Italian Cibo Weekend!

Last Saturday, my dorm house had Italian food catered to us for the Lucid Dinner. Lucid was our first house Dean, and he made a bunch of cool traditions that carry on to this day (e.g. study break!!).

 Last Sunday, my GA invited all of us (about 15 showed up?) to make Italian gnocchi! I have failed at making gnocchi once before, and this time, I got to learn from an Italian!! It was great, and I had a lot of fun!! I skipped half of my organic chem workshop for it, but who cares?! I even learned how to roll a properly shaped gnocchi using a fork!

 First we all peeled potatoes. 5lbs?

 Then we cut the potatoes and boiled them.

 We all mashed them directly on the table!

 And added a lot of flour to it, and rolled them out and cut them. We made a LOT OF DELICIOUS GNOCCHI!!

 My GA made some vodka + cream + tomato sauce. I've had vodka sauce once before, and it wasn't great at all! This time, it was great - fresh, creamy, tangy.

Drinks

The first floor had a nice study break last week in my GA's room. She's Italian, and went to Rome over winter break and brought back an absolutely gorgeous set of espresso cups and saucers. Unfortunately, my picture was blurry due to dim lighting, but you can see my espresso with a tiny spoon that has a bent handle (so that it can dangle off the rim of the cup). Fancy fancy.

She also brought back some Orzo, an Italian barley drink that is drunken hot and with cream/sugar/milk. So, of course I had to try it!! I think that one of the best experiences at Penn is meeting people from other cultures because they can tell me about their cuisine (and possibly feed me). I had it plain first, and then with some sugar. It doesn't taste like coffee or tea, and I keep thinking "hot sugar cane juice..." but I KNOW that's definitely not right. It tastes a little like burnt sugar (which I guess is due to the barley). Either way, it was quite delicious and I do want to buy oat or barley or rice drinks. On another note, I miss Horlicks (and Hong Kong in general), and I've been drinking black tea with dried rose pieces nearly daily.

Another great thing about Penn is that it's right next to Monell and lso, at Monell, I got a can of sparkling grape juice by The Switch (they have a really pleasing website with bubbly backgrounds, by the way). The marketing: "Drink this. It's tasty and healthier than soda and gives you nutrients."

Yet, who will chip out $1 for ~240 ml (roughly "one serving" of a beverage, according to the FDA) of this juice when soda is $1 for a litre? Also, sure, there may be a silo of vitamin C in a can of this drink, but a clementine will give you all the vitamin C... in fewer calories. I could go on about all the negatives... but I suppose the goal is this:

Exploitation of health misconceptions in the general population in order to earn money (with the facade of gearing towards making humanity have healthier junk food choices).

Also, I managed to flatten the can, bend it, and rip it with my bare hands. Pretty neat.

Mushroom Risotto

My GA is Italian and enjoys cooking. Therefore, we (10 or so people from my college house, even though the event was open for everyone) made some authentic mushroom risotto last Tuesday. 

For risotto, the key is to not add all the stock in at once; you add it in little by little (when the rice starts really sticking, add more stock). It was delectable!! So gelatinous, gooey, chewy, and mushroomy! (And cheesy, with the parmesan).

A special mention goes to TJ, who cut up the parsley really nicely.

I also really enjoyed having red shallots in the risotto, even though they made me cry when I was cutting them.

Potato Gnocchi

With a surplus of potatoes, I've been thinking of ways of eating them (other than mashed potato, even though I love mashed potato), and one of the ideas I found was potato gnocchi. I'm not really a gnocchi fan, since I don't have an emotional association with it. In addition, since we lack sauce in the house, the gnocchi is just another carbohydrate at dinnertime that pairs well with spicy stir fried Chinese food.

I agree with the recipe; the potatoes should've been baked instead of boiled because that way, they would've been drier and I wouldn't've obtained soggy, gruel-like gnocchi. Ah well. At least they stayed in shape (irregular) and didn't disintegrate in the boiling water. Maybe I should've baked them or fried them.

I don't think that this was the most appetising way of using potatoes, so I'm never making potato gnocchi again. Instead, I'm just going to make a freezer-shelf full of potato cake (tomorrow's post), which everyone, even MY SISTER, enjoyed.

