"Flying away from reality, whatever ever happened to gravity?"

So I've been pretty behind on blogging. My life has been somewhat relaxing this quarter. I'm not interning and probably won't unless I find something over the summer, so I don't really know where my time has gone.

Class has been pretty terrible. I feel like I'm always behind on reading. There's ALWAYS reading to be done, and although I "try" to catch up, I can only read so much every day. I really should be reading right now, but since I haven't blogged for over a week I figured I should catch up.

So last week I went out to dinner with Tejal. We had a small debate because we didn't know where to go, and even though I told her to choose the place I ended up picking somewhere relatively close since I didn't feel like battling through traffic. I really had no idea where to go, so I ended up asking Jemmy. Jemmy had been RAVING about a place called Jasmine in Culver City, so I Yelped the address and found it. Picked Tejal up, and when we got there, I was a bit taken back.

Tejal Narsai disapproves.

So the food wasn't bad, but Jemmy rated it a 10/10. That's definitely pushing it, I'd give it a 5 or something.

So recently I've had this urge to start playing tennis again, and since I brought my rackets to UCLA with me, I called up my friend Danny who happens to coach tennis at UCLA's Sunset Recreation Center to hit. He actually coaches a group lesson, so I've been going every Tuesday and Thursday from 6-8PM to hit. Sounds pretty lame, but I really look forward to them.

I don't even know what to blog about. If you're ever in the mood to try beer, get this one:

It's actually really good, and I don't even like beer. It just tastes like apple cider, just a little weird. It smells like beer, but don't let that deter you because it's actually really good. Stephanie gave me some of her peach flavored beer, but I think the apple was better.

Anyways, I've been cooking still. I went to go get a bunch of tortillas so I've been experimenting with Mexican food. The last two Tuesdays have been taco Tuesdays. The first Tuesday was fish tacos, last Tuesday was turkey and beef tacos. I forgot to upload the fish taco pictures so you'll just have to imagine it. I just seasoned and baked the cod then broke it up into smaller chunks and stuffed them into tortillas. I'd like to think my tacos look relatively normal.

I also diced some lettuce and made my own pico de gallo. Legit. Not really, but pico de gallo is really easy to make. I don't know how to correctly dice a tomato yet, so I just seriously do whatever. I didn't figure out how to dice an onion the "regular" way until I started watching a lot of Chopped. Then I figured their way of dicing an onion was definitely smarter and more efficient than my way, so I know how to dice an onion now. Anyways, the pico de gallo recipe just calls for cilantro, onions, tomato, garlic, lime juice, and garlic powder. Easy peasy. 

Speaking of Chopped though, you should all start watching it. Or rather, start watching the Food Network. It's easily my favorite channel now, but Chopped and The Best Thing I Ever Ate are my favorite shows. Restaurant Impossible is is pretty intense too. Anyways, so the last couple episodes of Chopped they pitted a bunch of celebrity chefs in head to head culinary combat. I was rooting for a chef called Aaron Sanchez, that guy's a beast. So basically in Chopped you have 20 minutes to make an appetizer, 30 minutes to make an entree, and 30 minutes or something to make a dessert. But the twist is that they give you a bunch of random ingredients that you have to incorporate into your dish. Sometimes like they give you like trail mix and steak or something really weird. Usually what the chefs do is they take the trail mix and blend it to use as a crust for the poultry or they make a ragu out of it. It's pretty insane what they manage to come up with using those ingredients and the short amount of time given.

So this past weekend I didn't do much since it was the NBA playoffs, I just hung out with my to-be summer roommates: Jemmy, Tyler, and Janelle. The four of us spent most of the weekend watching the NBA playoffs and swimming since it was blazing hot on Saturday. But after we swam, we planned on getting dinner together. There was this placed in Los Angeles near West Hollywood on Melrose that I've been dying to try for a while. It's called Mario's Peruvian and Seafood. Dude, this place was packed at like 8PM, and we had to wait an hour just to get a seat. The prices are pretty good, and the portions are huge.

I got the Lomo Saltado. I'm pretty sure I spelled it wrong, but it consists of strips of beef, onions, and french fries. They had this magical guacamole sauce that was really spicy, I was pretty tempted to steal the bottle. But the food was amazing. I was pretty bloated after I finished my dish. No one else managed to finish, what a bunch of weenies.

So the last post I raved about how brilliant a crock pot is. I wanted to experiment around again this weekend, so I looked up a recipe and decided to make jambalaya, or gumbo. I'm not even sure what the difference is, but I made one of those. The recipe was really easy, it called for chicken but since I didn't have chicken I just stuffed in some pork. Then I threw in some potatoes, sausage, onions, canned diced tomatos, chicken broth, oregano, bay leaves, thyme, cajun seasoning, and a dash of Tabasco. Apparently you're supposed to have a thickener for gumbo/jambalaya, and most people use okra. I personally hate okra, so I Googled alternatives. I was pretty close to use cornstarch but then apparently some people make a roux. There were a lot of recipes for a roux, but I just decided to use the most basic one - flour and olive oil. Well, they said to use butter but I thought that was gross. So you're just supposed to heat the olive oil up, and once it's hot you SLOWLY stir in the flour. If you put the flour in too fast it would burn or something, then you'd have to start over. It took me 20 minutes to make the roux, but it thickened up the gumbo really nicely.

OK. I realize it might not look appetizing, but it was really good. I'm trying to work on food presentation, but it's pretty hard to make a food look good. Oh, the recipe called for shrimp, but if I was to eat shrimp I'd probably die in hives or something since I'm allergic so I was forced to use imitation crab meat. Nothing wrong with that. Did you know imitation crab meat is just fish protein? Weird.

There's going to be a cook off at my sister's apartment this coming weekend. Rumors had it I'm going to win it all.



Oh and lastly, I was looking at my Blogger stats the other day, and turns out someone Googled "How to get out of a three night stand." Wasn't sure whether to laugh or to be slightly disturbed.

-Wilson