Rocky Road Cookies

Apparently, there are different versions of the "Rocky Road" flavour. Therefore, I don't think it's wrong calling these leftover-Halloween-candy-pieces cookies "Rocky Road" cookies. They have oatmeal, marshmallows, peanut M&Ms, rock-shaped chocolate with realistic rock-like sugar coating (I used to pass by a chocolatier at Penrith Plaza when  I was younger, in Australia, and they used to have golden and silver beads/sprinkles/candy balls on display. I don't remember if they had rock-like coating chocolate, though), one peanut butter bunny from April, 3 malt balls, and milk chocolate chunks.

My sister and I made half a batch of cookies using a recipe from a brand-name sponsored recipe book. Why did I buy a recipe book full of food company advertising? ...This was 4 years ago (wow...that long?) and I was in NY and the Strand was having a sale (closing sale?) and I got a thick hardcover recipe book for $1 with pages after pages of shiny, colourful pictures of scrumptious desserts!! So, I did it for the pictures.

Come on, why else -apart from the images- do recipe books sell nowadays, with millions of equally fancy (or, even better...like the recipes I have, which have comments on better technique and economical energy usage?) recipes online?

Half the batch ended up providing us with 31 cookies. Yummy.

By the way, the Australian version of "Rocky Road" is evidently superior to the American version (in my opinion, drawn from experience). According to Wikipedia (I know, not a completely correct source), the American version is just marshmallow, nuts, and milk chocolate--that is true. The Australian definition, however, includes things such as COCONUT, TURKISH DELIGHT and jelly!--that is true also.

Kashi GoLean Crunch! Oatmeal.

Because I don't have a fridge in my room, I also don't have any milk in my room. So, I can't actually have cereal with milk, which is kind of sad because I do love cereal and milk together [next year, my fridge will be filled with milk, chocolate, fruit, tofu, and vegetables].

I didn't feel like eating dry cereal, or cereal with cold water, so I decided to have hot water [yes, I have an electric kettle!] with the Kashi GoLean Crunch! cereal that usually is super sweet and... crunchy... [and reminds me of popcorn].

To my amazement, after absorbing a whole cup of water, the cereal swelled! It tasted like oatmeal mixed with some brown rice, with a really fibrous texture. It was still extremely sweet and had that Kashi company flavour. It was quite a nice change, and I think I like it better than I like normal Kashi cereal.

In this case, why is there even Kashi oatmeal out there? It makes so much sense to just buy a lot of cereal...and watch it puff and cook into oatmeal, instantly. JUST ADD WATER! [Wow, I'm turning into a college kid!]

MP's Grad Party

The Food. Was. Awesome! Well, who am I to judge? The food anywhere, at any party, is usually way more creative than the banal [Though, I eat a lot of bananas at home. And, bananas are NOT banal. Haha. Another silly joke! I'm going bananas!] stuff I eat every day at home for dinner. Though, today's snacks were truly original compared to the past few parties which I attended. Most of it was from my favourite supermarket/civil-exploration place - Trader Joe's! Anyway... awesome pasta sauce!
From left to right: tortilla chips, dried pineapple [simply the best thing there], seasoned crackers, TJ's cheese crackers [A.K.A. "better than Ritz" Ritz-Bitz], carrots, peanut butter crackers, [A.K.A. "better than Ritz" Ritz-Bitz. Did I mention that I used to love the peanut butter and/or cheese flavoured of these? Yeah, in HK these, along with the "Garden animal crackers" were my favourite. Oh, and the chicken [?] flavoured crackers.], sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, spicy chipotle salsa [great!]
Close-up.
Pasta with alfredo sauce, pasta with tomato sauce, and vegetables with butter and bread crumbs. I felt like there was potato in the vegetables... but maybe it was just me. Either way, the vegetables were really nice :)
Salad with onions and ranch dressing. I don't really have a thing for ranch dressing, but I like onions so that was good.
Bad resolution of crunchy oatmeal raisin cookies. They were approximately 2 cm in diameter... and although I could taste the oatmeal, I could neither taste nor see any raisins. Hm. Didn't make sense, but they were really delicious, so I ate a lot of them. Actually, I'm usually more into soft cookies, but these were quite interesting. Reminded me of ginger snaps, even though they didn't have any ginger in them, of course.
My first ever cookie cake [I think]! The icing was icky, in my opinion, but I'm not really into consuming icing. Icing is great to look at, but not really to chug down. The cookie itself was really soft [Some propylene glycol? HFCS? I didn't check...]. and the chocolate chips actually tasted like chocolate chips!
My first eggplant and ricotta pizza ever! The ricotta cheese was pretty amazing; usually I just have it in lasagne, but the creaminess added a really interesting texture to the pizza. The eggplant wasn't that great, though, and I think I prefer plain eggplant parm. Or just grilled eggplant. I found the crust rather sweet, which is kinda weird considering this is a savoury product [Not a candy pizza. Those are... eh...], and it was also really dry. Not flaky dry, but BLAND dry. Maybe I was just really thirsty at the time...

I will update about the chocolate tomorrow.

