Day 10: The Pledge

So after a couple weeks of serious blog hopping from craftsy blogs to sewing blogs (and some food blogs), I have decided to take up...

The Pledge

I, Christine, pledge that I shall abstain from the purchase of "new" manufactured items of clothing, for the period of 2 months. I pledge that I shall refashion, renovate, recycle preloved items for myself with my own hands in fabric, yarn or other medium for the term of my contract. I pledge that I will share the love and post a photo of my refashioned, renovoted, recycled, crafted or created item of clothing on the Wardrobe Refashion blog (and on my own blog, of course), so that others may share the joy that my thriftiness brings! Signed, Christine.

Well... One itsy bitsy problem: I can't sew for beans, but I will certainly try!

Okay, I lied. I CAN sew. Just not well with a sewing machine (which I definitely don't have at my apartment anyway). I've done lots of hand-sewing to make my friends cute sock animals :]

Meet Zareba, Mawry's zebra.

This is EmBem's seahorse and Jessie's moose.

Um... here's a photo to sum up the last ____ (however long it's been since the last post):

Walnut cake and chocolate sponge pudding

Baking with Metro (who is NOT keeping up with his blog!) a couple days ago. All in one evening. BAM!

I have some overripe bananas (I hate any banana that isn't at least slightly green. The BF hates all bananas due to some childhood scarring banana-flavored drug syrup crap, which I find utterly hilarious. I definitely make fun of him). Anyway, I'm planning on making some lovely chocolate chip banana bread when I'm not studying for midterms.

I finally went home last weekend to visit the BF and the girlies (EmBem, Mawry, and Ki). Yeeeeee!

• Ate a lovely, yummy dindin with the parents (SCORE for homemade food! And tons to take back to school).
• Watched Avatar with the BF (I KNOW. I'm actually the LAST person to see it! But it wasn't in 3-D. Boo).
• Got my beloved book back from a friend who kept it for... oh, maybe A YEAR. Kidding :] She's off to Brazil for a month, so I wanted to see her before she left!
• Made dinner with Mawry and Ki
• Watched SATC2 with the girls and snuck cosmos into the theatre (In an REI bottle. SO CLASSY, I know!)
• Had to get up early Sunday morning to drive two hours to the hospital where I intern :[
• Study, study, study :[
• Received some nifty nail stamping stuff in the mail to decorate my toenails and fingernails! But I've yet to try it out. Photos of my lovely nails will be posted!

And I shall begin swimming again today. In one hour, hopefully. If I don't bail... again. But it's such a good deal! Get in shape AND get tan :] Woooo go me!

Day 9: Fewer Pictures, More Words

That's a can opener on the couch. I swear.

I have come to realize that I should be a therapist. There must be some sort of aura about me that screams: "TELL ME YOUR LIFE STORY. I'M A GREAT LISTENER!"

With friends, I've been a good shoulder to cry on, but this comes with the territory of having friends, right? I mean, if I don't let sog up my shoulder, who the hell am I gonna turn to if I'm the weepy one??

Recently, I've been meeting new people at this semester's intern site, and I must have some secret key that makes people want to open their floodgates of baggage. The guy who comes in to empty the trash stopped in the breakroom, where I was munching my dinner in peace, to tell me his life story. Granted, he did travel lots when he was young and worked in many different countries, I didn't ask for this unloading of information! Maybe one day, I'll be grateful to all the random people who tell me their life lessons and shit, but right now, I'm simply bewildered! Another woman was telling me about the joys (or NOT) of working while trying to raise a baby. It was super cute, and I'm more inclined to gush about babies than chat about world travels (cuz I am SO well versed in the ways of the world…not). But honestly, the way we were blabbing on and on about the wonders of raising a babe, you would've thought I was a new mom, too. YEESH.

I did discover from conversations with a different coworker that she's the cousin of someone who graduated from high school with me. That was a frickin' "SMALL WORLD" moment for me. It was someone I didn't know very well, so the conversation definitely died after the discovery, but STILL! What a small world! And yet ANOTHER gentleman whom I met on the first day of interning told me about his growing-up adult kids who are all away from home, either at college or somewhere else finding themselves. He expressed to me his frustration that his daughter had majored in communications, but is now doing something completely different at her current workplace. Blah blah blah... It was fascinating and all, to hear other people's wishes and worries, to see how they view life and respond to challenges, but seriously, I feel like an EMOTIONAL LANDFILL. That term is amazingly self-explanatory; I'm so proud that I made it up myself!

