lots of randomness

yesterday I went Cactus Hunting.... haha. read about the adventure on my other blog.
but I now have a cute little family of cacti on my table... I might decorate the cans they're in.

Frozen pizzas... they only cost $5EC & if you microwave on a low power setting & then put in the skillet for a couple minutes the bottom gets crunchy and tastes like it was baked in an oven!

plantain chips again!! I took my sister Mandy & my friend Alfonso's advice & after they had cooked for a tiny bit I smashed them & then fried them some more & they were so good!!

Cajun Chicken Alfredo

Today I found Cajun seasoning at the grocery store so I was excited to use it.  Lee and I really like spicy pasta dishes.... especially  Cheesecake Factory's Chipotle Chicken Pasta and Red Lobster's Cajun Chicken Linguine... sooooooooooooo good!

If you have never had either one then you are missing out on two incredible meals. haha.
Cheesecake Factory is over the top good because they use honey glazed chicken, asparagus, red and yellow peppers, frozen peas, and onions.... and topped with little crunchy tortilla chip slivers. 

This is a picture of me eating it the day after our wedding, in Columbus, OH on our way to the airport. See how happy I am? and it's not all because I was a newlywed :)

anyway.... it's good.
I didn't quite match up to that tonight, but I came close.
I made a really good creamy, cheesy alfredo sauce using butter, milk, garlic, cream cheese, parmesan cheese, and I used the local "cheddar" cheese that I get at the grocery store... which is 0 like cheddar, but not like mozzarella, but it turned out really really good!  I don't really measure... I just added more cream cheese or milk as needed.
I sauteed onions and red, yellow, and green bell peppers and then added it to the sauce while I cooked chicken and the noodles.
It's difficult to make a meal with only 2 burners, 1 pot, 1 skillet, and NO oven! I had to wash my pan out twice during this process!
and to top it off I found the most incredible breadsticks today at Foodfair for only $3EC for like 8 breadsticks! I froze the rest to use another day...
and as I mentioned we have no oven... I creatively put the breadsticks over top the pot of noodles to let the steam melt the butter and warm them!

did I mention that they were GIANT breadsticks? We were stuffed!

Copy Kat Craving

 I want these!!!!
Denny's Blueberry and White Chocolate Pancake Puppies!
mmmmmmmm sounds incredible

http://www.copykat.com/2010/02/15/dennys-blueberry-and-white-chocolate-pancake-puppies/

I will post soon if I give in and buy the white chocolate chips to make these....

Homemade Potato Chips!

my friend Amber said that she made potato chips (they are hard to come by in Grenada...)
so I wanted to try, and they turned out amazing!!!

1. I cut the slices really really super thin.... you could almost see through some of them.
2. I put the slices into a bowl of ice water for about 30min (like I do french fries, it's supposed to make them crispier)
3. I layed them out on a towel to absorb the water off of them (all of these chips came from 1 potato!)

4. I cooked them in a hot frying pan of grease on medium heat (I used enough oil to cover the chips)
5. I flipped them over once they started to brown.. it only took about a minute or so

6. I put them on a paper towel to absorb the grease & salted them immediately!

7. Lee and I ate the entire plate like a couple pigs

an unmade bed

yesterday I had full intentions of washing our sheets so I didn't make our bed.......
and 2 people came over!

people never come over!
and yesterday 2 people (Adriana and Rebecca) came!

I had been so proud of myself by making the bed every single day....

alas.... today I washed the sheets and made the bed. and no one came over.
and no one probably will ever again...

hahahaha. ooooooo well.

ice cold.... salad

lately I have wanted to eat nothing else but salad!
I was really sad to find out that they don't sell caesar dressing here! it is Lee and I's favorite! so instead I got creamy italian and it's very good also.

I like my salad really really cold. like Ruby Tuesday's salad bar... it's always packed in the ice & so fresh and cold! I like to cut up my lettuce and/or spinach and put it in the freezer while I chop up the other stuff so it's gets super cold!
For the most part I am not very adventurous with my salad. I just started eating salad about 4 years ago when Lee forced me to take a bite of caesar salad, but I was instantly hooked! I LOVE caesar salad... how I went 19 years of my life without eating it I will never know... and I got my sister Molly, who is equally as picky, to eat it & her little girls eat it now too! especially from Texas Roadhouse. mmmmmmmmmm they have the BEST!
My salad usually consists of the following... lettuce and/or spinach, carrot shreds, cucumbers, cheese, boiled egg, and croutons.  Lee doesn't like egg, but I love it!

for dinner the other night I just wanted salad, but I made hamburgers too because Lee is a big man who needs more food than that :) and we had our star fruit!  I recently found star fruit that is a lot more orange than what we've had before and it's a lot sweeter... but we still sprinkle sugar on top of it, it's like dessert!

sure this dinner wasn't fancy, but it's a typical night for us

Sometimes I feel bad because I like to eat my hamburgers plain, with just ketchup so I forget to give Lee any toppings... usually he doesn't even get cheese! I just forget... but he never complains.  The yellow bottle is banana ketchup, it's made locally. It takes almost exactly like regular ketchup... I was a little disappointed, I wanted it to taste crazy, but instead it's just ketchup, only yellow. 

