Five Minute Nachos

I got a little too wrapped up in My Little Pony this afternoon and forgot to make dinner for myself. Lunch had already been a trying affair as I had a coupon for a free bagel/cream cheese at Breugger's but they wouldn't take an e-coupon. So I ended up driving to two different libraries trying to print the coupon and once I had the tasty toasted bagel in my hands I was so hungry that it just didn't cut it.

So I knew I had to have dinner. I took 5 minutes (if that) and created...

FIVE MINUTE NACHOS
You will need
Thawed chicken cutlet
onion
oil
seasoning
chips
cheese
salsa

I chopped up some onion and the chicken and threw them in a pan with a little cooking oil and fajita seasoning I had on hand. While those cooked I cracked some chips down into travel size in a bowl and covered them in cheese. Once the chicken looked done I poured the grilled bits on top and doused with salsa and Tabasco sauce.

Make sure the chicken is completely cooked or you will bite in and cry. Finding raw chicken in your mouth by accident is not fun.
The cheese wasn't melted since I wanted to reheat it fresh at work. Garnished with optional green onion.


NACHOS IN SECONDS. Taking the chip and cheese combo to the next level.

Poor Man's Lo Mein

So, the unthinkable happened today. We ran out of rice. No Asian person's kitchen should ever be rice-less but today it happened. So I improvised.

Poor Man's Lo Mein


Spaghetti noodles
Chicken
Cooking oil
Soy sauce
Brown sugar
onion
green onion
baby corn
garlic
ginger
ROOSTER SAUCE

Note: The baby corn and ginger are optional but they add a good flavor. Baby corn is around $1 for a can and you can throw some tin foil over the top of the can and keep it in the fridge. It'll last you a few good meals. It can typically be found in the section of your grocery store marked ETHNIC.

Side Note: I always feel awkward shopping in the Asian Ethnic section of the grocery store. I'm not sure why this is. I feel like everyone is expecting me to only buy fish heads and weird cabbage-y shit and when I check out I will pronounce my 'l's as 'r's.

Boil the noodles in some water. If you don't know how to do this you should stop. Put down the noodles. And go away from the kitchen. You do not belong there.

Get all of your mix-ins ready. Chop the onion, green onion, baby corn, and garlic and throw it in a pan with a little oil. Once the onions start to get translucent (translation: smells delicious and looks clear) you are ready for the chicken step.


You will find yourself with an incomplete rainbow. Many of the most delicious foods, you will find, are brown. Or white. Or colorless. Most green things are bad for you and taste like ass.
Start cooking up the chicken bits with the veggies and, once the noodles are done throw them right into the pan (sans water). Liberally douse with soy sauce and cook with about a tablespoon of brown sugar. I sprinkled in a little ginger but that's not necessary. Almost no one keeps that shit around the house. If you do use ginger remember that a little bit goes a long way. Use more than a sprinkle and your whole dish will taste like ginger which is gross.


FINAL STEP: POUR SOME ROOSTER SAUCE ON THE BITCH.

SOMETIMES BEING POOR CAN BE AWESOME.

My Little Pony: Modifying Twilight Sparkle

...or how I made Twilight Sparkle look like Twilight Sparkle. This is not so much a How-To guide (I didn't record my plight very well) as it is a little photo journal into the heart of what the fuck I did last night instead of working on my resume.

I decided, after staring at my lovely pony toy, that it bothered me that she looked nothing like the character. Hasbro has us by the balls, shoving sweet, sugary ponies down our throats but their toys are pretty lacking in quality. We've got ponies that are the wrong color, with the wrong hair, with the wrong faces and, honestly, we're all old enough to know that they look weird. If I were 5 I would just say, "pony!", put that shit in my mouth and call it a day.

So I got my shit together and started hacking.
MY LITTLE FIRST PONY MOD



Above you'll find Twilight Sparkle. $5.99 at any given supermart with a toy section. She's slightly darker purple than the show but I didn't have paint on me and I wasn't about to go buy some. This was a practice mod, I didn't want to throw down much money in case things went awry.

You'll see I have:
Scissors
Pack of sewing needles
Tweezers
Crafting knife

Everyone I live with plays Warhammer so I just had to run up to the crafting table and yoink a few things. If you do any sorts of crafts you'll be able to locate these items or pick them up cheap.


Pictured: MY HERO
Above is Citadel super glue. This was the most important thing: it allowed me to restyle the pony's hair right at the base without any visible residue. The top is actually a little brush which was aweeeesome.


