Today
10:25pm
hahaha i see that you "liked" the GCB
10:25pm
yes
it was one of those likes you add in desperation
because you want it so badly but you cant have it
10:25pm
COME BACK HERE
:(
10:25pm
I know.
!
10:26pm
spats has stopped serving margaritas
apparently no one orders them
that is a sign from god that you need to come back to prov
10:27pm
I just got a facebook chat message from my sister's cute friend and he was like do you think you could tell me about brown? and I was like go visit so I have an excuse to go up to campus... 20 minute tour for you... 20 hour catch-up/gcb binge for me with Ivy
What?! Obviously
who wouldnt order a margarity
10:27pm
i dont know
10:27pm
haha the y was an accident, but I knd of like it
10:27pm
satan has taken over
10:27pm
only crazy people
yeah and deamons
10:28pm
margarity!
im gonna name my first daughter that
10:28pm
oh my gosh... yes
if you dont i will
... name your first daughter that
10:29pm
hahahaha
margherita pizza also happens to be one of my fave pizzas
i should just marry a man-shaped margarita glass
10:34pm
Yeah... that is my dream man
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
I want to hunt again
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
- William Blake
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
- William Blake
Friday, October 1, 2010
How to make "The Best Apple Pie in the World"
Preheat your oven to 450 degs.
CRUST
Ingredients:
2 sticks frozen butter
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
6 - 8 tsp water
Freeze your butter for as long as you can. If you're the prepared type of cook, you'll have it frozen since last night or the morning or whatever. If you're like me, just throw the sticks in when the idea of making pie first starts sparking in your head and by the time you get your bowl, mixing spoon, flour, baking tray, and other shit together, the butter will be cold enough.
While your butter is freezing, put the sugar and salt into your flour (that I assume you've already put into your nice mixing bowl).
Take out your frozen butter and cut it into tiny cubes. I mean, cut it into slices or don't cut it at all if you want, but cutting it as tiny and cubular as possible really helps with the mixing.
Drop your butter into the flour and mix, mix, mix. Coat all the pieces in flour so they won't stick together and/or melt. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOUR BUTTER DOESN'T MELT. The separate tiny bits of butter are what make your crust flaky and delicious.
Once what's in the bowl starts looking like a crumbly mess, start adding in ice cold water a tsp at a time. It'll start to get kind of doughy. Add just enough water so that you can smush the dough into a ball. You can use your hands (I personally think hands are better at manipulating this stuff than a spoon).
Wrap up the dough ball in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.
Now repeat all the steps for your other crust! If this next one turns out better, use it as your top crust and use your crappier one for your bottom crust.
Put both balls of dough into the fridge to chill. You're gonna be busy for a while.
INSIDES
So, you don't really have to put apples in this pie. You could put peaches, cherries, or blueberries in it. Or pumpkin. Or pudding. Or straight whipped cream. Or a bunch of chocolate candy. Or you could bake the crust by itself first and then put ice cream in it. Then put candy on it.
Anyway, the title of the post says "Apple Pie" and I'm keeping it like that for now because I haven't tried making other pies yet. But I'm pretty sure any of the above options would be great.
Here is what you'll need for APPLE pie filling.
Apples
Sugar - White and Brown
Cinnamon
Allspice
Lemon juice
Butter
Onward!
Cut your apples up thin. This helps them cook faster, because the crust cooks really really fast. throw them all in a bowl and squeeze lemon juice over them so they don't turn all nasty and brown. Next, shake a ton of cinnamon over the slices and toss them a bit so the cinnamon coating is even. After that you're gonna want to put just a bit of allspice and mix that in too. Sprinkle about two handfuls of white sugar over it last.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Take those two balls of dough out of the fridge. Pick up the crappier one and smush it into the bottom of your pie pan (grease the pan if you need to). This is gonna be your bottom crust. Take out your nicer crust now and use your hands/rolling pin/book/whatever to make it as flat as you can. This is gonna be your top crust. With this one you can either choose to cut it into strips and make a super fancy lattice top pie or you can just plop it down on top of your pan.
Get your bowl of apple slices and pour them in on top of the bottom crust. Now, really quickly,
you're gonna make the last very important component of the filling - the butter and brown sugar sauce. It's just what it sounds like. Melt a half stick of butter and stir as much brown sugar as you're comfortable with into it until it's a syrupy brown sauce. Drizzle this stuff over the apple slices and maybe dust a little flour over them afterward so it's not too liquidy.
