Simplicity: Plain Old Biscuits

Simplicity is a word deeply twisted in the notion of nostalgia. We all feel that looking back, things were easier, less complicated. But it's only because we're looking at them through rosy hued glasses, to use a cliche. But at the end of the day, things were hard and not simple then, and nor are they now.

 I mean, when I see biscuits I think, oh, Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder, well mainly when she was still just Laura Ingalls. And man, those were not simple times. Come on. But even Laura wished for easier days. One story line that sticks out to me from the series was in the books after she married Almanzo, they move in and start a life together that is essentially a struggle bus. I think this was in the book The First Four Years, but basically their farm is a total fail, Almanzo gets sick, one of their babies dies, and there's a huge ass fire that burns everything, and the most important thing that Laura saves is this huge shiny plate they got as a wedding present. I really don't know why I remember that plate. But yea, those were hard years. And I'm pretty sure I thought they would have gotten a divorce at some point, but I guess divorce wasn't really a thing back then.

Lucky for me and my random impulses to bake biscuits, biscuits are 20000 times easier to make than farming or running a little house on the prairie. Probably because they needed all that time to well,  actually farm instead of whip up intricate macarons or something.

Recipe from Joy of Baking. As one would expect, best served hot. Also #nofilter #toolazytoiphotoediteven #suchapro.

Food Update: Yes I've Been Eating

In case anyone was wondering, yes I have been eating. Albeit, its been a scattered mix of being lazy and eating out at various places around New Haven. 

Anyways, without further ado, some pictures and rambling comments!

Chicken Arepas from Ay Arepas. My favorite food cart around these parts of town. I forgot HOW much I loved these until I too my first bite into that sweet, cheesy, corn goodness.

Peach Pancakes from The Pantry! I really really wish I could just still live in the fad that is The Pantry, but while these pancakes were good, they weren't trekking-1-mile-worthy-good. The peaches weren't ripe enough, and the batter was a little salty. All in all, tasted very homemade, which is good, but also, I could have done better homemade. Oh well, I'll just stick to Benedict's and cinnamon roll pancakes next time.


A dinner of homemade cheese sticks and a roasted sweet potato. Cheese is a weird thing when melted. It looks so alarmingly sweaty and wrinkly when heated into a gob. Well, a delicious gob.
Mozzarella sticks recipe from Skinny Taste.

Anddddd a mug cake that could actually pass as a mug cake!

Yellow Mug Cake recipe from the book Mug Cakes: 100 Speedy Microwave Treats to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth. This was in one of the first preview pages. Needless to say, I will be buying this book at some point in my life. If I was cool and a pro-blogger, this would be an excellent giveaway. But I swear, I will never ever ever ever force you to like a page on Facebook for me. Hell, I won't even make a Facebook page since thats my own personal peeve about the giveaways I never win. That doesn't mean you're off the hook for things like twitter or tumblr though. Bwahahahahaha.

Mac and Cheese Pizza: a la Parks and Rec

If Ron Swanson were here, he wouldn't even call my Mac and Cheese Pizza real food, let alone pizza. He'd probably call it rabbit-food, or no, Magikarp-food. Well, if he was into pokemon. Which he wouldn't be. Because, you know, real men hunt real animals.
Anyways, this pizza isn't about Ron Swanson. Maybe next time I'll make a bacon pizza with bacon-infused cheese with a bacon stuffed crust, but this pizza is for Leslie.

As a principle, I don't usually go for the carbs on carbs food combinations. Its typically way too bland for my taste. More specifically, mashed potato pizza is the worst. Even when its garlic mashed potato. Fortunately for mac and cheese, its cheesy goodness helps makes up for the carbs and carbs dilemma on this pizza. Oh, and the spinach and mushrooms I needed to get rid of anyways that I tossed in probably helped too.

Flattening out the pizza dough was probably the biggest struggle bus of the entire process. I bought premade dough, but it still needed to be rolled, or in this case stretched, tugged, yanked out into some semblance of a pizza shape. I then proceeded to not oil the foil enough and then slightly overcooked the pizza, resulting, in another struggle bus of cutting the pizza and peeling away the flow.

check out those poorly distributed breadcrumbs, yo.

Nonetheless, if I ever want carbs on carbs again, this is the way to do it. With maybe even more cheese next time. Man Leslie Knope is lucky to have Ben Wyatt.
Mac and Cheese recipe from SkinnyTaste (sorry, I couldn't bear the idea of whole-milk mac and cheese AND pizza).

Belgian Beer Collage Round Up

While in Belgium, one is obligated to drink beer. Prior to Belgium, I was really not a huge fan of beer. I could enjoy it in certain contexts, such as while out with my parents. But cheap college beer? Horrifying. While I still don't know what a trappist beer is exactly or the main difference between dark/amber/blond/pale or wheat or whatever (yea, so much for learning from those brewery tours), I do appreciate beer and enjoy it much more now. That being said, maybe I've become spoiled by Belgian beer and will hate any beer I try here.
Below is a sampling of the many beers I had over the course of my 9 weeks in Belgium.

This really makes me look like an alcoholic at first glance, but this was over the span of 9 weeks. There were a number of other beers that I had (probably another 5-10 kinds) that were not photographed since I was a bit haphazard about when I felt like being silly and taking my phone out to photograph at a bar. Also, Kilkenny is technically an irish beer, and Douglas is actually a cider, both of which I had at an irish pub while watching futbol in Belgium. There was some Swedish Cider I had while in London too, but I'm going for the just things I drank in Belgium theme here. Oh I'm going to miss the beer.

