It's the most wonderful time of the year... for a party!

I've been looking for excuses to cook more, clean my apartment, and have a housewarming party. And what better excuse is there than a Saturday? Well, a Saturday at holiday time, perhaps!
This last Saturday I threw a little shindig at my lovely Queens apartment and managed to drag about 20 of my closest friends into one of the most hated boroughs in New York.
*Disclaimer: Pretty much any borough not named Manhattan or Brooklyn is in tough competition for that beloved honor of being most hated. I think Staten Island may actually take the cake, but there's not much love for the rest of us either.*

Every party needs a menu, so I think I blew a good 4 hours digging around on allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com until I had the perfect combo of easy party foods and drinks. Final menu selections: deviled eggs, meatballs in cranberry and chili sauce, baby BLTs (cherry tomatoes stuffed with bacon, mayo and green onions - little slices of heaven in bite-sized doses!), snickerdoodles, brownies, hand-dipped chocolate-covered pretzels, a chocolate chip cheese ball (huge success!) and spicy pecans. Drink menu: hot buttered rum and spiced wine, and countless bottles of wine.

The only hiccup in this lofty plan was the ridiculous cold I'd been fighting for weeks and the torn intercostal muscle causing me grief from way too many hours of coughing. I was exhausted and in pain for a good chunk of my cooking time, which is probably why I thought it was ok to deep-fry pecans at 2am when I've never deep-fried anything, ever. I was fairly close to having to send the regretful "sorry the party's canceled because I stupidly burned down my apartment" email, but somehow managed to salvage the pecans and my apartment, and had some damned tasty nuts to show for it.

The hot buttered rum was a recipe I found online that made my tummy smile and my teeth ache in fear. The recipe calls for 1lb butter, 1lb powdered sugar, 1lb brown sugar, 1qt vanilla ice cream, cinnamon and nutmeg. People, that's 4lbs of essentially pure fat and sugar! And I've never tasted anything quite so scrumcious!








The chocolate chip cheese ball, which apparently tastes just like cannoli filling, had cream cheese, sugar, vanilla and mini chocolate chips. Easy as it gets, and wins friends over left and right.

As for the snickerdoodles, well, those cookies have won me two marriage proposals so far! If I'd only realized sooner that you can rule the world with just a little good food... suffice it to say, it's a good thing I'm using my powers for good and not evil. So far.





All in all, the party was a smash hit for the first party I've really ever thrown. Most of the food was gone in a blink, as was all of the alcohol. And I mean all of it. Followed up with a rousing round of karaoke in Manhattan. And all done in my new super-cute Kenneth Cole sweater dress! Who could ask for anything more? (The face of a girl who has been up cooking and cleaning way too many hours
in a bathroom mirror in midtown Manhattan at 12:30am, avoiding
singing in front of complete drunken strangers. No smiles left.)

Tomato Soup

As winter starts to set in more and more, there's nothing quite like a hearty bowl of soup to make the short, cold days feel warm and pleasant. Now I've dabbled in soup for a while now, having almost perfected the art of homemade chicken noodle soup, and nearly succeeding at a great batch of lamb stew. For this project, though, it was time to inaugurate the immersion blender with something more substantial than a blueberry/raspberry smoothie.

Winter soup round 1: creamy tomato soup with a touch of chili pepper. Made from fresh tomatoes and other such real ingredients that didn't come out of a can. Blended to smithereens by Iggy the Terrible (yes, I just named the blender Iggy. If you know me at all, you know that's par for the course. Babo, Ike, Juan Carlos, Camilla, Lucy, Daisy, Jade, Mickey, Floppy, Mork and Mindy all approve).



Below is the final result. It was a beautiful soup, and another good first attempt. I definitely have some tweaking to do, including finding the right base to start from. But overall I'm calling it a success. If for nothing else than that I found yet another ridiculous name for yet another inanimate object in my apartment.
Did I say 30 going on 20?? Maybe off by a decade or three.
And laughing all the way. =)

