The Sweatshop of Love Blog

PT and I were feeling pretty Asian-centric this weekend, what with all the cold Asian noodles we were eating (shit I seriously almost wrote DEVOURING! Damn you, Sex and Bacon!) and the… ok so the noodles were the only Asian part of our weekend, but as you know food plays a huge roll in our lives so I guess Asian felt bigger.

Aloe Drink - Looks Cooler in... Korean?

We rolled over to Joong Boo Market Sunday on Kimball to take a look around. Joong Boo Market is packed full of Asians, hipsters, and food labeled only in Asian languages. We did our best, picking out a huge bag of bean sprouts, 16 oz of button mushrooms, snap peas, two different kinds of noodles, three different oils and sauces including a bottle of sesame oil, and a bag of the same almond cookies you can get at Chinese restaurants!

We grabbed this bottle of weird aloe vera drink that I’ve tried before and really loved but have only ever seen for $4. $1.75 at Joong Boo! And just as delicious as I remember. Very refreshing on a warm day.

I was very annoyed at the end of this trip. Joong Boo is TINY and there are no baskets, you have to use a cart. All the Asians were looking in our cart and judging our choices. One woman even pointed in our cart to the mushrooms, maybe? and asked if we knew how to cook them, laughing. Back off, bitch! Can’t you just pretend we don’t exist like white people do? You can run into someone at Jewel with your cart and they still won’t make eye contact with you. America!

Kimchi

PT also picked up some kimchi (or gimchi, kimchee, or kim chee). I had the tiniest nibble because it is so pretty! But it’s seriously spicy.

All that? $20.45. I’ll be annoyed for all that savings. That would have been at least $40 at jewel, and where else can you find those almond cookies?!

Looks Can be Deceiving

Needless to say, PT and I were really excited to get home and cook up another batch of cold Asian noodles using our new sauces and veggies. We cracked open the cookies and the aloe vera while we chopped vegetables, mixed up the dressing (with the new sesame oil!), and cooked up our buckwheat noodles. Just like whole wheat noodles, right? … right?

NO. There were too many variables to pinpoint the problem, but this meal had the funkiest, mustiest smell and taste! I’m thinking it was the noodles (only like $2.50 so I’m not too upset about it), and PT thinks we got a weird kind of bean sprout, or they were bad (only $1 so I’m not too upset about that, either). You couldn’t even taste the dressing with the new oil in it! The musty taste took over everything.

PB & J on Stupid Bread

After picking out the vegetables we were still hungry, so we supplemented dinner with more almond cookies and PB & J on my stupid bread.

Simple Oat Bowl

It was a crushing blow. We were trying to remember a failure like that and couldn’t! Which I guess is a pretty amazing average, but it still hurt. Yesterday I kept it simple, a little gun shy! I had oat bowls with fresh Michigan strawberries I picked up at the Logan Square Farmers Market and stupid bread with peanut butter on it.

Huge Amazing (and Simple) Salad

I mixed up this salad last night for dinner. Snap peas, tomato, asparagus (from the farmers market!) hard boiled egg, mushrooms, romaine, and cucumber with thousand island free.

No cooking, just delicious. A place I’ll be for the next few days.

Flat McFlat Flat

I got cocky. Again. This always happens! PT and I ate that entire no-knead loaf of bread in about 36 hours, so I thought I would just throw together another loaf! I knew something was wrong right away, and then, of course, out came this hard, flat pizza crust like loaf. It was very disappointing, considering how amazed I was at the outcome of the last loaf, and how amazingly delicious it was with peanut butter.

Egg Salad with I'm Stupid Bread

Somehow PT cut this loaf and made sandwich-like slices out of it. It was very dense but crisp and a nice accompaniment to egg salad. We also roasted up some carrots with bbq seasoning and those made a nice accompaniment to the egg salad sandwich, so amazingly it all worked out. Another loaf, however, is rising it’s designated 18 hours as I write, and I kicked everyone out of the kitchen so I could count everything correctly. We will see what happens.

Asian Noodles

I found this food blog I’m liking called Keep It Simple Foods. These two women write it and its cute and all about eating simply, which I like. Friday they had a post about Asian noodles, and how simple they are to make.

