Photo post – my room

Burritos

Today I came home from class at noon and had another class at 1 p.m., but I was starving. Since spring break is coming up soon, I haven’t been buying as many groceries. I’m kind of running out of food, so I had to make something out of the food in my fridge.

The last batch of blurry cell phone pictures.

By the way, I got a new digital camera, so this is the last you’ll see of these gross pictures.

So I pulled part of a zucchini, a bell pepper and a jalapeño out of the fridge. I decided I’d make a burrito, since I had leftover tortillas from my enchilada experiment.

This is becoming pretty routine.

I chopped up the vegetables and added in some garlic because…well, duh.

I used the last of my olive oil. Wah.

I found some black beans and tomatoes (with jalapeños) in my food closet. I also grabbed the cumin and, of course, the olive oil. Then I remembered I had some leftover Morningstar “ground beef” in the freezer, so I got that out too. I drained the excess liquid from the tomatoes and black beans.

I would eat this filling all by itself.

I sauteed the fresh vegetables in the oil and cumin first for a few minutes. Then I added the beans and tomatoes. After that, I added the “ground beef” and let it cook until all the excess water was gone.

The burrito folding instructions were on the tortilla wrapper.

I put the filling in the tortilla.

Delicious.

I sprinkled cheese on top, folded it up, and ate it. And it was so delicious that I had to eat another one.

This whole process took about 20 minutes, so I still had time to relax before class. I think this is a great idea to try with my vegetable leftovers from now on.

Vegetable and tempeh stir-fry

I am not a very good cook. I am learning. I decided I would post about what I cook, whether it turned out OK or not. I’m not saying this stir-fry didn’t turn out alright, but I’ve made some pretty gross “stir-fry”-esque dishes before. I’ve also never successfully made anything with tempeh before. Surprisingly, this dish ended up being pretty tasty.

I took it out of the wrapper before I used it.

According to the Wikipedia page on tempeh, it is a soybean cake that originated in Indonesia. The other meat substitute, tofu, is squishy and hard to work with and also kind of gross (according to…me).

I mean, it looks authentic?

So this is my spicy Szechwan stir-fry sauce that I got in the “ethnic” aisle (the one with the Asian food, pasta, tortillas and matzo ball soup) at Kroger. I know that I could probably make a stir-fry sauce…but I’m sure I would screw it up, and I wanted stir-fry to be something I could just throw together.

Szechwan bath.

So I cut the tempeh into little cubes. I’m not sure how big they were and I don’t know if it totally matters. I didn’t want them to be oddly larger or smaller than anything else I’d throw in the stir-fry, so I planned accordingly. Then I threw them in a baggie, dumped some sauce on top, made sure all the pieces were coated and let them marinate in the fridge for an hour.

After the tempeh was done marinating, I fried it in canola oil for a few minutes. I then set it on a plate lined with paper towels so the excess oil could drain.

Bell pepper, mushroom, carrots, zucchini

I then put some bell pepper, carrots, zucchini, and mushroom (all just vegetables I had sitting in the fridge…as you can tell, I always have bell pepper sitting around) in a pan lightly coated with olive oil. I added my Szechwan sauce and tempeh, and cooked until the veggies were tender.

Ready to eat!

Then I put it over some rice.

Yum.

And I ate it.

I GOT A SUMMER INTERNSHIP!

Yes, I found out about this on Tuesday and am only getting around to posting it now. I’m terribly sorry, but I’m sure most of you already heard about it anyway. If you didn’t: I’m moving to San Francisco for the summer.

ROAD TRIP!

Also, my mother and I are planning to drive the approximately 2,500 miles from Piqua, Ohio, to San Francisco. When I was younger, we never did a ton of traveling. I’ve never been to Disneyworld or seen the Grand Canyon. We’re going to remedy at least one of those this summer (obviously, the one that’s in between Ohio and California).

So what am I doing this summer? Well I got an internship at Mac|Life. I have their link in my sidebar list of links, so you can go check it out. I will probably post more about this as it gets closer to summertime. Until then…just know that you’ll get a barrage of posts in June about driving across the country/living in a new city.

If you were driving to San Francisco, where would you stop along the way?

Black bean cheesecake

This is not a typo: I made black bean cheesecake. I know it sounds weird, but I ate some for breakfast this morning (even though it’s not totally a breakfast food) and I promise you, it’s delicious. I’ll probably grab a slice before I type more of this out.

I bet you think this is totally strange.

Your ingredients: tortillas, 6 eggs, three 8 oz. packages of cream cheese, a jalapeño, garlic, one 15 oz. can of black beans, cumin, chili powder and cayenne pepper.

You still think this is weird.

Chop up your jalapeño and two cloves (or in my case, one totally massive clove) of garlic. While you’re doing this, unwrap the cream cheese and let it just sit there. It needs to get to around room temperature. Well, it doesn’t NEED to, but it’ll make the next step a lot easier.

Not whipped cream.

Beat the cream cheese until it is fluffy. Do not try to do this with a fork, which is what I did. I do not have an electric mixer. You probably do, and you should use it for the sake of your arm.

Post-bath

Rinse and drain your black beans of all the nasty goo that comes on them in the can.

Then, beat the eggs into the cream cheese, followed by all the other ingredients (except tortillas). Then carefully pour the mixture into a tortilla-lined pie tin. I emphasize the word “carefully,” because I got my mixture all over the sink, counter and floor. And my pants.

Scary.

Slide your pie into the oven at 300 degrees for one hour and 45 minutes to two hours.

It still looks weird. I know.

Now you need to put the pie/cake/whatever in the fridge overnight or for eight hours…whichever is longer for you. This is why:

Side view: immediately out of the oven

...8 hours later

And then you eat it.

This is a good dish if you want to impress a foodie. I like it, but I don’t think I would make this for anything other than a special occasion.