OH MY NOSE!

Has anyone ever seen the Brady Bunch episode where Marcia Brady gets hit with a football and her nose swells up and turns black?

Watch this:




Last night, in the middle of the night, I got up to go pee. When I got back into bed, I must have startled Chad or something because he jumped forward very fast resulting in his face being punched into my nose.

We both heard a "CRACK", but I knew immediately that he didn't break it because the first thing I did was try to push on my nose and I didn't notice anything different. And then right away blood started gushing out of my nose and onto my sleep shirt and the bed sheets.

Chad took me back into the bathroom and made me sit there with a towel on my nose and within five minutes or so the bleeding calmed down. I'm assuming that when he rammed my nose like that, he busted a blood vessel but it was pretty quickly repaired.

When I woke up this morning, all I felt was pressure. Almost like a five pound weight was sitting on my nose. But as the day progressed, it has started to get more sore and now it's even swelling up. Knowing my luck, I'll probably wake up tomorrow and my nose will be like Marcia Brady. :(

Also, Chad has a nice little knot on his forehead where he rammed into me.

Merry Christmas to us! :)

Lessons Learned

Lessons I have learned during the past week:


1) WHERE THE HELL HAS SPAGEHTTI SQUASH BEEN MY WHOLE LIFE?

What is spaghetti squash, you ask?



This is a spaghetti squash. Maybe this is common knowledge, but until yesterday I had no idea what this was. I cut it in half, boiled it, and then the squash strings apart like spaghetti noodles to make this:




(images courtesy of Google Images... I was way too excited yesterday that I didn't take any pictures of my food.)

Here is a comparison:
2 cups of spaghetti noodles = 410 calories
2 cups of spaghetti squash = 66 calories

AMAZING!
It tastes the same as a noodle, but has a diffferent texture because it's squash... but it's AWESOME. AMAZING!!!!


2. No matter how hard I try, it's nearly impossible to eat healthy during the holidays. My work keeps having cake for us, they were selling chili dogs today for a fundraiser, and Chad's boss gave us a huge block of fudge to eat. Dammit.

Pho Adventures, Pt. 3

I made homemade beef pho!





It was way harder and took way longer than what I had expected.

I bought 5lbs of beef bones from Safeway. And then we went to Whole Foods to find all of the weird spices I had never heard of (coriandor, fennel, star anise... I don't know what any of those are, but I bought them and I used them!)
I boiled all of the bones for about 20 minutes to remove all of the dirt and cleaned them off really well. Then I put them back in water, added all the spices, some roasted onions and ginger, and let it simmer for about two and a half hours. I couldn't believe what kind of flavor comes from a bone and seasoning.


I froze about 3/4 lb of london broil (because it's lean) so that Chad would be able to slice really thin slices from it. I also prepared a package of thin thai rice sticks, some chopped cilantro, jalapeno and green onion and it was done.

Our final verdict: very good for a first attempt! Our only pho experience is from Pho King in Seaside. And the pho I made was completely different from theirs. But when I look online at how other people's pho turned out, mine looked exactly like theirs. I think I did it right, but that Pho King's is different.

Next time, after I make the pho broth, I am going to put it in the fridge and then let the fat rise to the top so I can scrape it off. It was a little greasy. But for now, I think I have completely pho'd Chad and I out for a while.

My next cooking adventure is going to either be vegetable chili of some sort, or learning how to steam and eat a full crab.

Pho Adventures Pt. 2

Last night, I made my first ever attempt at homemade beef pho. I used store bought beef broth (like I mentioned in my previous blog), and surprisingly it wasn't that bad. Or as Chad put it, "It wasn't bad for a first attempt." Win!

SO- the plan is this weekend, probably Sunday because Saturday (tomorrow) is my work's Christmas party, I will be attempting crock pot beef pho, from nothing but homemade ingredients.

I will be buying beef bones and all of the weird sounding spices that I've never heard of (what is "star anise"? I don't know, but I am going to find it and buy it this weekend.)

I have faith that I won't screw it up! In the meantime, here's to hoping I don't drink too much at my work's Christmas party tomorrow. (Not really, but I hope it's not too lame.)

Pho Adventures

Chad and I have fallen in love with this little Vietnamese restaurant in Seaside called Pho King. And seeing as how my number one favorite hobby is cooking, I decided this week that I am going to attempt to make my own Vietnamese Beef Pho tonight for dinner. Because I'm crazy.

Now, after reading about this on several websites, the trick to making your own pho is the broth. I have never made my own broth because I didn't think I had the time or resources. So I bought a few cartons of Swanson beef broth when i did our grocery shopping for this week that I'll be using tonight.

