90 Minute Sketch – Sock Puppet

Man… I’ve got nothing today. I looked through all my stuff. Zip, zero, natta.  It’s just one of those weeks where everything’s due, so you’re super busy, but then nothing goes quite your way. On top of that my spirit has been kind of down, but let’s not get into that. I’ll save the emo for a Monday post.

So without further ado, here’s a sock puppet I drew in MS paint for giggles. Quality work I tell ya.

Here’s to hoping for better content next week.

Favorite

My Favorite…

Candy: Swiss Chocolate

Music Genre: Alternative/Punk

Way to Spend Time: With Friends

Food: Chinese (Authentic)

Drink: Tea

Hobby: Video Games

Book: Ender’s Game

Movie: The Incredibles

Place: The Alps

Sport to Play: Ping-pong(?)

Sport to Watch: Soccer

Planet: Jupiter

The Minibar – Wines

Let us talk about wines. Actually this is suppose to be a new series where I talk about alcoholic beverages in general, but let’s be honest. I’m not a huge beer drinker, and most of the time I don’t know the name of the mixed drinks handed to me, never mind what’s in it. So here we mostly talk about wines.

I took a course back in Cornell on wines, but these days I am super reluctant to tell people about such a factoid. For some reason, whenever people find out that you have “formal” education on wine, they suddenly expect you to know everything there is to know about every label and every vintage ever made. I’ve had people go “Oh hey, you’ve taken a wine class before, which one of these is better?” When I look, they’re usually two names I’ve never heard of, and are the same variety from the same region. (Protip: Pick the cheaper one, if you don’t know better.)

For a while now, I’ve been trying to do a Wine of the Month kind of thing, where I try a different bottle every month. The problem so far seems to be that I just simply forget which ones I’ve tried after a while (unless it was really really good). The other problem is that the liquor shops I have access to (i.e. by foot) caters really heavily to the college crowd. As a result everything is pretty low priced ($10-25 range).

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with cheap wines. In fact, most of the time it’s great. But they tend to make poor gifts, and it doesn’t really prepare me for what I’ll normally see in restaurants (except apparently at Olive Garden, where I’ve seen them try and sell some of these wines at twice the cost -_- ). I think to fix this, I just need to search a little further out for better stores.

In general though, I’ll probably just take a photo or scan of the label and put it up here with some kind of a rating I haven’t figured out yet. It’ll help me remember which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t.

Laundry

I’d have to say, one of the biggest drawback of semi-cold weather is that I have to start doing a ridiculous amount of extra laundry. I have to deal with sweatshirts and socks and additional layers. It almost doubles the number of loads I have to do!

I can’t wait until it starts snowing, so I can justify wearing my winter coat everywhere and not have to worry about all this extra clothes.

Ministrel’s Corner – Wake Me Up When September Ends

Sorry, feeling lazy this week.

This seems fitting for today:

Green Day - Wake Me Up When September Ends

Shave

I left my electric shaver at Dan’s place a couple weeks ago, so I bought some razor blades and have been shaving manually. I’d have to say, it’s quite a different experience. The shaves definitely come out a lot closer. With the electric shaver, I’d have a slight shadow by the afternoon, but with the razor blade I’m usually good until pretty late at night.

The downside is that it takes quite a bit of extra time in the morning, and also I have a tendency to cut myself. It was really bad for the first few times. I’d get into the lab every morning looking like I had a scuffle with a miniature Edward Scissorhands. It’s been getting a lot better though, and today I managed to do it without a single cut! I was quite proud of myself.

I haven’t decided if I’m gonna just switch over entirely, or go back to the electric when I get it back. My guess is that it’ll be somewhere in between depending on how lazy I feel.

All Consuming – Pork Dumplings

Dumplings are like the best food ever! It’s too bad some of the ingredients are a bit hard to find, and I’m so lazy. Otherwise, I’d be eating it like every other week.

Here’s a recipe my mom taught me for how to make the pork filling. I’ve made it twice, once with the shrimp, and once without. It was way, WAY better with the shrimp:

1 pound of ground pork
1 napa cabbage, boil first and then sliced into thin strips
2 TbSp of Corn Starch
3 TbSp of  Soy Sauce
2 TbSp of  Sugar
1/2 TbSp  of Salt
1 TbSp of Seasame oil
1/4 TbSp of Black Pepper
5 TbSp of Water
1 TbSp of Chinese Cooking (Rice) Wine
1 bundle of Scallions(diced)
1/2 pound of shrimp (preferably fresh, non-frozen), remove shell/tail first.

-Mix together, and keep thick. Add corn starch if it’s too watery.
-Wrap in the dumpling skin(I generally use store bought, but you can make them with 4 cups flour and 1 cup water)

There’s a vegetarian version where instead of the pork you use Garlic Chives or Zucchini. I’ve tasted the garlic chives version before and it was amazing, but it’s like impossible to find. The lady that made it actually grew the plants herself. I’ve tried making the zucchini version once, but it didn’t taste great. Maybe I just did it wrong.