The horror...the horror....
The first thing I did was use all my might to rip the pony's head off. This was fucking hard as balls. Mine still had a little bit of the peg melted to the body so I ended up pulling and cutting and ripping it's head off. My boyfriend walked in on me with a pony's head in my mouth while I pulled violently on the other end. Don't let people see you doing this. It will make them assume horrible things.

But once the head was off I used the crafting knife to cut the base of the peg out of the body. So you've got the above three parts.


With the tweezers I grabbed the tail through the inside of the body and pulled it towards the head. The tail was too long and I didn't want to start cutting unless it was completely necessary. I then used super glue to shape it but got a little too crazy and the glue ended up sticking everywhere and making the whole tail crunchy. I fixed this later.


I didn't take many pictures of it but the pony's bangs were in two straight lines, one pink and then one purple. The pony in the show has blunt purple bangs with a pink and different purple streak in the middle. So I tied some purple thread around the pink hair to pull it towards the middle, threaded it on a needle and pulled it through the inside of the head where I tied it. This kept the pink in one streak like you see here.

I then pushed the hair down into bangs and painted super glue over the roots to hold it in that position. The glue dries super fast. If you do this make sure everything is exactly where you want it before you throw glue down.


I glued her head back on (I had destroyed the peg a little with all my pulling and ripping) and then started working on her mane. The mane of the Hasbro toy is fucking huge and unnecessary. I clipped it down and glued it in place at the roots again so it went over the shoulder.

Now, to fix my original tail fuck up I took the extra mane-hair and super glued it over where the tail was mangled and crunchy. This made it look a little fuller and covered most of my mistake.



And there you have it, everypony. How I made my Twilight Sparkle toy a little more show-accurate. I can bear to look at her now! I learned a lot from just grabbing the tools and hacking in: you can see her tail is a little off so I tied a bitty bow on the end. I think that turned out very cute.

Her bangs were hard to style. The fact that her horn peaks through the bangs was tough since it tends to look a little tard-tastic when there's a big part in the middle.

Don't settle for less, get those knives out, Bronies, and make your toy the pony of your dreams. If you fuck it up you can always get another for $5.

Non-Food Related Intermission

I found this today. I wanted to consolidate my blogs so I present you with my first non-food related post.
FROM: 12/11/2010

Time:7:07pm
Did I Get Out of Bed?: I did. I am actually at work.
Did I Eat Microwave Food?: Kraft Mac and Cheese. Ah, that blue box. Soothes my soul.

I had yesterday off. Fridays are great days, especially if you don't have to work at all. Therefore, it becomes more of a Saturday. But better, since you still have Saturday to come. It's like your birthday on the day before Christmas but you still get all the presents without people buying you one to trick you.

What did I do with my time? I didn't sleep in. No, for the first time in a long time I woke up at the crack of 10 in the morning and loaded up my laptop (the magical bed computer) to play Cracktown (Cityville).

Cracktown is the newest offering from the gaming company/drug giant Zynga. They are the masterminds behind such home wreckers as Farmville, Frontierville, Cafe' World, and a bevvy of other random nouns with -ville tacked on the back.

 Pictured at left: These horses wait quietly in their rows, waiting for the swift kiss of glue factory death that will never come. I will just harvest their hair, season after season, and leave them there for the harsh elements to take care of. My nursery barn will provide me with strong, young stock when the old ones can no longer stand. I have countless Farmville 'friends' who will gift the young to me in exchange for magical boxes and drugs.

Farmville lets you sit around and click things for as long as you want. There is no "energy bar", an evil that was provided in later games, so you can basically just move shit around and buy pixellated items for real money. Then, as the season changes, your pixel shit will go out of fashion and you will be forced to toil over the crop once again to buy the newest "Birthday Thanksgiving Themed Cowpie".


 Here, you can see the fruits of the past 24 hours. I have been building and supplying and merchandising my little 10x10 square. I have a small subruban area where all of the houses and identical and provide me with parcels of rent. I have a Headquarters for my Bakery empire (soon I will be adding my video game tower) and I have a small square where the people of my city can enjoy themselves and buy more things.

How did I build my shit so fast? Easy. Tawiwanese girls.

I went to the Cityville fan page where everyone was shouting 'pleez add me! neighbor neighbor!', hoping that we could perhaps be Cityville friends and I will send tour buses to their floundering cities and provide them with much needed commerce. I shuffled through them until I saw one person with a small ASCII banner that said 'Please Add Me!' It was simple. It was effective. I friended them and they immediately sent me rich, pure energy. But that wasn't all.

Her friends added me. One by one, I was friended by small Taiwanese girls who play Zynga games like it's their goddamn job. They set up businesses in my town and they sent me higher level items. They harvested my crops and gifted me with wonderful key items. My city grew and grew until it could no longer be contained by the city's limits. I needed to expand.