Friday was the first hot day Chicago has seen this year and I thought some cold Asian noodles would be a great dinner choice! So I cooked up some Chinese noodles, stir-fried up some broccoli, carrots, and the last of the farmers market mushrooms, and made the Asian dressing she recommended. This dish turned out so well! PT and I both loved it so much that we made it again for lunch Saturday.

Asian Noodles, Part Two

We replaced the mushrooms with Vidalia onion for lunch Asian noodles. See all those sesame seeds? It is a great summer meal!

Cinnamon Roasted Almonds!

Yesterday we made our way to the Belmont Arts and Music Festival, where we sampled some amazing cinnamon roasted almonds, which might be my favorite outdoor food. I smell that sweet nutty smell and I just can’t say no! I want some sweet almonds. And these didn’t let me down! PT and I sat in the shade and enjoyed every last one. Unfortunately there was some terrible music playing nearby and I almost got run over by a couple strollers, but I don’t harbor ill will for the nuts. To get these you usually have to deal with strollers and bad cover bands and lots of sweaty people.

Me Enjoying Some Fresh Lemonade

We washed our sweet nuts down with lemonade, the perfect drink on a hot day. Bud would have you think it is Bud Light Lime, but we were sitting right across from the alcohol stand where you could get regular Bud and Bud Light for $5 and Bud Light Lime for $6, which would be enough for me to get the Bud Light (Actually I would just get another bag of almonds! You know me.), but douchebro after douchebro bought the Bud Light Lime! It just can’t be good.

After the fest we biked to the lake, where everyone in Chicago was.

North Avenue Beach

Float+Baseball=Heaven

It was a nice bike ride, but there were just too many people laying around, running and biking on the trail, walking around with huge coolers, that we didn’t stay long. And my Snow White skin can only take so many hours in the hot sun. We biked home and relaxed with some baseball and root beer floats.

I started on my Summer Sweater straps and am working through them. 35 is a lot of inches! And K1P1 is much less fun than the diamond lace pattern I was knitting in my sleep I loved so much. I’m going to have to think up a way to use that pattern again soon! I miss it already.

After First Bake

My no-knead bread was for sure not more than double its size when I dumped it in the hot cast-iron skillet. But one thing I’ve learned from doing things I have never done before, both in knitting and in cooking, is to stick to the recipe/pattern unless common sense tells you to cease and desist. Since I really had no idea what to expect from this recipe, and it was costing me nothing but goopy hands and 68 cents, I stuck with it.

‘Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes.’ I was very happy to cover it so I didn’t have to look at it anymore. I set the timer and went to my desk. Just before the bell rang, I started to smell delicious bread and I actually thought, ‘Oh, where is that smell coming from?’ Um, my kitchen! That smell had to be a good sign. I pulled the pot out and took a peak. It looked kinda like bread, and it smelled like bread, so it might be bread! And I might not be seriously handicapped.

‘Then remove lid and bake another 15-30 minutes until golden brown.’

Golden Brown!

I’d call that golden brown! Look at that beautiful bread! It looks like bread! And my apartment was filled with amazing bread smell. I still can’t get over how that goopy mess turned into this.

Beautiful Bread Cooling

I mean, seriously. LOOK AT THAT! I’m in awe of it. This morning we had toast, just because we could.

My Peanut Butter Toast, PT's Raspberry Preserves Toast

The inside is holey and moist and amazing, the crust is hard and chewey. I want to use it as a pillow. No, I want to hollow it out like a bread bowl, shrink myself, and use it as a bed.

Peanut Butter and Jelly Lunch

I toasted some of the bread and made the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever, with some chips, two of the cookies I baked up Sunday, and Sex and Bacon, our book club book.

