Spaghetti & Cheese (Again)

Spring break is next week and I think it would be wise to use up as much stuff in the fridge as possible. Well, there is no way I can do that (Actually...I can. I really can eat all the food in my fridge within a week). So, I'm starting with the perishable stuff. Cheese, chili peppers, onion, and milk = spaghetti and cheese.

Ingredients with missing weight amounts because I just kinda threw them together...makes something like 5-6 servings.
250ish ml milk
200ish ml water
Mustard if you have it  (but I don't :( )
Rest of the chili peppers
Small red onion
TVP*
herbs!

300g (?) Monterey Jack cheese
2 tbsp flour

A lot of cooked spaghetti

1. Throw first bunch of stuff onto stove and wait until bubbles. Unfortunately, the milk curdled for me, but in the end the sauce turned up smooth enough.
2. Throw in flour and stir until lumps have sort of disappeared.
3. Throw in cheese, mix, turn down heat.
4. Turn off heat, throw in spaghetti.

*I usually throw the dry TVP into my cooked pasta+water. This way, the TVP gets evenly distributed throughout the pasta, it rehydrates rapidly (because it's hot water), and I save heat/water! Yay! Neat trick.

Spaghetti and Cheese

I like whole wheat pasta.

We don't have any whole wheat macaroni at home [and I don't think we have any macaroni], so I made some whole wheat sphaghetti with cheese sauce today.

I started looking through allrecipes.com to find a nice cheese sauce to make, since I've only made legitimate cheese sauce once before in my life [I think it was during Food Tech class? I'm not sure...]. I got sick of looking through recipes though, because the comments irked me and... I guess I just didn't feel like following instructions.

So here is my recipe, and it makes enough sauce for one pound of spaghetti, approximately. If you really like cheese, make more sauce!

1. 1 tbsp oil [highly unnecessary, actually, if you use normal-fat cheese].

2. 1 c fat-free milk

3. 1 c whole fat milk

4. 2 tbsp mustard

5. Old Bay seasoning, pepper, garlic, herbs, pepper.

6. 3 tbsp flour

7. Whatever filling you want, e.g. TVP, salmon chunks, ground-up flesh, lettuce etc.

8. 3 cups of shredded cheese. Or 4 cups. or 5. or 6. However much saturated fat you can handle.

Method:

1. Mix all the ingredients except for the flour in a saucepan. Put it on high heat until you start seeing bubbles.

2. On lowish heat, add flour, 1 tbsp at a time, and mix until there are no more lumps.

3. Turn off heat and mix in shredded cheese, one cup at a time. If you want, add in fillings.

4. Add in cooked pasta.

5. EAT WHEN HOT. When the cheese sauce gets cold, it tastes grainy and... cold... and not comforting at all. The image below is cold pasta because no one was ready for dinner at 5:30pm. After it was heated again, it was nice and gooey again. I know it doesn't look like the cliche "mac 'n' cheese" because I didn't use cheddar cheese and I used whole wheat spaghetti...

Macaroni and Cheese...on a Pizza.

The world is changing. There used to be a time where pizza, macaroni, and cheese were discrete. We then had pizza with cheese and macaroni and cheese.

And now I have encountered the sum of all parts. A macaroni and cheese pizza.

Yes, it's in a bowl because I had eaten cereal beforehand. The macaroni and cheese was ridiculously buttery, which was kind of a deterrent because it tasted more like buttery oily pasta on pizza dough. In other words, it didn't really taste cheesy or umami :(. Recently, I've realised that a lot of the dough at Commons is some mix of whole wheat and white flour, which makes the dough extremely... elasticky. It almost has a plastic sheen to it. I'd say it's the high gluten content that whole wheat flours tend to have [due to less refinement? If you look at nutrition labels, the 100% whole wheat flour-made breads usually have 5-6g protein per 120 Cal, wheras white bread... doesn't have many. 1-2g? 3? Anyway, this was at Hill... and it was most definitely white flour.

Party... at the Philadelphia Art Museum. 4th Sept.

I'm not even kidding. After having a party at the library, we had a party at the Art Museum.

Not just any art museum. I mean, the Philadelphia Art Museum. The PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM. Penn rented out the place.

THIS is where all my superfluous tuition money goes to...[and leaves me nothing with which to buy textbooks]

It was a ridiculously sumptuous feast for both the eye and the uh.. mouth? I like art, so it was a great field trip to the art museum :) I especially like modern art because it just shocks in the sense that one wonders: "How MUCH can they get away with? And yet they get paid and lauded 24/7?!"

So, this was a peanut cookie. It was rock hard. Out of all the cookies on the giant table... I picked the peanut cookie [I like peanuts. I like cookies. Peanut cookies aren't my favourite, though]. And, out of the mountain of peanut cookies, I picked the undercooked one. Or, the overcooked one. Or, the one in the batch that received NO BAKING SODA/LEAVENING AGENT whatsoever. It was dry and so rock hard that it didn't even taste crunchy. However, the peanut chips were nice.

