Nom Nom - Spanish Rice

Not to toot my own horn, but my favorite thing about what I typically cook is how it's easily adaptable to one's personal tastes. This is why I typically forgo the practice of offering measurements as I believe that, if you really like feta cheese, I'm not one to suggest how much or how little you should put in there. I'll give my opinion, of course, and suggest alternatives but ultimately cooking for yourself is about you, so make it how you like it!

That said, Spanish Rice is totes easy and very adaptable so long as you and whoever else you may be cooking for like tomatoes and beef. And rice.

In order to make it exactly as I have, you will need: half an onion, 1ib of thin cut beef, 1 can of stewed tomatoes, 1 can of diced tomatoes with green chilies, 3 cups of rice (uncooked), chili powder, garlic powder (or fresh garlic), and brown sugar.

Other suggestions: cheese, 1 can of any kind of bean, lime/lemon juice, and any additional spices that you like (for example, I think yellow curry powder would be quite interesting).
1. Place three cups of uncooked rice and 1 can of diced tomatoes with green chilies in your rice cooker. Make sure to add extra water as the tomatoes and chilies will increase the water line causing inaccurate measurements. If you don't have a rice cooker...uhm...good luck!

2. Place the half onion face down and slice the entire onion from the side. I prefer big chunks of onion, but feel free to dice as wanted. Add these to a large frying pan and set to a medium-high setting. Cook until they are semi-translucent until moving on to the next step.

3. Slice your beef into bite sized strips and add them to the frying onions. Let this combination cook together for a while, but you can add lemon or lime juice here.

4. After your beef is as cooked as you want it to be and onions fully translucent, add the can of stewed tomatoes and any spices you want (also beans). The green chilies in the rice should bring a little bit of a spicy kick when introduced to the beef mixture, but you can add more hotness here as well. Brown sugar is completely optional, but highly recommended. I love spicy-sweet, which is why I added it.

5. Once the rice is done cooking, add it to your beef and tomato mixture and stir together.

6. EAT UP! This would be the time to top with cheese if you want to, or stick it inside of a tortilla for burrito action.

This dish should only take as much time needed to cook the rice, so about 20-30 minutes.

Rainbow Dragon Cake of Awesome

For two of my friends' 25th we decided to throw an early Thanksgiving dinner to celebrate, and one of the food items I elected to bring was a birthday cake. They didn't know what kind of cake, and one of them spent nearly every day persuading me to make whatever outlandish cake he felt like having at that moment.

In the end, I decided on this beauty:

Well, that's not exactly how it looked at the end (I added some pirate action figures and a large gummi alligator for good measure), the castle may have been more leany-- but that's basically it.

Oh yeah, I did mention it was a RAINBOW cake...

30 Days: Day 15 - A fanfic.

Today is fanfic day, and in true fanfic fashion, it's time to see how JK Rowling feels about all of this.

Oops, break.

So today should be day 13 of continuous blogging, but I'm going out of town this weekend to a shoddy computer. I could rectify this by pre-writing all of my entries and just wrestling with the laptop until they post, but I'm going out tonight to celebrate my new job. I can't stress enough how much I need to celebrate.

I know this blog isn't very widely read at all (but to the person linking me from RedvsBlue, ilu, unless you're saying shitty things about me, then I hope you die in a fire), but for those of you who do periodically tune in to see what new asinine thing I'm spewing from my finger tips, know that I'm not dead yet, I'll be back next week.

In the meantime, here is the latest image I drew my friend after I told her I probably won't be able to be her workchat buddy after this month.

And then her little broken cow heart was repackaged into

Big Macs, bringing much joy to the overweight girls and boys.

Toodles!

Nom Nom - Rotini pasta with cream sauce and fresh spinach.

I like to cook and bake, and fortunately I'm not half bad at it. I've given up on being hush-hush about it since everyone who knows me found out about this within the last year, so now I'm a slave to the guys and girls in my life whose only accomplishment in the kitchen is starting a fire. In the mean time I thought I'd try to turn this into a benefit for the rest of you out there in internet land, especially you nerds out to impress your girlfriends (or maybe boyfriends).

When I cook, I typically like it to be fast a simple since I normally get home at 7:30pm from work and am just generally lazy. For the most part the dishes I share will be of that variety, but we're not talking Top Ramen fast and simple, k? Also, most importantly when it comes to cooking, once you learn a recipe, don't be afraid to improvise with it!

Rainbow Rotini with a Cream Sauce and Fresh Spinach

How I made it: