I made mac and cheese. Delicious homemade mac and cheese. FROM SCRATCH.

And since I have a shit-ton of it, I shall now spend a good time in a food coma. At least I won't have to worry about feeding myself if I can get around to packing the kitchen today.

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Entry originally posted at http://teh-kittykat.dreamwidth.org/33114.html

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Materials

3 5oz cans of tuna (15 oz total)
1 12 oz package noodles, cooked
1 can cream of mushroom soup
a bit less than a pint of cream, to moisten
brick of frozen corn
brick of frozen green beans
brick of frozen peas
crapton of grated Parmesan that's been sitting in the fridge
convenient breadcrumbs or panko to coat the top

Process

Combine all ingredients but breadcrumbs in a 9 x 13 pan. Or in a bowl if you're smart, which you will then pour into the pan.

Cover the top with breadcrumbs.

Bake at 325 for 25 min or until happy. (you want the veggies to still have a bit of crunch)

Eat and congratulate yourself. And fight the cat for it.

I am going to make tuna noodle casserole this week.

I couldn't find any recipes that had the stuff I have on hand, so I'm going to riff off the ones I did find and see where it gets me. Wish me luck.

I am attempting a cooking experiment in my crock-pot today while also using the time to do errands and do my best lump impression. I shall probably post something if the cooking bit works out-- from the way it smells now, it will either be awesome or suck terribly. THERE WILL BE NO MIDDLE GROUND.

I'm working through the paperwork for moving in November. I have a pre-move inspection scheduled for the 26th which means I have cleaning to do this week in addition to working on the last bits of stuff for my class, which ends at the end of the month. It's actually kind of exciting to be moving because I want to into a bigger space than I had before.

AND THEN I will hopefully be going to New York on the twelfth of December. Assuming there are spaces still left on the bus.. but with any luck I'll be going on an epic date with The Girl.

I have a feeling it's going to be an insane next few months. But then I'm kind of angling for quiet on the actual holidays and perhaps even staying home for a change with my insane cat.

The weather's been pretty unremittingly cold and rainy lately-- it feels like it did last December, if you want to be honest, so I figured I'd break out some of the Christmas music I have sitting in the computer and give them a listen, since I'm planning on waiting a bit before putting up decorations this year. Here's hoping this set of holidays will be good. :3

I've managed to completely destroy an attempt at making the "easy" french apple tart in the Barefoot Contessa book I have. It's my first actual total destruction of a Barefoot Contessa recipe-- I've managed to screw them up, but at least the screw ups were edible.

My apartment smells of burnt sugar and I am zapping a TV dinner for dinner. (Thankfully, that was my plan to begin with.)

I do believe I might have to leave the complicated stuff to the pros, at least until I can get to a place where the oven/stove is not freaking tilted.

Seriously, it's not level and all the butter and sugar in the tart ended up sliding into one corner and turning into gunk. I didn't notice how much of it had migrated until the end since I've gotten so used to the sight of something gooking up in one corner of a pan. I may in fact need a new baking sheet if all that carbonized sugar can't be removed. :|

On the plus side, I have ice cream still and the local store of grocery does have a mean baking department so I might be able to fulfill my cravings for something appley after all. Maybe I'll even go all out and get an apple pie.

I hate it when I get a good buzz going from tea. It makes me want to do crazy things at stupid o'clock at night.

I want to cook something!

I actually have planned a pasta dish for tomorrow. Bowties and vodka sauce and chicken and peas. I kind of want more peas than the small amount of leftovers, though. I figure I might pick up some frozen ones since they're just going to simmer in the sauce once I get the chicken cooked up. I should also probably drink the wine we have sitting around with it, since otherwise it'll go vinegar again.

I have nearly mastered the art of egg-in-a-basket. I think I need to let the bread toast longer next time, but I actually got cooked eggs with runny yolks this time without a mess. I love runny yolks. And the cage-free eggs I found at the grocery were totally worth the extra money-- they went down smoooooth.

I also kind of want to make Thanksgiving dinner. Which will be interesting considering I'm also considering moving at about the same time assuming the rent prices are decent. We're really hoping The Girl has her big job down by then so we can move in together, despite the extra headache that would be with juggling all her crap and all mine. I was thinking of making chicken instead of turkey because really everyone loves chicken better. I bet if I got switched to cooking a couple hours in advance I could get us Thanksgiving dinner and get moved! (Heck, I could probably pull it off in my stupid tiny kitchen if I stay stuck in my crackerbox.) I am ridiculously enthusiastic about this.

