College Pasta

So, cliche 5-college-friends-get-together-and-make-pasta-for-dinner-at-10pm. This is a whole week before college actually starts...

I'm handing out CFL (energy saving light bulbs) to the frosh, so I get to live NSO all over again!

TJ thought that I diced the onion and tomato really well.

We bought garlic bread and the sauce.

So. College.

Pesto Sauce & Whole Wheat Macaroni!!

Since we have a LOT of basil growing in our yard, I decided to finally make pesto, something I've been planning for the past 5 years. No kidding. With plenty of basil, a whole bag pine nuts, and a tray of garlic, all I needed was some parmesan cheese.

I adapted this recipe a lot since my sister doesn't really like basil. She actually doesn't like garlic either, so next time I'll just make pesto sauce without garlic specially for her and then make real pesto. In addition, I didn't use too much oil, since I used a whole cup of pine nuts and a whole cup of cheese. The pesto itself was therefore much creamier and thick, which I prefer over a light and liquidy pasta sauce. It also occurred to me that pesto is a raw sauce... Hm. Interesting. The nice thing was that I got her involved in the cooking process. Dinner was quite spectacular for my mum too because she didn't have to cook or do dishes.

Ingredients

1 cup fresh basil leaves!

1.5 cups spinach leaves (or more basil - again, my sister doesn't really like basil)

2 small bulbs of garlic

0.5 cup olive oil

1 cup pine nuts, toasted.

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

250 g organic whole wheat macaroni

0.5 cup water

Method.

1. Cook macaroni.

2. Wash leaves. Stick in blender with garlic and toasted pine nuts and pulse a few times

3. Add cheese, oil, and water. Pulse.

4. Scoop generous globs of pesto onto drained macaroni.

5. Sprinkle with more parmesan!

6. EAT EAT EAT!

The best part is that I made restaurant-quality sauce for literally something like a dollar.

Oh, here I am again ranting on that other person's blog (see yesterday's post) who lists the price of all the ingredients.

I'll do that here too, just so I can be "famous" and "adored".

Ingredients if I want to be honest about the price

1 cup fresh basil leaves! - $0 (from garden)

1.5 cups spinach leaves (or more basil - again, my sister doesn't really like basil) - $0.25

2 small bulbs of garlic - $0 (from garden)

0.5 cup olive oil - $0 (got reimbursed)

1 cup pine nuts, toasted. - $0 (got reimbursed)

1 cup grated parmesan cheese $~1

250 g organic whole wheat macaroni $0 (used dining dollars, so it's technically free.)

0.5 cup water $0

Total: $1.25

Price per serving: $0.25

Or, Ingredients if I want to emulate the other blog

1 cup fresh basil leaves! - $1

1.5 cups spinach leaves (or more basil - again, my sister doesn't really like basil) - $0.25

2 small bulbs of garlic - $0.20?

0.5 cup olive oil - $0.40?

1 cup pine nuts, toasted. - $3?

1 cup grated parmesan cheese $~1

250 g organic whole wheat macaroni $2

0.5 cup water $0

Total: $8

Price per serving: $1.60

IN YOUR FACE, TRITE OTHER BLOG!

I guess I'm still bitter about how that person gets so much freakin' respect for something not that notable.

I'm really glad that I made pesto sauce, since we have a LOT of basil, a lot of pine nuts, and a lot of delicious cheese. It's also so simple! I tried it on fries and it was great too. I don't think I want to use any oil next time; I'll just make it with water since the pine nuts have a lot of lipids anyway. I won't use spinach either, if I'm not making it for my sister.

Progressive Dinner!

My dorm house prepares a Progressive Dinner every year. "Progressive?!", you exclaim! Doesn't that sound pedantic? Is this dinner some kind of ceremony involving juniors progressing into seniors? Or, did some professor in this school donate a ton of money to a dinner fund (I wish) in his/her name? Contrary to the typical nomenclature here at Penn (every festival, building, public area, and urinal is apparently In Memory Of or In The Name Of), the name "Progressive" simply means that you start off on the first floor, with salads prepared by the people/RA/GA on the first floor, and move progressively up each floor to scavenge for food! The second floor is soup, the third floor is pasta, and the fourth floor is desserts. And desserts galore! GALORE! You know why it was desserts galore? We made a lot! Myriad! We didn't just stop at two or three varieties of baked goods; we flipped the fridge inside out, along with flipping some crepes!

Since the fourth floor was in charge of making desserts, and since I honestly have not been able to focus on academic subjects (exam in 24 hours...), I decided to devote my afternoon to mixing and decorating desserts. In all honesty, we made way too many chunks of sugary dough; the other floors didn't have multifarious dishes (I'll get to that later).

