I'm not back yet

Has it been a year yet? Jeeze. I've been so busy with school that I abandoned this place completely. But I still have such warm feelings for it! While I did abandon the blogging, I did not abandon cooking! ... But I did cut down on it due to my time being taken up with assignments, projects, and other fun exciting learning experiences.. :| Don't get me wrong, I'm all about learning, but learning so much in so little time is just stressful.

Almost done though! One week of classes, one week of finals, and I'm practically free to finally set up our Christmas tree, cook up a holiday feast for some friends, and make treats for Nickie's family's Christmas dinner.

What have I been up to lately... Let's see.. Nickie and I almost moved in together! So now it's like, legit. We had our 3 year anniversary, for which we visited La Chaumiere - a fancy French place uptown. We went there for our 1 year anniversary too, and had another very pleasant, very expensive 2.5 hour dining experience complete with wine, cheese, and souffle. We were the youngest couple there - it was full of older folks and (clearly loaded) families. I can't express how grateful I am to be able to experiences places like this at my age.

We also were hoping to go to a German restaurant and beer hall Wurst, but it was bad judgement on our part - we arrived around 7:30 on a Friday night and just couldn't get a table. So we settled for Antonio's Garlic Clove just down the street from Wurst. We had brie in pastry filled with roasted garlic and spinach, pasta for main (I had the one with seafood - very nice!), and garlic-y desserts. Yes, literally everything in this place has garlic in it, and unless you have a few days to spend at home on your own afterwards, I would not recommend this place. And it's not because of garlic breath. I'm gonna stop talking about that now.

Nickie and I attended his first company Christmas party last Friday. It was at Alloy, just off of MacLeod Trail close to downtown. Great place! Although it looks like it's located in the sketchiest part of town, they do a very nice job of camouflaging the fact. Great ambiance, delicious food, open bar... Good party! I was very happy to meet the people who work with Nickie. Also, I had a pavlova for the first time! Twas, how you say, yummy.

We've continued drinking lots of new beer, and I've acquired a taste for red wine. The Co-op beer passport thing ended, and we actually collected all four steins, and all 4 sets of glasses - although we've yet to receive one of the sets.

What else, what else... I got a great deal on a KitchenAid Dutch oven! Was $100, I got it on sale for $30! Didn't have a chance to use it yet, though. It's too pretty. I also got a Breville Convection oven on my Visa points - woohoo! It's awesome. I plan on preparing basically everything that will fit in it. It's got tons of settings, and I assume is pretty damn good with heating up to the correct temperature and maintaining it. My oven is old :( The convection oven takes little to no time to heat up, too! It's great.

I attempted to cook an artichoke at some point a few weeks ago - complete failure. I probably didn't strip off enough leaves, but they were super mushy on one side, and not ingestible on the other. Didn't taste good. Will try again later...

All in all, I can't wait to finish school, get a job, and get back to my favorite hobby of cooking.

Testing out BlogPress!

Waddup! Finally I can post comfortably from my phone. Thank you, Regan! Check out her awesome new blog. I also made lemon pound cake with a lemon glaze. It was delicious, and, as most delicious things do, contained two sticks of butter. God, I hope this post doesn't turn out too ugly. Here we go!


Ksenia
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Update! Yeah, it was ugly... I reformatted what's above like 20 times.

Delicious Links

Although it may seem as if I have fallen off the edge of the Earth, I'm still here - just a bit lazier than usual (and you thought that wasn't possible!). I got a ton of stuff to post, I just need to get around to posting it. Egghh, it's tough when you've got HBO a cold.

I was looking over my Favorite Sites page, and realized that, more often than not, the things I cook now (undocumented, that is) come from some of the many food blogs I subscribe to. While I'd love to sit and look at FFOODD ATTACK all day, I actually wanna taste some of that. So here are a few of my recent favorites (NOT in that order!).

The Kitchn
This one is one of my daily reads. There are always tons of useful posts - "how to"s, readers' questions answered, useful tips, delicious recipes, collections. Lots of great stuff. Check out their Delicious Links post on the left and a post about online specialty foods store on the right.

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Restaurant Review: Namskar - Cuisine of India

I would like to apologize up-front for the terrible quality of the photos. One day, when I get rich from blogging, I will carry around a DSLR and a light source, so I can take beautiful photos of delicious food even in dimly lit restaurants.

Finally, I get around to writing about our absolute favorite (and only) Indian restaurant Namskar. Alright, I'll admit, they are in desperate need of a new website, but look past the annoying intro, random lady reading items from the menu, and startling Indian music that starts playing on every page. This place is awesome. We started going there about a year ago I suppose, and it's been consistently delicious ever since. It's a relatively small place, but very clean, pretty, and quiet, with some Indian-style music playing in the background. The menu is quite large, they have a vegetarian selection, and even an Indo-Chinese menu. So the way it works is, you select a meat dish (we usually get one each) - it does not come with sides, it's just the meat. Then you select your rice (enough for 2 people), bread (2 large pieces per serving) and chutney, if you'd like. The meat dishes pretty much consist of sauce (however spicy you'd like it) and your choice of meat (lamb, chicken, beef, goat, or prawns). You really can't go wrong.

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Coconut Cream Pie

Who doesn't love pie? Everyone loves pie. And coconut. Also, cream. Just read the damn recipe!

Coconut Cream Pie
I used a deep 9 inch pie pan

3 cups half-and-half (I used cream, you know, it's better that way)
2 eggs
3/4 cup white sugar
1/3 cup corn starch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup flaked coconut, toasted (equal parts sweetened and unsweetened)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 (9 inch) pie shell, baked
1 cup whipped cream

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Self control? What's that?

I find it so hard to say no to myself when it comes to food. How sad is that? Real sad. I regularly raid my fridge for yummy leftover stuff. Pepperoni sticks. Cheese. God forbid there's some cake or pie left over! Oh, I'll just have one tiny slice. Oh god, this is so good, just another nibble. By the time I'm done with that, I've eaten 2 whole pieces' worth.

I never really binge though. I used to when I was younger. I'd sneak downstairs around midnight and eat a bunch of chocolate. Just like that. Oh, those were the days... I also went through a phase where I practically lived on tuna, salad, and water, and had an aversion to anything fried. Lost like 4 pounds! Was pretty proud. But that all passed. And, ironically, those were also the days...

I'm actually surprised that I've been able to more or less maintain my weight within the past year. And now that I've started a 4 week fitness camp, I'm really gonna try this portion control deal. Another big issue. I load up the plate, and eat it so fast that by the time I'm done, I'm ready to lay down if I make it to the couch. Eat slow, they say, but how can I if the food is so delish and I'm oh so hungry??

This has gotta be an addiction of some kind. How. Sad.

Potato Leek Soup with Bacon

After such a successful cream of asparagus soup, I thought hey, what the hell. Potato time. To be honest, I was looking for more of a... white potato soup. This one again turned out green. Thanks, leeks. OH, also, I way over-peppered this one. Greeaat. But that's my own fault. Use pepper sparingly - learn from my mistake.

The recipe was, once again, adapted from the Potato Leek Soup recipe in Joy of Cooking by I.S. Rombauerm, M. Rombauer Becker, and E. Becker. What a handy little book. 1132 pages little.

Potato Leek Soup with Bacon
About 8 cups

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