It's the tea, man.

I am half considering switching to tea from soda. Partially because I just really like tea and go on long jags of drinking it, and partially because soda is getting too expensive/pain in the ass to store. I also wouldn't mind cutting my sugar intake since I'm starting to wonder if it's been contributing to my periods of feeling like a slug, but I can't drink diet soda on account of aspartame makes me feel like I want to hurl. (Yeah, they make Splenda Diet Coke now, but I dunno, it tastes just a little off compared to both regular and diet. I do like Splenda as a sugar sub in other things.)

I have started reading through Alinea at Home which is the sequel to French Laundry at Home that I was reading back in July. The art deco food is kind of scary, but it's neat reading the stories about trying to make these insane preparations in a normal kitchen. I'm in the food-that-looks-like-actual-food camp and I prefer the simpler side of cooking because it tends to really showcase your yummy stuff's natural flavors and I've never been a big sauce/added salt/ketchup person. Or at least I haven't been since I was a tiny thing in elementary school when I tried to put ketchup on everything.

The last couple of days have been fun. On the 6th The Girl and I went out to The Melting Pot and ate fondue. It took about three hours and it cost a pretty penny, but it was totally worth it. We are at least going back for The Girl's birthday in March somehow. XD Since I got boozeahol and it was a late reservation, I spent the night.

So on the 7th I drove back home and the rest of the ol' nuclear family drove down. I asked for a wireless router for my birthday since I'm going to need some kind of networking set up when The Girl finally gets around to moving in.. and it gave me the chance to finally rearrange my apartment. The place has been in the same awkward arrangement since I moved in since it was the only way to have a decent wired connection on account of the totally awkward placement of the single phone jack.

The boys picked out router equipment, I found a copy of Nausacaa and a couple of Modest Mouse CDs (one of which I lost in the Great Mouse Disappearance of 09). We got dinner and then I got to listen to Moose complaining about how dirty the inside of the computer case was. Mother fussed until she managed to convince Dad and me that it was a good idea to just go ahead and rearrange the apartment, rather than go with the original plan of just setting up the router and letting me and The Girl do it the following weekend.

The final results are very satisfying, since the apartment now finally has clear traffic flow (aside from the junked up entryway, which is a victim of my efforts to clean out all my junk).

It also means I have a long list of things to pick up at the store, since I need a new small bookcase (the cube bookcase Mother picked out last year or whatever it too flimsy) and a bunch of little odds and ends. This looks like a job for another trip to IKEA, since the small Expedit cube case fits perfectly in the spot where the flimsy cube case is and it's much more rugged in terms of how much it can hold.. and the price is right, since IKEA dropped the small case's price to about $50~! I should also measure the space on the loveseat, since it desperately needs new cushions. If they have a set that fits at IKEA, I might go ahead and grab 'em since the loveseat itself is in fine shape aside from the thirty-year-old cushions.

If I actually wrote down how I spent my summer vacation, it would be an interesting read.

So I'm thinking about moving apartments. Not very far-- just trading up within the complex. I've decided I'm going to run by the office and talk options and such. If there's a way I can transfer my current deposits to a new lease, I might even go look at a couple places and get the paperwork train started. If not.. I suppose I'll be waiting until November to move since by then I will resume getting paid and can cough up the hefty deposit I'll need. (September and October weekends are kind of booked up with class... And since Thanksgiving is getting to be a non-event in my family aside from lots of good om nom noms and watching the parade, I might just move then. None of us get along the best with the extended family, and most of them live two days' drive and/or a flight away. No thanks.) WISH ME LUCK, GAIZ.

The Girl and I were talking about this, and decided to move our planned trip to DC up to during the next week. We plan on hitting the American History Museum and then probably Maggiano's. That way, if the move thing goes through, we'll have the original weekend of the trip to move stuff around.

As it was, we had a nice date out at the mall, though not the one The Girl currently works in. I actually picked up one of the newly-released editions of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I wanted that book since I saw a souffle recipe in a cooking magazine that was adapted from Julia Child, but naturally everyone assumes it's because of the book. While I admit, I do kinda want to take in Julie and Julia in the theaters since the previews looked solid, I don't plan on getting the book. And frankly, what I saw of the blog was pretty boring, at least the beginning part. The current crop of "cook the book" food bloggers are much more interesting. And have pictures, which totally does not sway my opinion at all. Much.