And I do feel heavy and burdened with everyone else's problems. HOWEVER, I am sometimes to blame for bringing it upon myself. I take such great satisfaction in letting people unload their hopes and fears because I know that people like to bottle things up and not let on that everything isn't hunky-dory. I don't know if it's because I think so highly of myself in my knowledge and ability to calm people, or if it's from all my experience of "counseling" friends, but I seem to think that I am someone who can advise people objectively (most of the time…), make them see things from a different perspective, and help them realize that it's all going to be okay. That reminds me of a quotation:

"Everything will be okay in the end; if it's not okay, it's not the end."

It just makes me smile to know that most of trivial things we fret about is not going to end the world; we're all going to be okay! [But now that I think of it, if things ARE going okay, should we be thinking, "OH SHIT, THIS IS IT. It's the end of everything as we know it!" Nah. I'll keep on being sunshiney.

Okay, on to lighter things.

Short list of things I've done in the last couple weeks:

1. Small dinner party (crockpot merlot chicken FTW! I amaze myself sometimes.)
2. ROOMIE'S frickin' graduation (seriously, she's leaving me for SoCal, and I hafta fend for myself all by my lonesome!)
3. So much shopping (this needs to stop, since I have no income to speak of)
4. Lotsa cooking for the Seester, who has just moved into an apartment (and she has no kitchenware/cooking skills/sense of responsibility/etc)
5. No studying (oh, right…that's normal)
6. Cleaned up my room partially and rearranged the living room
7. Decided to refurbish a clock and a canister for the bathroom to make it matchy-matchy with what the new apt-mate wants (it's okay cuz I love being artsy and craftsy!)
8. Successfully uncorked a bottle of wine with a regular corkscrew (it took SO MUCH arm strength; definitely need to work out ASAP)
9. Helped Metro move back in town (he's doing research for the summer; thank god I have someone to suffer with)
10. Installed Windows 7 on my laptop! Finally! (okay, I lie; my cousin did it, but it's amazing!)

Although the days are dragging by, it's nearly June. WTF, where is all the time going?? It's almost midterms, and I'm totally screwed.

On the bright side, the BF is home from the wrong coast! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee :]

Day 8: Reading the Instructions is Totally Overrated

So I've been more cooking and baking in the last couple days. After the naan, I made curry to go with it, which I have been eating nonstop since then. And I am fucking sick of curry. No more curry! At least for another month. But there's still more curry in the fridge! The recipe said it'd make 6-8 servings, but I swear I still have about 6 servings left in tupperware! What the freak.

Here's a picture of the final product :] The photo totally doesn't do it justice.

Damn, that looks rustic. And I used this recipe: http://www.oprah.com/food/For-the-Crock-Pot-Indian-Lamb-and-Spinach-Curry

I didn't follow the recipe at all. First, I didn’t use a crockpot. I wanted to make it in an hour instead of four. I used pork instead of lamb cuz that's what was in the fridge. So I got chicken broth for the pork. And I totally forgot the yogurt at the end. Ooooops. Well, it still tastes wonderful…until you've eaten it for lunch and dinner several days in a row. Ahhh, college life.

After all that cooking, I treated myself to this:

Mmm…White Russians are delicious men. I mean, drinks. And this drink was well deserved after toiling in the kitchen like a housewife, except without the working hubby and five kids.

The Roomie just took her last final yesterday and will be graduating on Saturday! Freeeeeeedom! But unfortunately, not for me. We did make almond cookies last night and dyed my hair with henna! Definitely sucked at following directions in the cookie-making process. I added everything in the wrong order. The Roomie took over, as she usually does when things aren't going her way, and they turned out lovely! Delicious with vanilla ice cream… Mmm…

Oh, I'm so arteeestic :] Here's the recipe, if anyone's interested: http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/almond-cookies

Then the henna fiasco occurred next. We were waiting for the Roomie's bf to bring back latex gloves from Seester. The Roomie refused to touch the henna mixture without protection, and I totally don't blame her. As you can see from the photo below… she was smearing shit into my hair. And it smelled pretty close to shit, too.