Goodbyes and Speculoos Rice Krispy Treats

Last Friday was my last day in Belgium. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how I enjoyed it. I certainly don't think it was a "life changing opportunity," but at the same time, I have zero regrets deciding to accept this internship. Sure, there were certainly facets that were not as great (paying for bathrooms, work being a little slow), but there were also lots of good things (biking, awesome PI, waffles). So, I guess my issue with being asked how I enjoyed Belgium and if I would go back is that I don't like thinking of good/bad as being summed together to net an over all +/-/0 experience, but rather as separate groups that cannot be combined. Perhaps this is simply the glamour of traveling abroad being wiped away. Because for all the cultural differences, on a day to day basis, life really isn't that different where you are. Maybe if I were older, with more responsibilities, staying for a longer period of time, I would have noticed myself adjusting more. However, I feel that I probably played the role of observer more during my time than actual lets pretend I'm Belgian.

As I mentioned previously before deviating into culture and my uncertainty about everything, my last day of work was last Friday. So to say goodbye, I decided to bring some present to my lab/office. Some interns who had previously worked there who left a few weeks earlier than me brought in pastries from a bakery. However, biking to work with a box of pastries sounds like quite a recipe for heart broken croissants and rock studded muffins.
So I had to think of something else that fit my critera:

• Something that wasn't quite so stereotypically "Belgian" (aka chocolate). 
• Something that had a slight American connotation.
• Something that was easily transportable via a backpack.
• If homemade, something that wouldn't require lots of ingredients.

For a while, I resigned myself to just buying chocolate since all I could think was "AGH, if only you could bake cupcakes or cookies! That would be so American!" Luckily while taking a break at work to peruse the internet, I was inspired to make rice-krispy treats. And then, since only in Belgium, I decided to make them speculoos flavored.

Not having tupperware, I had to wrap them in saran wrap. It felt very much soccer-mom (futbol-mom) esque to be giving people individually wrap krispies. They were a surprising hit among people, although many of my co-workers were very very confused what they were initially. I guess snap, crackle, pop aren't so big in Europe as they are in the US.
"Protocol" (as a post-doc in my lab calls it) from Rice Krispies website here. Just replace peanut butter with speculoos.

Belgian Yogurt + Oats: Mason Jar Style

This is awkward. I started this blog post about a week ago when I was actually in Belgium. But now have been back for officially 15 hours, so this is all a bit outdated. However, since I am very very lazy, and have quite a number of food related things to blog about from Belgium and in the future (baking!), we will just have to play a little bit of lets-time-travel-as-we-read-this. But, oh wait, isn't that what reading kinda does all the time? Takes you to new times and places?

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My lack of postings about all the wonderful foods of Belgium clearly mean that I am starving. Actually not. But its a little boring and not particularly aesthetically pleasing to post picture of my dinner everyday of a fried egg with sauteed vegetables. Just envision something foodgawker worthy.

One thing that I was initially very aversive about in Belgium was milk and yogurt. I can say I have never had milk while in Belgium. The predominant form of milk that they drink there is whole milk. Like, hard core full-fat milk. And, worst of all maybe, buttermilk. 2 of the 3 other people living in the same building as me that I know from school had unpleasant experiences involving accidentally buying buttermilk. And not for baking. For drinking. Straight.

However, that aside, I'm glad I decided to try belgium/european/whatever it is...?-style yogurt before I left. The yogurt is sold in milk cartons essentially and is way way way more liquidy than any yogurt I've seen in america. You can essentially eat it with cereal as milk. Which I did. Except by cereal I mean quick cooking oats. Its actually tastes pretty good to eat uncooked oats. Particularly the quick cooking ones tend to absorb liquids pretty fast anyways, so you get some fun textures while eating.

Furthermore, Belgium likes to sell everything in glass jars (yet fails to give you recycling bags for glass when they have ones for 1-trash 2-plastic bottles and 3-compost), so check out me being hipster with my mason jar!

Patriotism Abroad: No Blueberries Required

I celebrated 4th of July on the 3rd of July. Some of the interns working with a racecar team here had to  leave for a competition today, so we celebrated yesterday instead. Being kinda faux-martha stewart-esque, I felt it necessary that I bring something, and something patriotic. However some issues:

• Had to be portable in a bag because you just can't bike while balancing a tray of red, white, and blue fruit tarts.
• Had to not involve fruit. Because I'm a poor student intern in Belgium, and I have yet to see blueberries here.
• Couldn't be baked. Because I have no baking equipment here.

Fortuitously, I had popcorn. And lots of chocolate. And, as you may be able to deduce, popcorn is something that is definitely bike friendly for transportation.

White chocolate, mm popcorn for America's birthday. One of the awesome things Belgium has are crispy mm's. While they are no longer sold in the US, chocolate with crispies is generally pretty popular here I think, so this is probably why they still sell these mms here. (Sadly, they don't sell my all time favorite pretzel mm's though).

What was mildly annoying was the scant ratio of blue and red mms vs. other colors, as well as the unequal ratio of blue mms vs. red mms. Notice how there are at least 1/3 more blue than reds here?

Popcorn recipe adapted from Kleinworthco. Popcorn doesn't really need a recipe persay, but I still like to have one to reference so I don't accidentally use like, a cup of oil to pop a half cup of popcorn.