Curried Waffle Turkey Sandwiches

You're probably in your final preparations of tomorrow's thanksgiving meal. Personally, I made the big meal last week! That means that I have been feasting on leftover turkey and stuffing for a few days now. That's the big problem when you cook a full bird for just two people. We had lots and lots of leftover turkey.  After two days of reliving the meal, with a plate full of turkey, stuffing and potatoes, the BF and I needed to change things up.

Why Bother 2012 - Crackers

Before I can get started on those 2013 goals, I have to finish my 2012 ones!  We've only got two challenges left in the Why Bother, make it at home challenge!  I'm almost 100% recovered from my bout with bronchitis (Did you know the cough from bronchitis can last for up to three months!???!  Boyfriend knows all too well) and I spent the weekend making crackers!

Crackers are a very prominent snack in the Wilde household.  About an hour after dinner, every night of the week, boyfriend heads to the cupboard and brings a box of Wheat Thins to the couch.  He proceeds to eat about half of the box.  I'm thinking I need to feed him larger portions for dinner.

For the Cracker Challenge, I thought that I should try to replace Boyfriends favorite snack with something a little healthier.  The first recipe I made was a simple wheat cracker, with a hint of salt.  They were beyond easy to make and came out just like the plain store bought brand!  The trick?  Sizing bands for the rolling pin.  I use a Wilton brand fondant rolling pin with the ring guides.  The 1/16-inch guide gave a nice even dough for cutting the crackers.  They came out crispy and delicious!

Did boyfriend have any of them?  No, he did not.  He is a fan of the highly flavored variety of the crackers and I am at a loss at how to make a powdered sun-dried tomato flavoring.  The whole wheat crackers are all mine!

I thought that I would try to ply BF with a flavored cracker, since it's his vice.  Rather than make him something that we could pick up in the cracker aisle, I decided on something fresh and flavorful.  We both love Indian food, so when I saw this recipe for ginger and curry crackers I knew it would be a winner. 

The dough for these crackers came together just as fast as the first batch and they came out such a beautiful yellow color!  The apartment smelled warm and inviting and it made me want to order in some curry.  Topped with a smidge of cream cheese and red pepper jelly, these crackers are the perfect snack.

So, will I stop buying crackers at the store?  I don't think boyfriend will let me, he loves his nightly Wheat Thins too much.  I am happy to know how easy it is to thrown a batch of crackers in the oven.

One more challenge to go before we head into the Restaurant War!  Stay tuned in two weeks for our final homemade challenge - soft cheeses!  It's going to be so exciting, maybe I'll make some bagels to pair up with my homemade cream cheese.

Green Curry Fritters

When one person works in New Jersey and the other works on Long Island, it means that someone is going to have to make a long trek to work each day.  Since it's easier to get to my office via public transport than boyfriends office, I spend a lot of time commuting each week.  People at my office all give me sad looks when I tell them about my daily travels, but it really isn't that bad.  Let me list all the great things that happen while I ride the train.  Most of which they couldn't do while driving to work in their cars.

1. I can take a nap!  Try that in your car!  No wait, don't.  It usually happens about twenty minutes into my Long Island train ride.  My eyelids start to feel heavy and I begin to nod off during the middle of a paragraph.  It's okay to give into sleep because I have an alarm set to wake me up just before I get to my stop.  Do I have to worry about getting to my stop before the alarm goes off?  No.  The LIRR is never early.

2. I prepare powerpoint slides for my weekly meetings, because there are always meetings and there are always slides to be made.  I apparently should have taken a course in powerpoint slide preparation in grad school.  I thought it would be all chemistry and making compounds.  Nope, it's half that, half talking about doing chemistry and making compounds in meetings.

3. I watch movies.  In fact I watched one yesterday.  Thank you Netflix and 4G.

4. I read a lot of books.  My kindle has an ever rotating group of books from the Amazon store, my friends kindle loans and the NJ digital library.  I've spent time this year learning about the inticacies of cancer in The Emperor of All Maladies.  I stood by Nick as he was accused of killing his wife in Gone Girl.  I helped solve a World War II mystery with the War Brides.  And recently I've been hearing Anthony Bourdain in my head while reading his 2011 book, Medium Raw.

I'm about halfway through Medium Raw and it's funny, witty and sounds entirely like Bourdain.  As I read through the chapters, I can hear his voice in my head, narrating the book like he does throughout "No Reservations."  Bourdain has an opinion on everything food, I'm sure he has plenty to say about food bloggers.  All I know, it's a lot of fun to read and makes my train ride seem much shorter.

5. Finally, I plan my weekly meal plans.  I have five different cooking magazines on my iPad and I have clipped so many recipes to make!  (Want to know how to 'clip' a recipe on your iPad?  Just take a screen capture and it will send a copy of the recipe to your photo library.  To screen capture, hold the top power button and tap the home button.  You'll hear a camera noise and you know you've got it!)

