Phase one of "Project Clean Garage: Avoid Hoarding Show Nomination"

On Friday I was sitting at my desk and had a sudden craving for scallops.  Usually I sear my scallops so that I can watch them cook to the firmness that I like, but I wanted to try something different.  I had seen the Awesome Baked Sea Scallops recipe on Allrecipes and decided to try it.  Honestly, I don't now why I bother buying cookbooks anymore since I automatically check Allrecipes before I look at my books.  Most of the recipes that I found required hacking up the scallops into bits for stuffing, dips, and unscallop worthy mixtures.  I'm sure that all of those recipes were tasty, but I cannot bare the thought of chopping up beautiful whole sea scallops!  Awesome Baked Sea Scallops was the first recipe I came across that kept them whole.  The dish was easy enough to make, though it took longer than the specified 11-14 minutes to cook.  It was really hard to see how done the scallops were through the little window on my mom's oven, which I've gotten better at using, mind you.  I had my face practically against the glass of the window to see how the scallops were coming along.  My parents like their scallops on the verge of being over done, and in my opinion rubbery, so they would have been way too raw for them at the 14 minute mark.  I took them out and found that they were way too squishy (even for me) and had to put them back in, which is a no-no because the constant heat of the oven was compromised when I opened the door.  Oh well.  I believe I kept them in for around 20 minutes total.  The scallops were a little over cooked for my liking, but my parents thought that they were perfect.  With the butter, shallots, and garlic the flavor was awesome, but my dad and I both thought that the bread crumbs felt like we were biting into sand.  I ended up scraping off the bread crumbs from mine and just ate the scallops.  I would probably make these again and just cook them in the butter mixture.  I don't think that they would look as pretty, but I think it would be okay since we wouldn't have that odd sand-like feeling.  I would suggest making this recipe and cooking the scallops without bread crumbs for around 11 minutes and then flipping on the broiler to get a nice browned top.
 

Baked scallops over tortellini 

With my dad and brother down in Monterey getting their scuba certification tests done and Nick gone to a car show with friends, my mom and I had plenty of time to start cleaning the garage.  Back in April I vowed that I would start the garage the first weekend in May and get my mom and dad's cars back into the garage by June before it gets too hot to work outside.  I know that it would have been best to get rid of the old sofa that is sitting in there since it is the biggest thing and would clear up masses of space, but we have no way to get rid of it [yet...mauuahhhh].  It is too big to fit in our car, we can't leave it on the street because we'll get fined, we can't put it on Craigslist because my mom has been throwing out cushions whenever our garbage can isn't full (plus if it was usable it would still be inside the house), and we haven't really looked for anyone to have it taken away for us.  My dad said that he wants to hack it up with some tool that we got him last year, but he hasn't gotten around to it yet.  Dave, my coworker, suggested getting one of those pod things that you pretty much can throw everything in.  I think it's a great idea, but my mom wants to go through everything before we junk it all.  At least with a garbage pod we can get rid of that sofa!  In my opinion, if it's in the garage, we clearly don't use/know it's there anymore so we wouldn't be missing anything if we just junked it all.  At this point I've stopped caring about donations since there is just so much stuff to get through.  

Even though it would have been logical to start with the sofa, I planned to start at the other end in the third car garage.  I figured that if I started there I would be able to see progress and not feel like it's all for naught.  I've find, like most people, that when you clean everything seems to get messier before it gets better and if I would have started with the super messy midsection I think I would have gotten discouraged halfway through.  Well, that's what I was telling myself all through April anyway.  So on Saturday morning I got up to get my hair cut and then started on the garage. After the last hair cut I had, I wasn't very happy with the longish A-line after a while.  It looked sloppy so I had my hair dresser give me a bob like I had originally wanted.  This is probably the nicest that you'll see this cut be styled.  I haven't been doing much with my hair but put it in a ponytail like usual.  It's a shame that not even an hour after I got the blow out and style it went up in a ponytail so that I could do the garage.

New hair cut

The garage in full force!

See why I said that it's necessary to get this clean?  From looking at the inside our house you would never have suspected, unless you've already seen it, that we had sooo much stuff in here!

