My Awesome Attempt At: Pierogi

The other day I needed to make dinner for Baby but I couldn’t quite figure out what we were going to eat.

I decided I wanted bacon but obviously a responsible mom like me would never consider just frying up bacon and serving it as dinner. And I didn’t want to make eggs since that’s pretty much just breakfast. So while the bacon cooked, I looked through the fridge, hoping to be struck by inspiration.

Not to brag, but I’ve watched my fair share of Iron Chef and Chopped. Plus, I was in culinary school for a couple of months. And I’m on pinterest like every other day (except for Lent, then I’m down to once a week.) So, yeah, I’m kind of awesome at throwing random crap ingredients together and making well-balanced and nourishing edible meals.

Here’s what I found in the fridge:

It wasn’t exactly inspiring.

I guess I could have made a salad but I hate eating fresh spinach. Not because I’m some weirdo who doesn’t like fresh vegetables. I like the texture of spinach but that shiz is bitter. What I always end up doing is sauteeing it in butter and garlic. It’s SO yummy!

And everyone knows how good spinach is for you. No matter how unhealthy whatever I was about to make was, because I had the genius idea of adding spinach, it was totally gonna be healthy.
I’m a mom now so I totally know what I’m talking about.

I know, you want to know what amazing idea I came up with, right?

I decided on pierogi.

Pierogi are a type of European dumpling. Wikipedia has a ton of interesting info about them and I do have a recipe for them on my pinterest board. Pierogi is actually the plural of pieróg but nobody ever just eats one pieróg. They eat like 4-6 pierogi.

I only just found out about their existence back around Christmas. Baby and I were at a friend’s house and they offered to teach us how to make Pierogi.

Their family is Polish, so their tradition is getting the family together and making a big batch of these suckers, not unlike how my family likes to get together and find a tamale lady to sell us tamales.

Seriously.

Don’t judge us. Have you ever made tamales? They’re such a pain.

The awesome thing about Pierogi is that they’re so simple to make. The dough is just eggs, flour, and water. The filling, I learned, could be just cottage cheese with a spoonful of sugar and a pinch of salt.

And oh. em. gee.

It’s SO good. You wouldn’t think so because the filling is just cottage cheese with a spoonful of sugar and salt but they’re amazing. Baby had just as many as I did. Which was kind of a Christmas miracle because half the time, she won’t sit still long enough to eat. The other half of the time, she refuses to eat…sigh.

Anyway, because I think so highly of myself (and also because I was pretending to be a contestant on Chopped) I decided to try something a little different. I was going to make bacon and spinach pierogi.
That, to me, sounded amazing.

First, I chopped up all the bacon.

Then I chopped up an onion and started to brown it in the leftover bacon grease.

While that was going, I minced some garlic and chopped up the tomatoes and explained to my imaginary audience the importance of a good knife.

Because, apparently, now I was Alton Brown.

I added the tomatoes to the pan but left out the garlic and bacon. Bobby Flay has taught me to fear the possibility of burnt garlic, so I always make it the second to last item whenever I’m cooking.

While I was explaining this to my imaginary audience, I was also making my pierogi dough.

I probably could have followed a recipe like this one or this one but when it comes to cooking, I am most definitely a pantser.
I don’t need some recipe telling me what to do.
The dough had seemed relatively easy and I figured if I could invent a recipe for Tomato Soup Bread (which I totally did) then I could make my own pierogi dough.

And that’s when I realized my onions and tomatoes were burning.

Yep. I got mad kitchen skill.
And, yes. I had to throw out my first attempt.

My second attempt, I kept the heat on low and this time,

since I had all my ingredients ready (like I should have the first time) all I had to do was wait for the right time to add the tomatoes and garlic,

then the bacon,

and (because it seemed like a really good idea) a big glob of cream cheese.

By now, all the imaginary judges in the panel were oohing and ahhing over my creativity and Bobby Flay was getting a little nervous because, oh my gosh! This was gonna be so tasty!

Hands down, best peirogi ever.

And that’s when I added my secret ingredient:

BAM!

A whole mess of spinach to totally cancel out the fat from the browned onions, bacon, and cream cheese.

And also because spinach cooks down really fast and if I didn’t add like the entire package, you wouldn’t even have known there was any there.

Okay, yes, it did look a little like puke but whatever. The imaginary judges didn’t take off too many points.
This was a filling. It didn’t need to be pretty.

I added a little extra salt and some black pepper, then turned the stove off so that it would cool off a bit while I rolled out my dough.