I love my husband!

yesterday Lee and I celebrated Valentine's Day because he had his unified exams yesterday morning and was studying the eeeeentire weekend. so after his exams in the morning we headed for the beach! more about that on my other blog kelseycoghill.blogspot.com
after our beach excursion we came home and washed alllllll the sand and salt off and I headed to the orphanage.  Every Monday I go to Queen Elizabeth's Home and play with the kids there for a couple hours. Lee stayed home to study and prepare for a presentation he has to do in lab tomorrow (the studying NEVER ends!)
and when I got back we got ready to go out to eat for Valentine's Day.
I really wanted to go watch the sunset together... and I really wanted pizza (because like I said, I love it!!) and I've gotten pretty good at making most of our other favorite meals... so why pay for it in a restaurant, right?
and Lee really wanted to watch Star Trek... because we haven't watched a movie together in a while and we hadn't seen it and my friend Sherry gave us a  ton of movies to watch! and Sylar from Heroes is Spock!
so we went and watched the sunset, it was beautiful as always, and we just walked down the hill and got pizza from the restaurant on campus... haha even though we had full intentions of going out.
it doesn't take a whole lot to make us happy.
Pizza, popcorn, pop, and a movie! :)

but even better than that.... while I was at the orphanage Lee washed the dishes!!!!!!!!!!! hooray!!!! he knows how much I detest the dishes... that is true love :)\

My Lee.

Plantain chips!

today I perfected plantain chips!
this was the 3rd time I have made plantain, and the 2nd attempt at 'chips'
for some ridiculous reason, the first time I made them I started cutting the plantain by slicing it down the middle.... length wise. as soon as I did it I was like, why did you do that! so we had long strips of plantain that day... with brown sugar. they were really sweet and so good!!
Lee suggested I make chips (apparently they sell them in the vending machine where he worked) so the next day I attempted to do so but turns out Lee prefers his chips really crispy, and I like mine crisp, but with a little softness in the middle. so he wasn't quite satisfied.
alas today I decided to try again, we were having shredded chicken sandwiches for lunch after church... and in honor of valentines day, I thought to myself, I should cut the chips into little hearts! i cut a little v into the whole plantain at once and then sliced the chips... but they did NOT look like hearts.
I cut them soooooooo thin and they turned out delicious! I took mine out of the pan a little sooner than Lee's so his would be cripier.
and he LOVED them! 
he kept talking about how good they were, examining them closely, commenting about how I could sell them because they were better than the ones from the vending machines........ and he never noticed that they were supposed to be cut into hearts. HA!
I was waiting for him to say, why do these look like pac mans?? or what happend to them? lol.. but nothing. He just gobbled them down and I never mentioned it.

My chicken sandwiches (which my mom is famous for making) turned out the best they ever have!!! I made  them last night and let them sit in the fridge overnight & they soaked up all the good flavor.
and. I'm pretty proud of this idea... they got a little dry last night & I didn't have any chick broth or stock, or bullion cubes.... so I opened a can of chicken noodle soup & used the broth off of it! perhaps that's something most people would have done.... but I thought it was pretty smart of me :)

it looks a little gross here..... but is soooooooo good! 

a Cooper family favorite :)

Tomorrow Lee has his first tests of medical school!!! He's been studying like a fiend.  So we didn't celebrate Valentine's Day today..... well not really. we had really good lunch and dinner though, if I do say so myself... dinner was penne and alfredo with chicken, onions, and bell peppers and garlic bread, our favorite meal by far.
but tomorrow we're going OUT! :) and to the beach! together!

microwavin

I've been experimenting with baking in the microwave... I've made brownies and pizza crust so far and they have turned out really well!
I'm debating about making cookies. chocolate chips are $16EC and then you need all the other ingredients too! and peanut butter is really expensive too.... and they don't sell premade cookie dough, or I would buy it and just eat it. and I haven't seen any pre-made mix either.  Brownie mix and pizza dough mix are only about $5EC, so we'll stick with that I guess.
I may make peanut butter fudge sometime soon, I've been craving it... but for now jello and pudding are our desserts.

