Home...

BACK home! I got back on Friday night at 9:40pm ish, even though I should've been back at 7:15pm [traffic is terrible. I had traffic out of Philly, INTO NY, then OUT OF NY. What a wonderful experience. At least I had food :)]

I noticed that nothing much has been consumed at home... my brother likened it to the Pullman strike, in which nothing could get done in Chicago while the RR workers were on strike... in other words, if I'm not home, no food gets eaten. Even the freakin' pistachios are untouched!

Anyway, it's nice to be home and eat food at any time I want.

One thing that people in college keep talking about is the archetypal "home-cooked meal". I haven't had one yet, actually, and I don't really care for one. I don't get why everyone seems so in love with "home-cooked meals" when most families in the U.S. prefer to eat out anyway.

Strange culture.

Anyway, I did get to eat meals with my brother and sister so that was really nice since we could do the whole "eating and meeting" thing.

While I was at college, my dad had a business trip in Basel, Switzerland, and he brought back a lot of chocolate. It was also really expensive chocolate. I don't really think it tastes that much different from a dark chocolate bar, but perhaps there is something in the ingredients that makes it special. I don't know. I mean, the presentation evidently is better than a normal chunk of chocolate, but I personally just like dark chocolate bars.

This was the espresso chocolate, which was some dark chocolate espresso ganache covered in dark chocolate. It was okay but not worth however much it cost. I like cocoa powder more...

OH so we had two coconuts! My brother and I shared one, and we're gonna consume the other one at some point in the future...

After drinking the liquid portion endosperm, I sought to crack open the coconut in order to share the remaining endosperm with my brother. I accomplished this by throwing the coconut onto concrete since both the hammer and the knife refused to crack open the coconut.

Below is the splat created by the coconut when I threw it. Unfortunately, we could not retrieve all the pieces of the coconut. Coconut shells remarkably resemble autumn leaves.

We somehow cracked it open from there...

My brother likes frozen blueberries [as do I] so we have a stash of them.

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.