Here is the recipe I'll be trying tonight (I made this up using several recipes online as a base)

Ingredients:
10 cups beef broth
2 limes
2 tablespoons Vietnamese fish sauce (I found a huge bottle of this for $2.79 at our local produce market. It's owned by a Korean family, and they have a wide variety of ethnic ingredients available there.)
7 oz Thai rice sticks (I found this in the Asian aisle at the grocery store)
6 green onions, sliced
1/2 yellow onion, sliced
1/2 bunch cilantro
1 lb lean beef, thinly sliced (our butcher actually sliced up a filet mignon for us using their slicing machine, so it's really thin)
1 jalapeno
Basil

Directions:
Bring beef stock to a boil in a large stock pot with the juice of the limes, sliced green and yellow onion, and fish sauce. Let stock boil for 15 minutes.
Prepare package of rice sticks, and divide into bowls. Top with broth and sliced beef. Beef will cook in hot broth.

This sounds easy enough. But I realize that we're basically eating store bought broth with some noodles, which might be tasty but is INSANELY high in sodium. Being the crazy health nuts that we are, we thought I'd atleast try this recipe to see if we liked it. And then this weekend I will venture into making my OWN beef broth.

Apparently, the trick to making beef broth is to roast beef *bones* in the oven with a bunch of cut up vegetables (such as tomatoes, celery, carrots, onion, and garlic) for a long time until they are all brown. Then boil them in water (or put them in a crock pot with water on high) with some spices, and let it go for a few hours. Strain everything out and you're left with sodium free beef broth.

Cool, but what the hell are beef bones? Can you actually BUY them? I had no idea what the hell they were or if you could actually buy them.
But, Yes! *Apparently* you can! Upon visiting Safeway's website, they sell something called Ranchers Research Beef Soup Bones for $1.79/pound. If I bought 5 pounds, it would cost ~$9, and the vegetables would be around ~$2 at the produce market. So basically, it would cost me about ~$11 to make 5 quarts of beef broth. Store bought broth costs anywhere from $3-$4 a quart. I think it's worth it.

I also learned that you can make chicken broth that same way as beef broth, but you replace the beef bones with chicken thighs.


I'll be updating during the next few days with my pho and beef broth adventures.

Time zones suck

I have a phone consultation with the florist this Wednesday at 5:30pm PACIFIC. Yes, unlike my past vendors, this lady was courteous enough to work beyond her business hours to accommodate the time difference. I guess there are actually people who live in the eastern time zone that realize there are other time zones other than their own. Once you live in a different time zone, you will soon realize just how EVERYTHING is catered towards the east coast and how ignorant people are over there about it.

When we bought our washer and dryer a few months ago, L.G. decided to give me a call at 6:00am the next day to confirm the purchase. Yes, I understand that it is 9:00am over there, and that would be an acceptable time to make such a call IF YOU LIVE THERE. Did NO ONE who works at L.G. even think about the fact that I might still be sleeping because I live in a different time zone?

And I also love how everyone on facebook insists on plastering what happens on their favorite TV show when it happens. Thanks for ruining who got voted off Biggest Loser, Dancing With the Stars, and American Idol and at the same time explaining what you thought about the House/Cuddy love scene as well as your opinion about who hooked up with who on Jersey Shore and Teen Mom. I STILL HAVE TO WAIT 3 HOURS FOR IT and now I know what's going to happen because you are too stupid living in your little "east coast only" box without any regard to people who haven't watched it yet.

The one thing I enjoy about the time difference is that sports begin at 9:00am on the weekends and are over by 8:30pm, unless there is a specific west coast game on. The superbowl is over at 8:00-8:30pm and then we can go out somewhere and have dinner afterwards. And it's kind of fun to wake up at 8:30am, make a pot of coffee and watch College Gameday until the first game starts.

Rachael Ray... part 2

I made Rachael Ray's chicken enchilada last night for dinner.

The verdict?

It was actually pretty fantastic!
It isn't authentic Mexican food or anything, but it definitely has a Mexican twist to it. I used flour tortillas instead of corn, and there were about twice as big. So even though the recipe called for 8 corn tortillas, it made enough for 4 flour tortillas. And that was still way too much food for the both of us.

Next time, I will go a little easier on the chili powder. I will also add in some vegetables with the chicken mixture-- perhaps cut up a squash or a pepper and add it in. Chad suggested serving some Mexican rice with it, or homemade chips and salsa so we could have a full blown Mexican night.

In conclusion, Rachael Ray hasn't *totally* redeemed herself, but she is not on my shit list either!

