Our first honest heavy snowfall in New Jersey! The one I got last March doesn't count, David wasn't here yet. We spent it traipsing around NYC, getting soggy, frost-bitten toes and increasing anger at squealing children (hunger-induced, I'm sure). Came home hungry, and this is what we created. My own recipe, this -- makes a damn good meal.

( I'm Dreaming of a White Pizza )

David had a frustrating day today, so I thought maybe a new recipe might cheer him up. I originally decided to make chicken so that we could have a semi-romantic dinner: candles on the table, glasses of the white wine his mom got for us in wine country (my knowledge of white wine is limited to "it goes with chicken"). But then I got home from work and started cooking and we were so hungry that we didn't bother with wine or candles, ended up just scarfing down the noodle dish because HOLY STUFF it was TASTY.

Takes maybe 10 minutes to prepare, start-to-finish, and that's including the first-time-using-a-recipe what-the-hell-did-the-recipe-say pauses. Probably take less time the next time I make it. If that's not impressive (and oh, the result is SO GOOD), then I don't know what is. :D

( Spicy Peanut Thai Chicken with Noodles )

My first autumn living in New Jersey has been eye-opening: it gets cold here starting in September (instead of getting around to it by November, as in Ohio), the leaves change color and fall off like they have a deadline for clogging the drains, and the geese are here for one last noisy hurrah before they fly south to terrorize someone else for a few months.

Means it's time for some pumpkin dishes (and maybe an airhorn to scare the geese away).

This is a recipe I found on allrecipes.com and haven't really changed much, save for the addition of nuts (because c'mon, you gotta have nuts in a sweetbread). The original can be found here.

( Autumn Pumpkin Gingerbread )

Mousse I bookmarked back in ... June perhaps? and have only now gotten around to making. My mom mailed--not kidding, she express mailed--a birthday cake to me, which I ate in one sitting, so I made mousse afterwards because my cake seemed to be missing. *burp*

It should be noted: the cake was better.

But! This mousse is absolutely DIVINE. Very easy to make, though time-consuming; you have to chill the first part for an hour. Doesn't take up that hour of your time, though, and it makes six servings, so you get mousse in high supply.

Give it a go!

( Happy Birthday Pumpkin Mousse )

Why is it that most of the recipes I come up with start with a story about how I hadn't planned ahead properly and needed to throw something together out of what was in my refrigerator? I mean really. Yeah necessity is the mother of invention and all that, but this seems to happen to me way too often, I suspect I might suck at planning ahead when I go to the grocery.

Anyway, this is a recipe I came up with after I began getting up at 5:30 am to work on my novel. Now you might think that getting up at 5:30 am would give me PLENTY of time to cook lunch, but you see, I don't WANT to work on anything but my novel until 6:45, and making lunch would be a non-novel time-taker of the do-not-want variety.

So on Sunday afternoon (evening, where has the day gone?) I came up with this, mixed it together, and socked it in the 'fridge, from which I will grab one serving before leaving for work tomorrow. I'll do the same the day after, too, because this made four full servings, and frankly, that's awesome (in my opinion). More work once means less work on Monday and Tuesday, and you simply cannot go wrong with a plan like that.

... oh, and regarding the title? Say it fast, it sounds like "modified rice." Which right now is making me chuckle, perhaps I've finally gone off the deep end. :D

( Mollyfried Rice )

I feel like a true child of the United States of America. I can eat hamburgers again.

(And I only cheated a little!)

( Of Thee We Sing Turkey Burgers )

So David and I yesterday got a blender, our first blender since marriage (isn't that something you're supposed to get as a wedding present, stereotypically?), and today we've started making smoothies. They're cold and tasty and sweet and oh-my-goodness healthy, so I figured I'd start a list of them here, for the record or for the show-off or for the whatever, here they are.

( Lots of Smoothie Recipes )

So it's two o'clock in the morning, you've just been scared into consciousness by your radio alarm clock going off at full volume (when you had intended it to just beep you awake), and you haven't yet made the hummus you promised you'd bring to the surprise baby shower at work the following day (technically today, because you've slept through what was left of yesterday you lazy bum you). Your neighbors are pretty sweet so you don't really feel like pissing them off by running the electric mixer needed to make chick peas into paste, so you go to the internet to find an alternative.

It's gotta be a dip, it's gotta go well with pita bread, and it's gotta use only stuff you've got in the house.

I'd be embarrassed, confessing that this is a true story, except that the ending is happy: I ended up with a dip that took me all of five minutes to make and it is OH MAN really tasty. It's a modified version of a recipe I found online, but I've changed it so much that I don't really think they're more than kissing cousins, now.

Give it a go! It's good stuff.

( Two A.M. Peanut Butter Cranberry Dip )

This recipe is a combination of the instructions on the back of the Barilla no-boil lasagna noodle box and my own twisted sense of what's tasty. It baked up into a massive, tasty thing but oh my goodness, beware your portion sizes when serving this: what looks like a normal serving is easily twice what you think it'll be!

( Heavyweight Lasagna )

Probably the best take on my mother-in-law's shortcake, this is quick and easy and sweet and GOOD. Oh and relatively low-fat, too, but who cares? It's freakin cake!

( Oversized Blueberry Muffin Cake )

My apologies to the ... what, four of you who watch this journal? I did promise an update on my trip to Asia, and then life kind of went nuts and I didn't do it. I've been home three weeks and still I don't really feel like I'm home. Feels like an extended vacation still, and the thought that I'm here for good honestly kind of terrifies me. I'm sure that will pass, but for now, it's a mix of exciting and really, really scary.

