Thai Chicken with Peanuts

Don't want to spend a ton of time in the kitchen, prepping dinner and sweating over the oven? Make a stir fry! At least once a week during the summer you can find me tossing ingredients into a big pan and pouring on different sauces. Stir fry isn't really a science. I usually don't follow a recipe and cook up whatever we have in the fridge.

Yes, the stir fry is the ultimate pre-vacation meal. You can clean out the fridge and use up any meats and vegetables. For this stir fry, had a bunch of sweet peppers and carrots, as well as a pack of chicken sitting in the fridge. With a business trip coming up on Thursday, I decided to use up the stuff in the house, rather than buy groceries this week. Also, since I tend to make a lot of stir frys, I had all the ingredients for my sauce already. My pantry is a well-stocked stir fry zone!

What is your go to "Use it up" recipe? With so many business and personal trips this year, I find that I've been tossing way more food than I would like. Resorting to eating out each night is not the best plan either, for the wallet or the waistline!

Two Years Ago: Milky Way Cake
Three Years Ago: Peanut Chicken with Asian Slaw
Four Years Ago: Banana Coconut Muffins
Five Years Ago: Indian Chicken Curry

Thai Chicken Pizza

It's Friday, so I think that means we need some pizza.  Though let me give you some insight on my usual Friday night. It has been the same for almost three years...

Every Friday night, the boyfriend and I go to the same restaurant. Only occasionally do we stray from this restaurant, mostly because we aren't in the mood for burgers. The restaurant is a ten minute was from our place and we only drive in cases of extreme cold or rain.

Each week we order almost the same thing. It's gotten to a point that the wait staff knows us, not by name, but by order. We sit down with our food and play trivia. Specifically, Sporcle trivia on the iPad. It's so much fun. I know so many random facts now, I would probably be really useful in a trivial pursuit game.

Do you and your favorite person have any weekly or monthly traditions? The boyfriend and I have been trying to branch out and eat at different restaurants, but how many places will let you just sit there for an hour playing trivia and taking up a table?

One Year Ago: Peanut Butter Macaroon Brownies
Two Years Ago: White Chocolate - Raspberry Cheesecake
Three Years Ago: Peanut Butter Cup Blondies
Four Years Ago: Buffalo Chicken Pizza

Thai Chicken Lettuce Cups

Dinner last night was messy.  I blame Shoprite.  It's all because they didn't have the lettuce that I wanted, that Boyfriend and I wound up with sauce all down our wrists.  All I wanted was bibb lettuce, with its nice cup-shaped leaves.  But no, Shoprite had to have romaine, Boston, iceberg, spring mix, everything but bibb lettuce.

Even with all the juices running down our hands, this dinner was delicious.  I always like adding fish sauce into my meals, mostly because it starts out smelling so discusting, but lends such fantastic flavors to my meals.  It's such an amazing transformation!

I wanted a light, yet flavorful dish because I still had three miles to run after dinner.  These lettuce cups were just the perfect dinner to have before hitting the road.

Then I came home and had some chocolate cake.

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!

Thai chicken salad

We've been back from vacation for a whole week now and I guess we're back into the swing of things.  I could always use an extra day of vacation after returning from vacation, but sadly I had to get back to work.

Thankfully, I had a slow week to return to.  My calendar was unusually sparce as the directors were heading out of town for a big meeting.  This left me with little to do but work in the lab and made me a happy chemist.

Years ago, during my first organic chemistry lab, my lab partner and I would count down the weeks of labs remaining.  From check-in the first week, we would trudge to lab like we were heading to break rocks for six hours.  As the weeks went on, we would break glassware, spill precious product and try to understand why we were doing what we were doing.  At the end of the semester we happily checked out of lab and were so happy the semester was behind us.

As a sophomore in college, I had no idea what I would be doing in ten years.  If you told me that I would gladly spend my hours working away in a lab, I would have told you that you were off your noggin. 