I also totally plan on attempting souffle when the weather starts to go cold, either the original version in the book or the adapted version in the magazine or something I throw together myself. That and develop that oven-fried chicken recipe. I'm thinking of combining techniques with a Japanese cookbook that calls for a marinate and then flour rather than the flour-egg-flour technique. We'll see-- I want to see what oven techniques there are for crispy chicken before I settle on something I want to attempt.

We also went to IKEA. I can't not buy things when I go there.. this time I got straws. A big package of straws. Bendy straws. In neat designer colors. And I am totally thinking of putting them in a glass and trying to make some kind of flower arrangement with them. Send help.

I'm nesting again, a little bit.

We're getting into the last few weeks of break here. Miso has pretty much settled in, aside from his occasional stupid kitten moments. I picked my next grad class-- I'm taking it on a neat modified schedule that meets for almost the whole day on several Saturdays in September-October, leaving me free during the work week and all through November-December when my mind is usually very much on other things. It's one of those "Concepts and Issues" classes, which means it'll either be insightful and interesting about the politics at work behind my field or it will be eye-bleedingly boring and just a hoop to jump through. Time will tell. (I thought my research class would be boring, but I actually learned quite a bit about how research in social science works and a lot about the math and stats despite never taking a stats course in my life.)

I plan on moving apartments sometime in the fall. I'd like a slightly bigger one, especially if the rates hold the way they are in the complex and I can actually trade up to a larger apartment for the price I'm paying now for my hobbit-hole. The sad thing is that the lowest rent right now in the complex is $775, which would equal my current rent rate when the pet fee is added in (for the same size apartment). And I'm in the cheapest apartment complex in this area. Boo. (Trading up right now would mean I'd be paying maybe $15/mo more in rent with pet fee, but I'd be getting 100 sqft more space and a lot more closet space. And a dishwasher OMG.) I would really like to trade to something else in my building, but the only apartment free right now is a two-bedroom and those are outside my ability to pay for them. Leik Whoa.

The Girl and I will also hopefully be able to move in together sometime this fall. Even if she doesn't have her Grown Up Career, if we're in a one-bedroom I can cover rent and she can cover other stuff with what she's got. It's a thought, anyway. I'd like us to finally get to spend a Christmas together as a couple.

I totally started reading French Laundry at Home and some other "cooking the book" food blogs. I've been tempted to try and become a food blogger myself (my hobbies when bored are mostly daydreaming about how I will decorate my hypothetical house on an unlimited budget and cooking/food porn), if only a little bit, but sometimes I get held back a bit by my own issues. If you look at the foodie community, you don't exactly see a lot of fat chicks, and you usually get a lot of skinny bitches whining about how fat they're going to get if they enjoy their meals and indulge once in a while. So I shudder a bit at the sort of flack a fat foodie would get on the tubes and wuss out. (Nevermind my average caloric intake is less than or equal to what a skinny bitch eats and I get plenty of physical activity. Society says that if you're fat you can't enjoy food or you're just a cow.)

I'll probably think about it some more.

I am also totally going to try and develop a recipe for oven-friend chicken. Because all conventionally fried chicken just doesn't do it for me anymore with the grease factor making me sick. I will call it Q's Fried Chicken. (Watch the video in the link.)

My eyes hurt because I just finished chopping an onion. I'm making cucumber salad according to a Barefoot Contessa recipe. It calls for chopping up the cucumber and the red onion in the salad and mixing 'em up with salt and letting them drain overnight. (You have to do something similar with the yogurt) And it was right when I was mixing the veggies with the salt that I got hit with onion omg. My eyes are still a little irritated and I went outside to take out the trash and everything.

If it turns out nice, though, I'll drop the recipe here. Along with pics. I'm not sure what I want to eat with it yet, but I'll think of something.

I've been on a small vegetarian kick lately. I have a spinach quiche that I started nomming for lunch and I'm cooking eggplant parmesean for dinner, though the latter is mostly because today is relatively cool and tomorrow it's promising to get all warm again and running the oven during a warm spot is fail. Of course, tomorrow I'm probably just going to bite the bullet and finish off the pulled pork before it gains sentience, so there will be plenty of meat in my future. Not to mention the plans for steak on Friday. :D

It's funny because I've been bringing lunch all year and actually aiming for a bento-like lunch plan where I'm bringing leftovers and more nutritious odds and ends rather than the pop tarts that I resorted to waaaaaaaay too much last year. I stopping doing the ultra-cute lunches over the winter, but it's still nice to pack myself a little box of fun.