Rachael Ray

So I've been trying some new recipes lately to add to our collection. Chad and I are more interested in eating healthier these days and he has opened himself up to foods that I would have never imagined him eating two years ago.
I decided to try some of Rachael Ray's recipes. Picked three out:

1. Spinach and Artichoke stuffed shells: Recipe here. I bought some jumbo shells, and used my own marinara sauce that I make on my own instead of her sauce recipe. I replaced the ricotta cheese and parmesan cheese with lite ricotta cheese and lite parmesan cheese, and instead of using frozen spinach and artichoke hearts, I bought fresh organic spinach and removed the artichoke hearts from organic artichokes from our local produce market. I also used I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Lite instead of EVOO. After all was said and done, 5 stuffed shells with sauce came out to about 550 calories.
The verdict: WAY TOO MUCH CHEESE. We could have cut the amount of cheese in half. We couldn't really finish them either as the cheese was just hard on our stomachs. We might try this again in the future, but in the end it wasn't as good as I thought it would be.


2. Chicken and Wild Mushrooms in a Balsamic cream sauce: Recipe here. I made this using skim milk instead of heavy cream, and light butter instead of regular butter. I made linguini instead of orzo, but that is pretty much the same nutritional value. It was pretty gross. I don't think I'll be trying this again. There were way too many mushrooms and the "cream" sauce was not tasty at all, but instead tasted like sour mushroom water.

3. Chicken enchiladas: Recipe here. This is the recipe I plan on trying Thursday night. We both love Mexican food. I don't expect this to be like authentic Mexican or anything, but I'm hoping it will be tasty enough to where we might want to make it again. I'm going to use flour tortillas instead of corn (because neither of us really like the taste of corn tortillas), and omitting the cinnamom from the tomato sauce. Because that sounds disgusting and most of the comments suggest to do it. I'll use skim monterey jack cheese to cut the calories.
If this doesn't work out either, then I won't be trying anymore of Rachael Ray's recipes again. I'll probably start researching some Emeril recipes after this regardless.

I also have a cookbook from Jillian Michaels (thanks Eliz!!! :D). I tried two recipes from there already, one of them being this spinach egg white omelet with whole grain toast that was excellent! I also plan on trying more stuff from there. Sorry, Rachael Ray, but you just didn't work out for me.

Engaged!

Date: March 19, 2010
Location: Point Lobos, CA

Chad told me once a really long time ago that he was going to propose to me at Point Lobos. Why? Because when he and I came to Monterey to visit Dave (before he and I lived here), it was our favorite place that we had visited. Incase you didn't know, Chad is actually a very skilled photographer and he had gotten some amazing shots of the sunset there. I never took him seriously when he said he was going to propose to me there because, well, he was intoxicated when he told me. :) And I didn't think he remembered. Haha.

ANYWAY-
So, he got home from work at 5pm and said that Dave wanted to go hiking on Point Lobos that evening to watch the sunset. It had gotten up to 80 degrees that day (which is unheard of for Monterey) without a cloud in the sky. I thought "OMG, I wonder if this is the day?". Chad is really horrible at keeping secrets from me (he had told me all of my Xmas presents before I opened them, haha) and I was kind of expecting for him to be like "Hey, let's go to ____ so I can propose!" when it was going to happen. Well, we were sitting on our futon and he was like "Dave will text me when he is ready to go so we can pick him up" and I was like "okay, cool" so we sat there watching basketball. Sure enough, he gets a text from Dave saying that he was standing us up because he had forgotten about a cycling party he wanted to attend that night. Chad even showed me the text being like "He can't come because he has a cycling party." and that's when I thought "Oh, okay. So this ISN'T the day because Dave wouldn't have sent him a text like that if it was."
What actually happened is that they schemed earlier in the day for Dave to sent him a fake text pretending to "stand us up" on a hiking trip to watch the sunset, so that way it wouldn't look like Chad wasn't planning anything. Well, it worked. Good job, guys. haha.
So Chad was like "Let's just go anyway, without him." and said we needed to stop in his office to get the directions to the trail that Dave gave him earlier. Since Dave "wasn't coming anymore", Chad wasn't sure how to get to the trail. What he was REALLY doing was going to his office to get the ring he had been hiding there for the last week.
Point Lobos is about a 7-10 minute drive from our apartment. We got there and we starting walking on the trail as he snapped pictures of the ocean and the sunset.
Here are some of his photos:


This is a view of the trail we walked on.



Sunset.

We sat on this bench and he didn't say anything for about a minute. The view of the sunset from the bench we sat on is now my blog logo image above. :)
He said he loved me and I said I loved him too. He said "speaking about love... I don't think I'm going to keep you in suspense anymore." He got off the bench and got on one knee and said "I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?" and of course I said YES!!



The ring is a 1-carat diamond on a platinum setting from Tiffany&Co. :) I LOVE IT!