Gross. Luckily, it's all for a good cause, which is to make my hair red! Though it's only a tint or gleam seen in sunlight, it's pretty :] The Roomie says my hair has a glint of auburn, but less red than it was last time. Oh yeah, forgot to say this is the third time I've henna-ed my hair. I just like to mix things up, but there really aren't that many moderate options for black hair. Moderate meaning NOT bleaching my hair and trying to look like a white girl. I may act like one, but I sure ain't gonna try to look like one!

Day 7: Damn, it's already May!

I'm too ADD (or ADHD) for a blog. Seester creeped around and found my blog. She's seriously such a pro stalker, it's somewhat worrying. Anyway, her only comment was that I sounded bored. I replied with, "My blog is boring?? Or do you think I'm so bored that I started this blog?" Apparently, it was the latter. I do hope that doesn't translate into a boring blog, though.

Well today, I'm about to sit down to a lunch of leftovers. I have so many things to say since my last post was awhile ago. Yet, I can't figure what to talk about because I honestly don't think anyone reads this, and I don't think any of it is interesting or important enough to write about. But I can always relay on my good ol' friend, food :]

I'm currently letting my naan dough rise. Yes, I'm making lovely naan bread! And hopefully, I can make some curry to go with it. Otherwise, it'll be an easy pizza dough to top with marinara and cheese :] Oh, how I love college "cooking" and versatility!

But first, a shameless plug for Metro's new blog! After linking him to my blog, I apparently inspired him to start his own! He's getting lotsa experience taking photos everywhere and wanted a place to spill all those crazy thoughts and gorgeous photos. So there it is, my shameless plug for a dear friend.

Oh, and he's looking for a model for a photoshoot. I'd freaking love to do it. And if I do, I can check ONE thing off my bucket list! YAY! He's thinking something messy like flour :] Dude, I'm down. I wanna try paint. Hee!

Alright, onto the naan!

So this is the recipe I stumbled across long ago. I finally went out and bought plain yogurt. Shit. I just realized that I bought whole milk yogurt. Oops. Well, this follows the whole "never-follow-the-recipe" thing I do. And I didn't quite put enough yeast. Hee.

Alright, here is the milk-sugar-yeast broth. It smelled awful, but I made me smile to think that I was creating a little utopia for little yeasties to thrive, with warm milk to swim around in and sugar to eat. And then I'd bake them to death after having them slave away make my dough rise! Buahahaha!

Here's my set up. One day, I'll have a nice recipe book instead of my laptop. Or maybe not, since we're moving in the direction of replacing all paper mediums! Stinkin' Kindle! I'll never give up my lovely books. I'm going to have a massive library, bigger than the Library of Alexandria, to save all the world's books! It'll be magical.

Wet ingredients. Dry ingredients. Ew, mixing the egg, yogurt, and olive oil into the smelly yeastie broth was gross. I could just imagine some shy kid having to drink a nasty concoction like that as some frat pledge activity (AKA hazing). "Hey, you gotta drink this, jump into the creek, and swim to the other side. Then streak across campus; make sure to run in front of all the sorority houses. We'll laugh and take pictures. If you do it, you can join our frat and be our bitch." Hmmm sounds good!

Ha, anyway, PRESTO. Mix wet and dry together. I got this awful-looking crumbly mix. Um… that DOES NOT look like dough!

So I poured a splash of milk in. Then some more milk. And even more. WTF. Finally, I got something that held together well enough. I kneaded it

Covered it and let it rise for an hour. Then kneaded it some more. God, this bread is so KNEADY! What more do you want from meeeee?? I just want some damn naan! Oh, so I realized: "Hell, I don’t know how to knead bread!" But I DO know how to knead CLAY. From a ceramics class last summer. So I kneaded it like clay. Granted, it didn't act like clay at all, I tried. Then I let it sit and rise again. And boy, did it rise! It actually felt like dough, all soft and lovely. That's more like it.

So the recipe told me to put my oven on the highest temp possible. Um, seriously? Will my oven explode? That sounds too scary. Roomie told me to just set it on a lower temp and bake it for a bit longer. But the bake time is only 3 minutes. Well, I'm gonna take the plunge. 550 degrees it is!