I am almost off for the summer. Four weeks left. And I have so much crap to do in those four weeks that is is NOT FUNNY.

Graduate class has been slain!

Grades will be out sometime next week.

I am relieved.

I may or may not be seeing Star Trek again on Wednesday, depending on how long I'm working and whether or not lostangelssong decides she wants to drive out there or not. I think I might be up to it after all.

katimus_prime is also the best sugardaddy in the universe. :D

I made pulled pork on Sunday in my crock pot. It's adapted from this recipe at Not Exactly Bento, only I did it the lazy way using the dried bottled minced garlic instead of fresh and frozen onion/pepper mix instead of the onions. (OK, so I didn't feel like attempting to mince garlic and the onions I had sitting in the bottom of the fridge turned out bad...) I actually think maybe adding a shot of hot sauce to the mix might be interesting. I'll probably experiment with the recipe a bit and post my own version later.

I still have a couple pounds of it laying around, so getting a break on Wednesday will be a relief.

PS: The icon really IS Spock and a badass muscle car. (Well, on DW anyway. Sorry IJ.)

1. Finished with homework for the moment. I shall unfortunately need to do a powerpoint presentation and some editing before I am completely done with graduate school stuff for the semester. If all goes according to plan, I'll have an A to boot. :D

2. Out of leftover roast from dinner last night. Boo. I am contemplating making something with the frozen shrimp in the freezer tomorrow. Possibly something with pasta since I also got myself bow tie pasta on a whim.

3. Still sad about the warrior nerf. And I would really like to get back into the rotation for 25-Naxx since there are Valor Emblems and/or tokens I need to finished upgrading a bit more of my gear before I'll be happy going into Uldaur.

4. Also back on my baby undead mage, who I rolled after hearing about the fury nerf before abandoning it to enjoy my last hurrah before the Titan's Grip damage tax went live. I've gone from averaging something close to 2500 dps back down to 2100 on Yats and I am pissed. D: (Admittedly, I am not completely kitted out so that's not bad for still dragging around in a couple old blues, but STILL. GRAWR.)

5. Obviously still nerd raging about the fury nerf. I coulda been a contenda.

6. Awaiting delivery on my new wig for my Phoenix Wright costume. (Old wig is in this pic from the last time I cosplayed Phoenix at Otakon 2007. The Girl was Godot, btw.) The old wig really isn't full enough to get the sort of spikes I'm looking for, and the new one looks like it'll be more fun. I also ordered new wig caps since heck if I know where the old one went. This year's Phoenix will be the cheapest cosplay EVAR since I'm just re-doing the wig this year. XD

7. Going to have to practice tying ties again, since I'll have to keep track of both Phoenix AND Godot's neckwear. But ties are damn sexy, so it's okay.

8. Craving donuts. The awesome kind you select carefully off the shelf in the case, not the mass-produced ones in the flimsy cardboard boxes. I also still need to pirate me a wifi signal in order to update my DSi's operating system, so I might go find myself donuts and a hotspot tomorrow.

When I opened my e-mail this evening, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a Dreamwidth invite code! So I have set up my happy and wonderful account at the same username as always-- teh_kittykat.

What do you want? I've been Kittykat on the interbutt since I was sixteen. Almost a decade is quite a long time to have a username. Never mind if it's one of the most popular usernames among female interbutt users who don't exist. That's why I added that cynical little "teh" to the beginning when I was twenty-ish.

Good lord, that last sentence makes me feel old sometimes. God, I remember the days when Geocities actually hosted websites and didn't suck. I used to have a Geocities site. It was about the Power Rangers. I taught myself HTML and coded it myself and I seem to recall an eye-searingly green background as part of the color scheme.

Right now I'm going to make nifty use of the automatic crosspost feature on DW to continue posting at IJ, but comments will be off at IJ. I don't want to try and follow three simultaneous conversations. I'll pimp around the invite codes if/when they become available to me, or you can use OpenId to comment and/or make yourself a cool friendslist at DW. If you register your e-mail with your OpenId, I can even give you access to my locked posts on DW, which is kind of cool for people who don't feel like keeping a zillion journals but don't mind reading several friends pages. (Heaven knows I got used to following four flists pretty fast. LJ, IJ, JF, and DW. Wow.)

