Simplifying My Life, Since It's Going to Get Hectic Enough As It Is

Just deleted my Skype and Twitter accounts.  Don't really need them anyway, since most of the people whom I was associated with on Skype and Twitter...well, let's just say I fell out of touch with a lot of them, to put it nicely.  Furthermore, I don't feel the need to pander to certain Twitter followers whom I collected in a previous phase of my life.  I don't know how that helps me, except for the fact that I can freely view my thoughts about K-Pop now, but it's definitely a weight lifted.

I shall say that some of the people I talked to through these mediums were cool though.  Hopefully I'll be able to cross paths with them in another way.

Now off to biochem.  And cleaning the apartment...hopefully.

Another Kitchen Success

Somehow this is turning into a food blog.  Hmm.

I had a box of pre-washed kale in the fridge that had to be used up, and since it seemed to be too much for me to finish it all at once raw, I went to trusty old foodnetwork.com and found a recipe for it sauteed.  I haven't had the best luck cooking with oil though; I'm a clean-freak, but when I've sauteed with oil in the past, especially in a shallow frying pan, the oil seems to splatter after I add whatever I'm cooking in and stink up the entire apartment.  I've also had trouble burning garlic.

Instead, I thought I'd try a suggestion from my mom to saute with vegetable broth.  I basically switched the vegetable broth and the olive oil, starting with a base of vegetable broth, garlic, and red chili flakes, adding the baby kale, and finishing with salt and olive oil.  I must say the vegetable broth is quite flavorful, and the sauteed kale kind of reminds me of the sauteed bean sprouts I used to have at Chinese restaurants, except not as oily or salty, and with a fresh kale flavor added.

So Mom, if you're reading this, you can't blame me for not eating my vegetables.

Yes, pictures will be up...as soon as I decide to put them up.

Now on to my learning objective about Tums for tomorrow.  How fitting...

Cooking in Med School

So I started med school this past week.  The week before that was one long week of orientation, which was a long day of sitting in lecture and getting to know what the next year or two would be like, and then in the evenings there were a lot of social events, so I didn't cook much, if at all, since breakfast and lunch were provided, and I just had dinner at the places where the events were taking place.

But after orientation was over and we were on our own, I had to start cooking for myself.  Now supermarkets are not catered to the bachelor; the stuff they sell, even the fresh produce, isn't packaged for one meal deals.  I hate letting things go to waste, so I would dump the whole bunch of kale (or what I thought was kale) into the pot of canned tomatoes, and I had lunch and dinner for a week (well, mostly dinner, since a lot of student groups provided pizza for lunch as a way to entice us first-years).

Fast-forward to just now, when all week I thought I had a bunch of collard greens from last week left that I needed to use.  I go to the supermarket to get ingredients for this "southern-style collard greens" recipe I found on the Food Network website, and I come back home and start prepping the onions, chili flakes, and garlic.  I open the fridge, and I find kale.  Apparently I used up the collard greens last week in that tomato stew.  It's a little perplexing how I didn't notice that it was not kale I used up, since I used to have kale all the time back home, especially the kale salad from Whole Foods.

Anyway, I roll with it and replace the collard greens in the recipe with the kale.  Kale stems are a little tougher (a lot of recipes call for kale stems to be discarded), so I thought I'd add the whole box of vegetable stock instead of just three cups so that the kale stems would have more liquid to simmer in.  Hey, I've already gone away from the recipe, considering I had the wrong main ingredient, so why not?  I add tomatoes and some lemon juice as well, and somehow I end up with a weird hybrid of American hot-and-sour soup--the kale, sauteed onions, and leftover quinoa I used as a base to ladle the soup over, makes it American.  The tomatoes in the vegetable broth also reminds me of a light soup my mom makes from time to time, so I unintentionally end up with a touch of home as well.

I'd take a picture, but it doesn't look as pretty with the bowl already half-eaten.  Maybe tomorrow when I spoon a new bowl.

New Blog to Follow

A couple of my friends are hiking the Applachian Trail (something I've thought would be cool to do after reading Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods") and will document it here: http://www.jandcat.com/.  They're just starting, but feel free to check it out to see their progress.

In other news, if you didn't happen upon my Twitter post, I finally got into medical school.  I'll have more to say on this entire process in the future.