I clipped this recipe for green curry fritters a few weeks ago and have been thinking of making them since.  Boyfriend and I both enjoyed this meal, though we both decided that these fritters would be even better if made into sliders.  Next time!

Why Bother? 2012 - Coconut Milk & Thai Chili Sauce

I have been having pretty good luck with the challenges so far this year.  Most of the items on my list, I would probably make again.  Some of them I already have duplicated.  This time I can say with absolute certainty, I will never make coconut milk again.  I'm going to stock up on cans of coconut milk and coconut cream and never look back.  Why am I so certain?  Let me walk you through the process I went through to get 2 cups of coconut milk.

Since boyfriend and I were going out of town last weekend, I decided to make my coconut milk before we left.  We tried Whole Foods and only were able to locate young coconuts.  The flesh of a young coconut isn't what I needed to make coconut milk.  We stopped at Pathmark and surprisingly came home with two, whole coconuts!

I brought my coconuts home and drained the coconut water out.  It looked a little cloudy, but I've never done this before, so who knows what to expect!  I took out my favorite hammer and pounded on the coconut until it cracked open to reveal...  rotten, moldy coconut flesh.  It was gross.  Luckily I had gotten two coconuts at the grocery store!  I drained the second one, cracked it in two and discovered... a second rotten coconut!  Pathmark must have gotten a bad batch.

This sad turn of events meant that I was going to be making coconut water in Buffalo.  Thankfully, Buffalo is home to Wegmans and Wegmans stocks coconuts.  As a lifelong fan of Wegmans, I knew that they would not disappoint and sell me rotten coconuts.  My parents were a bit confused as to why I was making coconut milk when they sell it in every grocery store.  After three hours, I would be asking myself the same question.

Draining and opening the coconuts was the easy part.  Although my dad wondered what all the noise was about and I scared the dogs out of the kitchen.  When it came to prying the flesh out of the shell, I got a little frustrated.  Videos on youtube suggested keeping the shell whole of prying out the flesh with a knife, while others told me to break the shell into smaller pieces, then remove the flesh.  All I can tell you is, it took me over an hour to remove all of the coconut meat from the shell.

After the meat was freed, I spent the next hour and a half peeling the brown skin from the while flesh.  After spending all this time trying to get clean coconut meat, there was no way I was going to hand grate it.  The food processor was put into action and I finally was able to make my coconut milk.  Once the coconut is freed and grated, it's easy to make the milk.  Just a little boiling water and ten minutes time and it was done.  Took long enough!

Curried Chicken with Coconut Rice

I have been cohabitating with boyfriend for just over a year now and while we have lots of fun and it's great to see him every day, there are some things that I miss...

My mess.  When living on your own, any mess you make is your own mess.  It's your own responsibility to clean up, or not clean up, your living space.  My apartment was tiny, so it got dirty and cluttered pretty quickly.  During the week, I would treat my apartment as a landing pad.  I would throw down my stuff, eat a bowl of salad, change into my PJs and go to bed.  Things would pile up.  Dishes, clothes, books.  Come Sunday I would clean it all up and start fresh.  Now there is my mess and boyfriends mess.  You don't even want to see our apartment right now.

My big fluffy bed.  I bought a grown-up bed my second year of graduate school.  It was a full size, double-pillowtop cloud of a bed.  I had to climb into it at night and jump down in the morning.  I piled it high with pillows and covered it in a white, king size, down comforter.  While it was the most amazing bed ever sewn, it would be a little cozy for two people.  I sold my beautiful bed to a fellow grad student and moved my fluffy pillows to New Jersey.

My all day cooking sessions in my tiny studio kitchen.  When living in 300-square feet, with a kitchen that took up half of that space, the cooking took over the entire living space.  I would have marshmallows setting on my TV stand, a cutting board on my tiny cafe table and two burners running on my stovetop.  With working long hours in the lab all week long, I had to cram all my cooking into one day.  These days I can cook dinner every night and spend my weekends with boyfriend.

All in all, I'll take the two-person mess, less fluffy bed and spread out cooking schedule.  Boyfriend is a pretty fun roommate.

Thai Chicken Curry

It's been just over a month since boyfriend and I returned from our trip around the world.  While we travelled through Thailand, we had three cameras and two iPhones.  As you can imagine, we came home with over two thousand images and twenty gigabytes of video.  It has taken me this long to go through the pictures!  To celebrate the momentous occasion of finishing my photo editing, I decided to make some curry! 

Keeping it simple today, enjoy some images from Thailand, then make some curry while you plan a trip of your own.

