Month: July 2017

Doctor What?

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Recently, Luke and I have been watching Doctor Who again. I don’t say “again” as if we’d stopped watching it all together, I say “again” as in we’ve never watched the show together so let’s start over from the beginning. We’re currently in the middle of “New Who” Series 3, or The Tenth Doctor’s second season. This means we just recently finished Series 2.

If you know me and my relationship with the show at all, you know that Ten and Rose are my favorite and while I have accepted Eleven and River, they are not the pairing that is near and dear to my heart. And if you know the show at all, then you know what happens at the end of Series 2 and can probably guess where I am going with this.

I. Was. Bawling.

I don’t know why I put myself through watching that ending again. I really don’t. It wasn’t even when they’re both on the different sides of the walls that got me, it was when they’re on the beach. When Rose says “I love you” and The Doctor doesn’t get to say it back I thought my heart was going to fall out. That episode premiered in 2006. I first watched it in (probably) 2010. It is 2017. I feel like Snape, #Always (#ImActuallyNotAFanOfThatAndDontThinkItsAsRomanticAsItsSupposedToBe).

And I know that it’s sort of a happy ending for the two of them at the end of Series 4, but it’s really not. Once again, The Doctor is left alone while his companions are left happily galavanting about with their other mortal counterparts. It’s not fair to him but that is the life he chose, sort of.

After all of my crying and Luke stopping to play Pokemon Stadium so that I could get a break, we talked about the show and how we wish they’d show the Time War. I stated that the only storyline in Doctor Who that could even be more heartbreaking than Doomsday would be watching him have to leave his family and blow up Gallifrey and, though I just asked myself why I wanted to put myself through Doomsday again, I would totally watch him blow his family up.

To the new execs, because Moffat is no longer head writer: do this. People would watch it. We get it, he’s all broken up about it and it’s tragic, but give it to us instead of just making John Hurt yet another Doctor in the timeline, making it more regenerations than he’s supposed to have, and for the love of God, don’t credit Billie Piper as Rose when she’s the BadWolf, not Rose.

Looking forward on another note, while I am sad that Peter Capaldi is leaving, I am so excited to have a female Doctor coming in. I think it is going to be a wonderfully refreshing change. That’s really all I can say about that matter right now because I don’t know enough about Jodie Whittaker, but I am optimistic. Hopefully she does well and we can get more strong and awesome ladies on the show again instead of mysteries that need to be solved. I’m looking at you, Moffat…

Homemade Sweet & Sour Chicken

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Everyone loves Chinese take-out. I am no exception to this, but I don’t have the money for Chinese take-out right now. Thankfully, most recipes are rather easy, especially fried rice. All you have to do is throw some leftover rice in a pan with some oil, add whatever frozen veggies you like, soy sauce, and an egg and you’re done! If you wanna get even fancier, you can also add meat. In the past, we’ve added meats like char-siu pork and different Chinese sausages. Tonight we were going to add chicken since Luke had started defrosting chicken thighs, but I wanted to mix it up a little so I looked up a recipe for sweet and sour chicken. We also had a pineapple, so that aided in the idea.

This was the first recipe that came up on Google when I searched “sweet and sour chicken”: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sweet-and-sour-chicken-recipe-1957986.

I can post it this time because this time, I basically followed it. The things we changed were that we had no bell peppers, we used chicken thighs instead of breasts, we used fresh pineapple, and because it was fresh pineapple, we had no pineapple juice so we subbed in limeade that we had in the fridge. We also floured the chicken before frying it because it added a bit more depth to the dish.

It came out spectacularly. The only thing that we probably could have improved upon was that I think I didn’t cook the cornstarch long enough because I left the heat up too high so it reduced too quickly. However, the pineapple was super warm and tender, the sauce was sweet and sour, and the chicken was crispy and delicious. It all went really well with the rice too, which had corn and green beans in it.

The best part of it all, we have leftovers. I love leftovers. Who has Chinese take-out and doesn’t have leftovers?

The Best Time of the Month

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For the past 17 months, around the middle of the month an email has come to my inbox and within about a week from that day this package has come to my mailbox. This is the packaging that ipsy sends their GlamBags in. It’s super pink, super shiny, and super squishy. They bring a smile to my face.

