Sunday, September 23, 2012

thai cooking

I have to say, I'm enjoying the cooking aspect of domestic life more than I thought I would. I've been surprising myself with the types of dishes I am able to make that I previously only thought I could get at restaurants, for instance, beef pho or chicken tikka masala. The latest ethnic concoctions I have tried to prepare are Thai dishes. As you may remember, I started out by making red chicken curry, which I posted about a couple months ago. Since then, I have made two more Thai meals, pad thai and hot and sour soup, to round out goal #66 which was to cook three dishes in total.

Here's the pad thai. (I got a little crazy with the cilantro!)

Pad thai turned out to be my favorite to prepare of the three. It's a fantastic recipe! Here's where I started from: http://browniesfordinner.com/2010/05/11/easy-pad-thai/  Rice noodles, the main ingredient, were fun and easy, because I found out that they just cook in hot tap water. No need to boil! Nice! I made it vegetarian style the first time and Brian, the carnivore, didn't even really seem to mind.


Lastly, I gave thai hot and sour soup a try. It's funny, I used to not even really like soups up until about 3 years ago. So weird. Anyway, I've done a 180 and now I seem to crave soup all of the time! Here's the recipe I roughly used: http://thaifood.about.com/od/thaisnacks/r/hotandsoursoup.htm. This one was fun because I got to use bok choy for the first time. Look at it just draping itself so beautifully over the edge of the ladle. :]


If you come to visit, there's a good chance you might get served (at least!) one of these three.



Sunday, September 16, 2012

steve jobs book


Jenny, my rad sister in law (remember, the one who introduced me to this awesome goals challenge!), gave me the Steve Jobs biography for Christmas (technically, Thanksgiving ;) last year. I was excited because I'd heard good reviews about it and I've always admired Apple design. 

What a fascinating guy! I felt like I already knew so much about him, but the book is so thorough that I found out so much more. Obviously, as a product designer, I enjoyed reading about the details of Apple's product development process. What surprised me, however, was how interested I was in his interpersonal relationships. You probably already know that he could be a ruthless jerk, but he could also be incredibly sensitive. The author, Walter Isaacson, doesn't sugarcoat any of it, so that honesty made the stories so compelling. To quote Jobs, I think it's "insanely great" that he didn't have Isaacson edit out some of the stuff that makes him look bad. As a result, the book is such a complete picture (at least it seems) of the crazy life of such a passionate genius who truly did put a "dent in the universe." I definitely recommend reading it.

The marks one of the books off of my list for goal #46