Since my Victoria sandwich cake was already in the oven when I went to the kitchen, the GA asked me to start making a white chocolate and hazelnut (well, walnut, because we didn't have any hazelnuts) cake using a recipe that TM had submitted, in which the ingredients were listed with the metric system. This was alright, because I had submitted a Victoria sandwich cake recipe which was originally in grams. By approximating everything through comparison (mathematics!), I managed to get a pretty thick cake batter (much like the Victoria sandwich cake batter, actually, although fat-free yogurt was used instead of butter). While I was debating whether or not the chocolate chips should be melted, TM came in and we finished making the cake together. He actually was going to make it himself since he had emailed only the ingredients and no method (and no amount of baking soda either...). We did melt the white chocolate chips in the end, and the cake turned out dense, not too sweet, tasty, and had a rather gluey texture.

The one failure adventurous part of this baking event was the German chocolate cake icing. I used a recipe from online, but it called for three raw egg yolks. Since this didn't seem like a good idea, I just decided to make the icing without it. Unfortunately, there was too much milk in the mixture (I suppose the egg yolks would've made everything thicker), and the butter was melted. In other words, I ended up with a fatty sugar soup, with coconut and pecans as garnish. After adding 2+ cups of confectioner's sugar, I poured half the "icing" on the cake to see whether it would dry and glaze.
It didn't. It just made half the cake soggy.

I didn't to waste the other half of the icing soup, so I decided to stick it on the stove, and hopefully evaporate some of that liquid. After a bit, I realised that I could make caramel! However, I've never successfully made caramel before; somehow, I always end up with something like the image above: a sugar crumble. It's delicious, yes, and a great cake topping (I ended up sprinkling this on top of the German chocolate cake and it looked really pretty. I also used it for the macaroons. I'm telling you; people loved this! People ate it! Fast!), but it isn't caramel. This summer, I WILL make legit caramel. I think it has something to do with the time I add the baking soda; as soon as my sugar mixture started to caramelise, I poured in a LOT of baking soda. Since it didn't look like it was going to set, I dumped in A LOT MORE baking soda. Then, it looked like the mixture was turning into custard, so I poured it into a pan...

Then, I tasted some, and it tasted bitter and salty, so I was upset. I started to stir the "custard" to hopefully allow the CO2 to escape (?) from the mixture. The "custard" then started crumbling, and shrivelling...and I ended up with a crumble. I will definitely go more in depth with caramel-making when I actually get to make caramel this summer...anyway, digression.

My GA made almond cupcakes with amaretto poured into them. I decorated them. I also ate one; there definitely was an almond taste, and it was really moist. Technically I'm not supposed to consume alcoholic substances. I'm not sure what amaretto tastes like, so I really can't say whether it enhanced the flavour of the cupcake. People actually seemed to like the German chocolate cake more than these cute cupcakes, which is saying something about how plating doesn't really matter for college students, haha.

Banana cupcakes (above) and banana bread (below). The ones on the left are decorated with my glaze icing, and then topped with my awesome-crumble-icing.

Cakes decorated by someone else. G4! That's where I live.

We also dipped delicious, moist coconut macaroons (that were really irregularly shaped) with melted chocolate, and the crumble-topping. They are beautiful!!

And finally...here is my Victoria sandwich cake! I didn't bake it, but I jammed it and added powdered sugar. Someone else added the strawberries. I suppose the point of this post is that the Progressive Dinner is about teamwork.

As a side note, this Victoria sandwich cake was less rich, with more evenly shaped holes in the sponge part. I think this is due to the fact that the butter was melted (read = completely liquid) before being mixed. The one I made before was made with solid butter, and the uneven globs, spread throughout, perhaps created a more homemade/less uniform texture while baking. This one was still delicious, though.

Cookies made with leftover toppings, some in muffin pans! That's why they are so round and/or irregularly shaped!

Now to talk about the actual dinner! I started off on the first floor, with the salads. There was pasta salad (with two types of pasta), which was pretty oily, and not really salty, which was nice. The leafy salad had tangerines inside, which was pretty neat.

...And then there was potato salad! FIVE huge containers of potato salad! It was absolutely amazing! I've decided to fall in love with paprika now.

The second floor was soup, and the only vegetarian one was creamy tomato soup, and I got literally 750ml of it. It was only a bit creamy, which was wonderful because I've had a really negative experience with the too-creamy-it's-almost-weird-it's-sour way like the one made by Pacific Natural Foods (you know, the one in the carton).

The third floor included many trays of pasta. I don't have pictures of these because the lighting was terrible, and, although the pasta and soup were delicious, they weren't that exceptional or photogenic. The main focus = dessert!!

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.

Food Landscapes Calendar!

TS gave me a Food Landscapes Calendar for my birthday [no, today is not my birthday].

I have seen some food landscapes before; this specific calendar art was made by Carl Warner. I highly respect the creativity of using food to make art. I once painted a cup of coffee and included real ground coffee in it [and it smelled good, momentarily!].

I like the reciprocating relationship in which food can become landscapes/photographs/art, and art can become food [food items made out of yarn, crocheting, pencil and eraser, etc.] The landscapes are really pretty and are interesting to look at after a weary day of looking at other items in biology.

