Slacker Stir Fry

I found a single frozen chicken breast in my freezer today and decided to do some awesome slacker cooking. This is my favourite thrown-together meal, but that is because I really like Mr. Noodles. The idea was given to me by Ren over at Renegade Oboe back when we used to live together. (That’s right, we were roommates.) She did it a lot better than me though. (Mostly because she usually had more than one vegetable in the fridge.)

STEP ONE!

Fry up your protein of choice in some oil in small pieces. (If you are lucky enough to have cooked leftovers, just cut up one serving worth and throw it in a pan with oil.) I almost always use chicken because it’s easy. Ren uses tofu.

STEP TWO!

While your leftover meat is sizzling, start cooking the noodley part of your favourite single-serving ramen. (Noodle-san.)

STEP THREE!

Once your meat is cooked through, throw in bite-sized pieces of whatever vegetables you may have around. Really, pretty much anything works. This time I had nothing but red onion and snow peas. I also got really energetic and chopped up some peanuts for this one. (Honestly, this part is optional if you are a real slacker. I have had a bunch of these when my fridge was empty where my ‘stir-fry’ just amounted to meat and noodles with some sauce on them.) Stir the veggies around for a couple of minutes until their colour is a brighter version of what it was before.

STEP FOUR!

Strain your ramen and throw it in the pan with the veggies and meat. Mix it up a bit, then throw in a sauce of some kind. Whatever you like. I have made some pretty bizarre choices in the sauce department, but my best choice, (and one of the cheapest) was President’s Choice “Memories of Szechuan” spicy peanut sauce. Mix it up again.

Put it on a plate and eat it. Since I like to pretend that I am an adult, I chopped up some peanuts and put it on top of mine to make it look prettier. Looks like something that real people might eat, right?

[Tl;dr? Meat + vegetables + Mr. Noodles + sauce = stir-fry.]

Red Hat Society Cupcakes!

I have been meaning to write about these cupcakes since they were made. The wonderful Lara and I made them for my mother’s 50th birthday party. (If you don’t understand the importance of the colours and whatnot, then you should read up on the RHS. Then they are quite funny.) Their creation was a bit of a fiasco, but as you can see, they turned out wonderfully, and with much leftover material.

Our initial shopping trip involved a lengthy visit to the bulk barn for baking supplies, (fondant, food colouring, bulk icing sugar…) and some other grocery store for an entire dozen eggs and two whole sticks of butter, all of which we used. (These cupcakes were healthy.) The baking all took place at my parents’ house, so I had a hard time finding things, so we wound up buying a large amount of unnecessary junk. (For example, four muffin trays and a giant bag of powdered sugar.) There was also a dart lying around in the kitchen mysteriously, so it got used as a baking instrument. (By baking instrument I mean poking thing to open stuff with.)

Our first step was to make the cake itself, which I am ashamed to say was cake-in-a-box. After using an entire container of red food colouring to make the batter the right colour, we popped the cake part in the oven and planned our next trip to the Bulk Barn. We made one batch of buttercream in the meantime, thereby making a complete disaster area and staining pretty much everything in my parents’ kitchen purple. (The meat cutting board will never be the same.)

My plan with the rec cupcakes was for the icing to be red as well, so the fact that we had already used up all of our red food colouring on the batter was an issue. Once the cupcakes came out of the oven we went on another Bulk Barn adventure and picked up another container of red food colouring and (on a whim) a tiny vial of strawberry flavouring. Seemed like a productive trip. We then drove fifteen minutes back to my parents’ house and started making the second batch of buttercream. One whole stick of butter (See? Healthy.) and a crazy amount of icing sugar later, we had some yellowish-white icing. Upon adding another entire container of red food colouring, we had some slightly pink icing. Frak. Two more trips and three more containers later, we came out with the right colour.

After icing them, which was totally the easiest part, I had to figure out how the frak to make things out of fondant without them falling apart. (And pray that the little bit of purple that we had left was enough to colour the fondant.) With an awful lot of instruction from Lara, I spent about a million years making tiny bows out of sheets of purple sugar. Lara felt the need to take a picture of my “trying hard face”, which, though you can’t really see it, features my tongue sticking out of the side of my mouth. It would have been neat if I had any tools besides a knife that was altogether too big for my purposes, but it wasn’t a complete disaster.

All the people who ate the red ones kind of looked like they had been eating people, but sacrifices must be made for aesthetics. If I hadn’t spent so much money learning to be a musician already, maybe I would consider learning to be a baker. (Maybe I will anyway?)

Adventures in Deep Frying Pickles

I was having a conversation with a friend today about life and hoop scotch [sic] and other things, and eventually we got to talking about food. Being in Japan presently, he was talking about places from Kitchener that he misses eating at. Greasy food cravings, bacon (which apparently is not that common in Japan), and pickle fries. I suspect now that pickle fries are something completely different than I thought they were, but regardless, I started thinking (and talking) about deep fried pickle spears. (There was also talk of wrapping deep fried pickles in bacon and then oven-roasting them, but as I didn’t have any bacon, that will have to be an adventure for another day.)