Don’t bother asking how thick I rolled the dough out because I’m not really sure. To be safe, and also because it always seems to be what every recipe for everything says, we’ll pretend I rolled it out to 1/4 of an inch.

I have these awesome circle cutters from school, so I used those and then spooned the filling in the middle.

That was actually the tricky part.

See, after it’s filled, you’re supposed to fold the circles in half and then smush the sides together with a fork.

Then you boil them in water until they float.

I know.
The water looks funky.

But that’s because if you fill the peirogi wrong, they don’t stay shut while they’re in the water.

Once they’re done being boiled, you fry them in a pan of butter.

And voila!
You’re all ready to eat!

And they were actually really good! Baby seemed to dig them.

Or she may have just been starving. I started the whole process while she was napping (around 5) and didn’t finish until 8:30/9:00.
So maybe I won’t be winning Mom of the Year anytime soon. I at least, did feed her!

To me, the dough seemed a little rubbery and eggy. But that was probably just because I didn’t balance out the flour and egg. Other than that, they were pretty awesome.

Next time, I think I’ll try them with Gorgonzola and sweet onions. Or I might actually follow one of the recipes online.

The cool thing was, the next morning, I still had leftover filling so I mixed it into some scrambled eggs. And that was also amazing.

So really, it was an EPIC win!

In your face, Bobby Flay!

Tags: European cooking, I actually really am only good at running my mouth and pretending to know what I'm doing, I might be a little weird, I TOTALLY still managed to fit in a Disney princess with this entry, I would totally marry Bobby Flay if given the chance, I'm not actually trying to have a throw down with Bobby Flay, pierogi, there was a LOT of sarcasm in this entry

The Nostradamus/Inspector Gadget Effect

Reblogged from The Curse of Future Tom:

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Every time I read or see something Nostradamus predicted, it’s so vague I can’t believe someone is spending five seconds saying or typing it. 

There will be a great war, and an evil man, and then a big thing will crash! 

Sitting way back there in history, where you know, not much has happened yet, so if you don’t nail down a timeline, then pretty much anything you say is going to be true eventually. 

Read more… 925 more words

I just wanted to post this on my blog because for Christmas I got a Kindle Fire and I've been using it for reading (duh) but then I've also downloaded Evernote and the drawing ap thingy on it and I was thinking how cool it was that it TOTALLY looked like a real book. Especially with my nifty purple case. And then I was like, "Holy Crap! I wanted one of these back when I used to watch Inspector Gadget, cuz Penny had one and it was the coolest thing ever!" The closest I ever got to it was drawing all the buttons and knobs on a sketchbook. It's just so weird how this stuff works out.

Tags: At least I updated right?, Evernote, I didn't write this entry! I reblogged it from Future Tom!, I know this is not a "real" blog post, I totally cheated again, Inspector Gadget, Kindle Fire

My Failed Attempt At: Cake Balls

Most people who know me, know that not only am I amazing at procrastination and rambling nonsensically, I’m also a pretty good fairly decent baker.

Or at least I like to pretend I am.

Once upon a time I was in culinary school so every now and then I like to read up on sites like bakerella or Joy of Baking and think to myself, Ha! I can do that! It’s so simple!

So after skimming a basic step by step about red velvet cake balls and texting my friend El Paso (who has been selling cake balls during the holidays), I decided I was totally capable of handling something that simple.

Boy was I wrong.

I decided to go with El Paso’s Oreo ball recipe (which I will post someday when I get around to it) because it was the simplest recipe to follow. I figured even though i was the best baker ever it would make more sense to start with something easy, that way I’d get the hang of it and not waste expensive ingredients.

I think my first mistake was thinking I knew just as much as the ladies who make a living selling this stuff.
But, you know, I’m only one class away from getting my patisserie and baking degree so obviously I know what I’m doing.

After i smushed some Oreos and cream cheese together,

I rolled them into balls


and froze them for a couple of hours.

It wasn’t hard at all because there was literally no baking involved.

It was so simple!

So where did I go wrong?

I blame the chocolate.

Despite having spent way too many hours learning about how to temper chocolate in school, I couldn’t for the life of me get the chocolate to look good.

I don’t know if it was because the kitchen was freezing, the type of chocolate i was using was wrong (all the blogs and my friends told me to use chocolate bark but I was too lazy busy to look for it), or just because i melted the chocolate in the microwave instead of going through the actual process of tempering it (There’s a whole science to melting chocolate but I don’t feel like writing about it right now.) but my cake balls did not look anything at all like I wanted them to.
Instead of looking like this, they looked like this:


Crap.

Or as my sister put it, rabbit crap.

They tasted awesome though. You know, once you got over the fact that you were biting into something that looked like poop.