Take your top crust and throw it on top any way you like - just splat or in a fancy lattice.
Whip up an egg with a bit of milk and vanilla extract to make an egg wash and brush that over your crust.
Sprinkle some sugar onto your crust, if you'd like, to top it off.
Now throw that sucker in!!
Keep an eye on it. It'll probably take about 20 - 30 minutes for the crust to turn brown.
If you decided to make a fancy lattice crust, you might have to turn down the heat to 350ish once the top crust turns brown and let it sit in the oven a bit longer so the bits of dough covered by the other bits in your lattice can have time to bake.
While it's baking, have your friend run out to get ice cream.
Once it's done, take it out, dig yourself a huge chunk of it, plop some ice cream on top, and GO TO TOWNNN.
CRUST
Ingredients:
2 sticks frozen butter
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
6 - 8 tsp water
Freeze your butter for as long as you can. If you're the prepared type of cook, you'll have it frozen since last night or the morning or whatever. If you're like me, just throw the sticks in when the idea of making pie first starts sparking in your head and by the time you get your bowl, mixing spoon, flour, baking tray, and other shit together, the butter will be cold enough.
While your butter is freezing, put the sugar and salt into your flour (that I assume you've already put into your nice mixing bowl).
Take out your frozen butter and cut it into tiny cubes. I mean, cut it into slices or don't cut it at all if you want, but cutting it as tiny and cubular as possible really helps with the mixing.
Drop your butter into the flour and mix, mix, mix. Coat all the pieces in flour so they won't stick together and/or melt. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOUR BUTTER DOESN'T MELT. The separate tiny bits of butter are what make your crust flaky and delicious.
Once what's in the bowl starts looking like a crumbly mess, start adding in ice cold water a tsp at a time. It'll start to get kind of doughy. Add just enough water so that you can smush the dough into a ball. You can use your hands (I personally think hands are better at manipulating this stuff than a spoon).
Wrap up the dough ball in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.
Now repeat all the steps for your other crust! If this next one turns out better, use it as your top crust and use your crappier one for your bottom crust.
Put both balls of dough into the fridge to chill. You're gonna be busy for a while.
INSIDES
So, you don't really have to put apples in this pie. You could put peaches, cherries, or blueberries in it. Or pumpkin. Or pudding. Or straight whipped cream. Or a bunch of chocolate candy. Or you could bake the crust by itself first and then put ice cream in it. Then put candy on it.
Anyway, the title of the post says "Apple Pie" and I'm keeping it like that for now because I haven't tried making other pies yet. But I'm pretty sure any of the above options would be great.
Here is what you'll need for APPLE pie filling.
Apples
Sugar - White and Brown
Cinnamon
Allspice
Lemon juice
Butter
Onward!
Cut your apples up thin. This helps them cook faster, because the crust cooks really really fast. throw them all in a bowl and squeeze lemon juice over them so they don't turn all nasty and brown. Next, shake a ton of cinnamon over the slices and toss them a bit so the cinnamon coating is even. After that you're gonna want to put just a bit of allspice and mix that in too. Sprinkle about two handfuls of white sugar over it last.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Take those two balls of dough out of the fridge. Pick up the crappier one and smush it into the bottom of your pie pan (grease the pan if you need to). This is gonna be your bottom crust. Take out your nicer crust now and use your hands/rolling pin/book/whatever to make it as flat as you can. This is gonna be your top crust. With this one you can either choose to cut it into strips and make a super fancy lattice top pie or you can just plop it down on top of your pan.
Get your bowl of apple slices and pour them in on top of the bottom crust. Now, really quickly,
you're gonna make the last very important component of the filling - the butter and brown sugar sauce. It's just what it sounds like. Melt a half stick of butter and stir as much brown sugar as you're comfortable with into it until it's a syrupy brown sauce. Drizzle this stuff over the apple slices and maybe dust a little flour over them afterward so it's not too liquidy.
Take your top crust and throw it on top any way you like - just splat or in a fancy lattice.
Whip up an egg with a bit of milk and vanilla extract to make an egg wash and brush that over your crust.
Sprinkle some sugar onto your crust, if you'd like, to top it off.
Now throw that sucker in!!
Keep an eye on it. It'll probably take about 20 - 30 minutes for the crust to turn brown.