This month’s theme is Over Easy and features Gudetama who is an adorable little lazy egg character that I connect to so hard. The bag has an image of him on it and it is shimmery. In the bag, I got a COUGAR Beauty Cosmetics 24-Hour Liquid Lipstick in Mulberry, Ciate London Wonderwand Gel-Kohl Hybrid Liner in Black, OFRA Cosmetics Gold Rush Eyeshadow, Hempz Ultra Moisturizing Herbal Lip Balm, and two TONYMOLY I’m Real Sheet Masks in Green Tea and Lotus. Along with all of those fabulous products, I had also redeemed points for a Her Minerals Professional Blending Sponge.

I don’t know how much I’m going to use the eyeshadow or eyeliner, but I will return with updates and reviews as I try them. Even if I don’t continue using the products after I initially try them, I always try them at least once to review them. That’s how you get points!

On a completely unrelated note, Luke and I went to Target today on a mission. In the time that he was “living with me” in Tampa, every time we went to Target, we looked at a cookie jar. It was a grey cookie jar shaped as a little hippo. It was $20 and every single time I basically begged Luke to let me buy it but since we were in Tampa and knew we’d be moving to Austin, he always said no because it was another thing we’d have to move. Well, today, I would like to introduce you to Puds, the newest addition to our little family.

Yes, having a cookie jar means we will be baking cookies. Yes, I will post photos of him filled with cookies. For now, here he is in all of his cute glory. I love him.

Post-Grad Life Update #2

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I am still on a job hunt and it still sucks. What sucks more is what happened a couple days ago. Before heading out to the grocery store with Luke, my phone lit up with emails (as it does multiple times a day), but there was one that was different. Amid the sea of promotional store coupons and emails from Indeed.com telling me that new jobs had been posted, there was one from a real person reaching out to me. I said I would check it out fully later and we went to the store.

Later finally came and I pulled my laptop out to read the email. A recruiter reached out to me after I updated my resume and location on Indeed.com because they had job openings they thought I would fit. I checked out both of the descriptions and they didn’t really sound like something I wanted because they were in sales and making cold calls, but they reached out to me and I need a job so I clicked the button that said I was interested.

Fast-forward a couple of days and I’m watching Luke play some video game when I get a phone call from a 512 area-code. I pick up the phone and it’s the recruiter that sent me the email. I quickly got up and walked into the other room (our bedroom, we don’t have a big place) and she tells me about the job and asks if I’m interested. I tell her I am and she says that she will forward my resume to her hiring managers and I will hear back before the end of the next day.

The next day comes and I don’t think much of it but I am online again looking at new job postings when an email comes in. It’s from the recruiter. She says they’ve decided to pursue different candidates.

I wasn’t very excited about this job to begin with but the fact that they reached out to me and then decided that they didn’t want me seems like they could have saved all of us some time and energy and not reached out in the first place. They got my hopes up for something I didn’t even want and then crushed them and I wasn’t in a very good mood the rest of the day.

 

Today, however, is Sunday. I have put in a multitude of new applications today as well as sending an email out to a company that may not even have any openings in the hopes that my forwardness will make myself stand out and they’ll hire me anyways. Tomorrow, we will see how all of this pans out. Maybe I’ll just go to the pool to take a break from it for an hour or two. Or maybe it will storm again and keep me confined to the indoors. Only time will tell.

I Burn Things

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Last night was yet another night that Luke and I sat around thinking “what can we eat for dinner?” The answer, as it turned out, was not a lot. We had a plantain sitting around because we decided, the last time we went grocery shopping, that we wanted to try to fry plantains, as well as frozen pork chops and raw carrots. Those all turned into our dinner.

When we cook together, I am usually on anything-but-meat duty because I am just not a fan of cooking meat. It feels weird to the touch, I don’t ever know when it’s done, and I was a vegetarian for a few years some time ago, so it still gets to me sometimes. This meant it was my job to fry the plantains. I mostly used a recipe for this as I had never fried plantains before and the recipe basically said to slice and deep fry it. Easy enough, but I did not want to use the oil to deep fry them because I felt it would be a waste and we’re still trying to diet (even though we had Culver’s for dinner tonight). Pan frying them mostly worked, but, as you can probably guess from the title of this blog post and the photo accompanying it, they got a little burnt. The pork chops and carrots came out alright though the pork was overcooked and we both agreed that next time, a little brown sugar on the carrots and plantains would probably do them some good.

