on other people to do it. Plus, it also means that I don't have to do the cooking. Hehehe. I think this summer I will start slow with the grilling. I tend to burn anything I put on there because I'm too impatient. I really want to do some beer can chicken and now that I have a grill that's big enough to do it, I want to.
Tim eating Nick's hard work
Around the fire pit
Saturday night Nick and I headed out to the city for a little private dinner celebration at the House of Prime Rib. Oh it was good. We of course got the largest portion they offered and finished it. Boy how I love my beef. What had me even more floored was the dessert. I'm usually not a dessert person, not even really a sweets person at all, but the Crème brûlée was to die for. Oh. My. God. I have never tasted one that was so divine. Unlike normal Crème brûlée, it was not in an average 5.5 oz ramekin, but in a flat dish that you'd normally see serving a dip of some sort. It made all the difference. The flatness of the dish, probably about half an inch thick, allowed for the custard to be thin and the brûléed top to stand out. The ratio of brûléed topping to sweet custard was what had me. Usually in when the Crème brûlée is served in a ramekin there is too much custard to the thin amount of sugary brûlée. The brûlée gets lost in the subtle sweetness of the custard. This however, was different and it blew my mind. Whenever the day comes that I make creme brûlée, I'm doing it in a flat dish. The only thing that I regret is not taking a picture of it.
The House of Prime Rib
While I was having the bbq, Emmy was off to Davis to get some booster shots and a furcut. For some reason the groomer didn't cut the fur around her face or tail. Her front "racing" furs were also left uncut. She looked absolutely ridiculous. Her mane looked as if her collar was pushing all her fur up on her head, but really it was just that the groomer buzzed all the way up to her neck and stopped so that her long fur hung over the shaved part...like a bowl cut! So on Saturday after I had recovered from the bbq and cleanup, I took an hour to cut her fur. You can tell that it's not professionally done and it's a little choppy in some places, but it's much better and closer to how we had her in the past. She was a really good girl and sat still while I was snipping away...probably because she didn't want me to accidentally stab her with sharp shears.
Fixing Emmy's furcut
Sunday after everything was settling down Christopher and I headed out to Home Depot to get some herbs for my vegetable patch and then to Costco to get fish for dinner. Since it's been pretty nice out, Nick came back over and grilled fish for us while I planted my herbs. I'm still not that keen on fish so I got myself a separate tuna steak while my family and Nick had salmon. Nick marinated the salmon in garlic, lemon zest, EVOO, and a little pepper. While he was cooking it he put lemon juice on top. For the tuna I just marinated it in garlic, EVOO, and pepper. With our fish, Nick grilled up some asparagus and I made garlic noodles. Grilling is great because the clean up is so easy plus you get to be outside in the nice weather. Yay for Spring time!
Lately I've started using Olay's Regenerist Micro-Sculpting night cream. I love it. Before I had been using Olay's anti-aging night cream and it seemed to work well, but then there was coupon in Costco's little booklet so my mom got me some Regenerist. The cream smells so good and after two weeks it actually seems like there is a little difference in the fine lines on my forehead. I was just using anti-aging cream as a preventative, but it looks like it's actually doing something for me! You can never start too early in my opinion. Plus out in NY the weather and stress was giving me premature wrinkles. I think it was mostly the weather. It was so dry and cold there that I would put straight Vaseline on my face and it would just feel like a heavy lotion. I definitely think that Regenerist is a good investment since I can see small changes that I didn't even know where there to change. I never really noticed the little expression lines before they started to get smaller. Like other night creams, Regenerist is a little heavy, but it absorbs well and you don't need to put that much on to cover your whole face. I make sure to get all over my eyes since I'm always tugging at the sensitive skin around them to wipe off make up. My skin glows more, probably because I've been getting more sun, but it also looks tighter like when I was back in college. I really never realized how skin ages over the years. I guess it's starting to hit me now that I'm getting a little older and have had so much harsh weather and sun thrown at me. The only down side to the cream is that the pot is a little large, which would make traveling with it bothersome. (And it's a little pricey.) I've taken my other pots of night cream with me on trips, but they were significantly smaller. There is much more plastic to the container of this cream. Though very appealing looking plastic, it is still bulky to carry. Other than that, I love the actual product. The first few nights of using it I couldn't wait to put it on because I enjoyed the scent so much. It reminds me a little of the old Herbal Essences shampoo scent, which I miss terribly.