If you decided to make a fancy lattice crust, you might have to turn down the heat to 350ish once the top crust turns brown and let it sit in the oven a bit longer so the bits of dough covered by the other bits in your lattice can have time to bake.
While it's baking, have your friend run out to get ice cream.
Once it's done, take it out, dig yourself a huge chunk of it, plop some ice cream on top, and GO TO TOWNNN.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Prioritizing
I worried about this as a senior. Would I be happy with just two science classes a semester, or could I tack on a third? Should I take such-and-such a class for a grade or not? What classes would get me an easy A? Did I want to write papers? Did I really have to take that class with the four-hour lab? Would I have time for sleep, food, and myself? I thought about all this as I cooked little meals at my little dorm kitchen. It was so much to choose from, and it confused me. I almost wished I could just be told what to do, to take some of the weight of the constant cost/benefit analysis off my shoulders.
Hahaaa.
Little did I know that, come next year, I'd be dying for just the tiniest taste of the uncertainty that comes with having choices.
Things are completely different now. Long, long gone are the days of choosing between this difficult class or that one, this easy class or that easier one. Every class and lab I take has been chosen for me, and every single one is something I would never voluntarily have taken as an undergrad. I spend five days a week in a building from 9 -5, listening to overly dense lectures or gingerly flaying strips of rubbery skin and stringy muscle from a formaldehyde-soaked cadaver. I didn't choose the hours, the classes, or the professors. I will say that I expected it. I understood that this was to be a part of it. But I didn't expect ALL of it. I don't think anyone did. When exams draw near, I have time for nothing. Being able to sit down to eat is a luxury. A hot, home-cooked meal is an extravagant impossibility.
Remember to eat, just enough to live. Toast, toast, toast. Peanut butter.
Remember to drink enough water, or else my nose will bleed. It's happened.
Remember to get coffee on the way.
Remember not to shudder when I see an unfamiliar, wan face in the mirror, each eye carrying its own little bag.
Life pushes down from all sides until there's just no room for me anymore. I must shove "me" to the side, shove it underneath a comically mammoth backpack, piles and piles of papers, mismatched pairs of shoes and socks. I will take care of it after the exam is over.
Now my problems have nothing to do with choices. I know everything I must do. What I don't know is how I'm going to get there.
Hahaaa.
Little did I know that, come next year, I'd be dying for just the tiniest taste of the uncertainty that comes with having choices.
Things are completely different now. Long, long gone are the days of choosing between this difficult class or that one, this easy class or that easier one. Every class and lab I take has been chosen for me, and every single one is something I would never voluntarily have taken as an undergrad. I spend five days a week in a building from 9 -5, listening to overly dense lectures or gingerly flaying strips of rubbery skin and stringy muscle from a formaldehyde-soaked cadaver. I didn't choose the hours, the classes, or the professors. I will say that I expected it. I understood that this was to be a part of it. But I didn't expect ALL of it. I don't think anyone did. When exams draw near, I have time for nothing. Being able to sit down to eat is a luxury. A hot, home-cooked meal is an extravagant impossibility.
Remember to eat, just enough to live. Toast, toast, toast. Peanut butter.
Remember to drink enough water, or else my nose will bleed. It's happened.
Remember to get coffee on the way.
Remember not to shudder when I see an unfamiliar, wan face in the mirror, each eye carrying its own little bag.
Life pushes down from all sides until there's just no room for me anymore. I must shove "me" to the side, shove it underneath a comically mammoth backpack, piles and piles of papers, mismatched pairs of shoes and socks. I will take care of it after the exam is over.
Now my problems have nothing to do with choices. I know everything I must do. What I don't know is how I'm going to get there.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Things I've become thankful for that would have seemed inconsequential months ago.
1. Coffee
I've always liked coffee. It's got that unmistakeable, untameable bite that latches onto your tongue and shoots up into your brain like some crazy-ass panther. Adding cream merely throws a thin, lovely fog over that wonderful sharpness. It mixes in without covering it up. Cinnamon is the perfect sprinkling of gunpowder to top it off.
2. Hot food
Trying to satiate myself when I'm in a rush is becoming a lot more difficult than I ever thought it could be. Sandwiches, granola bars, and the like can be nourishing and filling, but I find that there's nothing satisfying about biting into cold food when I'm exhausted and starving. My dry mouth and its thickened saliva are unable to fully process the cold chunks that I've desperately bitten off, and I feel no further motivation to continue chewing.
