Tidbits

Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…

May is Cooking Month

May 05, 2007, 12:29 am

So May is upon us, and with it, the summer term at UW starts. So Gary is back living with us. And I must embrace cooking “real” food once more. I’ve grown lazy in the past four months when my brother was on his workterm. Eating out, letting the fridge (*gasp*) empty out… Going an entire month without going to Costco.

I’ve forgotten how much he eats! When it was just me and Mike, 2 cups of rice was enough for a few meals. Now even with three cups, there’s barely a bowl’s worth leftover at the end of the meal. Before, there’s usually leftoverrs for lunch the next day. Now, I cook even more, and there’s NOTHING left for the next day. And normally, the club-pack sizes of yogurt and breakfast pita are usually still around past their expiry date. No more.

Poor little Mikey, he never grew up having to fight for his food. Hopefully he’s learning from the experience of last term, in which he would look up from the newspaper he’s reading at the dinner table and wonder where all the food went. You snooze, you loose.

So I would like to share today’s meal.

It started off with Tea poached salmon with mango salsa.

I got the inspiration from the Heart & Stroke Foundation newsletter today.. I say “Inspiration” because I mostly just took away from it the fact that you can poached with tea, and that you use some citrus tea. For tea, I got some lemon-scented black tea instead of Rooibos (never tried this type of tea before, kinda interested. Rooibos that is), and as for “poaching”, I don’t really know what that means. So I just boiled some tea, and dump the salmon into it. Yum yum. It smelled really funky…

I totally ignored the part about the fruit salsa cause I don’t have any pineapples. But I do have mango. Found this recipe for mango salsa.

Takeaways:

Mango? Check!
Red onion? Umm, I think there’s some shallots in the fridge. Check!
Jalapeno, cucumber.. Don’t think zucchini would do.. ignore
Fresh cilantro leaves? Wiki says that’s the same as coriander. Have some coriander seeds on the spice rack.. Check!
Lime juice. There’s this old bottle of lemon juice in the fridge that we got for cleaning hard water stuff.. Check!

And there you have it. The photo looks good doesn’t it? The taste? Er, surprisingly viable? That is, it didn’t kill us.

But there’s more! Think back to the beginning of this post. You think one little slab of broiled salmon, some mango pieces, and a few stalk of choy will sustain my brother?

In come the kimchee:

Actually the kimchee was Mike’s idea. He wanted some with his rice. Then Gary told us about how there was this one Korean girl last work term that would just bring in rice, kimchee and seaweed for lunch. And thus I was inspired. The seaweed was technically the kind you can just eat by itself as a snack, but it’s grown so stale that it’s only pallitable wrapped in warm rice. The kimchee was also good for masking the taste, as did the rice vinager.

Mom, please save us from my culinary prowess!