Clearing out a mess like this took some planning.  The focus, as afore mentioned, was the third car garage with the pantry area.  The first day was designated to sorting food.  My mom had managed to keep the tiny aisle to the pantry just wide enough to fit a little step ladder.  I started with clearing out and consolidating all of our paper products on the top shelf.  A lot of the stuff in the giant pile in front of the pantry consisted of paper products that just wouldn't fit in the cupboard.  By neatly stacking everything and taking them out of their original packaging so that they could fit better to the space provided, I managed to get everything in there.  Next I went down to the second shelf that needed some reorganizing.  

Before I could get to the third, fourth, and fifth shelves I realized that I would have to clear out all the stuff piled in front of the cabinet in order to clear out the three bottom shelves.  Once that was clear, I was able to take all of the stuff from the shelves off and either sort them or throw them out.  Since the cabinet is so deep there were food stuffs back there that had been forgotten about.  I found purple ketchup and bottle lemonade that looked like urine.  I also discovered that cake mixes have expiration dates.  I didn't know that they had them, but I threw out box after box of old cake mix and we still have a ton of it left.  Thankfully none of the cans that we had were puffy from being so old, but if they had rust or the labels were unrecognizable I got rid of them.  Just getting rid of the old cans freed up a lot of space and makes me feel a little better that if someone in my family was digging around for something to eat that they won't accidentally pull out an expired can.

Once the three shelves were empty, I mulled over how to put the food back in.  It's actually kind of difficult to find a logical way to stack the canned food especially since the cans go in about 10 deep and three high.  I'm hoping by stacking everything in categories that my mom will just reach further and further back to keep getting soup or chili cans out, which will hopefully prevent so much waste in the future.  (It was a little painful to see all that food/money be thrown out.)  By the end of the day my elbow joint was creaky and my odd desire to work at a grocery store was cured.  My obsessive nature pushed me through to the end.  There were a few things out that my mom said that we should just leave until the next day, but I had to get them into a place that wasn't the middle of the floor.  

While I was doing all of this, my mom had set to work on sorting through old paper products that had been saved because the packages were half open.  She found Care Bear napkins and table cloths and all sorts of little girl paper decorations for parties that were so 80's it was comical.  Kids nowadays probably wouldn't even know who the Care Bears are.  Not the Care Bears I know anyway.  I think I've seen some that are really bubbly looking cartoons of Care Bears.  They're practically unrecognizable.  For shame!  Anyway, my mom is very thorough in her cleaning jobs, but she gets very sentimental and I would catch her staring at the table cloths remembering certain birthday parties while I was unceremoniously throwing cake mix into a big black bag.  As a result, it takes my mom a really, really long time to clean because she likes to look at all the stuff we have, although by Sunday she was getting much better. 

Beginning of Day One

 I couldn't take a picture of inside the pantry cabinets because I couldn't get in there to take it.  I felt very skinny being able to squeeze through a 4 inch gap of the doors and the pile of stuff to be sorted.

Old lunch box

Somewhere during our clean I found the old lunch box that I used to carry everyday in high school.  Yes, I carried a lunch box and was gosh darn proud of it.  I had a little bought of sentimentality before it went into the garbage bag.  See, this is all you have to do.  A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

Newly sorted pantry

By the end of the day I was getting really pooped.  My mom had stuck some beers in the fridge for me so while I was sipping away she made nice little labels for everything in the pantry.  The trick that I use to continue on to the end is to not sit down on something comfy.  I was sitting on the step ladder which isn't the softest thing for your butt.  If I would have gone inside to sit on the sofa the rest of the clean up wouldn't have gotten done.  For dinner my mom and I were so tired that we sat in front of the tv and she made herself nachos and I had left over tortellini with Chicken a'la King sauce on top.  

 

End of Day One

Emmy is looking at me like I'm crazy, but we haven't seen the cement in this part of the garage since I was in high school. 

Beginning of Day Two

This was clean up from where the tissue boxes were towards the doors of the garage.

For some reason, I had a really difficult time sleeping on Saturday night and then woke up at the ungodly hour of 8:30am on a Sunday.  I don't even get up that early for work!  I was planning on making an early Mother's Day dinner for my mom so I went over to Ranch 99 to pick up some clams and got dim sum while I was there.  After we had some food and lots of coffee, my mom and I headed back out to the garage.  There wasn't nearly as much stuff in the second section of the third car garage.  Sorting all the food was much more of a challenge for my organizational skills than this part.  We basically had to figure out what we wanted to keep and what we could get rid of.  For instance, a box of baby bottles and plates were donated to the Veteran's pick up today.  Along with that are some barbies and toddler toys.  I know my parents are sentimental and want us to keep all these toys so that we can hand them down to our kids, but with all the new regulations for what is safe for babies and the fact that Fisher Price has so many cool baby toys, hand-me-downs just aren't going to happen.  

