Adventures in Cooking

Hey guys! I had a really packed weekend and I finally got a chance to blog about it. On Friday night I went out to St. Mark's with friends to get food, listen to music and hang out in Washington Square Park. Saturday we went to breakfast for my friend's birthday at a place called Yaffa on St. Mark's which has an amazing brunch special ($11 on weekends, $6 during the week), then we walked around Union Square and went shopping and got yogurt. Saturday night I made fried zucchini with pasta and tomato sauce for dinner which I shared with my friends while we talked about politics and career choices. Intelligent conversation and food is the best part of college. Sunday morning, my friend walked into the kitchen and told me how she'd gained so much weight since starting college. She wanted to start a healthy diet. So we decided to make a healthy dinner. We all went shopping together at the Trader Joe's on 26th and 6th and bought all the ingredients for Thai chicken and vegetable stir fry that we would need. We combined the ingredient lists from two different recipes. Here's what we put into the mix:

zucchini
edamame
red and green bell peppers
chicken
crushed cashews
onions
garlic
soy sauce
lemon juice
vegetable oil
salt and pepper
red pepper flakes

It was my first attempt at cooking at the dorm and I'd say it was pretty successful! Don't be afraid of cooking guys. If you have a pan and vegetable oil, you can basically cook anything. I also got a chance to use my rice cooker for the first time. Stir fry is amazing for college students because you can basically throw all the vegetables in your fridge into a pan and stir them around and it's a meal. You also usually have leftovers. Conclusion: stir fry and omelets are the ultimate food of college students.

In other news, I have to start my seminar paper on Surrealism and film. Although the paper seems difficult, I'm glad we got to choose our own topic. When my teacher first introduced the paper, it sounded like the five-page paper from hell: writing five pages about art was not going to happen for me. But I finally found a topic I'm interested in and now I'm excited to write about it! Maybe if I actually get off my butt and stop watching Glee, Elementary, and Sherlock I could focus and get past an outline!

Finally: my friend and I were going to try to get tickets to the sold out Ed Sheeran concert at Terminal 5 on Friday, but it was pretty much impossible. That's what happens when you sell $28 tickets at a great venue for a perfect artist. Nonetheless, I downloaded his whole album and have been listening to it for two weeks. Personal favorites include: "The City", "You Need Me, I Don't Need You", "Grade 8", "Wake Me Up", and "Drunk". Oh, and "The A Team", of course. He's attractive and a good singer and British. That's just a good combo right there.

Erica