And voila! Here are the first two prototypes!

They seemed pretty thick and hefty, so I tried to get the second two thinner. But they turned out just as dense.

And it has the consistency of dense bread. So not naan. Semi-success. Even though it's not quite like naan, and my entire apartment (and probably the whole building now, too) smells like burnt something, the product is edible! I think I kneaded it too much. I've heard that working the dough too much does that. Turns out that I'm the kneady one! Or maybe it's all that extra milk I had to add to make the dough not crumbly. ONE DAY, I SHALL CONQUER BREAD. But today, I shall be munching on dense "naan."

Same as my pie. Oh, yes, I never told you the outcome of my first pie! Well, it was so deceiving, how perfect it looked and how wonderful it smelled. The next day, I finally tried it, and it was sorta awful. Something about the balance of spices and tastes was completely off. I couldn't taste the pear AT ALL, and the nutmeg was too strong. Roomie thought the spices were okay, but she agreed that baking with pears is quite different from baking with apples. Apparently, you need to be more delicate with pears, so I suppose throwing in a bunch of other spices that the recipe didn't call for was NOT the right thing to do, even though it seemed "natural" and very "professional baker." Oh, a dash of this and a pinch of that! Not so much...

I totally overestimate my baking skills.

But the BF and Metro will be baking with me all summer, so perhaps I shall learn a thing or two :]

Speaking of summer, I've just started my spring semester, which actually goes til the end of July. I'm super sad that I pretty much don't have long summer breaks anymore! Mawry will be at mountain camp all summer :[ I'm not sure what KiKi and EmBem are doing. LSay is moving to the East Coast for good. Ack! Tragedy! But at least, I have a functional oven at school. Yeeee! Oh, the silver lining :]

Day 6: First Pie Ever!

I decided earlier this evening that I want to make a pie. There were three pears at the bottom of the fridge since…who knows when! So with my desire to bake my first pie ever and several lonely pears, the pear crumb pie was born. Mmmm, and I wanted to finish it before Glee came one. So two hours start…NOW.

Pie Crust = FAIL

So I read the back of the box wrong. And yes, I used a boxed pie crust. Baby steps, people! But obviously, even with one instruction of "Just Add Water!" I messed up! But luckily I didn't pour the entire cup of water into the bowl. I estimated the 4-6 tablespoons that should've gone in and mixed. Got my hands dirty and realized I left the camera in my room! Must document the insanity! Here's the scene on the kitchen table (AKA the only work space in the apartment). I always have my laptop to chat with the BF while I'm baking!

I mixed the whole box, which makes two crusts, but I only needed one. The lovely, scrumptious crumble is going on top. Best part. Well I managed to roll out one crust on the dinky plastic cutting board. Can't wait til I can have a huge wood one! It's probably less hygienic, but who cares?!

Then I stuck the pie crust onto the glass pie pan, and it's gorgeous. I'm feeling more like a legit baker at this point. That crust went into the fridge while I worked on the pears!

I tossed the walnuts into the food processor and got it to be "finely chopped." Also, I decided not to peel the pears because generally, the most nutrients are right under the skin. I guess it's getting baked anyway, but it's less work for me! Slice time! Definitely feeling more pro after seeing how nicely I was slicing the pears. I have evidence!

Abracadabra! BAM DONE!

Then I mixed the pear slices in lovely spices and extracts. I never follow recipes: didn't have lemon juice, so I used vanilla and almond extracts; it called for only cinnamon, but I also added nutmeg and ginger. Meh, I just like experimenting! Yet, this wild side of me usually leads to disaster… like in this photo.

So I was mixing the crumble, which was freaking annoying. I guess my arm spazzed, leading me to fling some crumble all over the armchair. And my leg. Mmmm, and I haven't cleaned that up yet. But here's the result! Pear slices soaking up spices and yummy crumble!

Filling up the pie….mmmmm.

And in the oven!

An hour and 20 minutes later! Golden brown and sizzling. I wish the picture could convey how amazing my apartment smells.

And I can't seem to delete this redundant photo... But here's my lovely pie crust again!

Oh and here's the recipe I vaguely followed: http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/apple-pear-crumb-pie-10000001694333/index.html

Yummmmm :]