A Cure for Hot Weather

Seedless limes were on sale at Buy-For-Less for 15 for a dollar! I bought some.
Ok, I bought lots.
My head was dancing with visions of cold, tart treats.
So I brought them home and Morgan and I started juicing... and juicing.... and juicing.... and we did not get through all the limes I bought, some of them are still sitting on my kitchen table. But we did get through enough to make yummy cold treat things!

I don't like ice cream.
I'm sorry, I know that is probably bordering on blasphemy.
But I just don't.
I don't really know why... I used to blame it on my cold-sensitive teeth, but I love sorbet and frozen yoghurt and frappaccinos, so it obviously can't be that I just don't like cold things.
I even really like homemade ice cream. And I like smoothies, and some of Dairy Queen's stuff.
It's just regular old ice cream, I just don't like it that much. Its... I don't know... too heavy? Too creamy? Too sweet? I just don't know. Too ice-creamy.
I'm sorry.
I'll go hide in a hole now so I don't get hit.

But I love sorbet! So I made some sorbet. For me. Because I like it. And because I've convinced myself that it must be healthier than ice cream. Surely. Besides, in Bethany, OK this time of year in a house without air conditioning, you really need something cold. Really.

Lime Sorbet
1 c water
1 c lime juice
1 c sugar
1 tbsp lime zest

Combine in pan, simmer over medium heat until sugar is fully dissolved.
Freeze.
You can just pour it in a bowl and set it in the freezer, and freeze it that way. I must warn you, however, that when you do this the sour tends to float to the top and the sweet will sink to the bottom somehow, so that you end up with a wow-thats-super-sour-stuff-now-my-jaw-really-hurts-a-lot first few bowls, and then oh-my-goodness-this-is-incredibly-sweet last few bowls. So if you do it like that, you may want to visit it now and again during the freezing process and stir it up.

You could also freeze it in an ice cream maker, if you have one of those.
Also, as we learned in my brother's 4th grade science class, you can freeze it by putting it in a little ziploc bag inside a bigger ziploc bag, then filling the bigger ziploc bag with ice and salt and shaking it for a while. You may, however, want to make sure your ziploc bags are well sealed before coming into your mom's office with all her paper work strewn about and demonstrating to her your science project. It might get messy otherwise. Your mom might not fully appreciate your science project. Just a guess. You know... from experience.

Sesame Chicken Noms!

I really love Chinese food.
A lot.
I could eat Chinese food and Indian food every day for the rest of my life.
For real.
And one of my favorite Chinese food dishes ever is sesame chicken.
I made sesame chicken for dinner.
It was really, really good and I ate a lot of it.
Lots and lots.
I know, I shouldn't sing my own praises and all that, but it was really good.
Really.
It made me forget that I am trying to lose weight and all that. 
You should make it too.
Right now.
Go ahead.
Here, I'll even give you a recipe. I looked up online a recipe for sesame chicken and then I kind of adapted it a lot until it looks a little like the original, but not much. So, I'll give you mine because it is good and worth eating.

Recipe: 

Ingredients: 
2 pounds of cubed chicken
1/4 c toasted sesame seeds (toast till light brown in a pan on the stove)
vegetable oil for deep frying

Batter:
4 Tbsp soy sauce
4 Tbsp flour
4 Tbsp cornstarch
4 Tbsp water
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp vegetable oil

Sauce:
1/2 c water
1 c chicken broth
1/8 c vinegar
2 Tbsp cornstarch
1 c sugar
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp chili soy sauce (or chili sauce)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp sesame seeds

Method:
Mix ingredients for marinade and pour over the cubed chicken. Mix together and let this sit while you put together the sauce.

Mix together the ingredients for the sauce in a small sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium to high heat while stirring occasionally with a whisk. Let sauce thicken to syrup consistency, then set heat to very low while you fry the chicken.

Heat enough oil to deep fry chicken in a deep pan. I used my wok. Test the oil by dropping a little of the batter into it. When it sizzles a whole lot, the oil is hot enough. Drop the pieces of chicken into the oil little at a time, separating them as you drop them. Keep stirring, or they will stick to the bottom of the pan... or is that just me? When they are done (light brown, crispy) pull them out and put them in a bowl lined with paper towels to drain.

When the chicken is all fried, heat the sauce up to boiling again. Mix the fried chicken and the sauce in a bowl, then toss with all but a spoonful of the sesame seeds. Sprinkle the last few seeds over the top.

