Peanut Soup

Good news: I'm not dead.  Just too busy to blog.

Mediocre news: Peanut soup is sort of weird.

I actually am not overloaded with plans or homework today, so I decided I should cook something (after sleeping in till 11:30.  Lovely!)  I love thai food, so when I found a peanut soup recipe in one of my cookbooks, I was excited.  One of the roommates and I took a trip to Tops, which is a decent store, but still makes me miss home/Wegmans.

While trying to find all the stuff we needed, we learned (maybe relearned.  I feel like I've gotten confused by this every time I enter a grocery store) that canned tomatoes are not with canned fruits and vegetables.  I wanted to get some sauce, too, because I eat noodles like 800 times a week.  We were trying to figure out which was the best deal when this lady came up to us and not only recommended a type of sauce (Prego) but also told us an entire recipe for homemade sauce.  So a future foodblog project might be making the Tops lady's sauce.  It was cool and weird.

Anyways, peanut soup.

You need a bell pepper...

I forgot to take photos until I was already chopping.

...and an onion.  Chop 'em up!

Fun fact: I don't actually like the abbreviation "'em."
"Them" is a one syllable word.   No abbreviations necessary.

Then you sauté them with margarine in a saucepan for about 5 minutes with a little garlic powder (or a clove of chopped garlic.)

My garlic powder burned onto the pan a little.  It was weird looking.

Then, add a 24 oz can of chopped or crushed tomatoes with the liquid, a can of water, a few sprinkles of chili powder, and 24 oz of vegetable broth.  Bring it to a boil, then cook uncovered on low for half an hour.

As is often the case, it will look better soon.

After half an hour, add 1/2 cup instant brown rice and cook covered for 15 minutes.  When the rice is done, turn off the heat and stir in 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter until it dissolves.

Okay maybe not much better.

Overall, it was decent.  I really failed when I was trying to get the seal off the chili powder container, then I ended up adding too much and it kind of made my tongue numb.  But it tasted nice, if unfamiliar, and will probably be good with some grilled cheese later this week.  And I'm proud of myself for trying something new.

Wow.  This looked way cooler on my camera.
Like a magazine or something.   Now I'm disappointed.

My Unclassy Entry

I feel like my entries so far imply two things:

1. I only eat classy food.

2. I only eat once a week.

Both are false.  Here is how most of my meals go.

STEP 1: I get an idea.

In this case, tacos.

STEP 2: I try to collect ingredients, and get distracted.

Today, I dug out my vegetarian ground beef and found some green beans, and decided I should eat green beans, because those are healthy, right?

So while the roommate cooked up the fakebeef...

Hi!

...I made my beans.

Green beans become classier with American cheese.

That's when I remembered that tortillas are really just empty calories, and it would be way better to just mix the beef in with the beans and some salsa.

Thaaaaaat looks awesome.

Then I mixed it all together.

Oh god.  Even better.

Then, because it needed that special touch, I added some Gardettos snack mix.  Because that's way better than chex mix, and I'm obviously keeping it classy here.

Oh yeah.  That's the stuff.

And, of course, you can't have a meal like this without dessert.

Only the finest.

It's a rainy, overcooked day.

I haven't updated in a little while, but don't worry, I'm not dead.  Also, sorry that my last post was super weird.  It turns out that starting a pre-med track while keeping your old major and pretending you still have the other major can actually tire you out a bit.

I made another zucchini pie the other day, but I feel weird about it, because I got a stomach ache after I ate it and I'm paranoid that it was undercooked.  I think it's more likely that I've been pushing the levels of my lactose intolerance.  That might be too much information.  The point of me telling you about the pie is that I still had that italian zucchini left from the farmer's market, so I wanted to make zucchini parmesan.

I made some over the summer, but it took forever.  I've got my crock pot though, so I googled "zucchini parm slow cooker recipe."  Nothing came up, so I tried eggplant.  I ended up using this one--

Problem 1: My zucchini didn't keep super well, probably because it's been two weeks.  It was kind of mushy and when I sliced it there were these weird spots, so I cut them out.

Bleaugh.

My tomato sauce was some homemade stuff I had frozen from the summer, made with tomatoes from my garden at home, so I knew that would be good.  But--

Problem 2: I only had one zucchini, so my crock wasn't very full.

I loves me some cheese, though.

Anyways, the recipe said to cook it for five hours on low.  I put it in around noon, then went to class.  When I got home a little after five...

That's depressing.

Problem 3: ...it looked like this.

It actually wasn't all crunchy and terrible like it looks, and I don't really mind overcooked cheese.  It just looked kind of nasty.

I heated up some noodles and had it over them.  Honestly, it was pretty delicious.

Yum.

Side note: it looks like meat sauce.  That is because there are bread crumbs and some overcooked mozzarella in there.  So if you're a vegetarian and you miss that meat-saucy kind of texture, this is a nice substitute.