INGREDIENTS

800 g mashed potato

~140 g whole-wheat flour (just keep adding until the dough is malleable and not too sticky)

oregano

pepper

salt

METHOD

1. Mix everything.

2. Pluck small balls from the dough and stick into a pot of boiling water.

3. Take out after a few minutes.

Turkey Meatballs

I don't eat turkey but I baked turkey meatballs. According to my brother, they were amazing (the best food I've made this August, apparently). They looked moist and flavourful too.

Unfortunately, I forgot to use metric.

Ingredients for 54 small turkey meatballs.

About 3 cups ground turkey

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

2 cups bread crumbs

0.5 cup (fat-free) milk (120 ml)

1 small onion

1 egg

1 tbsp oil

A few fresh basil leaves

Parsley flakes

Oregano

Lots of garlic cloves

Salt

Pepper

Method

1. Chop up stuff and mix everything

2. Clump into 54 balls, each about the size of a gumball. Since I'm so used to having baked items spread out, I left space between each meatball. I guess it wasn't that necessary and that I could've squished everything on to one baking sheet.

3. Bake at 375 degrees F for 10 minutes.

4. Take out, turn meatballs upside down.

5. Bake at 350 degrees F for 10 minutes.

6. Let sit in oven if you want, or just serve.

I'm sure I can do the same thing with firm tofu or chickpeas.

SUGARRRR

...and now I have a bloated stomach and feel terribly drowsy/headachy after eating around 1000 Calories (~250 g) of sucrose in the form of peach gummies.

Actually, after my swim today, I decided to read outside in the shade. It was pretty breezy, and there was a concert going on on Walnut Field. They were giving out free water ice, so I got a pina colada water ice, which melted really fast. It tasted like artificial coconut, and didn't have much hint of pineapple, although there were small specks of yellow (presumably pineapple pieces).

While watching Stargate SG-1, I ate the ~1000 Calories worth of peach gummies. Today, I walked towards Market St. intent on going to a yard sale, but the yard sale didn't exist at the address listed on the flyer... so I figured, Eh, I might as well go to the Rite-Aid on Market, and buy some Circus Peanuts because I've never had them before.

However, the Circus Peanuts had HFCS, so I decided to buy peach gummies instead. I don't know why I didn't buy the sour gummy worms... because I like sour gummies the most...

However, now I'm fully satisfied with my gummy craving, and I will not buy anymore gummies in the next month or so. Yes, this includes not buying any Peach Sour Patch Kids candy from Sweet As Fudge Candy Shoppe.

In eating my gummies, I stumbled across a bunch of mutant ones! I love the sight of mutant candy! I wonder if any companies will send me free/reduced price mutant candy...

:) Okay, I'll eat healthy tomorrow. Kale!!

Harrison's Masquerade with Maggiano's

Last night, Harrison had a semiformal event with a dinner catered by Maggiano's, an Italian restaurant about 26 streets away. The main part of the semiformal wasn't the food, of course (it was the dancing! And laughing!...even though there were only about 40 of us there...), but I've decided to blog about it anyway. The sad part is that 2/3 of the time, the lights were off, so I had to use flash and it bleached my photo. In any case, the food wasn't that photogenic, and because there was a whole group of us, we evidently got to Harrison kind of late. So, half the food was gone (no linguine left!!).

The food that I did eat included angel hair pasta with very unevenly distributed tomato sauce (with real large chunks of tomato! and nothing much else...), two oily asparagus spears, some broccoli, and some salad. The salad was basically lettuce with feta cheese and onion, and midway through, I noticed something crunchy. Upon dissecting my salad, I noticed a few rectangles of some dark pink crispy stuff, which I am assuming is bacon. :(

You think that's sad (for a vegetarian)? Well, I tell you, that bacon wasn't even good! It was dry and didn't taste like bacon! It was tasteless!

The dessert was tiramisu, which was different from the tiramisu I usually consume (not that I consume tiramisu much...I've only had it about 4 times in my life, perhaps?). This tiramisu was literally 90% mascarpone, 0.005% cocoa powder, 3% coffee, and 7% ladyfinger biscuits. The mascarpone was super overwhelming. It's good, but I prefer a more 1:1 ratio of ladyfinger biscuits : mascarpone. The top half of the tiramisu was literally fatty, sweet, mascarpone. The cliche pictures of tiramisu have cocoa powder dusted on top. This one didn't, so no one could recognise it as tiramisu. Either way, the dessert was better than the meal itself.

There was frozen pomegranate juice, which was really nice.