I think I mentioned before that for book club this time we are reading Vladamir Nobokav's Lolita. Well, it took me a month to finish and when I did, I felt like I was supposed to write a paper afterward. It is just one of those books that scream "required reading" to me. There was plenty, and I mean plenty, of content and style to analyze in this book, but I chose not to. Of course there were times that I just couldn't help myself by underlining something or writing in the margins, but in general I tried to breeze through the book. In general I thought that Nobokav did an excellent job of making the main character likeable, for lack of a better term, despite the fact that he was an unrepentant pedophile. The way that the narrator described the children was very similar to how others would describe a beautiful woman, which of course had me a little miffed at the blatant objectification of the female body. I really did enjoy how the character knew he was wrong to be so in love with young girls, but couldn't help it. It definitely gives a different perspective on things like love. Sometimes I wonder how writers get so into the character, especially one like this. I'm actually tempted to buy his autobiography just to see if he explains how he got inspiration for Lolita. The narrator's passion for young girls was so utterly convincing that I really want to know how Nobokav did it. I think it doubtful that he himself was a pedophile since he's gone into great and even better detail in his other works, so I really, really want to know how he wrote a character who was so convincing.
On an opposite spectrum, I've gone back to reading Bret Easton Ellis. I'm on a mission to read all of his work. So far I've read two of the seven and am working on the third. Right now I'm reading The Informers which is awesome, but I can't really tell you why. It is a series of short stories with linked characters. The thing is, nothing really happens. Nothing happens! Yet I still find it to be a page turner. There is always so-and-so is sleeping with so-and-so and then the short story ends and you're thrust into another story with related characters. Everyone knows everyone and is doing everyone, yet there is nothing really going on. You reach a point where when reading you're like, ooh plot! But then the next story starts. The whole book is kind of like a puzzle. There's not really anything there until the end of each short clip. I feel like I'm piecing these relationships between people together to try to get a whole story. Pretty cool if you ask me. Maybe that's why I keep turning the pages. I still have about 50 pages to go, which I'll probably get done tonight so I'll let you know what I think next week. So far so good.
I think, if my memory serves me correctly, that I've already over explicated about how Ellis writes about the degeneration of LA locals. Basically how LA has its own little niche of groupies that all get sucked into the city and can't escape. They conform to the commercialism and superficial qualities of the city, all wearing designer clothes and driving expensive cars. Everything is glamored up to make the characters think that their lives are peachy except that around them their friends are ODing or being murdered by drug dealers. Everyone is in their own cloud of drugs and can't be bothered by what happens to others. There is one particular section of the book that is cleverly written as a series of letters from a girl who is "visiting" LA from NJ (she later decides to live in LA and drop out of college). Within a five month period she is transformed into an LA clone. It was great. Ellis also used some pretty neat symbolism, but I won't get into that. I find it inspiring that Ellis can write stories where not much actually happens, but still has the reader invested because the characters are so messed up that you can't help but wanting to see if they die or not. Morbid, I know, but it gives a different perspective on how glamorous LA actually is. Ellis is quickly becoming my favorite author. JK Rowling, move over!
I think, if my memory serves me correctly, that I've already over explicated about how Ellis writes about the degeneration of LA locals. Basically how LA has its own little niche of groupies that all get sucked into the city and can't escape. They conform to the commercialism and superficial qualities of the city, all wearing designer clothes and driving expensive cars. Everything is glamored up to make the characters think that their lives are peachy except that around them their friends are ODing or being murdered by drug dealers. Everyone is in their own cloud of drugs and can't be bothered by what happens to others. There is one particular section of the book that is cleverly written as a series of letters from a girl who is "visiting" LA from NJ (she later decides to live in LA and drop out of college). Within a five month period she is transformed into an LA clone. It was great. Ellis also used some pretty neat symbolism, but I won't get into that. I find it inspiring that Ellis can write stories where not much actually happens, but still has the reader invested because the characters are so messed up that you can't help but wanting to see if they die or not. Morbid, I know, but it gives a different perspective on how glamorous LA actually is. Ellis is quickly becoming my favorite author. JK Rowling, move over!
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