Faux Thanksgiving

Last night was faux Thanksgiving with the Brooklyn friends. The Soup Maestro outdid himself with possibly the best batch of butternut squash soup known to man. It was truly amazing! He also made up game hens with pear and cherry compote and stuffing. I sauteed some green beans with olive oil, butter, garlic, shallots, shiitake mushrooms and salt and pepper. Oh goodness, they were good! For dessert I slaved over a dump cake. If you've never had dump cake, it is the genius invention of what could only be a Southerner, as it's way too sweet, and way too easy to make. To make it you pour a can of crushed pineapple in a cake pan, pour cherry pie filling over that, add a bag of yellow cake mix over the fruit, and then slice up 1/2 cup of butter into pats and place all over the top. No stirring. No splattered cake batter from the electric mixer. No clean-up. And then you bake at 350 for about 45 minutes until the top gets crusty and bubbling. Quite possibly the easiest dessert ever, unless you find opening cans difficult. Which I definitely do not.
Needless to say, we were all in food-induced comas last night. Which didn't prevent us from jamming out to RockBand for a bit and butchering some classic Beatles tunes, but did make for a long commute home.

Soup Night!

I have this friend out in Brooklyn who used to be a chef, and a damn good one at that. These days, however, he's doing the 9-5 in a cubby, but every once in a while he gets the urge to cook for everyone he knows. And thankfully, I'm on that lucky list of people.

Last week he made the infamous tomatillo soup, and it was such a smash hit with everyone there that it looks like Soup Night will be a regular occurrence. Sweet! Another excuse to test my cooking limits, AND get delicious soup out of it!

Last night we had a sweet and spicy buffalo chicken soup with sour cream and a side of to-die-for garlic and asiago toasted baguette slices. And of course rice pudding for dessert. To make the experience even better, we dined while watching Wayne's World. I haven't seen that movie since probably the mid-90s, so I forgot how rad it is. Schwing! Perfect match for the crowd and the meal.

Next on the soup menu: Vermont cheddar soup.

I could get used to this life.

Rice pudding, a la Alton Brown

I've had this super craving for rice pudding lately, but it seems ridiculous to spend like $4 for a tiny tub of it at the grocery store when it will last half a blink. Plus, I need new stuff to cook, right?

So I dug around on foodnetwork.com for the perfect first rice pudding recipe, and of course went straight for Alton Brown. For those of you who haven't seen his show, he's the quintessential scientist who channels his geekiness into cooking. If you ever want to know the ins and outs of cheesecake, butter, the perfect turkey, etc. he's the guy to look to. And Alton never does a recipe halfway, so naturally his rice pudding is Indian rice pudding, cardamom and all.

Total cooking time: about 30 minutes.
Total shopping time to find cardamom and coconut milk in Sunnyside, NY: um, 3 days?? It's like mission impossible to get spices in this neighborhood. I finally found cardamom at this little spice counter at the Grand Central Market. Yes, there's a food market inside Grand Central. What won't New Yorkers come up with to save a few minutes?

Final product: so worth the hunt for ingredients! I added a little nutmeg and cinnamon for my own flavor. Yum! So good, in fact, that I may have to make another batch for Soup Night. But that's a whole different blog...

The start of it all

Oh lord, here I go again with another blog. I can't promise regular postings, but I will definitely try to keep this up to date when I can. Here goes!

I'm 31, single, living in NYC, and maybe, just maybe, living as ridiculously now as I should have been at 21. So why not share the embarrassment and awesomeness with those I love the most?!

Living in New York City can be one tough adventure when you're a book nerd from Seattle. Made even worse by being buried in nursing school and beginning a new career. I've been here for over 2 years now and I'm just just starting to get out regularly and appreciate all the character and uniqueness of the different parts of this crazy city. And did I mention that I only work 13 days a month? I think that means it's time to get out more!

Meanwhile on the home front, I'm also discovering a new passion for crafting, cooking, and general shenanigans. Well, the shenanigans aren't new. But the cooking definitely is! And since most of my loved ones aren't close enough to experience this in person (and probably won't believe me anyway!) I'm going to let pictures speak their thousand words. So to inaugurate this blog, I'm posting a picture of the apple pie I made a few weeks ago, from scratch. Yup, I did it all by myself, crust and all. I'm such a big girl! It was a huge success with Book Club and may even make an appearance at a Thanksgiving table or two in a few weeks.

I hope to use this blog to keep you posted on what's going on in my part of the world. Ok, really it's to have an excuse to make more cool stuff and post pictures of it. And to document a few of the shenanigans, as half of the things I do I can't believe myself. Hope you enjoy! And feel free to send suggestions, for food and/or tomfoolery.