D.C. in a Nutshell

Damn awesome, except that it's, uh, a QuakerFoods ad for oatmeal, in the metro station.
Chipotle in Chinatown in D.C. I didn't think that this was possible. But it is!! Yay hope!
Giant plastic icecreams on the way to the metro station. The family sitting outside was watching me with scorn. They probably thought I was the stereotypical tourist with camera who doesn't speak English. Well, they're WRONG!
Space/Air Museum. They're actually M&Ms. However, there is probably some copyright/royalty issue with using the phrase "Mars M&Ms".
Air/Space Museum, plastic aeroplane food way back when gas appeared "unlimited". Looks very tasty.
Some vegetable pizza. The crust... reminded me of this pizza from Pizza Hut in Australia. Or, it could've been Pizza Box, in Hong Kong. I'm not quite sure, but it was that thick, doughy and dry kinda crust. The best ever!!
Swiss Roll at breakfast time from their Asian food market. In the end we ended up trying the green tea, orange, coffee, and strawberry flavoured ones. They all tasted exactly the same, except that the strawberry one had a little zing to it. Apart from the colour, they could've all passed off for "Original!" flavour [whatever "Original!" means in company terms]. Later I found out that there was propylene glycol inside the cake. Which irked me. Yay antifreeze ingredients...
Green bean soup, with sugar and TAPIOCA. Genius! Gotta try that soon.
My parent's friend made dumplings. Egg and Chinese chives... BEST. DUMPLINGS. EVER!
I will post about La Tasca tomorrow.

Art Shows Cookies

Sup? Persimmon. SUP PERsimmon?
Supper. @ Simon Mall Company. aka our town mall.
Well, I had already had dinner, but I went to volunteer anyway, for NAHS. Art show today...my art piece was the bread [above] from my concentration...the show itself, though, wasn't that great in the sense I got hit with reality [again]. Usually, I'm the crowd, spoiled with free food... hogging the corner of the table in order to get the second cookie [Well, truth be told, I'm not hogging the table, but if there's leftover food I'm willing to take it.] But... today was just people swarming, picking and dropping cookies and grabbing apple juice. Weird... how we all know this stuff kills us yet we go taking and taking and taking... and hoarding...
This is why stuff costs $$. If we were allowed to take what we wanted, we'd all get fat and grumpy, like the mice in experiments [which, to put it out there, saves YOU from whatever illness you have/had. So don't go all PETA-crappin' on me].
So... voici des photos.
Well, this is what we started with, along with 3 jugs of apple juice.
This is the third tray of cookies. I didn't have the camera for the other trays because my mum had it, and they were gone wayyy too fast.
This is a few minutes later. I sampled [with A, so we split them] the chocolate chip [typical good], cranberry [very buttery.], jam [very buttery], nut [okay.], oatmeal [instant oatmeal? It was chewier than I had expected], and brownie [literally a brownie in the shape of a cookie.].

Oats

Lately I've had an obsession over oat bran and oat meal. With dried mango, without added sucrose crystals. And apple, this morning. Been eating it every opportunity I get. :) Check out the snow :)

Cookies! With Raisins!

YAY COOKIES! I made A some cookies last night, because she got into college, and she PRed on the mile, and I appreciate her as a friend. A lot. And she invited me to go with her to the Millrose Games. I was going to make oatmeal cookies for her, because she loves oatmeal raisin cookies, but it turns out that we only had one cup of oatmeal left. In the whole house. Makes me sad :(
The recipe called for one cup of flour and four cups of oatmeal [which in my opinion is superfluous... 5 cups to make 2 dozen cookies? Not likely, since typically we use just two cups of flour]. Since I only had one cup of oatmeal, I substituted the other "3 cups" of oatmeal for one cup of bran and this multigrain cereal thing and more flour. I left it overnight in the fridge, because leaving dough overnight in the fridge makes the raisins more moist, and the dough more browned and flavourful.

So the next day [aka yesterday] I baked the cookies with my sister - Oh and another good thing about sticking the dough in the fridge overnight is that when you scoop them onto the cookie sheet, they stay round :D, which is especially important when using oil instead of butter :D
We made 23 large cookies :)
A was really happy to get cookies :D but then again, who wouldn't be? She gave some out at track because we were having exit interviews. It was pretty chill :)

Yoghurt Oatmeal?

So... I had a track meet today, and as all runners know, carbs = vital for racing. In all honesty though, a 1600m race is not going to require 5 meals of 90% carbohydrates the day before and of. The 1600m is short enough that one could definitely chug 140 Calories [or even fewer, since 6-7 minutes of racing does not require 140 Calories] worth of sugar [a.k.a. candy!] However, since I love food, I always eat a lot before race day. Well, I eat a lot in general.

Even though today is Monday, I only had 1 hour of school because it was midterms, so I went to school to take the French midterm around 10. This meant that I could actually cook something for breakfast :D [Though in all honesty, I love cereal, toast, and sandwiches. I could live on that].

I made oatmeal. Usually, people add water or milk, but I decided to be adventurous and added yoghurt... I figured it'd be gooeyer. My method of cooking oatmeal? Dump everything in at the same time and stir it until it looks done, on medium to high heat. Gets done fast... and uses the least energy. I do not want to use fossil fuels to let the liquid boil, then add the oats, then add the fruit. *Kerplunk!* goes everything.

I cut up a whole apple [Pinklady, though I personally prefer Royal Gala Apples the most] and dumped it in, with the oatmeal and yoghurt. I also added a small cinnamon stick since I don't have powdered cinnamon at home [unfortunately - way back, when we went shopping for spices I got the cinnamon sticks because they looked cooler. Sigh.].

I'm guessing, [at most] 10 minutes later, I turned off the heat.

Looks pretty bland.
Tasted kinda sour... so I added stuff to it :) Dried fruit, chocolate powder. I know, I'm not traditional at all.

As for the track meet... didn't go so well.