To sort, I made "keep" and "give away" piles on our driveway.  Thankfully we were able to give away more stuff than we were keeping.  I was stoked by the idea that Christopher could possibly use my dad's old work out bench and that I could use the treadmill, but then I started moving stuff back in and that hope was crushed.  I think that we can still get onto the treadmill with no problem, but stuff got piled onto the workout bench. What disappointed me the most were the bikes.  There seemed to be so much space on the platform until I had to put the bikes away.  They just make everything look so messy.  We were hoping that the Veteran's donation people would take my Mom's old stationary bike, but they didn't it.  I'm not surprised, but disappointed.  Anyone want a stationary exercise bike circa 1983?  That's right, 1983!  My mom said that she had gotten the bike right before she found out she was pregnant with me so then she didn't use it.  I remember playing on the bike a lot.  I must have thought it was some sort of mini jungle gym.  

End of Day Two

 Hopefully my dad will install hooks in the beams of our rafters so that we can hang the bikes up when they aren't being used.  Maybe now my mom and I will use the treadmill that it doesn't have piles of stuff on it.

After finishing up in the garage I gave Emmy a quick bath because she's been making my allergies really bad from the pollen that sticks to her fur and then started on dinner.  I have to say, with this new short fur giving her a bath took less than 10 minutes and she was dry in no time.  Anyway, I was planning on making Emeril Lagasse's Fresh Seafood Pasta.  We had made my parents something very similar before, but it was a tomato based sauce instead a white wine sauce like what I made this time.  I'm not sure which I liked better.  Instead of using muscles, I used clams since I can get them live at Ranch 99.  I also added scallops and squid to the mix, both of which I bought frozen.  The only thing that I would suggest for this recipe is that after you add the shrimp, scallops, and squid that you take the pot off the burner immediately so that the seafood can cook in the residual heat.  When it's waiting to be served it will cook enough so that your seafood won't be overdone like mine.  I let the seafood cook until the proper doneness, but then when I was waiting to serve the food, it continued to cook and the shrimp were over done.  I think I will also sprinkle in some red pepper flakes for an extra kick next time.

I couldn't get over how gorgeous these tomatoes were. 

Early Mother's Day dinner

Our early Mother's Day dinner since we're going to be busy this coming weekend with Jazz Dinner Dance and Mother's Day dinner in the city.

Tired girl after a hard day of watching Mommy and Pau Pau work in the garage.

I don't know what I was thinking, but after we had our Mother's Day dinner I worked out with Christopher.  Not only had I been in the garage lifting boxes of encyclopedias and kid books, but I worked out too.  No wonder I can't move.

Nick's birthday weekend

What a week it was.  Monday was a normal hum drum Monday, but come Tuesday I was busy as a bee.  Nick took me to a nice French Bistro in Lafayette called Metro for our six month anniversary.  I know, it's already been six months!  Time sure does fly when you're having fun!  At Metro we ordered a dozen oysters and calamari as appetizers. He's created a monster by introducing me to oysters.  (I think I say that every time I have them now.) I love them and can't get enough...of the small ones, that is.  I still haven't developed taste buds for the larger, more briny mollusks.  For dinner Nick ordered black cod over a rice cake and I had a lamb sausage and a side of potatoes.  My goodness, it was good.  On his sister's recommendation I also got a Pink Lavender Metro cocktail that was really tasty.  All in all I thought the place was good.  The portions were just about right and the setting was very nice.  It had a modern club-ish feel in the front by the bar though it was a nice sit down restaurant with a fireplace and sun room in the back.  Maybe the owners were trying to dip into the best of both worlds for ambiance.  Who knows, the food was good and that's what we care about. The evening ended nicely with Glee and V, two of my favorite shows. 

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!

Cooking, cooking and more cooking

 To kick off this cooking weekend I started Friday afternoon by making the Greek Lemon Cake I found on Allrecipes.  First road block: Christopher and I went to Safeway looking for cake flour.  I know the stuff exists, but Safeway didn't have it.  We scoured those shelves looking for it, but it was no where to be found.  It's a good thing for Allrecipes' resources and reviews.  According to the flour article, you are not supposed to substitute all purpose for cake flour.  However, there was a reviewer who said that if you use regular all purpose you take out two tablespoons for every cup to get the same sort of result.  Since I've just started baking I can't actually tell you if it had the same texture and consistency, but it seemed to work out fine to me. 