The difference now?  I actually know what I am doing.  When you start organic chemistry labs, you don't understand what is going on in your flask.  As a PhD chemist in the lab these days, I have a much better view of the atoms and molecules at work.  And I love it.

Lesson?  You never know what you'll be doing in ten years.  I wonder what I'll be up to in 2022?

Thai Sweet Potato Stew

I am completely wiped out after this weekend.  Boyfriend and I spent the weekend moving into a new apartment.  That might not sound unusual or especially tiring, except for the fact that we moved from the second floor of our building up to the fourth floor.  We did this move over the course of three days.

Day One: Wait, before I get into the details of the moving process I should tell you this - I packed almost nothing prior to our move-in date of February 4th.  The morning of day one, we were scheduled to get the keys to our new "penthouse" apartment at 10 o'clock.  Not wanting to move on an empty stomach, we did what every moving day person does, we went to Dunkin' Donuts.  We filled up on egg and cheese sandwiches and hot beverages.  Movers need protein!

Upon receiving the keys, we signed our new lease and went up to our new place.  We knew we were moving into an apartment with a slightly different bed/bath layout, but we weren't quite ready for what we saw when we entered the room.  The main living area was the exact reverse of our apartment downstairs.  This is going to hurt my brain for weeks.

Moving day one was fine, with the exception of our harrowing journey with the couch into the elevator, everything went smoothly.  We moved our clothes from the old closet to the new, smaller closet.  The bedroom set went from our old, weirdly shaped bedroom to our new, normally laid out one.  The couch and TV did make it upstairs without being broken or leaving too many marks on the walls.  It was a good move.

We did not have that soup for dinner.  Oh no, no.  We had Chinese food from the take-out place down the street.  The Thai sweet potato soup that you see above was made last week and enjoyed by one and only one person in the apartment, me.  Someone doesn't like sweet potatoes.  Someone is a weirdo.

Thai Chicken Soup

The weather has taken a turn for the worse here in New Jersey!  Walking out of my apartment yesterday morning I was confronted with a torrential downpour.  By the time I got to work, the temperature had dropped by ten degrees and the wind had increased by twenty miles per hour. 

The weather seemed to deteriorate as the day went on.  By lunchtime, the winds howled and a chill began to take hold.  Shortly after returning from lunch we sat in our office (discussing highly intellectual things like chemical bonding and cell assays) (actually, I think we were talking about food), I looked out the window to discover hail bouncing off of the windows.

Waiting on the train platform everyone looked like cows, with their backs to the wind.  Forty mile per hour gusts blasted us commuters, tearing through even the thickest jacket, scarf or hat.  I was never so happy to see the train lights cutting through the night.

In an effort to warm up, spicy soup was in order.  Luckily, this soup was ready in no time flat.  The stock and chicken were prepared this weekend, the thing that took the longest time was cleaning the mushrooms!  Boyfriend and I were warm in no time!

Spicy Sesame Noodles

It's official everyone, I work at my company!  I know, it's an odd thing to say.  You might even be thinking "Wait Vicki, didn't you start your new job in July?"  First, thank you for remembering!  Second, yes.  I did start working at my job in the summer, but today I got my first set of business cards.

They are so pretty.  My name Dr. Wilde, Ph.D., in bold black lettering, tells everyone that I am an official member of the team!  Before I would go up to people and be all, "Hi, I work here!" and I would have no tangable proof to back up my claim.

Not any longer!  I work here now and I can prove it!  I can even back it up with a little information about what I'm working on.  I can spew fancy chemistry and pharmaceutical words and sound like a professional.  But don't let the business cards and fancy language fool you!  I'm still feeling my way around my new job. 

When I joined the team I was told that my first year would feel like I was thrown into the deep end of the pool.  I've learned to float and now I'm learning to swim.  Soon, I'll have all the goods necessary to back up that business card.  That little piece of card stock holds a lot of pressure and responsibility!  Here's to finding my sea legs!

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...

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.