In all honesty, I wouldn't've cared if the food was barbecue flesh; for $5, I got to party with my friends, scream, dance to The Lonely Island and Ce Lo Green (you guys know the songs...I just don't want to write them out because it's not really PG), and have fun for 3 hours.

I Miss Penn Food.

Home food is good. I had a poached egg today. Do you know how difficult it is to obtain a poached egg at a dining hall? All they have are scrambled eggs and hard-boiled eggs. One can NOT obtain a poached egg with pepper. :(

Egg aside, I still actually miss Penn food a bit. At least I ate exactly 3 meals a day (or 2, on weekends), instead of 6 or 7 mini meals...

This is an apple crumble from Penn. There is no such thing as apple crumble in my house. Oh no. Fresh, raw apples are not to be cooked and wasted into sugar- and butter-clad chunks. The only times I use fresh fruit to make stuff... is black currant or gooseberry jam in the summer, because no one likes fresh black currants in our house, due to the high number of seeds in the currants. No one wants to eat fresh gooseberries either because they're "too sour", and also full of seeds.

The raspberries go from branch to mouth in a matter of seconds, though.

Stromboli of amazingness. I mean, vegetable and cheese stromboli; the best ratio of crust to filling ever. I also love potatoes. I LOVE CARBOHYDRATES!! And the quiche was okay... I don't really miss it because it was dry and the egg proteins were overcooked.

But I can NEVER obtain stromboli at home!! Speaking of which... maybe I'll make some one day... although it'll never be as poofy as the ones at Penn.

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.

Coffee Ice [or...Granita?]

I'm technically not supposed to have much caffeinated stuff anymore due to the fact that it apparently interferes with methimazole efficacy, but this was made with decaf coffee [so, it has 2% of the caffeine it otherwise would have] which means that it probably has the same caffeine power [if not less] as some chocolate. I started off with coffee, fat free milk, some honey, and some saccharin. I froze it for an hour, and it looked like the image above.

An hour later, a layer of ice had formed on the inside sides of the plastic container, but the centre was still liquidy [or, slushy, after I mixed it]. The whole point of making this is to chop up the ice crystals every hour or so. I actually should've used a shallow container, since it was more difficult to reach the bottom parts which were frozen.

In total, six hours later, this is what I ended up with. Granules of frozen coffee and milk! The volume had [evidently, due to not only the lattice structure of ice, but also to the air between each crystal] increased to... about 157% its original liquidy volume.

I'm not sure whether this is "Italian Ice", "ice" or "granita". When I was younger, my brother and I used to make watermelon granita, which I recall included 150g of caster sugar dissolved in water, a lot of watermelon juice, and lemon juice. It was made in the same way as this, and did NOT taste like artificial watermelon flavour. It used to be such a big deal! Today, I felt like making this since it's too humid to drink hot coffee [even though it was pouring with rain all afternoon] and I felt like this would be yummy. Before freezing, the slurry tasted like normal sweet coffee with way too much milk [I tend to like coffee without milk]. After freezing, I feel as though it tastes even more watery than originally... which means that next time, I have to brew super-strong coffee. This is saying something, since I generally make really strong coffee. However, it isn't super sweet, which is great. I'm just worried that it's going to freeze into one huge mass by tomorrow morning, since I probably didn't add enough sweeteners to keep the ice not-that-frozen, since adding sweeteners means that the freezing point of the solution increases, which means that, in theory, the granita would freeze at a higher temperature [because the sweetener molecules prevent the water molecules from bonding to each other as efficiently].

It-t-t-talian Ice. [Luigi's]

This is the U.S. Slap on a native name, and you get a native food. Blue raspberry, which does not exist in reality, let alone in Italy, is the official artificial feature of this cup of Luigi's "Italian" Ice.

They say:

"LUIGI’S Real Italian Ice may not date back to ancient times; however, we have got a pretty cool history going. Although we only date back to 1989, LUIGI’S Real Italian Ice is now the world’s #1 Italian Ice. We think you’ll enjoy it."

Nowhere does it state that they're Italian. Actually, Luigi's is owned by J&J Snack Foods Corp, which sounds distinctly American. In fact, the company is based in NJ.

"LUIGI'S^® is not only delicious and nutritious"... um... 160 calories of pure corn syrup is considered nutritious?

1 cent gave me 10 Cals of corn syrup flavouring. Good experience, bad idea.