Usually this is where my escapades stop. We eat, sit around for a bit, and then will eat dessert later- ice cream or some fruit depending on how we’re feeling. I started eating peanut butter on saltines (do I still sound like a broke college student?) when I suddenly wanted to make rice pudding. I’d never made rice pudding before but I knew it took milk and rice, two things we had. Luke told me to go for it so I looked up recipes and I found an easy one that didn’t take too much work, put the stuff in the pot and let it cook. Lazy foodie for the win! I also decided to make a bit of a peach compote to go with it since we had some peaches in the fridge that were getting a bit soft. The whole dessert turned out really well and we ate the leftovers for a snack this afternoon. The process of getting to the wonderfully delicious pudding you see on the left however, was more of a mess than I wanted. The milk boiled over and since we have a glass flat-top stove, it ended up burning onto it and the kitchen smelled like burnt marshmallows for about ten minutes. It still isn’t totally clean and I still hate myself.

Neither of us were happy but the pudding helped.

 

Budget-and-Lazy-but-Still-Delicious Chicken Parmesan with Angel Hair.

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Last night both Luke and I didn’t know what to eat for dinner. We’d been making meals in the Crock-Pot the past few nights but wanted something different. I looked around the kitchen and found the large container of fresh basil that his mom bought us and immediately thought to do pasta. Not having any pine nuts, we couldn’t do a pesto (which is my favorite), but I then saw a can of tomato paste in the pantry and decided to do a red sauce with basil in it instead. This would have been all well and good to do a vegetarian meal for the day but the only other vegetable we had to go into the sauce was onions, not even mushrooms, so I had to start thinking again. This is when I pulled the last two chicken thighs out of the freezer and threw them into the sink to defrost.

Here I present to you: Budget-and-Lazy-but-Still-Delicious Chicken Parmesan with Angel Hair. 

Red sauces are one of the easiest things to make from scratch (especially if you’re not picky about flavor) and pasta is always an easy go-to as well. The part of it that we didn’t think of until the last minute was to flour and sear the chicken before putting it in the sauce.

We don’t have a bag of flour in the apartment right now. This is not just because we forgot to get one from the store, it is because if we have flour, we will bake bread and other yummy baked good that we are trying to cut out of our diet. I did, however, have a small bag of whole wheat flour that was left over from a Blue Apron box that didn’t make it to me on time (the meat went bad but all of the dry ingredients and veggies were still good). It was just enough flour to coat both thighs. Those were then seared in a hot pan and removed once they had a nice golden color and then we threw the onions and garlic straight in after them and cooked everything else on top of that. One-pot/pan recipes are always great because you a) don’t have to clean a million dishes and b) all of the flavors stay together- perfect for the lazy foodie.

In the interest of being a lazy foodie that I am, I’m not going to post a whole recipe/step-by-step because a) lazy and b) I really don’t have a recipe. So many dishes that I cook are not fully thought out until they have to be. I fly by the seat of my pants and just go with what I’ve got. It’s much more fun that way.

Post-Grad Life Update #1

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It is a Tuesday at noon and I am sitting in my new apartment in Austin, TX writing a post on my brand new blog!

Yes, Tuesday at noon at home.

No, this is not ideal.

I’ve been on the job hunt since April and have had no luck so far. Back then, it was a little less pertinent and scary because I hadn’t even graduated college yet and I knew I was going to need time to figure myself out and do all the traveling I had planned i.e. a move to Austin from Tampa. Now though, it’s a bit scary. I haven’t let the panic totally set in yet because I’m hopeful and optimistic. I’m still applying and putting myself out there and I know something is going to happen soon. In the meantime, I’ll be updating this blog with different little things going on in my life and I may start up YouTube videos again because apparently I still think I’m interesting enough for people to watch and/or listen to me. Luke will probably make an appearance here and there, so even if you don’t like me, maybe watch for him?

 

Just kidding, why wouldn’t you like me?

And just because I am a narcissist and I want to show off his photo skills, here’s a photo he took of me at an overlook on Capital of Texas Highway. He’s not as bad at he thinks he is. Also yes, it is the same as my default photo… it’s the most recent good photo of me, alright?