Wow! Today I am very excited to announce that I am hosting my first guest post! I want to invite you to Tashya Heim,
one of my very best friends. Tashya is both the author and the artist of the blog,
Those Weird Heims. You should check it out.
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Hello! I'm Tashya! I don't have much to say about myself up here, but I do at the bottom of the page.
I love cooking. I love baking even more, but I really enjoy cooking. (Andrew is no complete stranger in the kitchen, either, especially when it comes to meats. That's why I got him a barbecue for Christmas- and talk about the gift that keeps on giving!) However,
I sometimes have a few issues when it comes to scaling recipes. I am the second of ten children. I grew up making large quantities of everything. Being married and trying to
make food for only two people can become a difficulty. I'm getting the knack for it, and I've decided to start sharing my learnings on my blog.
Good, tasty, sensible recipes for two people. Or for one person with leftovers. I figure if I share my ridiculous stories, I may as well share something useful as well.
I tried out a new recipe for
Mexican Rice recently (recipe below). It turned out pretty well the second time I made it. The first time through, I didn't actually make it. But it's
not because I'm a bad cook. No, this was a different kind of
operator malfunction. What happened, you ask? Read on, good friend, read on.
Andrew, like most men, has a strong attachment to bacon. He'd been pretty excited when he saw me putting bacon in our grocery cart at the store. On Wednesday, he called me on his way home from work. (It was the Wednesday two weeks ago when I posted
this ode to my non-blood related twin Tanney (aka Tayler) because she had posted this
woeful tale of sorrow about her lousy day teaching the day before.) I was pleased to give him a status update.
And that made him pretty excited to get home even faster. Too bad there was traffic in his way. We continued to chat for a bit. I told him about the post I'd written about Tanney, detailing funny pictures I'd drawn,
completely unaware that something nefarious was afoot.
I have a tiny kitchen in my apartment. I also have a
sensitive smoke alarm that sometimes goes off if the shower produces too much steam. This has trained me to be very conscious of how much smoke my cooking produces. Therefore, while cooking this bacon, I was just
staring at it to make sure that it wasn't getting smokey. And it wasn't. That bacon was turning out very beautifully, if I do say so myself.
But the burner was being a
sneaky little monkey, yet it was. It was producing tendrils of practically invisible smoke from something that had been smeared on the bottom of the pan. I couldn't see it, and I couldn't smell it. All I could smell was bacon.
Continuing to squash my phone between my ear and my shoulder, I picked up the pan and moved over to my small plastic cutting board. I tilted the pan to pool the grease on one side, stuck in my wooden spoon and gathered up the bacon, and while I was in the process of transferring it to the cutting board...
THE SMOKE ALARM WENT OFF! Now bothering the neighbors with noise is one thing, but what about other consequences involved in apartment living? What happens when smoke alarms go off for too long in apartment complexes anyway? Does it trigger the whole building alarms? Would it set off the sprinklers?
Was everyone in my building about to hate my poor little guts?
SNAP-A-DRAGON! With these optimistic thoughts in mind, I put down the pan and spoon, and ran towards my patio door. I threw it open while throwing my phone somewhere else, shouting to Andrew I'd call him back. The bedroom alarm started going off too.
RATS! And basically this is what followed:
I'm a
short person, so the dish towel I was waving above my head wasn't doing anything to help clear the smoke away from my very high ceiling. I jumped
on a chair. No good. I jumped
off the chair and ran to the bedroom to try and stop that one. I got the bedroom one to go off, and I ran out and shut the door. I jumped back
on the chair again, and was about to get extreme and start jumping
on the table. I lifted my foot to do so-
and then the alarm stopped.
Thank goodness.
Then I noticed that
I was in front of a wide open door and several full length windows, standing on a chair with foot raised and ready to bring myself onto the table. In front of my ground floor, opened patio door, which just happens to face the common walkway and several of my neighbors parking places. I sent out a few furtive glances to see if I had an audience. I saw no one.
Thank goodness again. With all of my hopping to and fro and dishcloth waving, I probably looked like some witch doctor or sadly disturbed Arabian nightmare.
I sighed in relief, noting that there were no building fire alarms bellowing, sprinklers sprinkling, or neighbors hating. Walking back into the kitchen to finish crumbling the bacon, I picked up the pan.
And the cutting board came with it.
That's right. In my frantic crusade to end smoke alarm tyranny, and thereby deflect a possible bloodbath between neighbors, I had
dropped my hot pan onto my plastic cutting board. My FAVORITE pan.
Melted to a plastic cutting board.
I placed the board and pan combo back on the counter. I recovered the bacon from the pan. If nothing else, that was safe. To salvage my wounded chef pride, I munched on a piece of delightfully cooked bacon while rummaging around my apartment trying to find where my phone had landed. Andrew didn't pick up when I called him. I left a message:
"Pick up some dinner on your way home. I'm not cooking any more tonight."
But then I tried again the following week. My pan was rescued from the plastic, the burner was cleaned off, I got rid of the gold coins on my dress, and the Mexican Rice was delicious.
*Brief Interlude Before Recipe: I really do love to cook and bake, and you can ask my husband and my friends, and they'll tell you I'm a fair hand at both. I am a princess and I try to see the good in the world. I also enjoy seeing the humor in the world. I'm a graduated English major who now enjoys homemaking full time. I read way too much, love to write, and absolutely adore my husband of a year and a half. Andrew is an engineer, and often chimes in on the blog. He is more practical than I am. If you go to our blog, you'll find pictorials (like above, only far more grandiose), stories, recipes and commentary on life. Cheers!
MEXICAN RICE (for a couple, a single girl's meal with leftovers, or one college dude's serving)
4 slices bacon
1 cup water
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup rice
1/3 cup salsa
(you can play with different types/spiciness levels of salsa to find what you like)
1 tsp chili powder
Cook and crumble bacon in a medium saucepan
(make sure your saucepan has some kind of lid or covering).
I put the bacon on a cutting board to cut it up instead of crumbling it in the pan. Remove bacon from pan and add water into bacon drippings. Bring to a boil. Add remaining ingredients and stir well. Reduce heat, cover with lid, and simmer for 20 minutes. (Do not attempt to use a plastic plate as a lid. No. A baking sheet if necessary, but no plastic tableware, please.)
If your heat level is too high, you could scorch the bottom of the rice. Remove from heat and allow to sit 5 minutes before serving.
I like to serve it with some sour cream on the side. Green onions are never a bad idea either.
If you have a little more time and the desire to do so, you can upgrade your fanciness level to:
SPANISH RICE
Substitute tomato sauce for salsa. Turn rice into casserole dish. Add 1/2 cup corn and sprinkle with cheese on top. Bake at 350* for 10-15 minutes or until cheese is melted and bubbly.
Eat and enjoy.
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