kapachino

Tag: cooking

  • Ten On Tuesday

    rr10tuesdayMy friend Chelsea (I can totally call her my friend now because we had dinner together once!) has started a weekly feature called “Ten On Tuesday” where she comes up with ten random questions and answers them. I haven’t had the time to participate for the last two weeks, but today I made it a point to because the questions are always interesting.

    1. What are you going to be for Halloween?
    In all likelihood, I won’t dress up at all. I work that day, as well as the day before and after, so I don’t plan to be going anywhere. I think I may have only dressed up for Halloween twice in my entire life. Boring, I know.

    2. Have you ever been on television?
    Racking my brain, and no, I don’t believe I have. Not even on the local channel for high school sports.

    3. Do you have a toilet paper preference?
    Yes. I always buy Quilted Northern double rolls. I think it’s because that’s what my parents always bought. Also, the paper needs to go over the top of the roll, not down the back.

    4. When you’re pregnant, will you find out the sex of the baby? Why or why not?
    Yes, I think so. I’m a planner and I think I’ll need some time to adjust.

    5. What are three items that every kitchen must have?
    Other than large appliances, I’d say a saucepan, a baking dish, and some basic utensils. You could make a lot of meals with those three things, I think. (What I’d like to know: what are your favorite kitchen gadgets? Christmas is coming up and I NEED TO KNOW!)

    6. Do you enjoy Christmas shopping?
    Yes, I do. I love the holidays and when I’m in the mood I like going out into the bustling crowds. I like having specific things in mind to shop for, and I feel accomplished when I find them. Also, ever since 9th grade my dad and I have taken a whole day and shopped together, just the two of us. It’s become very special to us, and something I look forward to every year.

    7. What is your go-to recipe? (The thing you cook more than anything else because it’s easy and mindless.) Please share the recipe.
    I think this is one of, if not THE first thing I learned to cook, and was the first meal I cooked for David when we were dating. So good.

    Enchilada Casserole
    1 pound lean ground beef
    1 cup chopped onion
    2 cloves garlic, minced
    2 (10 oz) cans enchilada sauce
    2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
    10 (6 in) tortillas
    1 (16 oz) can refried beans

    1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
    2. Cook beef, onion, garlic until beef is browned; drain.
    3. Stir in beans and enchilada sauce. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cook 5-6 minutes.
    4. Layer tortillas, beef/bean mixture, and cheese in a 13×9 dish.
    5. Bake, covered, for 20 minutes.
    6. Remove cover; bake 5 minutes.

    8. Do you sleep on your back, belly, or side?
    Never ever on my belly. I usually lie on my back to decompress, turn to my side to fall asleep, and then I wake up on my back again.

    9. How do you feel about Tom Cruise?
    Well, I think he’s kind of crazy. Definitely lost and misguided. But I do like a lot of his movies.

    10. What books are in your “books to read” stack?
    I’m trying to read all of the books I own but haven’t read yet. You can see my list here (as well as other books I’ve read), or I’ll list them for you:

    • The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon (Got this one as a gift from my best friend years ago, because she did voluntary service in a similar neighborhood for a year)
    • Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (Supposed to read with a friend, but don’t know if that’s going to happen)
    • Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (I have the complete works)
    • Emma by Jane Austen
    • Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
    • Lady Susan by Jane Austen
    • The Professor by Charlotte Bronte (I also have the complete works of the Bronte sisters)
    • Villette by Charlotte Bronte
    • The Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart
    • The Host by Stephenie Meyer (actually on loan from Maggie, she says I will like it)
    • Inferno by Dante Alighieri
    • Magical Thinking: True Stories by Augusten Burroughs (bought really cheap because I heard it was the best of his books)
    • Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
    • The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
    • Moby Dick by Herman Melville (I’m big on reading classics if you can’t tell)
    • The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (loved The Dante Club by the same author and this one seems similar)
    • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
    • The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

    Okay…that is a lot of books! I need to get on that, especially since I’m trying to finish them all (plus some others) for my 101 goals.

  • El Burgos

    Until I’m whipping out meals on a regular basis with ease, I’m going to write about the meals I cook, dangit. I’m still an amateur, so pretty much every recipe I make is new for me, and when it turns out edible I’m still supremely excited!

    I made this meal last week for my husband and I, and since there was so much of it we invited David’s brother and his wife over. They had already planned on going over to David’s parents’ house, so we just invited the whole crew over. When I told them that I hadn’t even tasted what they were about to eat, my sister-in-law said, “That’s what family’s for!” Luckily it turned out pretty good, although I will make some adjustments next time.