The smart thing to do, would have been to analyze my mistakes and try to prevent that ugliness from happening again. But, I needed to make a Christmas present for my secret Santa so I decided since my first batch wasn’t a complete fail, I could attempt to make lemon cake balls with my lemon bar cupcake recipe (again I’ll post that when I’m not feeling lazy).

And once again, the baking of the cake

and the rolling of the balls (teehee)

was not hard.

It was the damn chocolate.


Otra vez!

Argh. I dunno.

The first time, I thought maybe the chocolate hadn’t been melted properly so this second time, I attempted to temper it.

I like to tell myself that because I used regular white chocolate chips instead of chocolate bark, it made the fat separate from the rest of the chocolate.

I’d also like to blame it (again) on our freezing cold kitchen.

What I got was this weird modeling chocolate consistency that I ended up folding around each cake ball.

And that couldn’t possibly have been because I used milk to thin the chocolate out instead of heavy cream.

Next time If I ever make these stupid things again, I’m gonna spend the extra money and buy the ingredients I was supposed to.

And in case you were wondering, the lemon cake balls actually tasted pretty good. The lemon made the cake really sour and the white chocolate made it really sweet. But by that point, i was so irritated that the work just didn’t seem worth the results. Plus, I just don’t like white chocolate anymore.

I think I’ll just stick to cupcakes.

Aw, crap.

Tags: cake balls are too mainstream anyway, how many times did I admit to laziness just in this one entry?, I said balls a lot, I'm so over white chocolate, wow I am really lazy!

The Fine Art of Stealing Other Peoples’ Ideas

Because I totally lack originality and it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything, I thought I’d share some scanned pages from this journal thingy I’m working on. I got the idea originally by watching this video at Moleskine.com:

When I started it, I was thinking I’d want a Moleskine because, have you seen one in person? They’re amazing! And apparently they’re like waterproof and just generally awesome. And okay, yeah, I’m a total sucker for advertising and they make it look like something that EVERY aspiring artist/writer/lost soul person should have because obviously, the best way to express yourself is through a journal of some sort.

And also their youtube page is kinda awesome too. I just spent 30 minutes looking at their videos instead of typing this blog…what I was talking about again?

Oh right.

So, I was going to invest in a Moleskin. But then I had to think about what size do I want cuz there’s like a million sizes. And then I had to decide if I wanted an unlined or lined notebook. And then I started thinking about what I was actually going to put in the notebook. And while, yes, I like the idea of making my own recipe scrapbook, if I want to be able to use the recipes, they’re going to need to be in page protectors because I’m probably gonna get stuff on them or put them down and realize that they’re actually in a pile of sauce that I forgot to wipe down. Plus, what if there’s not enough pages in my notebook? Then I’m going to have to get another notebook and then I’ll always be looking from one notebook to the next wondering which one had the recipe I wanted.

And then, my coworkers got me hooked on this other site called Pinterest…and that just sucked up another 30 minutes of blogging time. But come on now, a website that let’s you pin the stuff you like into one spot so you can always look it up whenever you want?!! That’s amazing! And it’s so simple to use! Argh!!

The problem I’m having is that I’m stuck. I’m in a place that I won’t be leaving anytime soon. Literally and figuratively speaking. And so I’ve been passing the time by playing a little game of What If.

• What if I could leave? Where would I go?
• What if I had the money? What would I buy?
• What if I had the time? How would I spend it?
• What if I had the ability? Would I really use it?

And last but probably most importantly:

• What if I was wherever it is I think I’m supposed to be at? Would I finally feel happy?

I honestly don’t have any answers. But at least now I have a bulletin board of ideas online.

While I was thinking all of these depressing philosophical thoughts, I decided one thing I could do, instead of moping about the things I don’t have, is to start organizing the stuff I do. Maybe appreciating what I have will make me feel better. While I was looking for something to store Baby’s clothes in, I came across the January issue of Real Simple. Their focus was on New Year’s Resolutions and how to fix bad habits. It spoke to me. So I bought the issue. Normally, I don’t buy magazines. I don’t buy anything, honestly. I’m broke. I had talked myself out of the Moleskine notebook and I was determined not spend money on anything unless it was food, gas, or an absolute necessity (like a storage bin for Baby’s clothes or an oil change for the car). So why did I buy the magazine?

Because I liked the recipes, for one thing.

And for another, I found an article that really seemed like it might do some good to read. So I bought the magazine and reread the article. Below are the bits that I chopped out and made into a collage.

Admittedly, I could have just glued the article itself onto paper but it's more fun to butcher someone else's hard work and reclaim it as a form of artistic expression.

