Simplicity, Italian style.

I love simple ingredients and simple preparation, things you can just throw together with barely any preparation. One of my favorite snacks is a quintessential Italian salad known as caprese, which is sliced tomato, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, and some salt and pepper. Cut them up, layer them, done. Nothing tastes fresher than basil straight out of the garden, and my mom grows basil in our back yard so it's always a special treat when I go home. Lately I've been trying to eat better, but it's difficult when I have less than ten minutes between each class, and then at the end of the day I have ten minutes to get to the gym so the only option is fast food, making the two hours of hell I'm about to endure completely pointless. So tonight I used three of my favorite ingredients to make a pasta salad based on one by Ina Garten, aka the Barefoot Contessa. It has spiral pasta, diced tomatoes, cubed fresh mozzarella, chopped basil, black olives, and sun-dried tomatoes, then a dressing of olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, salt, and pepper (I added some Italian seasoning too - you can never go wrong with that stuff). Not only is it delicious, but hopefully it will stop me from resorting to McDonald's or Cheetos to get me through the day.

Jalapenos and Bacon

The other night I experimented with two of the most delicious and painful-to-prepare ingredients: jalapenos and bacon. I decided to host a game night at my apartment for the Georgia game, which I soon gave up on, and make jalapenos stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese, cheddar cheese, and bacon. The jalapenos were extremely fresh as they were picked earlier that day from my mom's garden, and therefore very...potent. First I had to cut the peppers in half and seed them, and since my pairing knife was in use I abandoned all use of logic and seeded them by digging out the insides with my thumbnails. At first everything was fine and I continued to cook in blissful ignorance, at least being careful not to get my hands near my eyes. But then...the burning started. Imagine paper cuts underneath your finger nails, then set those paper cuts on fire - I was still feeling it 24 hours later! As to the other painfully delicious food, anyone who has ever cooked bacon knows there is a definite risk to frying it. In order to fry it, the pan has to get hotter, which produces more grease, which makes the bacon shoot HOT FIERY OIL AT YOU. So not only my hands burning, but now my arms and pants are covered in splatters of hot bacon grease AND Georgia lost the game.

On a good note, the jalapeno poppers were delicious!