Probably one of the awesomest things about living in an apartment this year (besides my WONDERFUL roommates) is that I can constantly make food and have people over. Today, I did both (sort of)--so much fun! My friend J came over early this afternoon, and helped me make the rice and adjust the ingredients for the sauce, since I know absolutely nothing about cooking with curry and he is apparently familiar with Thai cuisine. R (one of my roommates) set the table, L (another roommate) dropped by, and we had a lovely time eating dinner!
Main ingredients:
5 chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized chunks
2 cups long-grain rice + 4 cups water (in rice cooker)
Extra-virgin olive oil for skillet
Sauce:
5 gigantic spoonfuls of apple sauce
3 gigantic spoonfuls of chunky peanut butter
1 spoonful curry
1/2 spoonful chili powder (Microwave until the ingredients mix together smoothly, or ~3 minutes.)
Cook chicken in skillet. Add sauce and push around until well mixed. Serve on rice, with additional curry and chili sprinkled on top if desired. Absolutely delicious, and SO filling.
I will definitely have to try more "different" recipes. It's easy to shy away from the odd ones, since they're a bit intimidating, but this shows that they can be very WIN!
Recipe ripped off from foodnetwork.com. Thanks to my awesome mother for finding it for me!
A bit less than a month ago, I had one of the most terrible weeks this year. It was absolutely AWFUL. My medication ran out, experiments didn't work, my lab presentation was a total fail, etc. I decided to take action, and spent Thursday lunch break cooking. This recipe was sort of improvised, using another recipe as a starting point. I had been craving fish, so I settled on tilapia, which I happened to have in the freezer.
5 tilapia filets
~3/4 stick butter
black pepper
lemon juice
chili powder
thyme
salt
I started by melting the butter and mixing in the spices. Then, I dipped each filet into the mixture. Using my brand new skillet, Oscar, I cooked each filet for 2-3 minutes per side, pouring extra seasoning mix on top.
After they looked reasonably cooked, I moved them to a tupperware and added 1/2 onion, thinly sliced. After the onions were thoroughly done, I added them to the tupperware then put in 1 white potato, sliced. I occasionally poured any extra butter mixture on top. These then went into the tupperware as well.
Though I was planning on eating the tilapia for lunch the following day, my roommate L and I ended up eating this for dinner, along with some broccoli. Delicious--and therapeutic!
Having just purchased a skillet (named Oscar) I have been looking for stir-fry recipes to try out. I'd been trying not to use pots and pans too often, since I would have to borrow my roommate M's stuff, but now that I have my own, I am freeeeee to experiment!
Tonight, my other roommate L and I tried out a new recipe, courtesy of burpandslurp.com. I am titling it "Plantain and Sausage Heaven," for obvious reasons...here is the recipe, with some of my own modifications (picture is from the site--ours didn't look this pretty)!
Cut plantains and sausages into optimal-sized (as close to a cube-shape) chunks. Cook in pan.
Chop 3/4 onion, 1 clove garlic, 1/2 green pepper, and ~1/2 cup pineapple (all amounts are approximate). Pour these, as well as a handful of craisins, into the skillet.
Once the veggies are done, add the sausages and plantains back in.
Add ~1/4 cup mustard, a few squirts of lemon juice, cinnamon, black pepper, chili powder, ginger, and salt. Stir until everything is mixed and warm.
Enjoy!
Oh my gosh, SO delicious! L and I managed to have almost all of the requisite ingredients (she provided the amazing sausages and I had everything else lying around). We were missing mango ginger chutney and Greek yogurt, but we didn't really miss it. I used ginger to substitute in for the chutney and added craisins for color. We put in almond milk (as included in the original recipe), but I've omitted it from this version because it seems kind of pointless. Finally, I poured in orange-mango-pineapple juice at random times, since I had it in the fridge and we were missing mango to begin with. I don't know if it did anything, but if nothing else, it added an INCREDIBLE smell.
I highly recommend that you, faithful readers (all 6 of you :-)), try this recipe. Absolute win.
Favorite food in the world = pizza. Hands down. This is probably the thing I miss most of all since going gluten-free, and after more than two years, I'm still not used to it. I constantly crave it, and the torture is particularly acute since people eat it so often. Of course, it's not a big deal at all, but it's certainly nice when I come across a delicious, edible pizza. Even the non-delicious ones are fine.
Hence my excitement when I discovered that the Kroger near my apartment this summer carries gluten/soy free mozzarella cheese pizzas! Yes, they're a bit plain, but they're PIZZA!
Naturally, I glammed it up before baking and consuming it, so there were a few delicious toppings I piled on top of the pizza: chopped bacon, minced garlic, pineapple, and thinly-sliced onions.
This is one of the most difficult bands to categorize--the influences are all over the place. The general sound spans a whole slew of genres, and each album has a slightly different feel to it. But despite its decided strangeness, the songs are very easy to listen to. I first digested their entire discography while working on my take-home final for Biological Techniques. It was a monster final, and I ended up having more than thirty sources over the course of the twelve hours spent sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by notes and junk food. Tired of the loud, obnoxious music I usually listen to when working on a difficult assignment, I decided to try out the strange new band I'd recently discovered (courtesy of Julian Casablancas, who lists them as a favorite band), and was surprised when I realized I'd listened to all sixty-something songs almost without interruption.