Little bird, out of the nest you go.

( Anyway! Here are my pictures from the Taiwan leg of the trip. )

That's it for my Taiwan photos. I'll post up my Thailand photos next month, when Flickr's done being sulky and not letting me upload all my pictures at once. Stupid bandwidth limits!

In summary, though: Taiwan was great. The people are very nice, very willing to talk to me, very willing to be helpful. The taxi drivers are a bit, uh ... shady, sometimes, and some of them can't read Chinese characters, so beware if you only have writing and can't speak. I think that, when I go by myself, I'll do a lot more walking than Cris and I did together. Save myself the annoyance and cost of taxi drivers not knowing where I want to go and getting frustrated when I can't tell them, verbally.

Thailand'll be posted next month!

So here's the story of my life, lately. Had to get my parking tag and staff ID from Felician before I start work on Monday, but in order to get those, I had to get a NJ driver's license and NJ plates for my car.

Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Well.

( This is how it played out )

Had an interesting conversation today with a friend about the notion of feminism and women's empowerment, wanted to post my thoughts here.

( Feminism and Separation of the Sexes )

Just my thoughts. ^^ Let me hear yours.

~mQ

It's 12:43 in the morning, I have a 9-hour drive tomorrow, and I can't sleep. Figured I should post here to give some details about the good news I got on Tuesday, since I'm otherwise just sitting here re-reading a very good Naruto fanfiction for the ... um. Probably sixth time? Maybe more.

... wow, that's embarrassing.

( Anyway, here's my excellent news )

So! That's the story, as it stands now. Any questions about what I'm doing or when I lost my mind or grew another set of balls or both are more than welcome. I'm just plainly thrilled. Out of Ohio at last! :D

~mQ

So David and I discovered this tasty ... thing awhile back. It's called "Simply Asia" and it's a box set that has noodles, teriyaki sauce, and sesame seeds in it, you cook veggies and meat to toss in and boom, lo mein. However, it seemed dumb to buy the premade packaged food when it's just noodles and sauce and veggies, so I've been experimenting with making my own, and I've got it nailed.

It's good stuff, serve it with a glass of milk (soymilk, in our case) and a piece of fresh fruit, and you've got a well-balanced meal. You can add shrimp/beef/chicken/pork to it if you like, but that stuff's expensive, so we usually just leave it out. ;)

( Mixed Vegetable Teriyaki Stir-Fry )

So remember back in ... I don't even know when that was ... when I had myself suspended from y!gallery so I could focus on my thesis?

Yeah well, that didn't work out so well for me. Being suspended sucked, I did all my research, discovered I couldn't stomach working with my topic, got strung along by my advisor, and in the end, had no thesis to turn in.

I decided ten days ago to change topics, get something I could work on without feeling sick to my stomach. I've got all my research done now (did it in one week, baby) and I'm working on my outline and ... I'm feeling really adrift. Advisor is, once again, not answering emails, and I'm feeling ...

It's weird, actually. I feel so free to "do whatever you want however you want to do it!" that I don't know where to start. I have all this good information, but I don't know how to best organize it. When I felt this way with my novel, I sat down and just wrote a bit of Jasen's life, let the story go from that point on.

How do you do that with academic research?

If anyone out there has suggestions, tips, advice, anecdotes ... really anything, I'd greatly appreciate it. I can't let this one slip through my fingers like the last one did, and I've set a personal deadline of Wednesday -- two days from today -- and if I miss it (missed my personal deadline for the last one, too) it'll really upset me.

So. Help? ;_;

~mQ

This is my recipe for hot cocoa, I suppose, but it's a mix of recipes I've picked up from many many people over the course of my life. It calls for vanilla soymilk, but I suppose you could probably use cow milk or goat milk and add some vanilla. I don't recommend it, simply because I don't like how cow milk tastes once it's warmed up. But, do what you will based upon your own preferences. :)

( The Best Hot Cocoa Ever )

So tempura is a fantastic thing: you take just about anything a child wouldn't eat—broccoli, sweet potato, mushroom, shrimp—and freakin' deep-fry it, then serve it with a sweet sauce and rice. I mean really, is there anything Japan hasn't turned awesome.

Yes, but that's not the point.

mr. Quickly and I make tempura from time to time. Not frequently enough to remember exactly how we've done it in the past, though, which is a royal pain in my posterior. So here, I'm going to record what we used and how much of it we used. This is NOT some kind of suggestion that we know what we're doing; we're not Japanese and we've certainly turned this recipe to match our specific tastes. If you want to make actual Japanese food, I really recommend going off and doing a Google search if you want real instructions.

Oh and don't make fun of what we do, we like it because it tastes nice. If it's "wrong" then ... wait. How can our recipe for us be wrong?

( mr. & mistr3ss Quickly's Tempura )

This is, I believe, officially the longest and most complicated recipe I've put up on my blog. And at that, I'm pretty sure I've left something out. *sigh*

Also, it should be mentioned that other things can be fried in tempura. I've listed the things we like to eat. The rest ... well. Make your own recipe, yeah? ;)

A recipe I found while surfing about, trying to find a way to make mr. Quickly eat more vegetables. It's easy it's tasty (it has a whole stick of butter in it, how can you go wrong?) and it's excellent with butter crackers, saltines, or good French bread.

( Tummy-Warming Broccoli Cheese Soup )