Okay, so it’s not really a collage. It’s more of a copy and pasting of the article onto some notebook paper in a way that I think looks good. Don’t judge me. I’m going through a funk and I needed to make something the way I wanted it to look pretty. It was actually very therapeutic. Plus, it gave me the chance to figure out how I was going to make my Moleskine notebook when I didn’t feel like paying $15 for an actual Moleskine.

What I’ve decided to do, is basically cut out magazine articles that I like and glue them onto notebook paper. My clippings then go into sheet protectors and the sheet protectors go into a pretty binder that I’ve been saving for something awesome. Then I decorate accordingly with all the scrapbook paper I’ve been squirreling away and add my own notes or whatever else with my amazingly perfect pen.

And it works wonders for my sense of accomplishment. I think the second page I made looks more collage-y.

The soda can and the Mark Twain quote were from different articles. But whatever, it fit and it's my journal/collage thing. I do what I want.

Except now I’m squirreling away every magazine I find that has pictures of furniture or intersting looking recipes and especially catalogs from work.

I want all of this.

I think cutting and pasting is an art project that psychiatrists use for obsessive compulsive people or like, serial killers. And also for little kids who are just learning how to use scissors and glue. I should, in actuality, be discussing the content of the pages that I posted because it’s especially relevant to my current mindset but instead I’m going to let you read them for yourself and figure out whether or not it’s something that applies to you. And then next week, if I do post a new entry, maybe we’ll talk about it. Or maybe I’ll get sidetracked and talk about something else instead.

Happy New Year!!

Tags: Art, don't sue me, In which I post magazine articles that I did not write and do not claim as my own work, look at all the pretty stuff Pier 1 has!, Mark Twain, Moleskine, Notebook, Real Simple, seriously all I did was cut out articles from Real Simple's January Issue and repasted it onto notebook paper

HiJINKS!!!

Since I have been sucking royally at updating regularly on my blog AND keeping up with NaNoWriMo, I thought it would be fun to give you all a little heads up as far as how my progress has been…er…progressing.

And so, I present to you:

My Month of Writing Dangerously

As you can see by all the red days, I have not been doing well. However, i can now also present:

Le Month of Hijinks:
In which I….

traveled cross country

made a five tier wedding cake (in about 48 sleepless hours)

helped rescue my friend’s phone from a rampaging sofa

more than likely lost my phone to said sofa

got back in touch with childhood friends

helped improve the vocabulary of Orlando citizens (who doesn’t know what hijinks are?!!)

visited a free portion of DisneyWorld with my daughter

actually caught the wedding bouquet!!

wandered around downtown Orlando (on purpose!)

tried to use a friend’s name to get in for free at a club in Orlando (didn’t work)

wandered around downtown Jacksonville (so not on purpose, cops and crying were involved)

learned how to drive to two completely different wal*marts in Jacksonville

quite possibly may have microscopically improved my Spanish (side note: don’t say cabron/a around Puerto Ricans and never under any circumstances refer to anyone as a jiggaboo)

And I’m not done yet folks! This month has been full of hijinks!!! accomplishments that I’m quite proud of. If I could do almost all of that in two weeks, I’m sure I can actually complete the things I need to in 8 days.

Just like updating this blog, it’s just a matter of actually buckling down and doing it!

Tags: evil evil electronic eating couches, Hijinks is a real word! I swear I didn't make it up!, huzzah for friends, look! There's almost real Disney Princesses this time!, Oh Florida! You were so nice to me, procrastination vs last minute inspiration

Happy Halloween!!

I ask myself the same thing everyday!

Tags: I felt lazy but I promised Jaclyna I'd update regularly, I want candy!!, Trick or Treat!

What The Hell Is A Pantser?

I know, I know. You’re wanting me to start the recaps of Jem and the Holograms. Well, too bad. Today I feel like talking about something else.

November is only a few short days away. Guess what that means?

…Besides turkey comas and non-stop Christmas specials?

November isn’t just that month that gets you panicked for Christmas. It’s also National Novel Writing Month, which is a thing some people started to help promote literacy. You can check out their site here but basically, what you do is you sign up and agree to TRY to write 50,000 words starting on November 1st and ending at midnight on November 30th.

Fifty THOUSAND.

That’s a lot of words. And you’re not the only one who thinks so.

Everyone who has helped organize the event agree that you’d have to be insane it’s a crazy goal to attempt. Even though a lot of people will sign up, they don’t think many will finish. But like with most marathosn, finishing isn’t really the goal. The point is just to get you to start writing because apparently, despite all the blogs and fanfiction, there is just not a lot of literacy going on in the world today. And really, with crap like Twilight being a bestseller, I kinda have to agree.