It was super delicious even though it was a tiny bit under cooked.  There was a little portion that was "custardy" as my mom put it.  Woops.  The rest of the cake was good though!  The recipe started with peaking egg whites, which I was apprehensive about in my last post.  I've seen this done quite a bit on Barefoot Contessa, Paula Dean, and even when my mom has done it, but I'm impatient.  I beat the egg whites until the mixing bowl looked like it was full of bubbly loogie and then added the sugar.  Apparently the loogie-like egg whites become more like meringue, which I knew but chose to ignore.  I figured that it had been beaten long enough and I hadn't done it correctly.  It's a good thing my mom was around to tell me that I needed to leave the whites to beat longer.  Thankfully they came to fruition even though I added the sugar way too early.  So after beating the heck out of those egg whites they finally fluffed up like they were supposed to.  I swear that if I didn't have a stand mixer I would never, ever bake.  Anyway, putting together all the ingredients took a lot longer than I thought it would.  I'm hoping that when I start getting better this will speed up.  Once the cake was done I topped it with confectioners sugar.  I thought about making a glaze and frosting it that way, but I kept envisioning pools of gloppy glaze and decided to go with sprinkled powdered sugar, which is pretty fool proof.  Even though the cake was completely cool before I powdered it, (I let it sit over night) it was a very moist cake so after a while the sugar started to soak in.  This could be because it was a little under cooked, but I can't say for sure.  Hopefully half a year from now and many cakes later, I will be able to look back and say, yup, cake flour makes a difference and yup, it was too moist because it didn't bake long enough.  Time will tell.

Greek Lemon Cake

After making the cake I thought I was going to be too burnt out to cook, but it was actually refreshing.  The pressure was off and I was back in a realm to which I am a little bit more familiar with.  While my cake was baking I was measuring out spices to bring to Nick's for our dinner and for the dinner that we were going to be making with Linda.  Linda and I planned to go grocery shopping together, which we did, but I didn't want to have to buy all new spices so I prepacked them in little baggies (clearly marked of course) and took them with me to Nick's place.  

For some reason I had been craving fajitas for a couple of days but didn't want to go to a Mexican place and pay a lot of money for good, but fattening food.  I was a little discouraged with making fajitas ourselves since the meat needed to be marinated and I wasn't picking it up until I headed over to his place.  I don't know why, but I was reluctant to do a dry rub on the meat even though I love dry rubs.  After realizing this, I decided that dry rubbing the meat would be just fine for the fajitas.  After googling "dry rubbed fajitas" I found a good recipe on Recipezaar.com.  Along with making the fajita meat, Nick went to a local Mexican restaurant and picked up rice and beans and we also made our own pico de gallo.  The meat turned out so well.  It had an awesome kick to it.  Yum yum yum. 

Fajita burritos that Nick and I made Friday night.

On Saturday before heading to Nick's where Linda and Rob were coming for a mini cooking lesson and to make dinner with us I made my dad and myself giant bagel breakfast sandwiches.  (My mom and brother were at a band thing.)  On the toasted bagel were two slices of cheddar cheese, kielbasa sausage, and two sunny side up eggs with ketchup.  Oh it was delicious. 

Stuffed to the gills, I was ready to start making dinner with Linda.  Hehehe.  With sharp knives in hand, Linda and I set out to start making our own enchilada sauce and enchiladas, both recipes from Allrecipes which is my go-to recipe website if you hadn't noticed.  My mom said to me on Friday while I was watching my egg whites peak that I choose difficult recipes when just beginning.  I am starting to think she is right.  The enchiladas weren't difficult in the sense that we had to do extravagant things.  It's not like we were trying to make an aspic or something, but it took a lot of work.  

