Lasagne.

UPDATE: Here is another picture. It is still rather mixed up and the layers are a bit hard to see. There were three layers...

I am exhausted from packing and studying chem and blah. I don't even know how I had the brain capacity to drag myself into the kitchen this morning and make lasagne.

Vegetable lasagne with cucumber, carrot, onion [lots!], and red bell pepper. We unfortunately didn't have any spinach...

I added some couscous for texture variation, and breadcrumbs on top, even though they turned out too soggy because I put way too much sauce on top, instead of just leaving it cheesy...

We didn't have shredded cheese... so I used the handy pre-sliced cheese! There were swiss, cheddar and monterey jack slices.

Apparently the lasagne sheets could make two pans of lasagne... which was a lot more than I had expected. All I wanted to do was use up the box of sheets since no one else knows or wants to cook lasagne in this house, so I had to get it done before I go to college. Actually, I've been wanting to make lasagne for ages but I never remembered. Or felt like it.

MORE CHEESE! This was before I started dumping bread crumbs on top. In retrospect, the lasagne lacked enough cheese. Next time, I will literally smother the top with cheese, so that it looks more like a cuboidal cheese wheel than a lasagne.

Lasagne after baking, before the lasagne noodles had a chance to soak in all the sauce.

Same pan of lasagne; I never got around to taking a picture of the other pan... I got busy with studying... so tomorrow I'll upload some more pictures.

Beautiful.

Also, I learned that DRY PLAIN LASAGNE NOODLES DO COOK IN THE OVEN. Honestly, precooking them is definitely unnecessary [Good thing I didn't precook them.] A simple 40 minutes in the oven at 350 degrees F solves everything. Especially if you feel like leaving the lasagne in the oven for another 10 minutes.

After taking the lasagne out, it is definitely necessary to wait for approximately 20 minutes for the lasagne noodles to sponge up the watery sauce that was emitted by the tomato sauce and vegetables. I didn't wait... and ended up with lasagne soup for the first serving. Above and below are the images of the non-soaked-lasagne noodles. I never got around to taking a picture of the lasagne after "actually" done, though. Tomorrow... I shall post them. However, later on I was looking at the lasagne and the sauce/cheese/noodle ratio wasn't defined clearly :( However... this isn't terrible since this is the second time I've made lasagne in my life. I should definitely make it more often.

100 Gingerbread Crumbs!

For the 100th post, I decided to add some spice to the items that I usually blog about. :) [haha...] By spice, I mean gingerbread. Not "real" gingerbread, though. It's microwaved gingerbread.

"Microwaved? Inconceivable!", you say. I'll let you mull over that while I talk about the tomato couscous soup I made again today! This time I added soft tofu, which added this amazing soft nuttiness to it, which contrasted with the grainy texture of the couscous.

Anyway, back to gingerbread. Or, gingerbread mix. This is actually a gingerbread cake mix from Target [Archer Farms?] that I was too lazy to follow directions and add the butter and stick it in the oven. Instead, I just added an egg, water, and a bit of oil [Not sure how much, though]. Then, I mixed it until it looked like cookie dough rather than egg batter, and stuck it in the fridge.

About two tablespoons of this dough, covered with a spoon of cold milk, then microwaved for 60 seconds, yields the image above. GOOEY AWESOMENESS! Well, awesomeness for those who like cakes that are of a brownie consistency. I stirred up the bottom which was still liquidy and microwaved the whole thing for another 20 or so seconds. If you want a more "cakey" [read: dry] cake, stick it in the microwave for another 30 seconds, and then another 10. Just because. Last time, I microwaved one spoonful for about 90 seconds, which yielded a really CRUNCHY COOKIE rather than cake.

In other words, this stuff is really versatile. For those of us who aren't afraid of salmonella [I'm not afraid!], it tastes great "raw", too. It's gingery, but much sweeter so that the ginger taste isn't prevalent. I guess if you want an authentic nutmeggy gingery taste, this isn't for you, but since I honestly dislike the taste of ginger, or ginger candy, or ginger tea, this "ginger"bread works just fine with me. Oh, and if any of you end up walking around 59th ish near that park at NYC near the Lincoln Centre, BUY THE GINGERSNAPS. THEY. ARE. AMAZING.

Couscous Soup!

Because I was too lazy to make pasta today, I decided to make tomato soup and add couscous instead. I've recently become really fond of soups, mainly because soup is basically water, and I've been pretty dehydrated mostly, due to the fact that it's the summer and I've been running more than I have in the past few months. Also, since I'm on a sort of coffee ban [due to the caffeine negatively impacting methimazole efficacy], I've cut down my morning consumption of liquid from one litre to maybe 250ml. No, not one litre of coffee [although that'd be pretty intense]. During school, I used to drink say... 500ml of coffee/tea, 250ml of milk, and 250ml of water, juice, coffee or milk, before noon. Now, it's just 250ml of milk. If I remember.

Anyway, no one else is using the artichokes, so I guess I have to use them for something.

While consuming this soup, I wondered how soggy pretzels would taste like in it, since there ARE oyster crackers for soups, but we don't have them at home. So, I stirred in a handful of pretzels and promptly forgot to take a picture of them. They didn't really enhance the flavour or anything, since they barely absorbed any soup... I suppose this is due to the shiny malty [?] coating that most thin pretzels have. Nevertheless, the pretzels were okay. I should've let them soak in the soup longer, but I was hungry.

Also, at Costco today, they were giving out samples of the "Hollywood Cookie Diet" which is, at first, oxymoronic, but then you realise how truthful it is. The facade of glamour and prettiness and hedonistic lifestyle... yet it is all due to restriction and limitation, since if you point one finger out of that bubble, you collapse all your fame and blah. The same goes for this diet thing. The sample piece of cookie itself tasted artificial, like a protein bar, sans the protein. However, it really looked like a cookie. I'm not kidding. It looked like a legitimate chocolate chip cookie piece. But if you think about it, do you want real or fake? Real love vs. fake love? Real food vs. fake food? Real friends vs. fake friends? Real is way cooler.

When I Am Occupied.

Today I was very occupied.

I ate a serving of couscous, some cocoa powder and milk, an apple, two pieces of toast with a bit of peanut butter, and a bowl of chili.

That's all.

I don't think I've eaten this little since I was 13.

Cocoa Oatsy Couscous

Oat bran?

You probably automatically think of bran muffins. With raisins.

Couscous?

Hm, maybe a salad this time, or some savoury side dish.

Yesterday I discovered that cocoa powder goes well with everything. So, this morning I had cold oat bran with mango and COCOA POWDER. It is amazing. It tastes just like chocolate, sans icky-sweet-stuff, and the texture of oat bran [which I love, and is a key component to this meal] perfectly contrasts with the smooth gooey part composed of the water/cocoa/oatyness.

Then I decided to make chocolate couscous, which isn't as great, because I don't like couscous as much as oat bran, but it is still quite a novelty for me. I took a bunch of pictures but they all don't fit. [That is a euphemism. Out of context, you will realise why the photos are inappropriate for a food blog.] so I just have one of each. Or should I say one of eat? [since I'm out of oat bran now :( so I gotta get more!!]