Serve with rice. Or with spaghetti noodles if you want to... personally, I recommend the rice.

Morgan approved of this sesame chicken. Or at least, I think he did, since he ate about three bowls worth.

 

Oh yeah, and I think you should eat this with chopsticks. Because I think all Chinese food should be eaten with chopsticks, with the exception, perhaps, of eggdrop soup. It just tastes better with chopsticks. Trust me. Now go make sesame chicken.

Yoghurt!

I recently found out that evidently the word "yoghurt" is not spelled the same in british and american english. Yet another example of how impeded my ability to communicate with my peers is. Yeah, you can stop talking about how much I communicate anyway. I know I talk a lot. I know.

But honestly this post is not about my tendency to not stop the flow of wisdom that proceeds forth out of my mouth, but rather about my attempts to make yoghurt. You see, it recently occurred to me that while yoghurt costs over $3 a quart, milk only costs about $3 a gallon. And I eat a lot of yoghurt. So, I thought, I could save a LOT of money by just making my own yoghurt! Well, actually, I probably would not actually save any money because I would be so much more likely to actually eat the yoghurt that I made that I would eat enough more of it to negate the fact that it cost less. Whatever. The point is, less money, more creamy tart yumminess. So I set out to find a simple way to make homemade yoghurt.

That search, while it may sound easy, is not. It is hard. Yoghurt is a thing which is shrouded in mystery, difficulty, and precise temperatures for prolonged periods of time. I do not have a) a yoghurt maker, b) a double boiler, c) a candy thermometer, or d) a heating pad thingy. It would seem that my yoghurt making ambitions were doomed. However, after much perseverance (I really like yoghurt) I finally happened upon a blog which told you how to tell when the milk and the yoghurt are the right temperature without a thermometer! With a little tweaking, the recipe worked great! My yoghurt is lovely! It is wonderful with fruit and granola in it for breakfast, and I feel oh-so-healthy as I eat it. And yes, I do eat about 4 times as much yoghurt now, which means I spend about the same amount of money on it as before, but hey, I get more of it now! =D

Ok, I'll stop talking and just show you how I make it.

You will need:
a pan
a whisk
sealable containers for your yoghurt
a blanket or several towels

milk (the amount of yoghurt you want to make, that's how much milk you need)
1/4 cup yoghurt (for your first batch. after the first batch, you can use the leftover yoghurt from your last batch)

Step 1: heat the milk in the pan, stirring lots with a whisk. Like, stir it a lot. Obsessively. Do not go do your laundry. Stay right there and stir that milk. Sometimes I wash dishes in between stirring, but mostly do stirring. Or it will burn. Yuck. Heat it until it begins to froth like that stuff you put on top of cappuccinos, and steam is coming off of it a lot.

Step 2: Now transfer the pot with the milk in it to a sink of cold water. I know, it seems weird, heat up the milk, cool the milk, but trust me it works. Promise. Continue stirring the milk, and cooling it off until you can keep your pinky finger in the milk for 10 seconds without it burning. Why? Because that's the right temperature. Just is.

Step 3: Take the pot out of the cold water and stir the yoghurt into the milk.


Step 4: Pour this warm milk-yoghurt stuff into your yoghurt containers. Make sure your containers aren't cold when you do this, they should be warm. You don't want to cool off the milky yoghurty stuff.

Step 5: Snugly wrap up your yoghurt containers in the blanket or towels and put them somewhere they will stay warm. It being Oklahoma in the summertime here, "somewhere they will stay warm" is right there on my kitchen counter. I mean, it's 105 degrees, they aren't going to cool off. You might need to find a warmer place, like near a heater.

Step 6: leave them there for about 8 hours, maybe a bit more depending on how it is doing. If it is getting thickish (it will still be pretty runny) and tart, then they are doing good.

Step 7: When they are done, take your containers out of the blanket and stir the yoghurt vigorously. You are trying to stop the bacteria activity, so it doesn't keep yoghurtifying. Then, put the containers in the fridge overnight (about 8 hours again). The yoghurt will thicken some in the fridge.

Step 8: Eat!

My House Part 2

So now that you have waited oh-so-patiently a couple of days (ok, so I didn't get to blogging on my to-do list yesterday), I will now deliver the "after" pictures.