In other news, this last weekend was pretty fun. The Girl and I ended up watching lots of Mythbusters (I got hold of the "Big Blasts" collection, so it was mostly explosions!) and got most excellent burgers at Five Guys. I was still restless on Sunday, so I drove down to Towson to trawl the mall and meet The Girl for more Five Guys and Mythbusters.

I gave in to temptation and got myself a DSi. It's blue. I traded in a handful of DS games that I was bored with and got about twenty bucks off the DSi, which wasn't bad. I'm keeping my old DS since I still want to be able to play my GBA games, but based on a lot of the tech reviews for the DSi, I wanted to get myself in on the ground floor with the new system. Now I just need to find my USB WiFi thing for it so I can update the system files and get that Wario game they were talking about in the reviews. (Okay, so I guess it's not really an impulse buy if you've been researching and considering for about a month? I kinda wanted the DSi when I first heard about it...)

I even got myself a copy of Gardening Mama at an earlier video game run, so I've got a cool new game to play as well. Considering my addictions to both Chibi-Robo Park Patrol and Cooking Mama, the interbutt might never see me again once I actually get around to starting to play it.

The weekend was also time for summer clothes shopping. I got myself some shirts from J!NX and The Girl dragged me into Nordstrom's to look at sandals. I found a nice pair and got them, though we gave the poor lady ahead of us in line cravings for Five Guys when we were discussing dinner plans. The Girl got candy at Trader Joe's, which we went into since neither of us had ever been there and it was right by the mall. If we weren't planning on looking around Towson a bit more, I would have totally picked up a couple things there-- everything is organic and fair trade, and the prices are actually reasonable compared to something like Whole Foods. Plus, they had this green juice stuff that I kind of wanted to get out of sheer morbid curiosity, but avoided since we were still walking around and I was already stuck carrying a big bag o' stuff from the mall.

Whee, commercialism ho!

This entry was originally posted at http://teh-kittykat.dreamwidth.org/365.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Tonight was taco night at my place. A guildie was waxing rapturous about taco kits in gchat back on Friday, and after that I just had to have them.

Made some on Saturday, and the batch lasted a couple days. It was boring, though, since I hadn't thought to get much toppings-wise and I couldn't get my salsa jar open.

To celebrate getting finished with paperwork and banging out a response paper, though, I went out shopping and returned victorious with taco stuff. Along with sour cream, more cheese, and this pico de gallo stuff that was ready-made but good since I didn't feel like getting the stuff and doing all that chopping myself.

I also got my salsa open. I went by Kitchen and Company to see what sorts of jar-opening gadgets they had (and to pick up cosmo mix for the weekend, but they stopped carrying the stuff I like, so I'll have to get mix and more vodka at the liquor store Friday). I saw a couple of these really crazy-looking clamp things that were like $14, and then I saw this little plastic thing called a jar popper that bragged it could open about any vacuum-sealed jar without fuss. It works by simply levering the lid up enough to break the vacuum and pop the seal without you trying to brute-force twist the lid. It was only $4 with the tax, so I got it. Worked like a dream. No more grunting and cussing and hurting my hand and beating things on concrete for me!

I had strawberries and bananas for dessert, with chocolate sauce. The strawberries have been stewing a wihile, with a bit of sugar. They taste bright and just a little bit like they're trying to ferment. Like, an edge of something but not really alcoholic, yanno? It's kind of an exciting taste. I'd wax lyrical about my dinner, but these sorts of things always sound better in my head.

I do regret not taking my camera into Kitchen and Company, though. They had a can of spotted dick. And apparently Rao makes salad dressing, though I did find some photographic proof that Rao also makes pasta. Who knew the god of Krypton had just mad culinary skillz? and thus am I outed as not only immature, but a geek! Some more!

I'm going to DC this weekend, to celebrate The Girl's birthday. And making cupcakes (probably tomorrow or Thursday so they're ready) and making steak dinner, but I figured we could buy the stuff on Friday. And rent Twilight out of the local Redbox and get skunked. We're going to the Air and Space Museum Saturday. We'd go to the building by Dulles, which has the space shuttle and the blackbird, but the only way to reach that is by driving or switching public transit and it would be a pain in the ass. On the plus side, they finished refurbishing the space part of the museum, which we missed when we went last year. And we're planning on Maggiano's for dinner again, which is expensive but they give you enough food to sink a moose.

Obviously I will not be raiding this weekend due to smoochy RL stuff. I suspect I will live.