trying new things

It's been a great week (or couple of weeks) for trying new things, running and otherwise. This week was my birthday, as I'm pretty sure everyone who actually reads this knows, and I decided to celebrate with a few different new things.

First and probably least exciting of all, I decided to make homemade black bean burgers on Wednesday. Making homemade veggie burgers is NOT difficult, but over the last few years I've still been buying them at the store when I was in the mood for them. I'll tell you right now, those days are over. I used a recipe I found at Daily Garnish, a fantastic blog by a vegetarian chef/marathoner. I looked through other recipes on the site, and everything looks fantastic. If the black bean burgers were any indication, this chick is a genius.

They were SO DELICIOUS. Cinnamon, coriander, chili powder, cumin, onion powder... I can't even describe them. The recipe made 6, so I froze 4 and can't wait to eat them. In case you want to try them, here's the recipe: http://www.dailygarnish.com/2010/05/vegan-bean-burger-recipe.html/. I will say that I would check on them about 5-10 minutes before the posted cooking end time -- mine could have come out a little earlier. I had mine on a wheat bun with greens and guacamole, yummmm!

On Thursday (25th birthday), I had a pretty busy/normal schedule and wanted to do something special to make it seem a little more... special. So I went on my first-ever group run with the Bloomington Area Runners Association, or BARA (http://inrunco.com/bara/). I was pretty nervous, because honestly I still feel like a poser runner a lot of the time. These guys absolutely proved me wrong, though! They were sooo welcoming, and I actually found that I could comfortably run the two mile warmup and the three half mile hill repeats (so 3 mi total with the descents)-- which we did in a parking garage and which I shockingly had SO MUCH FUN with -- with two super nice women who have both run several half marathons. It was really the first time that I've felt like a real runner. I couldn't believe that I easily kept pace with these ladies who were far more experienced than I was, but I really did. The feeling of really belonging in this sport was the best birthday present I could have given myself. :) It was also fun that two of the other runners were also 1/19 birthday folks!

The last chunk of new stuff was definitely my favorite. Last night, Laura and I went to dinner and a bluegrass concert, and it was the most fun. We had dinner at Taste of India, which I've always had kind of a grudge against because they replaced the creperie that used to be there, but it was some of the best Indian food I have ever had in my life. We shared vegetable jhalfrezi, which was spicy and delicious, and masala dosa, which was INCREDIBLE. I hadn't ever had anything like it... it's a South Indian dish that's a thin pancake kind of thing wrapped around a mix of potatoes and chickpeas and served with a delicious coconut chutney and the best sauce of all time. For dessert, we tried both a fantastic mango ice cream and an odd paneer in sweet spiced milk, which reminded me of wet cheesecake and toed the line between delicious and just weird. It was one of the best meals I've had in a long time!

The concert was probably the icing on the cake of the whole week. There was a great local opening act, but the featured band (The Travelin' McCourys) defied description. Probably the best bluegrass I'll ever hear. It was so cool to watch them play off each other while they improvised... it was kind of like getting to sit in on a jam session with some of the best guys out there. I'll leave you with a youtube clip of them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQmMEEOlfcA/

Such a great week! :)

it's blogging time

Those of you know know me (read:  "all two of you who actually might read this blog") know that things have changed pretty significantly in the last month or so, and I've been trying to think of something new and interesting to do.  Making a blog was one of the first things to come to mind, but then I realized that I don't really do enough of any one thing to make a whole blog about it (other than music, but who wants to read about that?), so I decided that the best idea would be the obvious cop-out... to make a blog about doing new things!

I'm not going to promise that I'll update this at any regular intervals, but I'll certainly update any time I try something new or revisit something after a long hiatus -- and hopefully, the blog will actually inspire me to try some cool stuff.

To start out this extremely ambitious project, which will undoubtedly be read avidly by friends and will ultimately launch me to internet star-dom, I'll share a bit about my adventures making dinner for a few of my friends to celebrate my birthday.  When I started thinking about things to make for this dinner, I immediately thought about my very favorite food from the semester I spent abroad:  risotto alla milanese!  While unbelievably delicious, this risotto is traditionally made with some rather unusual (and expensive) ingredients:  saffron and bone marrow.  Being a vegetarian -- something I pretty obviously felt free to ignore occasionally when I was in Milan -- I was not about to run out to buy a bottle of marrow, but I did go out in search of saffron.  It turns out that while saffron threads are $18 for 1/10 of a gram (yes, that's 0.13 grams for 18 dollars) at your friendly neighborhood Kroger, if you actually know about them, you can buy tiny packets of saffron powder at the cash registers at Bloomingfoods.  Thanks to the friendly employee on the phone for that handy tidbit.  I also learned a fun tidbit from the little saffron packet -- apparently, it takes 75,000 blossoms to produce one pound of the spice, which is why it's the most expensive spice in the world.  Makes sense to me!  In case you're curious, here's what the flower that saffron comes from looks like:

So armed with saffron, some very expensive organic arborio (not something you necessarily want to buy at Bloomingfoods, but since I was there...), some spectacularly cheap white and all of the other things I needed to make my neat birthday meal, I got cooking!  All in all, things didn't turn out too badly.  I didn't think ahead very much and bought too little broth and no butter, so the risotto was not quite as orgasmic as I remembered it being, but the garlic green beans I made as a side were definitely tasty.  The chocolate pots de creme I made for dessert were pretty darn tasty, too -- although I did manage to forget that my oven runs about 25 degrees on the hot side, so they were a more like chocolate bricks than chocolate custard.  Either way, you can't really go wrong with dark chocolate, whipped cream and raspberries.

The star of the evening was definitely the garlic shrimp I made for an appetizer, so a big thank you to Rachel Ray -- who I'm quite honestly not usually crazy about -- for the quickest, easiest, tastiest shrimp recipe EVER.  Overall, it was a fabulous birthday evening and a very fun thing to do.  I may try to stick to a slightly less weird and bone marrow-containing main course for next time so I don't disappoint myself again, but I will almost certainly be having another dinner party sometime in the near future!  I'll just finish out with a few pictures from the evening:
     

And of course, no evening would be complete without my cat doing something weird...

Until next time!