Here is the living room, from the same view points as the before pictures: 

Here is the bathroom (again, same view point):

Kitchen:

Dining room:

Bedroom-- there were no before pictures of the bedroom because our landlord's stuff was stored in there and we couldn't even get into it until three days before we left for our wedding. Hence, by the time we got into it, I was so panicked about getting it done that I didn't think to take pictures. Trust me, it was a mess.

The spare bedroom and the pantry don't need to be included yet because they are currently being worked on. My family (hi family!) is coming in a couple of weeks to stay with us so we are frantically trying to make a place for them to be able to stay. It's coming along fast though, so pictures of that will be up soon.

My mother-in-law (hi mommyinlaw!) helped me with painting in the pantry today. That was so much fun because it was 103 degrees today, our house doesn't have air conditioning, and the pantry especially has no airflow at all. Also, the only painting-pants I have are jeans, so I was wearing jeans. Fun fun. At least I wasn't doing it all by my lonesome! =]

So there you go, the house transformed. I hope you enjoyed this series, tune in next time for more of whatever I come up with to write about!

New blogging thoughts, and My House Part 1

Well, we just got home this last week from spending the summer up at Golden Bell camp ground in Colorado. It was a lovely deal, because we missed the worst of Oklahoma's heat and lived in the gorgeous weather that is to be found at 9200 ft... I think we may have hit around 85 on a hot day this summer.

We did not have much internet access over the summer and were very busy, hence the non-post-ness on my blog, but I am now back in the land of computers and some slight amount of free time, so hopefully the situation can be remedied. I also may have found a solution for the other reason that I almost never post on my blog: lack of something to write about. I mean, I have an exciting life and all but I just can't ever think of anything of interest about my life to broadcast to the world.

However, I was reading through a blog of a friend of mine, who talks about the way she lives a mostly chemical-free, eco-friendly lifestyle by cooking from scratch for her family and home-making a lot of things. (see her blog here: http://mindofthemother.blogspot.com/) It came to my attention that the way I live isn't the way every newly married housewife who is going to college full-time lives. For example, we live rent-free because we basically rebuilt the inside of a gutted house. We live on $40 a week for groceries and eat really well because I make everything from scratch. I spent next to nothing on clothes because I make or thrift-store-buy all my clothes. Etc. Hence, I thought I might give a try to blogging about that kind of stuff... we'll see how it goes.

The first thing would obviously be our house. If you would have told me 10 months ago what this house would look like today I would not have believed you. The house is a couple blocks north of where I go to college, and our landlord is an old work friend of Morgan's. The previous renter/ occupant had completely trashed the house, after it had already endured years of neglect. The entire ceiling in the living room and half the kitchen was not sheetrocked. Most of the walls were either not sheetrocked, or the sheetrock had huge holes in it. There was trash all over the place. There were no kitchen cabinets, counters, sink, oven, fridge, etc. There was no bathroom sink. The toilet was broken (the stool part was cracked and leaking). The list goes on and on and on.

We, being the brilliant people we are, made the bright decision to "fix up the place" (on our $200 or so dollars in savings) during the three months prior to our wedding. This is the same three months in which 1) I was going to school full-time as a sophomore pre-med major. My hardest semester of college to-date. Approx 25 hours a week in class and lab.  2) We were planning a wedding.  3) Morgan was working a part-time job.  4) We were trying to figure out a relationship... we had just gotten engaged, and relationships at that stage take a lot of time to figure out!  5) I was recovering from mono.

It's a good thing we were ignorant of the fact that what we were going to do was completely impossible, because despite that fact, we did it. Granted, everything was not perfect. Granted, there were a few... ok, a lot... a whole lot... of tears shed along the way. But every time something was completely impossible, God seemed to show up and it happened. I guess I'll stop talking about it and try to show you some before-pictures... the pictures really don't do it justice, but oh well.

The living room (left to right, same room. See, some of the stuff in the middle is the same. =] )

Dining room and kitchen:

Spare bedroom (the boards in the front are actually all that there is of a wall between this room and the living room)

 

Bathroom:

From these pictures, you really cannot see at all how yucky the house really was. The mice, the gunk, the general feeling of dirtness is not communicated in the least.

Since it is late here and I did not have the forethought to take pictures of my house in the daylight (surprise!) I will wait and post the "after" pictures when I actually take them. Hopefully tomorrow. We shall see. =D