chrryblssmninja

I've been trying to write a proper post for a while, but my feelings shift with the tides.

So here are handy year-end links instead!

My year in new music!
Other highlights of the year in movies, TV, and books

Favorite new shows: Elementary and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
New favorite cartoon: Adventure Time

Feature-length movies I watched during the year: http://chrryblssmninja.tumblr.com/films2012
Films of the 2010's, ranked: http://chrryblssmninja.tumblr.com/cinema2010s
Rankings don't necessarily correspond to ratings.
Books of all sorts read during the year: http://chrryblssmninja.tumblr.com/books2012

aw man I need to update my cooking posts, because I did get to improve on this pasta sauce by simmering Roma tomatoes for a long time. I'll try heirloom tomatoes next when they're on sale.
Lots of stuff went down offline this year but I think I'll dump all that negativity in 2012 and only focus on catching up on food/restaurant/cooking posts in 2013. My next assignment: making acceptable masala chai tea (or even latte) with Assam tea base and pre-packaged garam masala spice.

ETA: whoops I forgot to finish up my "TV episodes watched" list!
( episodes watched from October 1 to December 31 )

My latest book review is up! Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction.

( liveblog and thoughts on Sherlock 2.2 - The Hounds of Baskerville )


in other news:
lol look at my spill making hot chocolate with Nutella
I cleaned it up well, though.


Finally: maybe the Star Wars crime TV show might happen after all.

Lately, I've stopped baking because money is tighter than ever, and eggs with rice can make one meal. So my cooking has been limited, only making a quesadilla here, a sandwich there.

While searching for jobs this afternoon, I came up with the idea of using the chocolate bar I got (Lindt 85%, just over $2 at Walmart) with the tortillas we have stocked in the kitchen. I also wanted to add some cinnamon for spice. I looked up recipes and thought this one was closest to what I was thinking.

At dinnertime, I was ready to experiment.

I dusted a sheet of wax paper with cinnamon, then put the butter in the pan before melting it at a low heat. The pan must be coated with the butter. Then I placed the tortilla in the pan. These are really cheap flour tortillas, so I had to let them warm in the pan a few seconds more than usual, or else they break.
Then I break the chocolate onto the tortilla. It's warm around the pan, so I have to do this fast.

This is the best picture I could get of my chocolate-stained hands:


Cook as if you were cooking a quesadilla. Place the finished product on the wax paper and let the cinnamon coat it, flipping if necessary.



Experiment with the heating levels and amount or type of butter/coating substance.



- - -

On the way to Walmart yesterday, I saw that the sunflowers were growing again!


Also, I have a work assignment next week, staffing this event.

so I failed at making pastillas

( twice )

STUBBORN NEAR-SUCCESSES IN COOKING



Fried ice cream. Recipe from here.

I used crackers for the "coating." I recommend you make more of the cinnamon-sugar-crumbs coating than they suggest.

Also, I found out in the process of cooking that it takes a lot of oil to deep-fry something. I couldn't coat and fry it 100% completely, thus the leak you see on the plate above. I had to find the smallest pot possible, and it still used up a lot of oil. At the end, it looked like this.

It tasted good.



Now I'm waiting for the Craigyferg Doctor Who special. Five more minutes!

this is what I had for lunch


there's this version as well as this version.

That second one uses the Lindt sea salt chocolate. I tried this before with that chocolate (which is cheap at Walmart) and it was okay, but I wanted more sea salt flavor to balance

Those recipes have special instructions, but I just grilled the thing using olive oil and that's it.

I used Valhrona 85% cacao chocolate, because it's good and only $2.99 a bar at Trader Joe's.

I also used wheat bread because I'm poor

and I got a bit of sea salt on sale yesterday

yay for expanding my easy yummy sandwich repertoire

VICTORIES IN COOKING

mwhahahahahaha I sucessfully made this olive oil rosemary cake for lunch!



I halved the recipe, because I finally found a tin in the house small enough to fit in the toaster oven. I was worried about our rosemary being stale, so I crushed it in a napkin, hoping that breakage might possibly release more flavor. When measuring the vanilla extract, I accidentally spilled some into the batter, so I had to judge how much extract I had to pour back from the measuring spoon.

But it turned out fine and yummy!

Some tasting instinct told me to put boiled peanuts and apple chunks on the side. They became good watery things to nom while the slices of cake cooled (they were pretty hot) and to rest the tastebuds before another slice.

Afterwards, I had mango juice to drink. We got a giant pack on sale a few days ago, yay.

Also on sale: this pretty top at Banana Republic. $10.99 each when I got them! And this weekend in the store, the salespeople walk around giving discount flyers, so I got 25% off too. I got this one and a white one. My mom wanted me to get a purplish blue one as well, but they didn't have my size.

The conspiracy against size 4s is still strong, though. There were cool pants I considered getting that would be fine for Work 2 (where I have to look professional), but they had every size EXCEPT 4. It's really frustrating when you see 0,2,3,5,6,8-14 but no 4. So many times. So many places. But hey, it saves me money on the things I can't find my size for.
At least I haven't grown much since I turned twelve...ten years ago, so many of my older clothes have lasted a long time until they wore out. I still have one pair of shoes from when I was nine! uhh...my shoe size ranges from 4-5 American, sometimes 6 depending on the shoe.
handy international shoe conversion chart
Yeah. It can be really hard to find things.


In conclusion: fun geeky link via meiou_set: How to Be Heian.
Heian Japanese culture is super interesting. I like how specific they can be in describing aesthetics and emotion, even with slim vocabularies. awesome.

Even though I like much of the literature and culture, I'm far from ~embodying the Heian spirit~ Especially since I like excercise. So much so that I get up at 4:45 AM so I can exercise before 6 AM work. but hey, I do it as anti-stress.
Exercise is pretty much decadent in my family. So I guess it counts.

LOST WAS EPIC

They seriously have to move the plot forward from now, though.



and now...

EXPERIMENTS IN COOKING

- one of the giant food packages friends gave us is a bunch of croissants from Costco. To make them taste more ~authentic~, I put bits of butter on top of the croissant and then heated it in the toaster oven until the butter melted. This also makes the croissant have more of that crisp, flaky taste I like.

- I failed at making caramel the first time - don't use a black-bottomed saucepan, even if the cookbook says metal cleans easier- but the second time I got it nice. Since it was hard to clean off a dish the first time, I poured the second batch onto sliced apples on wax paper.

Turned out I could easily pull the apples away from the caramel after it hardened. I'm not a fan of thick caramel. I like it either chewy or thin or cracked into pieces in creme brulee. But look at this:



IT'S A PRETTY LITTLE DRAGONFLY!!!

Now I have an idea of what to put on top of some baked stuff - use apples or other fruit to create a loose mold, then let it harden and see what comes out.


ETA: oh wait my dream during the nap I had before Lost kind of predicted something ( SPOILER SPOILER )

GAME OF THRONES PILOT IS PICKED UP BY HBO
I'm about 400 pages into the second book now.
Of course it takes a TV/film adaptation to get me fulfilling the promises of "oh yeah I will read that" I've been saying for so many years


and now....


( MISADVENTURES IN COOKING )