 Pictured at left: sweet sweet commerce.


I'm babysitting my city in the other window right now. I'm actually only making this blog post while I wait for my crops to grow. I sometimes log in just to gaze upon my shining city on a hill. This is what Lex Luthor must feel like every goddamn day


Here are a list of things I put on the back burner to play Cityville:
Eat
Sleep
Poop
Grocery shopping
Christmas present shopping
Play the real games I purchased
Drink water
Go out
Hang out with friends
Gas up my car
Work

The message in all this? Don't play Facebook games. They destroy lives. And that, boys and girls, is today's 'How Not to Be a Fuck Up'.

KFC Famous Bowl

Today was a stressful day. I was turned down by my credit union, informed that I was in collections for a cable bill that flew under the radar from two years ago, drove around on errands for almost four hours, spent almost my whole paycheck on student loans, and my car is acting up. I had to do something for myself. So first, I bought a pony.


HER NAME IS TWILIGHT SPARKLE. FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC, GUYS.
And then I made this chicken bowl.

KFC Famous bowl
3 potatoes
a handful of shredded cheese
canned mini corn
1/2 onion or shallot
chicken
flour
garlic
butter
cooking oil

Microwave the potatoes. Make sure to cut slits in them or they will explode and you'll be too angry to make the rest of your famous bowl.

In a pan fry up the onion and mini corn. Chop them up as small as you like but they mix in with the potatoes best as tiny chunks. Set those aside.

Now, fill the pan around halfway full with with cooking oil. Put that on high heat and, while you're waiting, chop the chicken up into bite sized pieces. Throw those in a bag and toss with a big handful of flour and some garlic (dry works well for this). THROW THEM IN THE OIL.

Fry them up until they turn goldeny-brown. Then put lay them out on some paper towels to drain off the extra oil. Don't pour that oil down your sink. You think you can when no one is looking but plumbing problems actually come back to haunt you. Just last week I wiped my butt with paper towel and the toilet stayed clogged for two weeks until the repair man came. It was awful. Don't do things your mother says not to, even if you are alone. You will cry and be sorry.

Once the taters have been microwaved and left to cool you can either mash them with the skins on or peel it off. I think the skin is gross and weird so my taters are typically naked. Mash those with a fork and butter. If you begin to get uncomfortable with the level of butter and oil used in this recipe spray them with Pam.

Throw the onions/corn on top of the potatoes, then the chicken and top with the cheese blend. I used a shredded four cheese blend but you can use anything you want. No need to whip out the Gruyere or bleu cheese. This is chunks of fried chicken, guys.


It will look something like this. I need to get a better camera. My cell phone is not cutting it.
Now, enjoy this in front of people so you can tell them you made a famous bowl yourself. They will think you crazy.

TIPZ:
-Make sure the chicken is cooked in the middle. Smaller chunks cut the cooking time down and you can be more comfortable eating it without finding chewy pink parts.
-Mash the potatoes in the bowl you're going to eat it from.
-You can try tossing the chicken with other spices but a couple shakes of the dried minced garlic were great for me. One teaspoon of dried garlic is equal to the taste of biting into an entire bulb.

Hawaiian Chicken and Coconut Rice

This recipe was originally 'Hawaiian Grilled Chicken' but then it rained.

Haiwaiian Made-In-a-Pan Chicken and Coconut Rice
2 cans coconut milk
1 cup soy sauce
1 cup water
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon garlic
1/4 cup chopped white onion
1 handful green onion
1/4 tsp cooking oil
3 large chicken breasts
motherfucking rice

The first thing you're going to want to do is un-can the coconut milk. For some reason it did not smell like sweet and fragrant coconuts. It smelled sort of like cat-butt. The solids and the coconut water will doubtlessly be separated so scoop that shit out into a bowl and whisk it around until it's like a runny paste.

Combine everything into a big mixing bowl except you'll only want to use half a can of coconut milk and the rice is for the side so don't throw that in there. Mix it, as per bowl instructions.

At this point I halved the chicken breasts for faster cooking and marinating. I threw them in the mixing bowl with the marinade, covered, and left it in the fridge while I went and picked up The Goonies 25th Anniversary Box at Best Buy with my boyfriend. It came with a board game. It was cool.

Now, once a few hours have passed you'll want to heat up a frying pan with a little butter and throw the marinated chicken on there. Here you will cook them on medium heat for forever.

In a saucepan bring 2 cups white rice to a boil in a mixture of 2 cups water and 2 cups coconut milk. Cover and reduce heat. Keep opening it and mixing it around or the coconut may burn to the bottom and then you might as well throw the pan away because no one wants to clean that.