I decided, as I hadn’t eaten anything yet (at 3 in the afternoon), that deep fried pickles were as good a lunch as any. I Googled “deep fried pickles” and briefly looked at one recipe, but before I had even finished reading the ingredients list I thought to myself “psh. I can do this. How hard can it be?” I know what you are thinking: “Oh no. Things that start with ‘how hard can it be?’ always end in disaster!” but not so! For once, it was really easy. If anyone cares to try it, I will send you my delicious made up combination of stuff that I used for breading and breading adhesive, but it would be easier for you to just look it up on the internet. (I’m sure there is a name for ‘breading adhesive’, but I don’t know what it is.)

So Operation Home-Made-Deep-Fried-Pickles was a great success. Successful enough that I felt the need to take an artsy picture to show them off. (I should be a food photographer.) As you can see, they are a little bit ugly. (Who knew that the technique for getting breading to stick to meat does not also work for pickles?) The ones that were double-breaded looked much prettier, but the breading fell off of them a lot easier. You can’t win them all.

All in all, a delicious way to spend half an hour.

Banana Marshmallows

Some things make me unreasonably happy. For example, the song Missy, epic orchestral music, office supplies, cuddles, singing loudly, and banana marshmallows. (You know, those ones that are ALWAYS stale? I’m pretty sure they let them get stale right at the factory so that no one will ever know what they are like when they are fresh.) My relationship with banana marshmallows is a complicated one though.

I was walking through the kitchen, feeling kind of blah, and I decided I wanted something to snack on. After casting around for something to spark my interest in eating it, I remembered that we had bought a $2 bag of banana marshmallows (that were probably on clearance from Easter) and my face lit up like a frigging candle. There was no one in the kitchen to see how crazily happy I was about these stale banana things, so I continued to beam like an idiot for quite some time, until I walked into the bedroom with them and Bryan laughed at me. I’m not sure whether he was laughing at me because of the stupid grin I had on my face and the way I was holding the bag of marshmallows as if it were a teddy bear, or just at the fact that I’m sure he believed that I was going to sit down and eat that whole bag of marshmallows in one sitting. (Which I did NOT.) Anyway, that was a bit of a downer on my marshmallow high, but I still had them, and could be eating them at that very moment. So I cracked into the deliciousness and all was well in the world. After about two fifths of the bag of them, (I struggled really hard at picking a fraction for that number, because half was WAY to much, and a third was not nearly enough.) I decided that they were losing their appeal, and sealed them up and put them on the table beside my desk. My irrational glee at the idea of eating these marshmallows had passed.

This morning I woke up and sat down on my computer, because that’s what I do, and thought, without any trace of excitement, (because it’s really hard to be excited when you are just waking up, unless it’s Christmas,) that banana marshmallows for breakfast sounded like a smart idea. An hour or so later, I realized that I had devoured the entire bag. (Remember back when I was defending myself about eating the whole thing in one sitting? That’s because it took TWO sittings.) This made me depressed. At the beginning of the bag I was practically giddy with excitement about these marshmallows, and now I am downright sad about them. Partially because they are gone, but mostly because I feel like a bad person for sitting down and eating such a ridiculous amount of candy all at once, and partly because my stomach is upset because marshmallows and some freezies are the only things I have eaten all day, and also a little bit because I ate so many of them that I didn’t really enjoy them anymore.

Tl;dr: I was happy because I had marshmallows, and now I am sad because they are gone, and because I ate all of them by myself. My feelings towards banana marshmallows are complicated. The end.

Distraction

I had originally written a long and elaborate series of words about the tiny herb garden that I recently acquired, and then I remembered that I have to close at work tomorrow, ALL BY MYSELF and I am terrified, and that is much more interesting than me not knowing how to identify a bunch of plants. Maybe I will talk about my plant-related confusion another day.

So work. I am SO SCARED to close tomorrow. It is a Monday night, so hopefully it won’t be busy, but I don’t have a good driver helping me, and I don’t want to have to call the store manager in the middle of the night and ask her what the crap I am supposed to be doing, so I will have to figure it out. I am just concerned that ten million people will decide that they want pizza at 10:30 on a Monday night and I will have to make them by myself because I will be the only one there because the driver will be out delivering ten million pizzas. I am also concerned that I will forget how to do all of the computer things that are necessary for a close because I still haven’t ever had to do them myself without some serious prompting from someone else.

I guess time will tell. I’m sure I will have a ridiculous story to tell tomorrow night, but I will be too tired to tell it, so maybe the internet will hear about my exploits on Tuesday. We’ll see.