Chicken and Beer

It was actually quite some time ago when my friend left a case of Stag beers in our hotel room. She left earlier than I did, and I called her to ask if she still wanted those beers and she said no. I hate wasting things off, so I took them with me and I didn't know how to deal with them since I don't drink beers.

Chicken breast cooked in beer and herbs on rice vermcelli and sauteed squash

It was a little scary to see the beer foaming up as I heat it up on the saucepan. So basically I boiled a piece of chicken breast with a can of beer, and I added dried basil, thyme and parsley. I added a pinch of black pepper and salt to season. And I actually boiled the rice vermicelli together with the chicken. I added the vermicelli much later than the chicken. To put it simply, all the remaining beer got absorbed by the rice vermicelli.

I like the fact that the chicken had a herby feelings in it, but I don't think children will like this chicken beer >.<

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Bye Bye Bye, Forest

Today was the last day of internship. I'd say I will miss living without a TV, newspaper, internet and phone service. I'm serious. Okay, I did get some phone service in the kitchen and sometimes in my room. I did get unreliable internet service at the lab and at home (but it's always gone whenever it rained because it was a wireless connection). But seriously, no TV and no newspaper. We had some old magazines from like.. 2005 at our house. That's about it.

Work was tiring in the morning - it was hot, and physical work was not really my forte. Mowing the grass, weed eating... picking tomatoes, blueberries, blackberries... No. Not my thing at all. But I do gain some field knowledge from those days, like pruning tomato and apple trees and such.

Dinner was always my joy. It's a pain to think of what to eat. The closest restaurant was like 20 minutes away and rather than driving I'd rather cook at home. Thankfully, we often got lots and lots of tomatoes from the field, and they're really good and sweet!

I think during the past 11 weeks I ate a lot of tomatoes. I normally make tomato sauce by crushing the tomatoes and cooking them under low heat for at least 30 minutes on the stove. When there were some peppers from the field, I'd normally put those in too. There was one time we got onions. I cooked them with the tomato sauce. Yum~

Freshly made tomato sauce with broccoli, cauliflowers, carrots, yummy orange peppers, green pepper and meatballs, seasoned with dried basil, parsley and thyme.

Dixon Springs. Shawnee Forest. I'll miss them :)

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Forest Treats

Well well well! I'm back again from my deep slumber.

I've been living in a forest again for another month, and that explains why I don't really post anything on this blog. I do have internet access but sometimes I'm just too tired to post pictures.

And lately, sad to say, I haven't been making bentos. Sigh. I do have my rice cooker, but since I'm sharing fridge with 3 other people in the house, I don't think I could get as many ingredients to put in a bento. Plus, I don't feel like hogging the kitchen to myself.

I've been working on blueberries. I picked quite a lot of them for my project, and I also helped my company with U-pick sessions where people from all over the place (one lady told me she drove for an hour to get here) went to our company and pick blueberries. These blueberries are sold for $1.50 per lb (which is VERY CHEAP, if you compare them to those in groceries stores).

When I went back to Urbana one time I decided to make beignets (some kind of french doughnut) with blueberries. And so I did! Unfortunately, since I'm not so friendly to baking, I didn't have confectionery sugar in stock, so I had to use granulated sugar instead. But that still does the trick :)

I bought the beignet mix from New Orleans Cafe Du Monde. You can actually buy the mix online and now they sell those mixes at Far East, an Asian store in Champaign, IL. So there's actually no need to go all the way to New Orleans to buy these >.<

And of course, the blueberries were fresh from the tree. The cultivar that I like the most is called Bluetta, which is actually the one I used in the picture above. Another one is called Earliblue, but at that time I hadn't realized that they're sweet, so I hadn't been picking on those. These two are far sweeter than those commecially sold blueberries. One time I brought back a quart of these blueberries and gave them to my friends, and gosh, they liked them so much! They can tell that the blueberries that I picked are far more flavorful and sweeter than the ones they normally buy from the groceries.

Now that it reached the end of July, we no longer have the U-pick sessions. No more blueberries hanging on the bushes - they're all green :(

I miss them T__T

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