Not that I’m completely hating on Twilight. I have succumbed to the crack that Stephanie Meyer has been dishing out to lonely, heartbroken women and teenage girls.

It’s quite possibly the worst written thing ever, but, if you’ve ever been one of those people who falls head over heels in love and then builds up a romance in your head that the real relationship can in no way realistically match, then you totally get where Meyers is coming from and you can fill in the gaps for yourself.

What would I give to be where you are? What would I give to see you dancing? What I would I give to see you smiling at meeeee?

And it just got me thinking, if she can write that piece of crap and become a millionaire, why can’t I?

Did you know JK Rowling (the chick who invented Harry Potter) was on foodstamps when she started writing The Sorcerer’s Stone? I’m on foodstamps too!!

Although, truth be told, I don’t think I’m as good a writer as JK Rowling. She’s good with action, character development, combining magic and mystery into a realistic environment, and…you know…plot.

I’m most definitely on the same plane as Stephanie Meyers (I even copy and pasted some writing samples on iwl.me to make sure). I can:

• make up characters that stand around and talk about how much they love/hate each other. Or how sad and heartbroken they are. Or how they can’t stop thinking about the person that they love/hate so much and it makes them feel so sad and heartbroken.
• Use the word murmur repeatedly. 
• And, I’m really good at writing run-on sentences and/or sentence fragments and pretending that it’s poetic license because really, I’m trying to portray a stream of consciousness and nobody thinks in grammatically correct sentences. (Right? I know I don’t.)

One thing that I do have over Stephanie Meyer?

I like to pretend that I have a sarcastic, witty sense of humor. It comes across much better when I’m writing it out since nobody knows how long it took me to think of my snappy comebacks or offhand insults. It also helps if the subject I’m making fun of is being continuously insulted on a daily basis.

My point isn’t that I’m a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. (Although I totally think I am.) It’s that she is an actual paid author. She’s a millionaire.

Plus she gets to hang out with celebrities. Lame.

And it’s all because she wasn’t afraid to sit down and actually write all her stuff out.

Me?

I’m stuck rambling on the interwebz at 1 am to nine people who probably just clicked the link on my facebook page cuz they wanted to be wonderful, supportive, amazing friends. (And you totally are! Thank you!)

And I’m not getting paid for this.

Hence the food stamps.

Hence the reference to JK Rowling.

And hence the decision to sign up for NaNoWriMo.

Which leads me back to my original reason for writing this post.

What the hell is a Pantser?

Or better yet, who came up with that term?

Cuz all the NaNoWriMo blog entries and various other blogs about writing (like this one and this one) all mention Planners Vs. Pantsers. Which I totally wanted to see as like an epic battle between hipsters and people who ran around pantsing them…

She's so over small provincial towns...And I couldn't find any pictures of pantsers on Deviant Art...

But alas, it’s a boring battle. And while those blogs did have some helpful writing tips, there were a LOT of words and nowhere near enough pictures of Disney characters in amusing setups. I’m going to summarize:

• Planners are people who are OCD with their writing. They have indepth character analysis, twenty page story outlines, extensive research notes on every single part of their story, and who know EXACTLY what they’re going to write as soon as they sit down.

• Pantsers are people who “fly by the seat of their pants”. They get a random idea, sit down and kind of just write down whatever pops up in their head. They usually have a general idea of what they want, they just don’t know how they’re going to get there.

I automatically think of Aladdin. Cuz you know how he's supposed to be keeping one jump ahead of the something or other?

I’m more of a pantser. And dude…I so do not want to end up like Aladdin…well, ending up like him would be fine. I mean he gets a palace, the love of his life, tons of money and gets to hang out with his friends all day…I just mean…you know, the part where he’s scrounging around for food and just trying to make it through the day without getting killed off by palace guards or seduced by plus sized women. All of which could be metaphors for random plot bunnies and poorly thought out written scenarios.

So maybe planning some stuff out would be a good idea…

And guess what? This blog entry was over 1000 words long! So hypothetically, all I have to do for NaNoWriMo is write about fifty more blog entries of about the same length.

In one month.

That sounds easy enough, right?

Tags: hating on Stephenie Meyer, hopefully I don't get sued, I do hate how much I like reading her work, I totally stole more stuff from Deviantart, JK Rowling, okay yeah it's embarrassing admitting that I have read the ENTIRE Twilight series, seriously though I really don't completely hate Twilight, this entry was almost a thousand words!