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Try this extremely simple fruit turnover recipe when you need a tasty fast desert.  You only need croissant pastry dough and fruit filling. Read more…

Rachael’s stuffed peppers are fantastic!  Though apparently this is a simplified version of her mom’s recipe which is even more delicious.  Pretty fast dish, great for times when you find peppers on sale.
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Wednesday night a group of SIParCS interns gathered for a night of sushi making and eating.  The group consisted of Evan, Kuo, Nick, Dan, Kate, and myself.  After work Evan stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some supplies, including sushi grade fish, rice, vinegar, wasabi powder, soy sauce, and vegetables.  It turns out someone just cleaned out most of the sushi-grade fish just before Evan.  We ended up with a small amount of tuna and around a pound of salmon.

Surprisingly, making a roll that tastes good was quite easy.  Not surprisingly, making a roll that looked good was very hard.  I can definitely understand why people can study sushi making their whole lives and never master the art.  There are so many interesting tastes, ingredients, and techniques to explore–the variations are so numerous!  I’m definitely going to have to make more of this type of cuisine in the future.

Following the sushi making/eating and beer drinking, we headed out (around 10pm) to play ‘bocce ball’ around Evan’s apartment complex.  I put it in quotes because, despite knowing the exact rules of the real game, I doubt we were actually following them at all.  Mostly we just made up a game using the ceramic balls from the bocce ball set Evan had purchased a few days before.  It reminded me of when I was much younger and we would make up games on our own and play for hours.  Apparently it takes late nights, sushi, and beer to do this now.  Regardless, it was lots of fun!

Over the past weekend I took part in a few exciting events.  It started off with a 6 person ride around Fort Collins hitting up the local breweries on Friday.  Adam, Eric (networking post-doc), Doug, Kate, Jesh, and myself took part.  We started off by stopping by New Belgium but it was a bit too busy for our tastes.  We skipped out there and headed straight to Odell’s.  We had a few interesting conversations over a few beers (Nukes!) and then headed off to Fort Collins Brewery.  Again, as is usual with our group, interesting conversations ensued.  We ended the touring at Coopersmith’s with food and more beer.  The night wound down at Adam’s by playing a telephone-like game that uses small drawings/descriptions on post-it notes.  Adam’s crazy (but cool) neighbor stopped by and played some songs on guitar for us.  It was a good start to what turned out to be a great weekend.

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Last week Rachael and I started working out every morning.  Along with the workouts came our push to start eating/cooking healthier.  Anyone who thinks eating healthy implies bland, boring, tasteless food better think again.  Some of the dishes we’ve cooked the last few nights have been some of the best we’ve ever cooked.

Here is a taste of some of the recipies we’ve based our meals/snacks on lately:

• Southwestern pasta salad
• Sweet potato crisps
• Chicken burritos
• Mexican Manicotti
• Cilantro lime salsa
• Chicken veggie southwestern wraps
• Fruit smoothies

We’ve also got some great ideas for the coming days/weeks.

I hope to develop a recipe database soon.  This will allow each of the above listed items to be described in detail, including name, ingredients, preparation details, comments for making it next time, etc.  All this will be easily searchable for easy recall later.  I can then link to the recipe the night it gets made and comment on it in a blog post.  Now I just need to find the time to write the code for such an application…