Tomato and White Bean soup

I can't believe that it's almost Thanksgiving!  Where has this year gone?  I suppose that it helps that this time of year is my favorite time.  While I'm not a fan of the coming winter, I enjoy fall immensely. 

There are a series of events that make fall the best time of the year.  First, we have the changing of the leaves.  This is one of my favorite times to take a long walk outside.  When I was younger, we would always head out to Chesnut Ridge Park and walk through the leaves.  My family and I would crunch through piles of fallen leaves, while gazing at the bright colors still clinging to the branches.

After the leaves begin to change, we are greeted by Halloween.  As we've discussed before, we never got trick-or-treaters at our house.  This didn't keep us from decorating the house and carving pumpkins.  I always carved using a template, my mom always made beautiful  pumpkins without any help at all.

Once we've put away the costumes and the pumpkins have gone to the mulch pile, it was time for the most important day all year, my birthday.  I just celebrated my birthday, which means that we're in the thick of Fall!  From here we get to celebrate Thanksgiving (at least here in the USA!) and on to shopping and christmas we go.

For the next few weeks, we're all going to be very, very busy!  With that in mind, I've made you this delicious and healthy soup, that will be ready in ten minutes.  Fabulous!

Thai Cooking

Hello everyone!  I'm back from vacation and starting to feel like a normal person again.  Unlike the previous few days where I've been a half-asleep, crazy person, going through the motions of regular life.  I think that I've finally recuperated from our 28 hour return journey and I'm ready to share some of the fun of Thailand with you all.

Over the next few days I'll be posting some of my favorite pictures from our trip, after I sort through the thousands of images that we took.  Boyfriend and I spent four crazy days in Bangkok, Thailand, followed by four relaxing days in Phuket.  I say that our days in Bangkok were crazy because there was so much to see and do, we tried to see a lot and do even more.  One of the things that I really wanted to do was take a Thai cooking class and that's just what we did on our third day in the country.

After looking around a little online, I discovered the Bangkok Thai Cooking Academy.  There were some very positive reviews and they held classes just about every day.  Bangkok cooking academy offers twelve different classes, all teaching you how to cook five Thai dishes.  I chose the Monday morning class because I really wanted to learn how to make my favorite dish, Panang curry. 

Monday morning, boyfriend and I headed out of our hotel at the reasonable hour of 8:30am and set out to the meet up location.  After riding the Bangkok SkyTrain (BTS) a short three stops, we wound up at Asoke and met our group at the Dunkin' Donuts kiosk (no joke).  We met a man with a "Bangkok Thai Cooking Academy" tag around his neck, who introduced himself as Ron, or Mr. Ron, as boyfriend and I took to calling him.  We also met our classmates, a funny couple from Sydney, Australia and a quiet guy from Singapore.

The cooking class started out with a tour through one of the small markets located throughout Bangkok.  Mr. Ron introduced us to all sorts of interesting Thai fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices.  As we learned more and more about the items in the market, I quickly realized what exactly I had been eating all week.  Ohh, so those are tiny eggplants, not weird, bitter peas.  Ahhh, the orange juice I've been drinking isn't orange, it's tangerine.  It was very enlightening.  After our tour, we caught a cab for the cooking school.

The cooking school is located in a small, unassuming building, with a simple sign outside the door.  Inside the entryway was an open area with five cooktops set up.  We took off our shoes and headed inside the, luckily, air-conditioned home.  Spread out the in main room was a large mat, covered in all sorts of fruits and vegetables, knives, cutting blocks and two enourmous mortal and pestles.  We enjoyed some water and met our instructor, Nat. 

All six of us sat down at our stations and began preparing our dishes.  Something we learned during the course of our class, Thai cooking is all about the preparation.  Twenty minutes on the chopping block, followed by five minutes on the fire. 

Boyfriend and I wielded our knives and chopped everything up. 

We poured the ingredients into the mortar and pestle and ground out a delicious curry paste.

Nat took us through the secrets of Thai cooking, including using ketchup as our main ingredient in a sauce.

Finally, once we had prepped all four of our dishes, it was time to hit the fire. 

We had spent two hours chopping, grinding and mixing and spent literally thirty minutes cooking all four dishes.  It was fast, working over the fire, and someone didn't have the attention span for his stovetop.  Boyfriend spent more time taking pictures and less time stirring his pot, which meant that his curry, soup and chicken wound up unusually salty.  I am proud to say that my meal turned out pretty delicious.

The class turned out to be one of the best parts of our stay in Bangkok, fun, informative and full of great food.  While I don't think that I'll be opening up a Thai restaurant anytime soon, I now have the confidence to try my hand at more Thai dishes at home.  I'm sure my neighbors will be thrilled.

Ginger Chicken with Snow Peas

Living with a boy seems to mean eating a lot of carbohydrates. This is one thing that I have learned in the first two months of living with boyfriend. Pasta is a totally acceptable meal for every day of the week. But as I've said before, I'd like to continue to fit into my pants, so I'm working on some pasta-free meals.

So, I can't find my camera...  Enjoy some puppy pictures instead!

While boyfriend was out of town last week, I spent the week making tasty pastaless meals. I think this works well for me as a meal, but boyfriend would be wondering where the rest of the food was. That must be the thing, boys have bigger stomachs and need all those carbs to fill them up.

If you need a little something more to eat with this meal I would suggest cooking up a batch of brown rice, should keep you full and happy. It might even keep those male members of your household away from the cookies for the evening as well.



My mom has been taking some pretty awesome pictures of my little, puppy, sisters!