But hot food. Oh, there is really nothing like sitting down and feeling searing heat travel agonizingly down my throat, lightly burning every nook and cranny of delicate epithelium in its path. Hot soup. Hot stir fry. Hot ramen. Hot pocket. There's no need to be picky as long as it's hot. "Heat" should have its own space on the food pyramid.
3. Free food
Imagine this scenario: You've been slaving over your lab table or some textbook or mammoth binder or just any sort of inhumanely monumental task. You realize that the odd pain that has been grinding in your stomach is hunger. You search in your bag, and, lo and behold, you've brought everything - laptop, charger, textbooks, change of clothes, sneakers, hairties, gum, makeup - except food. In such desperate times, you would be glad to eat even the stalest, coldest cereal bar to mysteriously materialize in your backpack. You stumble into the communal kitchen and open the fridge. Your bleary eyes scan other more well-prepared people's yogurt, cold noodles, and salads guiltily before focusing on a mysteriously shrouded platter marked with "PLEASE EAT." Well, you think, you didn't even have to ask. And whatever is inside is, without fail, delicious and fills you with tear-inducing relief and happiness.
4. Finishing early
Even 5 minutes can make a huge difference. I consider the happiness gained in finding an extra minute to that of finding a dollar on the street. A minute = $1. In just one minute I could read a paragraph of a book, skim a magazine or fashion blog, buy myself a treat to go, stand in the shower just a bit longer, sit in the sun.
5. Being told that I look nice.
When I feel my mind and body slowly unraveling as I continue to push myself past endurance, trying my to tie up my loose ends isn't so bad when I'm told that I appear to be doing a decent job of it. I've already decided that I'm going to do at least a bit of makeup every day, just to keep myself feeling human. This isn't saying that humans are defined by their looks and ability to superficially dress up. I'm speaking for myself.
6. Being able to put everything away and just go to bed
This requires no explanation.
I've always liked coffee. It's got that unmistakeable, untameable bite that latches onto your tongue and shoots up into your brain like some crazy-ass panther. Adding cream merely throws a thin, lovely fog over that wonderful sharpness. It mixes in without covering it up. Cinnamon is the perfect sprinkling of gunpowder to top it off.
2. Hot food
Trying to satiate myself when I'm in a rush is becoming a lot more difficult than I ever thought it could be. Sandwiches, granola bars, and the like can be nourishing and filling, but I find that there's nothing satisfying about biting into cold food when I'm exhausted and starving. My dry mouth and its thickened saliva are unable to fully process the cold chunks that I've desperately bitten off, and I feel no further motivation to continue chewing.
But hot food. Oh, there is really nothing like sitting down and feeling searing heat travel agonizingly down my throat, lightly burning every nook and cranny of delicate epithelium in its path. Hot soup. Hot stir fry. Hot ramen. Hot pocket. There's no need to be picky as long as it's hot. "Heat" should have its own space on the food pyramid.
3. Free food
Imagine this scenario: You've been slaving over your lab table or some textbook or mammoth binder or just any sort of inhumanely monumental task. You realize that the odd pain that has been grinding in your stomach is hunger. You search in your bag, and, lo and behold, you've brought everything - laptop, charger, textbooks, change of clothes, sneakers, hairties, gum, makeup - except food. In such desperate times, you would be glad to eat even the stalest, coldest cereal bar to mysteriously materialize in your backpack. You stumble into the communal kitchen and open the fridge. Your bleary eyes scan other more well-prepared people's yogurt, cold noodles, and salads guiltily before focusing on a mysteriously shrouded platter marked with "PLEASE EAT." Well, you think, you didn't even have to ask. And whatever is inside is, without fail, delicious and fills you with tear-inducing relief and happiness.
4. Finishing early
Even 5 minutes can make a huge difference. I consider the happiness gained in finding an extra minute to that of finding a dollar on the street. A minute = $1. In just one minute I could read a paragraph of a book, skim a magazine or fashion blog, buy myself a treat to go, stand in the shower just a bit longer, sit in the sun.
5. Being told that I look nice.
When I feel my mind and body slowly unraveling as I continue to push myself past endurance, trying my to tie up my loose ends isn't so bad when I'm told that I appear to be doing a decent job of it. I've already decided that I'm going to do at least a bit of makeup every day, just to keep myself feeling human. This isn't saying that humans are defined by their looks and ability to superficially dress up. I'm speaking for myself.
6. Being able to put everything away and just go to bed
This requires no explanation.
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