Chatuchak Weekend Market

Grand Palace & Wat Phra Kaeo

Damnoen Saduak Floating Market



The Beautiful Andaman Sea



Phangnga Bay (as seen in this years Amazing Race!)

Thailand has some pretty flowers!

Now, on to the curry...

Indian Pizza

On our most recent trip to Europe, Boyfriend and I had some pretty amazing food. I would say it was some of the best food of my life. We started with authentic Indian food in London, a perfectly roasted chicken in Paris and amazing pizza in Italy. We ate schnitzel in the Alps, wieners at a castle and finished up our trip at a dimly lit restaurant, smiling over plates of curry. It was a crazy twelve days.

Yes, I said twelve days. We travelled through seven countries in seven days. We would have made it eight, but just couldn’t see how to get to Belgium and make our flight home. In honor of this crazy week and a half in Europe I decided to combine two great culinary palettes. Indian plus Italian equals delicious.

Mango Shrimp Curry

From Mondays post I learned two things. First, deep fried foods appeal to everyone! Second, apparently I’m the unusual one for my lack of running and arm-flailing in the presence of bees. Most people seem to cringe at the sight and sound of bees. I’m more of the slowly saunter away from the bees-type of person. I say “Hey bee, you’re cool over there. I’m cool over here, but why don’t I get a little further away from you? Thanks!” Bees and wasps totally freak me out, but I try not to let them know, it’s my little secret. To show you I’m normal, how about some bug stories from my childhood? Always a good time.


Gather your ingredients

My childhood home is beautiful. A cream and brick tudor that sits on a hill, it overlooks an acre of bright green grass. That room with all the windows on the second floor? That’s my room. It sits on the corner and gets a nice breeze in the summertime. It also has gaps in the baseboards.

We had lived in the house for at least ten years before the Japanese beetles invaded. One year, no bugs, the next year, swarms of red beetles. And they bite. They smell like lettuce when you squish them. How do I know this? Read on.



Bring them all together

For some reason, the Japanese beetles decided to take up residence in my room. The beetles were in no other room in the entire house, just my room. Maybe it’s because I’m a girl and I was into Bath and Bodyworks in a big way back then. Maybe the beetles had heard about the nice breeze that flowed through the room. Maybe they are just stupid and I hate them. For whatever reason, the bugs started their migration.

Just a few bugs showed up, at first. I would find them crawling along the wall, flying around the light and generally beetling about. Until one night, when it all went down. Me versus the beetles! Or, as it turned out, the Shop Vac versus the beetles!

Late one summer night I returned home from what I can only assume to be a day full of rollerblading and Dorito eating. I walk into my bedroom, flick on the light switch and I’m greeting to a veritable swarm of Japanese beetles! Hundreds of the little buggers (ha!) beetling all over my stuff. Screams and cries ring out and I run from the room. Here’s the fact – I don’t do well with LOTS of bugs. Especially not in my room. Not cool Japanese beetles.



I run downstairs and find my dad, inform him of the situation and wait for rescue. “There are bugs! Lots of bugs! In my room! Help!” Waiting, hoping for dad to come to the rescue. That’s what dad’s do, they kill bugs. What does dad say? “Shop vac is in the garage.” Humpf, not what I was hoping to hear.

I spent the next hour sucking up Japanese beetles with the Shop vac. I also discovered they were sneaking in through the gaps in the floorboards. A whole box of tissues later my room has been beetle free for the past ten years. You’re welcome parents!



Thai Chicken Curry

It’s been a little chilly up here in the Northeast! So cold, that I decided it was unnecessary to leave the house yesterday. I checked the weather channel and found that it was only 18 degrees out, with a wind chill making it feel like 2 degrees. I left Wisconsin to get away from those temperatures, right? Why are these chilly temps following me around the country? Maybe I should move to Florida next time.


I can’t complain too loudly though, because I was invited to go down to Florida this weekend. Boyfriends parents recently moved down south, escaping the cold Buffalo winters once and for all. They are very smart people. A quick check of the temperature in Florida? 74. Curses, why didn’t I take boyfriend up on that offer? Oh right, I have a bunch of stuff to get done at work this week. Double curses. Cold weather and work.

I guess that since I can’t escape the cold weather, then I might as well make something hot. Spicy hot! Curry spicy hot! Nice. This recipe is light, delicious and it’s chicken! I also added zucchini to the curry. The strange thing about zucchini is this. I hate raw zucchini. I will always pick up a piece of zucchini thinking that it is a cucumber. I will bite into the slice of veg and then spit it right out. I think zucchinis have a very bitter flavor when raw. When you cook zucchinis, this raw flavor is cooked out and they are delicious. Plus, I had leftover zucchini from baking the bread last week.



Sorry for the lame-o pic.  Cooking took place pretty late!