Every time I look at the January landscape, I see something new. Today I saw the hot air balloons.

Now, food is permeating pop culture. Think about it. At Hot Topic, they have pizza and potato chip cloth bags that you put your change in. There also is a huge influx of food-shaped erasers. There are tons of jewelry out there that depict food; I have cupcake earrings and pasta [farfalle] earrings.

Food is becoming a serious topic.

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...

An Epic Day of FOOD!

I'm finally getting into the swing of things. I'm finally getting used to managing time in college... so now I think that blogging shouldn't be as difficult as it was in September. Everything is finally settling down and I don't really know if I want to blog for PennAppetit. Can I double post? Can I blog here and then copy and paste the same thing onto their blog? Will PennAppetit shrivel up from my seriously bad sense of lack-of-humour and honestly longer-than-necessary sentences?

Anyway today at lunch there were ricotta cheese stuffed pasta shells [They. Are. Gigantic. I don't think I've ever had pasta that was THAT THICK. Yes, the shells were thick.] and a variety of pumpkin/squash stuffed with Buglar. This meal was amazing. It was also a really photogenic dish.

Later, TJ and I went down to the basement of Commons to do some homework. At around 5pm, there was a reception for another Food Week event, and even though TJ and I hadn't signed up for it, we managed to obtain some food [not the ones with animal pieces inside, though, since both she and I are vegetarian]. This Food Week event included the audience and chef of Commons, Donald Stauffer, asking 5 local farmers about gardening and raising animals and meeting the demands of the clientele. It was pretty interesting, I suppose, except I was sitting in the corner trying to do my Comparative Medicine outlining. There was a point, though, where a guy asked one of the farmers a question, and the farmer said something about how he had "two angels on his shoulders" [as opposed to an angel and a devil, I presume]. Of course, this generated some giggles from the audience. Then, as the guy proceeded to ask his question, the farmer cut him off and started saying some random stuff that wasn't really related to the question [which we never actually heard]. The farmer said that "we should get off the computer and unplug everything because we don't need to know about what Britney is wearing" [paraphrased]. A few minutes later, the guy who was asking his question left the forum.

I was pretty surprised, but in retrospect, I would leave a pro-choice forum [but why would I be at one in the first place?!].

I need to stop digressing. The food that I DID eat included a cold pumpkin soup with cute little cubes of pumpkin texture and a candied walnut [amazing], an apple crumble with flaky pastry, and a pumpkin cheesecake. The pumpkin cheesecake itself didn't taste much like cheesecake; the pumpkin flavour was more prominent. The crust was phenomenal, though, since it had this caramelly butter taste, and it also reminded me of Digestives. The crust was honestly the best part of my day, foodwise.

The apple crumble was deliciously textured and clearly resembled stewed apples with seasoning, nuts and oats. It was wonderful. The pastry was icky and tasteless, but that's because I don't really like plain pastry [yes, I ate all the crumble first].

Evidently, Commons food need not be terrible. The other animal-filled stuff seemed good too, judging by the way MA was eating them. He ate a lot of food and appeared to be sincerely enjoying it.

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!

Penn Picnic and Reception - 2nd Sept

Penn NSO started on the 2nd of September, and we all got up at 5:30am to drive to PA by 9am. As usual, it took 90 minutes to get into Philly, but half an hour to actually end up at the specific street on which we stopped. I'm not disclosing where I live, although one could probably figure it out... since I don't have a cafeteria at my dorm house, unfortunately.

Anyway, after unpacking and all, there was a Penn Family Picnic for all we families and kids. It was actually very similar to the food at the Penn Frosh Picnic in my area on the 19th of August. There were wraps and cookies, but there was also some punch and iced tea and lemonade, which helped, since it was really hot that day.
Firstly, I'd like to say that I fell for the cookie trip again. Last time, I ate a chocolate cookie that was way too hard for my liking. This time, I made the same mistake. I need to learn!! I'm not particularily fond of hard/crunchy cookies. I like the moist cakey ones more, such as the raisin one. It's good to know that Penn has consistency though, concerning its cookie production. The wraps were really good though, with the mozzarella cheese and vegetables, although it was a tad oily.
After the President made a speech, there was a reception, and it was quite a sight watching 3000+ people swarming around taking food... There was this amazing mashed white bean thing, some caramelised onions [the first I've ever had] and a smokey-chipotleish spiced [I'm guessing?] eggplant thing.
There were also tons of cookies. They were the hard kind.
The vegetable station was ridiculous. I wonder what they did to the half heads of cauliflower, the whole peppers and the corn. Surely it's not solely for display? If it was, that'd be a waste of vegetables...
Whole heads of broccolis! Whole rutabagas! Utterly ridiculous!

Excess. Superfluous. Extravagant. Luxurious. I don't know; so much for this being the "year of water". Think about all the water used to produce these crops...they better use them.