Every now and then between chapters in your book turn the chicken over. After about ten minutes I covered them and let them simmer for a few minutes on each side. You'll know when they're getting done because the marinade sticking to the chicken will have reduced and the sticky, delicious brown sugar will be searing to the sides of the chicken.

Pull the chicken out, put it on a plate, and throw in the rice. Garnish if you'd like. This is what I did:


I am awesome and so can you.
I put the still warm rice into a small drinking glass. It formed to it immediately and then slid out of the glass in that shape. I topped it with a few fried onions and some fresh green onion. I then drizzled soy sauce onto the rice and circled the plate with drips of Rooster Sauce.

TIPZ:
-make a lot of rice since you can refrigerate it and make COCONUT FRIED RICE.

Indian Spiced Chickpeas and Light Butter Chicken

My cooking and baking has become kind of sporadic. Emiry, The Baron, and I decided to make ourselves an Indian feast; Emiry had a bag full of rhubarb so I decided to work outside of the "pie" box and make some Indian food out of it. Here is what happened.

I apologize but this recipe requires you to go shopping. For spices and shit. I know, I know, I said I wouldn't pull this shit but I did and it was delicious.

Indian Spiced Chickpeas
Olive oil
A handful of whole mustard seeds
A thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger
3 cloves garlic
1 medium red onion, chopped
1 cup canned chickpeas
3 1/2 cups vegetable broth
2 heaping handfuls of chopped rhubarb (...as scientific as I got)
6 cups spinach leaves

I omitted both cilantro and raisins from this recipe since those are disgusting. I'm not even going to tell you how to add them.

Put about a tablespoon of olive oil in a pan and throw in the mustard seeds. Cover that shit because they're going to start popping like popcorn. Wait a few minutes and once the popping slows down take it off heat and throw in the minced garlic (you minced that shit, right?) and the ginger which is easiest to just shave in with a potato peeler. It has the weird, gross little body that you can mostly shave right off. Put all the spices aside in a bowl to cool off.

Now, start browning the onion in some more oil. Wait until they smell amazing. We are very scientific here at Kitchen Haeyoon. Now, throw in 3 cups broth and the cup of chickpeas. Leave it for about ten minutes, go play some Spider Solitaire or something. Don't be all up in its grill, stirring and fucking with it.

Once the chickpeas have had time to get a little softer throw in another 1/2 cup broth and then rhubarb and spinach. Let it simmer on low heat. Mix in the spices from before and you're done.


Light Butter Chicken
I like to take recipes and make them retarded and easy. I made a double batch of this and added two potatoes instead of more chicken. It was pretty alright. They weren't super fresh so they tasted sort of dehydrated but such is life.

Make sure the yoghurt you buy is the runny, plain kind. Like Greek yoghurt. We bought one that came in a milk-like bottle. You will want this because you are using it instead of a thousand leagues of butter.

2 chicken breasts
1 thumb-size piece of fresh ginger
2 red onions
2 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp chili pepper flakes
1 tbsp garam masala
1/2 cup yoghurt
1 cup water
1 tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper
Oil

This shit is so easy. Mince up and saute' the onion. Throw the spices down on top of that (brown sugar, turmeric, chili pepper, pepper, salt, and garam masala.) Mix it all up until it looks delicious. Throw the chicken in and cook it until it's white on all sides. Add the yoghurt and stir. Add the water and let it simmer, covered, until it looks delicious. At least 10 minutes.

Make some rice while you're at it.


Ding, motherfucker!

Fuck Cake

I have a new food partner. My buddy, Gwyneth, is getting married in the fall and she wanted a custom cake. All the places she shopped ideas around to were very, very expensive so we thought we'd experiment with making fondant sculptures on our own.

It was a horrible failure. The FailBoat came in to the station and capsized, killing thousands of men. Here is the tragic story.

Fondant
2 lbs (or one bag) powdered sugar
1/4 cup cold water
1 tablespoon unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 tsp. almond extract
GEL food coloring
1 can CRISCO

Take that cold water and mix in the gelatin. Cub Foods was sold out and Gwyneth and I were starting to get desperate. We almost bought Jello. Don't do this. Keep searching for fucking god's-honest gelatin or you will be ever so sorry. Pop the water/gelatin in the microwave for ten seconds. Pull it out and mix it up good.

Add the almond extract and the light corn syrup. Sift out the sugar into a bowl (or, if you are me, dump it into a dirty cake pan). Pour the wibbly-wobbly stuff into the center of the sugar and then coat your hands in Crisco. Mix it together like you would bread dough until you have...


