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!

Fajitas and Procrastination

Now that I have an apartment of my own, I realize how much my mom really cooked. Even if it was leftovers, there was always something in the fridge to eat. Earlier today, I looked in our refrigerator to find leftover pizza from two weeks ago, half a block of cheese, and some jalapenos from my mom's garden. I have a hungry boyfriend to feed, so I had to think of something. With a kitchen of my own I now feel like I should be morphing into some sort of culinary mastermind, but for college students anything above the cooking difficulty of ramen noodles should be considered impressive. Tonight I made some of my favorite fajitas.The marinade for the chicken requires a good bit of different seasonings, and I also got bell peppers and onions to saute. First I combined all the seasoning, which includes chili powder, oregano, paprika, garlic powder, cumin, red pepper flakes, lemon, and oil, and mixed it with the raw chicken strips. I then set it in the fridge for about an hour and a half.
While the chicken set in the marinade I started doing laundry, making iced tea, and cleaning the entire kitchen. But why go through so much trouble? Why did every dish have to be cleaned right then? I've thought about it and figured it out - it was because I had homework to do, and nothing makes me accomplish trivial things like procrastination of school. If I have homework to do, I will cook a delicious and complex meal (excluding the fajitas, but come on, I made the marinade) and clean my entire house. With the thought of 7 reading assignments in the back of my mind, I cleaned all the dishes, did two loads of laundry, watched an episode of South Park, and almost broke the washing machine. But most importantly, the fajitas were delicious. The marinade is mildly spicy and the peppers and onions give the fajitas a crunchy texture inside the soft tortillas - and of course, I coat mine entirely in hot salsa. Afterwards I of course cleaned up the whole kitchen because I still had reading assignments to do, but I think it was worth the meal.