    So this is just your basic ground beef casserole type thing, dubbed “El Burgos” by the More-With-Less cookbook. Hey, I don’t profess to be a fancy cook.

    Ingredients:

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    5 large potatoes, thinly sliced
    1 lb. ground beef
    2 green peppers, chopped
    1 large onion, diced
    2 c. shredded cheddar cheese
    1 t. salt
    1 T. brown sugar
    2 c. tomato sauce

    1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cook potatoes in small amount of water just until tender. Drain.
    My notes: 5 potatoes is WAY too many. 3 would be plenty.

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    2. Saute in skillet ground beef, green peppers, and onions.
    My husband hates peppers and onions, so to season the meat I used some good ol’ Tony Chachere’s.

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    3. Combine in a bowl cheese, salt, brown sugar, and tomato sauce.
    Next time I’ll double all of these ingredients. It needed more sauce!

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    4. Alternate layers of meat mixture and potatoes in greased 2 qt. casserole. Pour cheese-tomato mixture over all. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
    I used my Pampered Chef stoneware and sprayed it with cooking spray.

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    When dinner was over, there was one helping left, which I ate for dinner the next day. Success! When I make it again with my modifications next time it will be perfect. Yummy comfort food. :)

  • Inspiration For Life

    I stayed with my best friend Becca in Kansas this past weekend, and she inspired me in so many different ways. It was the first time I saw her new house in its mostly-finished state. The last time I was there, last year, they hadn’t moved in yet and it was kind of a wreck. They did all the work on it themselves and now it’s adorable. Talking to her about it really inspired me to get working on my own house again, which I haven’t done a thing for in months.

    Some ideas I have for the house:

    • Some open shelving in the kitchen, filled with dishes, cute baskets of produce, and spices in mismatched glass jars
    • Plants all over the place
    • Tear down the outdated vanity in the half bathroom and put in a pedestal sink
    • Replace the linoleum with tile throughout, and do it ourselves
    • Make my own Roman shades

    mwlThe inspiration isn’t just limited to home decor. For an anniversary gift, Becca gave me the cookbook More-with-Less: Suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world’s limited food resources. She explained to me that all the recipes use mostly basic ingredients that are healthy and can be bought in bulk. It stresses unprocessed foods and teaches you how to make some things yourself that you might be used to buying pre-packaged. While we were there Becca made some of the dishes and I was impressed with how good they were. So now I really want to get back on my cooking kick, and in a healthy, world-conscious way.

    Finally, I noticed that Becca uses a lot of organic, fair-trade, local products, which is something I have wanted to transition into doing for awhile now. I have noticed that the older I get, the more hippie I become, except without the drugs or political activism. :) I’m not sure how my conservative husband feels about that, but I think he’ll be happy when he sees how I can save us money without compromising on quality and do good to ourselves and the environment at the same time!

    Basically I want to be a perfect little homemaker, but unfortunately that’s a hard goal to reach having a demanding full-time job. It’s an ongoing battle to balance the two, but at least now I have some inspiration to keep me going!

  • On Being A Wife

    My husband and I have been married almost a year. Although I’m not planning on trading in my scrubs and stethoscope anytime soon, I have this crazy idea that I can be both a full-time, successful nurse and a fantastic, domestic wife. In my mind that means everything from keeping the house clean, doing chores, cooking frequent meals, budgeting and saving money, decorating the house, entertaining, and gardening to birthing babies and keeping my husband happy.

    In some of those areas I am quite deficient, which bothers me if I’m honest with myself. So yesterday, my day off, I resolved to be the perfect housewife.

    First there were the four piles of dog vomit that needed to be cleaned. Step One: pick up the bulk and throw it away. Step Two: vacuum the dry pieces left behind. Step Three: spray with pet stain remover and forget about it for hours on end. Step Four: drizzle with water and scrub. Step Five: blot dry. I’m sure you have all been dying to know that information your whole life.

    Then there was dinner to prepare for. I found this recipe for spicy meatballs in creamy beef broth and was bound and determined to make it happen. I spent an hour or so on the prep and then they were in the Crockpot cooking away. Later on I cleaned the house, paid some bills, and was just settling down to read when David came home. After some last minute preparations we ate dinner together (success) and I asked him how his day at work was. Then he took a nap and I read.

    But the crucial part of the day came when I went to see Julie & Julia with my mom. It was a great movie that we both loved, and it affected me on several levels. Most obviously, it encouraged me to cook more. It also made me want to continue to be devoted to my blog while adhering to personal boundaries. I could write an entire post about either of those subjects.