Fluid, lyrical, and thoughtful, Beirut are technically a combination of Balkan folk, Mexican folk, electronica, and "world" (whatever that means), producing an overall sound generally labeled as "indie." This strange combination actually works, in a melodic stream of awesome that you have to hear to understand.
Beirut is the brainchild of New Mexico native Zach Condon, who plays ukelele and flugelhorn in addition to being lead singer. His voice is carefully emotive, reminiscent of Rufus Wainwright and Jeff Buckley. Like his vocals, the albums themselves are subtle and beautiful. Each is different, but they all have an undercurrent of loving, longing, searching, romanticism, and perhaps even nostalgia for a world never experienced. As a superficial example, see the front cover for the first album, Gulag Orkestar:
According to wikipedia, this photo (as well as the back cover) was torn out of a book found in a library in Leipzig, Germany...an unknown photographer and models, European license plate, vintage clothing, troubled situation, and ambiguous time period--romantic mystery, anyone? It was later found out that the photographs were taken by the equally moody Sergey Chilikov, a Russian photographer who is currently alive and well (see some of his other beautiful, albeit blurry, pieces here, but I don't recommend googling him...), yet the romanticism remains.
Speaking personally, all of Beirut's work is delicious, but I recommend either Gulag Orkestrar or, if in a hurry, the Lon Gisland EP [correct spelling] as a starting point for the neophyte.
Sample songs:
Postcards from Italy
Cherbourg
Le Moribond/My Family's Role in the World Revolution
Wow, no recipes posted in a while! But I'm now back out on my own at my summer internship, so I'm having to feed myself again. Here is one of my new favorites.
For me, black beans are in a special food group of familiarity, along with garlic, hummus, dark chocolate, tostones, and cafe con leche. Having been raised in a Cuban family, these beans were practically my first solid food. There's nothing quite like a plate of homemade black beans on white rice (with tostones and boliche, of course). They are flavorful, filling, cheap, and very healthy (they contain plenty of fiber, protein, folate, a lot of antioxidants, and help stabilize blood sugar).
I have recently developed and perfected a new meal idea: canned black beans dumped into a tupperware, with a few slices of mozzarella, a spoonful of minced garlic, dried chopped onions, a dash of cayenne pepper, and a handful of chips or torn up corn tortillas. Nuke for a few minutes, enjoy. Or, if there's a bit of time, stick in the slow cooker on high for 2-3 hours.
Total win! SO easy to prepare, SO delicious, and very inexpensive. The beans were under a dollar a can at Wal-Mart, the tortillas come from a gigantic stack that cost a few dollars, and the other ingredients are always around anyway. Of course, I can only make these every few days. It's such a great "cop-out" meal when I'm tired and just want to get enough protein to not start breaking down emotionally (it happens).
When I have a bit more time, I go a bit further and add the following to Gretel:
2 cans black beans
1 can corn
1 spoonful minced garlic (or 1-2 cloves)
1/2-1 onion
1/2 green bell pepper
A few dashes of cayenne pepper
A few dashes of black pepper
Any other foods that have been hanging out in the fridge for a while and need to be consumed (examples: okra, avocado, and celery).
Whatever meat is lying around. I've used ground beef I browned in my rice cooker, chopped up steak, and chicken.
Mozzarella cheese, once the soup/chili-thing is done cooking
SALT! Oh my gosh, salt salt salt salt salt. Otherwise it tastes funky.
Aka, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the genetic material! This journal article, published in 1952 by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, is a landmark discovery in molecular biology. I won't go into the gritty details, but I will offer some background and the basic gist of the experiment. (FYI, it's not the anniversary of its publication or anything--I'm just really excited that the .pdf is available online for free :-) )
At the time, no one knew exactly what passed on genetic information. By the 1950s, it was between DNA and proteins, and most scientists figured the latter were the molecules of life. It made the most sense, since proteins are far more complex than DNA--proteins can be made up of up to 20 different amino acids, whereas there are only four nucleic acids in DNA.
Hershey and Chase wanted to see what a virus used to infect bacteria (the "infectious material"). They labeled the proteins in one batch of virus with radioactive sulfur, and the DNA in another batch with radioactive phosphorus. They let the viruses hang out with the bacteria for a little while, then tested to see which batch of bacteria had labeled material. They discovered that the only bacteria with radioactive material were the ones that had been infected using viruses labeled with phosphorus--basically, DNA, not protein, was being used to pass on genetic material from virus to bacterium. Here is a diagram that does a way better job illustrating what I'm trying to explain:
The main reason why this experiment is extremely cool is that, despite the incredible importance of the findings, it is very simple and straightforward. A lot of the most revolutionary discoveries in science have been made with very simple but elegant experiments. Also, this was one of the first important biology papers coauthored by a woman (I think), so that's pretty neat too.
I have to confess that the main reason why I decided to post this is because I love how, after trying all sorts of high-tech, lab-ey ways to separate the viruses from the bacteria, Hershey and Chase settled on a plain kitchen blender...oh yeah.