A terrifying ball
This is right. This is good. You now have the beginnings of fondant. Now you're going to want to separate it all out into however many colors you'd like. Use the GEL colors as the drippy ones will make your fondant loose and water it down. Now, this is the part where Gwyneth and I failed.

While we were mixing the gel colors into the fondant we kept putting Crisco on our hands. This was our biggest mistake. The Crisco mixed in and made the fondant incredibly squishy and shiny. We were technically massaging fat into the ball of frosting for over an hour. This made it impossible to work with and everything we made was deformed and fell over.

We very careful about how much you work the fondant. Gwyneth and I, trying to save the project, ended up making tiny and retarded things and then rolling the rest of the colored fondant out and laying it over our Funfetti cake. This is what happened.


Do you see? Look with your eyes and gaze upon the horror
Because we overworked the fondant with Crisco everything became impossible. It was pretty tasty but nothing you would want on your wedding day unless you are John Waters or criminally insane. The fondant recipe was great, before we worked in color it came out beautiful and perfect, so we'll keep you updated on what things come to pass as the wedding inches closer.

Fried Rice!

Hey guys. I know it's been a long time. But I'm coming back and I've got a recipe for you. I know fried rice isn't actually very Asian but I am an Asian person and I love this shit. It's one of those recipes that you can intuitively make from what you think is usually in fried rice. Or maybe that's just the yellow in me talking.

Now, I hate to do this to you but this recipe is going to take about a day's worth of forethought. I hate it when recipes make me wait. I want to make fried rice right the fuck now. And you can. But it's way more delicious if you cook the white rice a day beforehand. If it's been sitting in the fridge and it's cold it'll fry up really nicely. Otherwise it's mush-city for your food.

Haeyoon's Totally Asian Fried Rice
I originally made a fuck ton of this stuff and you can, too! Feel free to double the rice amount. I'd suggest cooking it in smaller batches for when you actually want to eat it. The rice will keep as long as it's covered and you can throw it in a pan and fry it up fresh and it'll be tastier that way.

1 cup cold white rice
Cooking oil
1 large yellow onion
2 cloves garlic
1 green onion
2 eggs
1 boneless chicken cutlet
soy sauce
1 Tbsp. butter
Rooster sauce if you're AWESOME

Cut the onion up in to small bits and mince the garlic. Start cooking these up in a little cooking oil on high heat. Cut the chicken into fucking small pieces. If you make cubes it'll be lame fried rice with random chunks of chicken in it. You want that shit to taste like one homogenous dish. Cut them very tiny indeed.

Mince up the green onion and throw that and the chicken into the frying pan. Cook it until the chicken looks white on all sides. Then, throw in the eggs and cook them until they are nice, solid, scrambled eggs.

Throw the butter in and let it melt. I like to throw a dash of turmeric in to make my rice all pretty and yellow but, again, that might be the slanty-eye in me. Now, throw your rice in and drizzle a really generous amount of soy sauce over the top.

Mix it up and just sort of move all the ingredients around for about ten minutes. I also throw in rooster sauce...


YES YES YES YES YES
Once it looks good and brown (or yellow if you got your turmeric on) take it off heat and let it cool a bit. This is the sort of thing where cooking it longer can only make it more delicious. If you get it crispy on the bottom then you're amazing.


Fuck yes delicious rice. Like this but without the carrots. You can add carrots but that makes you suck.
Like I said, it's a good idea to make a big batch of rice (2 cups of dry rice will make about 4 cups of cooked rice). Throw it in the fridge and cover it. You can take chunks out at a time and cook up fresh fried rice whenever you feel like it.

Delicious add ins to this recipe are:

-Peas. Not the frozen kind, homeboy. The fresh or the canned will do.
-Mushrooms. I think Chinese mushrooms are fucking weird so I always roll with button.
-Carrots. These are for losers.
-Ginger. Shave a little fresh ginger on and you're a baller. I didn't include it in the above recipe because WHO JUST HAS FRESH GINGER FLOATING AROUND.
-Pork or shrimp.
-Broccoli florets. I like to trim them down and steam them first since crunchy and healthy things are bad for you.

NOTE: Make sure you fry everything up separately. This is easy with a large pan. Keep the egg separate from the veggies until it's cooked and, once all the veggies look good, throw the rice in. If you throw everything together uncooked it will be a blobbery mess.

ALSO NOTE: Experiment with different kinds of soy sauce. Kikkoman's was good but I actually prefer La Choy which is the cheapest brand around. It's got more salt in it but it gives the rice that proper brown coloring fried rice should be. Also, it tastes like me childhood down by the hobo camps.

This was so easy I almost cried. If you fuck this up then you can probably stop cooking forever.