Sundays are not 'lazy days'... as it turns out

I'd like call Sundays the 'lazy day' of the week, but it is soooo not true! If I'm not working, I always find I can preoccupy myself with something around the house. Today was a good day in that I managed to clean all the rooms around my unit, do laundry, buy groceries, cook and start on "Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson". Also, this was a good weekend because the weather permitted with warmth and lots of sun! :)

But of course, with all the good, there's also the bad. I've developed a bit of a pet peeve, and that is 'unresponsive texting'. Unresponsive texting happens when you're having a nice conversation over text message (at that very moment) with someone and all of a sudden, a single closed ended question leaves you in the dark waiting for a response. Sound familiar? It happened tonight after I asked (another) friend to come over for dinner. Not getting any answer as to whether or not she was going to come or not, made me waste consider amounts of time for whether I should cook then or later... It may be my fault that I didn't take it a step further to make the call, but it has happened one too many times that I can say it is a bit annoying. Still no response... Well... I'll just leave it at that.

I invited one of my close friends over for dinner and cooked him quite a 'big' meal. I went out to grab groceries today at Loblaws and bought everything I needed to make beef stew :) ... yes, one step close to making the boeuf bourguignon. Anyways... I tried a couple new things tonight and I'll share with you what I made here... maybe it will quench your taste buds and get you back into the pitching cooking something delicious for yourself :)

Dishes:

• Pork loin in steak sauce
• Garlic lemon tilapia fish
• Boiled broccoli, carrots and mushrooms
• Left over Romanian salad
• White rice

I marinated the pork last night in preparation for tonight's meal. I find the taste in an meat that need to be marinated will taste A LOT better if you give it 12+ hours in a ziplock bag in sauce before it hits the pan. I like to fry the meet until it is golden coloured and burnt a bit on the outside. If your meat is thick, consider sliding it onto a tray and into the oven for 5-10 minutes to make sure the meat is cooked through well. The pork will have enough flavour from the steak sauce... so I would say, eat the pork without BBQ sauce.

The garlic lemon tilapia fish I took out from the freezer this morning to thaw out. This dish is quite simple, and I've already cooked this dish 3 times already, so I think I've gotten quite 'good' at this dish ;) Give each one of the fish a good run under the tap, then pat it down with a paper towel to get rid of the excess water. Afterwards, place the fish on the pan that will go into the oven (make sure you cover the pan with tin foil and spray oil over it to prevent it from sticking). Squeeze some lemon juice onto the fish, add some melted butter over the fish, minced garlic, and finally touch it up with some parsley flakes. Your tilapias are now ready to go into the 375 pre-heated oven for 30 minutes.

The boiled vegetables were simple to make. Get about 2 inches of water and get it to boil before adding your vegetables in. Add a bit of canola oil to the water prior to putt your vegetables in. Sprinkle some salt into the water to give it a bit of flavour :)

Rice is self explanatory :) Bon appetite!

Julie & Julia - what's for dinner?

I spoke to a friend over Skype last night and our conversation ventured down a path about food. She suggested I watch Julie & Julia starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. The movie was based on TWO true stories. There were three takeaways from that movie; (1) if you hate your job, look for something you love and quitting your job a goal (2) accomplishing something requires perseverance and commitment and (3) Jackson needs to learn how to cook better!

I watched the movie in my room, on my computer, with a bowl of Ramen with egg and lettuce. Afterwards I had a Romanian salad a potato I baked. It was sad I know...

The famous dish in the movie was Boeuf Bourguignon. It was cooked maybe 3-4 times in the movie and everytime it looked amazingly delicious! I'll be ordering Julia Child's cook book just for that recipe... now it's a matter of figuring out which volume that recipe is in :p

Back to the cooking I did tonight (not much cooking really...)...

The potato turned out very good!

• One potato
• 80 minutes
• 350 degrees

The Romanian salad I kept simple:

• Romanian lettuce
• Dice tomatoes
• Carrots
• Balsamic dressing

Another friend suggested I try making Double baked potato, and that I only got part marks for making a regular potato... ok... next project! haha :)

New lens adapters making beautiful pictures!

A couple months ago, I came across a few cool lens adapters that essentially transform the regular image seen through the viewfinder into close-up macro, wide angle and fish-eye style images. It was more of an impulse buy than anything else so I ordered them (I got them from the Photojojo Store). They weren't very expensive, but you can go to the store and check them out yourself :)

The lenses were... Opteka...

• .45x AF Wide Angle (with Macro)
• .35x AF Fisheye (with Macro)

They are pretty sweet adapters! One thing that you absolutely need is the adapter ring. The ring goes in between your lens and the lens adapter. Without it, it won't fit into place. So maybe you get the right size! I made the mistake of ordering the wrong size and it took 4+ weeks before I got it (because it came, then went back because the address was written wrong during the purchase process, D'OH!). Anyways, I learned my lesson :)

Here are a couple quick shots I took with it tonight... what do you think?

This is my work desk... really messy right now, didn't have time to clean it up for this shot:

This is the .45x AF Wide Angle lens taken with the Macro:

I`ll get more shots in with these once I get some time freed up!

Garlic Lemon Chicken Breast with no Garlic

More chicken... Decided to try something new tonight... I had two chicken breasts sitting in my fridge after thawing it 3 days ago and thought it would be a good time to cook it before it goes bad.

Ingredients:

• 2 chicken breasts
• salt, pepper, parsley, paprika
• lemon squeezed juice

Directions:

• 375 degrees Celsius
• 40 minutes

I also heated up the leftover pork and rice I had the other nice. Mixed in some fried mushrooms and scrabbled eggs :)