    But one thing that especially stood out to me in the movie was how these two women had amazing husbands. I kept expecting something to go very wrong with their relationships like it usually does in movies, but it never did. This movie made me want to be a great wife, and I don’t mean by cooking elaborate meals.

    I’ve been married for almost eleven months, and I am trying to learn how to cook, decorate my house, live on a budget, and hopefully even birth some babies along the way while balancing my vocation as a nurse. This blog is in large part a record of those things. But most importantly, I just want to love my husband. I want to love him better all the time. Lucky for me, he’s quite lovable.

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  • Keeping Me Cooking

    Not all of my stories about patients are sad.

    Ms. R, only 54, came to us with thyroid cancer. She had a mass that was obstructing her airway so she had to have a trach put in. She then went through many rounds of chemo and got radiation to her neck, which is a tough place to have that treatment because it left her skin burned and the tissue inside her mouth fragile and sore. Since she came into the hospital in May she hasn’t eaten or spoken. She gets fed through a tube in her stomach, and if she wants to say something she uses a whiteboard to write it down.

    The thing is, Ms. R has been very depressed. She sleeps almost all the time and doesn’t really attempt to communicate. When she was first on our unit I wasn’t assigned to her very often. But one thing led to another and a month in I became her primary nurse. For a couple of weeks I really didn’t know what she thought of me. We had established a routine of care, she was compliant, but I had no idea if she liked me or not.

    Then one day, after one of my days off, Ms. R slept in until 2 p.m. When she finally woke up she wrote down on her board, “You leave at 3?” When I said yes, she made kind of a frowny face. I smiled and said, “You’ve been sleeping all day! It’s almost time for me to go home!” Then she wrote, “I missed you yesterday.” That was the first time I got any clue as to how she felt about me.

    I had never seen any of Ms. R’s family, so I wasn’t sure if she had any support at home. But then one day her sister came up to surprise her. Apparently her family usually comes in the evening after I’m gone. From Ms. R’s sister I learned that she used to be a great cook. When I heard that, I paused, thought, then made a decision. I took a deep breath and just started rambling. I decided that since she couldn’t open up to me, or was unwilling to, I would talk to her about my life and see what happened. I told her about how I’m a newlywed and I’m just now learning how to cook because I never did much of it before. I told her about how I always eat Lean Cuisines for lunch because I think they’re good and they’re easy. I told her about how my parents were coming over for dinner the next night and I was going to be making them enchilada casserole and I was nervous.

    Her eyes lit up. She asked me (or rather, wrote) all about the ingredients and how I was going to prepare it. I blabbed for awhile, and then at the end of our conversation she finally wrote, “I miss cooking. And eating.” And she looked up at me with her big, round, sad eyes.

    Not many days later, Ms. R’s trach got plugged up deep inside and she couldn’t breathe. I’m so, so grateful that I was there when it happened because she was practically dying in front of me from suffocation. I couldn’t get anyone to come help, and I couldn’t suction it out myself. I had to call a code on her, which flooded the room with doctors and respiratory therapists and nurses. They brought her back, but we had to transfer her to the ICU. I sat down on her bed and told her that we were going to have to move her, but that it would only be temporary. Huge tears started rolling down her cheeks. She had been to the ICU before and she didn’t want to go again. I held her hand while she was stuck with needles and given breathing treatments and her bed was prepared for transport. I escorted her down to ICU and I promised her that she would come back to me soon.

    She did. She came back the next afternoon, and ever since then she’s been improving. The amazing thing is that her cancer is gone. Gone. She’s still recovering from her chemo and radiation, but the cancer is gone. I was with her when her doctor came in and said, “This is the lady who USED to have nasopharyngeal cancer.” After three months, he had a 10-day plan to get her home.

    Ever since then, almost every day when she sees me she’ll write, “Did you cook?” Most of the time I have to say no. I try to explain to her that I’m taking it slow, that right now once a week is about all I can handle. One day last week I got tired of disappointing her and I promised her I would cook the next day. The next day came around and David and I got busy and I didn’t get to start the meal until late. David asked me, “Are you sure you want to do this tonight?” I snapped, “You don’t understand. I can’t go back to work tomorrow and see the look on my patient’s face when I tell her I didn’t cook!”

    I was off yesterday, and all this morning I was stuck in a computer class. I returned to my unit in the afternoon to help out. When I went into Ms. R’s room to give her some medicine, she SMILED. I mean a real, big smile like I’ve never seen on her face. We talked about where I had been, her plan for going home, and of course, cooking. She planned out my whole meal for me, and that’s why on Saturday we’re going to be having spaghetti and meatballs, salad, and garlic bread.