I’m fighting with Sex and Bacon. I want to like it, there are parts of it that are funny and clever and interesting, but for every paragraph I think is well written and fun, there are three that are overly graphic just for the sake of being overly graphic, to the point of it becoming off-putting. I’m a prude, a bible prude by proximity and not by faith, I know this. I’m not into asses. I’m not into sex with girls. I was a virgin till 19 and I’ve only had sex with three people. I know who I am and I’m more than ok with it. I’m also more than ok with people who love rim jobs and having sex with animals and cucumbers. But seriously, every page. Every chapter. Every paragraph has either graphic sex or graphic meat eating. I don’t mind meat eating, either! Yeah, I’m a vegetarian but I read this hamburger blog and love it! I don’t mind when people eat meat around me, I even cook it for them on occasion. But all the meat juices and the devouring of whale and bacon grease! It is just too much.

BREAD!

I wonder if people get sick of me talking about how much I love bread on this blog. And pasta. And oats. And vegetables. Like, are there people out there reading this thinking, ‘Yeah, she is kinda funny but all those carbs? SO off-putting. Makes me nauseous.’

As I stare at that peanut butter and jelly sandwich on that amazing crusty bread it took 24 hours to bake! Shit. I mean. Shit. I’m saying they don’t know what they are missing the same way the bacon lady is saying I don’t know what I’m missing in every chapter. Every. Chapter. Over and over.

But isn’t it easier to love bread? It can’t hurt you. You can’t get poisoned from it, you don’t have to kill anything to eat it. It costs practically nothing. It comes in a million different variations! It can be sweet or savory or plain or spicy.

Well, bread, I’ll always love you.

Last night I threw together an old stand by.

Potato Bowl

I thought I only had 20 minutes to throw something together before my class last night, so I picked out a big potato, baked it in the microwave, threw some cheddar, salsa, broccoli, and mushrooms on it, and it was delicious. Sometimes a microwaved potato is all you need.

If only I knew that both my students last night would cancel! I would have baked that potato up right.

PT's Dinner

PT got home and cooked himself up this amazing pasta dinner. He sauteed up some mushrooms, olives, garlic, and sun dried tomatoes in olive oil and threw it on some whole wheat pasta, finishing it with some fresh parmesan. He gave me a bite, and I’m sure I would have liked it but for my intense dislike of olives. In any case, the boy’s dinner beat the crap out of mine.

Pasta Salad Lunch

To make myself feel better about my culinary skills, this morning I got up early and made a pasta salad for our lunches. I packed mine so I could eat lunch before going to the gym, something I wanted to do right from work. Delicious!

This was the first time I’ve packed a lunch, eaten it at work, and gone straight to the gym when I got off work. I like it! That way I don’t go home and get distracted. I pack my clothes, my lunch, and I’m off! I’ll be doing this more often.

Mark Bittman had a blog recently about saving money by cooking at home. You know how much I love saving money by cooking delicious food at home, so I was all about this article. Unfortunately I already do everything suggested (eat less meat, cook more beans, grains, cook in bulk, buy on sale, etc), but I did want to try this no-knead bread recipe that apparently costs 68 cents to bake and was super easy.

1. In a large bowl combine 3 cups flour, 1/4 tsp yeast, and 1 1/4 tsp of salt. Add 1 5/8 cups of water and stir up until blended, it will be sticky. Let rise 18 hours.

Post Rise

I let it rise like 20 hours. The recipe says, ‘dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles’. Totally done, right?

‘Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.’

Done. Easy.

‘Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel with flour’ put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours.’

Um?

Could I have messed this up? I used a ton of flour when it says to use ‘just enough’, and look at my hand! Right now I’m an hour and 18 minutes into the let rise for 2 hours part. Though, the recipe says, ‘when it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.’ Unless this puppy is going to more than double its size in the next 42 minutes, I fucked up a recipe Mark Bittman made a point to say: ‘The method is surprisingly simple — I think a 4-year-old could master it — and the results are fantastic.’

So I’m not quite saying I should have kidnapped a 4 year old to make this bread for me, but I have some low expectations. What the hell did I do?

My only bit of solace comes in the last instruction: it may look like a mess, but that is ok. It sure as hell looks like a mess alright. This is God telling me to stop being so cocky about my cookies and muffins.

‘You think you’re Martha Stewert?’ I hear him scoff as I look down at my soggy, sticky dough. Who knew God scoffed?