Here is how I made the stuff in the microwave....

Pizza
- got the Martha White mix that you just add water and oil to.
- mixed it up and let it sit covered up for 5minutes
- made two balls of dough
- pressed one down on a plate to form a mini pizza
- poked holes all over it
- put it in the microwave on 20% power setting and let cook for about 4-5 minutes... I watched it until I saw it was rising
- took it out and it had baked pretty well, it just didn't get brown.
- so I stuck it in the frying pan to brown and crisp it up!
- and it worked!!
- I then added our toppings..... which saddly consisted of the following. spaghetti sauce (beacuse I was too cheap to buy pizza sauce for an experimental pizza) adobo powder seasoning (because I use it for everything!!! salt, pepper, garlic... and other stuff all in one!) parmesan cheese, and really thinly sliced cheddar-ish cheese (sliced b/c we don't have a grater, and cheddar-ish because it says cheddar but is really light orange and doesn't taste like cheddar, but it's good! and once again I didn't want to buy mozzarella cheese for an experiment)
and it was GOOD! we loved it. I want to make it again soon to cure my pizza cravings!

skillet pizza? haha

actually quite delicious!

and for the brownies... I just followed directions and poured half the batter into a plastic microwavable storage container, because that's all we have besides bowls and plates, and microwaved it on about a 20% power setting until the top didn't look wet anymore!

it makes a really fudgey brownie, not cake-like at all... but still good.
the first batch I made I cooked it on about a 50% power setting and they were good for the first 15 minutes while tHey were hot... and then turned to BRICKS! so cook them slooooooow.

and sorry no pictures. we ate them quickly :)

Homemade.

the last time we went to St. George's we went to a fabric store and I got a yard of fabric for $4EC and a piece of elastic for $1EC and decided I could make a skirt. for about $2US
It already looked like a skirt, the way the print was, so it wasn't that difficult... but I'm pretty proud of the way it turned out and the little details :)
I hand stitched it laying in bed watching Project Runway.... haha. took me about 3 days to get the fit right.

and I wore it to church this morning.

love the little butterflies!

I put little pleats in the bottom hem so it wouldn't be too voluminous or blow up in the wind.

and added a bead.

Star Fruit

I found star fruit really cheap, so we have been eating it like crazy.
I've found the very best ways are to eat it cold with a little sugar sprinkled on top to take away some of the sourness... and to grill it. it tastes so much sweeter when it's just cooked a tiny bit.
I found a website with about 4000000 recipies for using star fruit, so I'll be trying some of them out.
Here's what we had the other night. and it was GOOD.
Chicken, bell peppers, onions, and star fruit.
and we had potatoes

and it's pretty! i love pretty food

rant

I just had a few things I needed to say to make myself feel better today

1. I am still mad about Conan getting kicked off of NBC. booooooo NBC! if my 2 favorite shows, the office & heroes weren't on that channel I'd boycott. well I guess I am boycotting b/c I don't have a TV

2. I hate doing dishes!!!

3. Adam Lambert is scary looking. end of story... I just caught up on the red carpet looks at the grammy's on eonline.  and why are these jersey shore people at the grammy's??

4. I really wish people would learn the difference between YOUR and YOU'RE.......  no one on facebook ever uses it right and it bothers me tremendously. and these people are supposedly educated.

5. I really really really really want a blender..... all I think about is making my own smoothies.  I have a very addictive personality & right now I feel like all my nutrition could come through a straw b/c I love them so much. Banana and Guava are my favorite.... but I want to try sooooo many more. and I don't want to spend $8EC everyday! and Lee doesn't think I need one! uuuggggghhhhhh.  I'd be a much happier housewife with a blender. there is a yard sale Monday. pray they have one!

6. and finally... it's COLD in my room!!!! I live on a tropical island and I wear sweatpants and a sweatshirt at home b/c it's sooooo cold. and I can't adjust the thermostat. it's on 80 and cold air is pouring out on me :(

ok I'm done... and I feel much better

There IS a difference between sweet potatoes and yams!

On Friday I got the chance to go downtown St. George's and go to the local market! I was so excited to see everything they had and the people.
I bought what I thought to be sweet potatoes... but once I got them home and cut them open I realized they were white inside... so we googled it and found out that they are actually yams.  They grow yams in South America, the Caribbean, and Africa.  They are white-ish in color, a bit dryer than sweet potatoes, and a lot sweeter!  I microwaved them just like you would a baked potato and we didn't even add brown sugar, just butter, they were that sweet!! and hopefully just as nutritious.... but I wonder if they are because they are white ? they say that the brighter the color the better for you things are.... hmm.