I later got a chocolate chip cookie which was divine. It made up for the lousy peanut cookie [hey, personal preference... someone else might've enjoyed the peanut cookie.]

Amazing mac and cheese and breadcrumbs.

The best part of the day was that I had a corn tortilla that wasn't fried. This is my first soft corn tortilla in my life. With beans. In a burrito-esque thing. I'm not sure what it was. The salsa was tangy, and the guacamole was INSANELY LIMEY! This is the first time I've had such limey guacamole... it was a beautiful piece of art, which, of course, fit the Art Museum theme.

I also ran up the stairs, which is an allusion to Rocky although I've never seen Rocky. When we [ML and I] got to the top, fireworks went off. I'm not kidding. It of course was for Labour Day... but still. What a coincidence!

BOSTON!

I consumed fries. From Monday to Saturday [today]. This is the first time in my life in which I have consumed at least one potato fry for six consecutive days. The irony is that we were roadtrippin', from NJ to NY to CT to RI to MA. And back. Yet, every restaurant served fries with the dish. American cuisine is incomplete without fried strips of potato.

Anyway... there is too much to update all at once so I'll just talk about the "only" New England-related items that I consumed. One is corn chowder, and the other is the Boston cream cake [better known as the "Boston Cream Pie", which is the official dessert of MA.
The biggest problem for me was actually FINDING some corn chowder and Boston cream pie. No kidding. Nothing in Cambridge, MA. Nothing in Downtown MA. Nothing in Chinatown, duh, and by that time I was giving up hope so I got an egg tart [remember: I love egg tarts].

Finally, at the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, I found Quincy Market, which basically was a corridor filled with restaurants. There were a lot of ice cream, bakery and seafood fare there, and I finally. Found. Corn. Chowder. It was, understandably, at a shop named "Boston Chowda". Actually, I ended up with a sample of macaroni and cheese, and of a strawberry smoothie. There was also vegetarian moussaka, but I was too full to eat anything after the chowder and cake... or else I totally would've tried not only the moussaka, but also the whoopie pie thingy which I've never had before either.

I don't like styrofoam :( but everything there had styrofoam containers with plastic forks or spoons. I should bring my own. In college, I'm gonna carry around a metal teaspoon.

I can't believe that I have never had oyster crackers before. They. Are. The. Best. Crackers. In. The. World. YES, they probably even beat Goldfish crackers!! There is no real oyster in them, of course.Blurry shot of the oyster crackers with a piece of potato and some corn and soup. It was soooo creamy, super hot, and very flavourful. The potato wasn't mushy, the corn was sweet, and the whole soup made me really thirsty. There was no weird aftertaste or anything else negative about the soup. I couldn't see any oil or grease, so it was visually appealing too! Quite amazing. I don't even remember the last time I had corn chowder [have I had it before?], but the last time I had clam chowder from a can, I could taste this fatty-ness that came with it. In contrast, the corn chowder was simply poofy corniness [yeah. this description is getting really corny.] and makes me think of comfort food. Also, this means that I have to make some corn chowder at some point soon.So, I wanted a Boston cream doughnut. I was unable to find any in Boston. Okay, fine, Dunkin' Donuts definitely has them, but THAT DOES NOT COUNT, considering I can run to two Dunkin' Donuts from my house within 15 minutes. I wanted authenticity! If anyone knows of a place in which there are BOSTON cream doughnuts, please enlighten me. There was NY style cheesecake, and random funnel cake, but no Boston Cream Doughnut. Sigh. I did find two stores that sold Boston Cream Pie [cake.] though, and I picked the Carol Ann Bake Shop because the shopkeeper appeared to know what he was talking about when I asked him about it. Also, they had this lobster tail pastry that looked like a lobster tail [and it was apparently filled with cheese?] The other store sold Italian food... and the Boston cream cake/pie had almonds on the side. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed with it.
HUGE COOKIES!!
HUGE PASTRIES/CAKES!
The Boston Cream cake/pie consists of three things. Chocolate icing, plain sponge cake, and the cream.
The icing was ridiculously sticky and hard. My fork is completely immobilised and not prone to the effects of gravity when stuck into the icing. It was really sweet, which is nice, but lacked chocolatey flavour.
The sponge cake was really bad. As in, I didn't want to finish it, which rarely happens with cake. So, I'm not going to talk about it. The cream... hmm, it was really light and makes me think of clouds. Nothing heavy about it, which makes it more of a custard than a "cream" and at first taste, you think it's sorta watery, but it's actually just really light. It's a bit sweet, but ends up a tad sour, which was unexpected [think yoghurt]. Actually, it's really thin... I'm trying to figure out what it would match up to because it's NOT like yoghurt or icing or egg tart filling. It's more like... American pudding. I think I'm indifferent to it, but the [inferior?] kind I tried before in the form of a doughnut from Shoprite was definitely sweeter and more gelatinous. So, I don't think I like Boston cream cake/pies. At least, from this shop.