Linda did pretty much all the cooking with Nick and I milling around and trying to hold ourselves back from checking the status of the chicken too many times.  It is a lot harder to not step in than you think.  When I first started cooking my mom showed me how to dice and onion, but I refused to do it her way and would do slices and then chop into a dice.  I think it killed her a little bit everytime she saw me do it.  She'd always show me how to do it, but would then step back and let me figure it out the hard way that her way was better.  (I'm stubborn.  It runs in the family.)  Eventually I learned the right way to go about dicing an onion.  I also would always hold the knife at the handle and not at the bolster where you have a better grip and more control.  When Nick showed me how to hold the knife I resisted at first but then acquiesced after watching a few instructional videos.  By starting on garlic that is easy to cut and low to the cutting board (I have a harder time with using proper knife form on larger vegetables like thick carrots so I started with smaller stuff first) I was able to get the hold down while also using the rocking motion that I was finally getting used by holding the handle.  Holding the knife down at the bolster actually makes it easier to do that rocking motion, who would have thought?  Thank goodness Linda is much more receptive than I am.  She picked up the bolster hold, which feels really awkward at first, quickly and was chopping away in no time.  

Anyway, the whole point to me getting side-tracked is that it's much more difficult to stand back and let someone learn than it seems.  This is exactly that saying "Give a man to a fish, he eats for a day.  Teach a man to fish, he eats for life."  Once things were going smoothly and we had our mise done I reverted to my cleaning lady mode and started cleaning things as Linda used them.  This worked out well so that she always had uncontaminated knives and cutting boards to use.  By the time we were ready to assemble the enchiladas we were getting tired so Nick suggested that we do them lasagna style.  It was the best idea of the day.  Linda layered tortillas, enchilada filling, and our enchilada sauce up so that it was basically a Mexican lasagna.  Again, Nick and Rob went to get beans and rice from a restaurant so that we wouldn't have to make that ourselves.  The enchilada lasagna was soooooo good. It was a major success and I think, even though it was was labor intensive, that I'll be making this for my family. 

Linda hard at work

Rob also hard at work

While we were slaving away at our enchilada feast, Christopher and Briana were getting ready to dance the night away.  Awww how cute they look!

Briana's prom

On Sunday I spent the day at home doing stuff around the house.  After lunch Christopher and I went to Costco so that I could get dirt and plants for my vegetable patch.  We got 3 tomato plants (I ended up going back for three more while I was planting yesterday) two green bell peppers, and a pepperchini plant.  I have a feeling that the bell pepper plants were mislabeled and that we got two pepperchinis instead of two bell by accident.  The leaves of one of the "bell pepper" plants looks just like the pepperchini plant that we got.  By the pointedness of the leaves the mystery plant is not a bell pepper.  If I remember correctly from my planting in NY the spicy peppers have pointy leaves and the bell have rounded.  Oh well.  We'll see what happens when it starts to sprout.  

Things were going pretty well until the allergies hit.  I think I was only outside for an hour before I could barely open my eyes and was sneezing up a storm.  Getting halfway through de-weeding the strawberry patch I decided to take on the vegetable patch that had a bunch of weeds and wood in it.   That's when I started seeing nickle-sized brown spiders with spindly legs scurrying across the dirt towards and away from me.  (The bugs hide under the wood.)  There was more than one girlish squeal and sprinting across the yard.  My dad, who was putting a sealant on our patio, would just shake his head.  Since the strawberry patch was relatively safe, I went back to weed that section.  By the time I finished with the strawberries, my allergies were killing me.  Christopher came to my rescue and evacuated all the debris and weeds from the vegetable lot.  He also put in more dirt, hoed, and watered the patch so that I could plant.  (I asked if he wanted to take a picture by his hard work but he declined.)  I did however take a lovely picture of how miserable I was.  The rest of the night, even though I showered, I my nose was runny.  I felt like I was drowning in my own snot.  I had to plug up my nose so that it wouldn't drip on the food that I was preparing.  After a couple glasses of wine which usually clogs me up right away I was no longer drippy but at a normal nasal passage state...that's how runny I was.  At the end of the night after dinner I was drained.  My vegetables weren't planted, but at least Christopher cleared out the area and I got my strawberries in better order.  

Before vegetable patch

After vegetable patch

Before strawberry patch

After strawberry patch

Miserable allergies

For dinner I had picked up some pork tenderloins at Costco.  I rubbed them down with two different spices.  I also made a veggie dish with all the stuff in our fridge.  My mom always buys all these vegetables that look awesome but then we don't eat them all.  This time I cut them all up and put them in one big stir fry. 

Grilled pork tenderloin with Southwestern and Middle Eastern Rub from my Good House Keeping cookbook.

I don't know how she did it, but she managed to get a grass stain on her eyebrow while we were outside doing yard work.  She says that she was also working very hard, which is why she has the stain.

Green brow