Thoughts on facelift?

Decided it was long overdue to customize my blog just a little bit. I think the artwork best represents what this blog entails. Do you think its inappropriate? Let me know your thoughts!

Margherita Pizza Night

Before:


After:

A few weeks ago we had a roommates pizza night. We actually made the dough from scratch which is something new to me!

I followed this recipe/video for the dough and it was delicious! The only complaint about the recipe is that they gave it in ml and g instead of tablespoons/cups so I had to keep my computer by the kitchen to look up google conversions. Garlic was added which was the only difference from their recipe.

After letting the dough sit with a towel on top for 2 hours, we were ready to roll out 3 pizzas. I had bought basil, fresh tomatoes and the sweetest onion in the world from the farmers market outside my place. We also got fresh mozzarella cheese.

So we sandwiched a slice of cheese, slice of tomato and basil leaf and distributed this around the pizza. Drizzled olive oil on top and more chopped up basil leaf. That was it. 20 min in the oven at 350.

For the other two pizzas, we experimented with the sweet onions, garlic greens, pepperoni and mushrooms.

Seriously, the best (freshest) margherita pizza I've ever had. I like the no tomato sauce and very little cheese - I think we could've put a little more tomatoes and basil though.

Miso Steamed Fish

I was flipping through a cookbook and read about a miso salmon - however the recipe called for putting it in oil and a pan and I really felt like steaming a fish. I got a whole fish from T&T on sale for $7 and decided to experiment a little.

Miso paste: I combined a 1/2 cup of water with 1/2 cup of miso, one piece - maybe 2-3 tablespoons of thin strips of ginger, and 1 tablespoon of sugar. Mixed it together and left it aside. This portion was waaay too big for my fish. Maybe if you cut this in half it would be all you need.

I bought the fish pre-skinned, had to clean it out and slit into the fish to expose more skin to marinate. I dumped some soy sauce, ginger and rice vinegar first - only maybe a tablespoon at max of any of this. Then I spread the miso paste evenly.

I love the Ikea wok for steaming. After putting a little water on the bottom and bringing it to a boil, the fish took about 20-30 min to be steamed and not over done.

I brushed and flipped it half way through. Top it with green onion after it comes out.

The whole fish was soo flavourful and delicious! Actually today I had left overs and put it into my salad...still delicious.

Pea Soup

This week I decided to try as much as I can go to back to the diet I started at the beginning of the thufat journey. Soups are easy to make and lasts over so many meals. Since the weather has been over 30 degrees everyday and sometimes reaching 40, I decided a cold soup would do me good.

I bought free range chicken broth (1 container - 900mL), boiled it with 1 potato chopped and 1 onion chopped and the white part of a bunch of green onion. After the potato was soft - about 15 min, I added 1 cup of fresh snap peas (separated from its pod) and 1 cup of frozen peas (as I don't think I have the patience to remove all those damn fresh peas).

Thats it!! I heated it for about another 15 min, turned off the stove and waited until the soup was a little bit cooler.

When it had cooled down, I scooped it into the magic bullet blender (it filled 3x the extra large cup that comes with the magic bullet). 10 seconds of the magic bullet produced a beautiful green soup.

I put it into a container and left it in the fridge until I was ready for dinner. Having it cold is very refreshing. If hot is desired, you can reheat it.

Top it with green onion and salt and pepper. Simply delicious.

Where to begin...

Shoot, you'd think I'd have more time now but unfortunately blogging has taken a backseat in my jam packed summer of fun. There's so much content and pictures I've been gathering up to write about, I just don't know where to start!

Well ok this post will be of the present then the next 10 posts will be of the food, activities and fun since I moved countries.

Some new updates:
- you can now go to www.thufat.com and ditch the blogspot part to find my brain dump.

- I'm pretty happy about my new Magic Bullet High-Speed Blender Mixing System purchase. Ever since using it at Yap's, I've been meaning to destroy my blender and buy it. Since I donated my blender to Salvation Army, there was room for a new smoothie super machine. For the last 2 days, I've used it 3 times already. What I like most about it is the portioning. The cup can fit 1 frozen banana, 3 strawberries, some spinach and a cup of soymilk. I add 1/4 cup of Granola and it's the most delicious breakfast in the perfect size.

I also made a pea soup last night which required some blending. I dumped the soup into the extra large cup of the Magic Bullet and 5 seconds later, the peas, potato and onions combine in a lively green colour. It is pretty magical.

- I'm trying to force myself to have a regular schedule of working out and eating and I think it's finally starting to shape up. The thing that bugs me the most is that I still don't have a bike and have yet to find a pool. Last weekend, I was in Okanagan Lake swimming laps. It made me itch to swim in a proper pool again and also try to figure out where the heck my waterproof watch/lap timer went. The 35+ degree weather and no chlorine smell was really nice though. It was replaced with rocks and seaweed and little fish. Probably my first time doing laps in open lake water.

- Wednesdays directly across the street from my apartment is a Farmers Market!! Ah thats today...and I'm excited. I wanna buy corn on the cob for a BBQ and fireworks tonight. I also want to see what to buy to put into my Magic Bullet smoothie for the rest of the week and what we can cook to go camping this weekend.

This post is completely random as my brain is trying to organize what has happened in the past 2 months. I promise to share recipes of what I've been cooking and of the road trip up the west coast and of the camping and hiking that I've done. Don't give up on me and come back and check...starting today :)

New goals

So I've relocated, somewhat unpacked and settling back into a nice routine. Luckily in my month of eating out and no resemblance of a routine, I've been maintaining a weight of 135lbs. Meaning...I haven't lost a pound since May except days after a hike and dehydration.

That's 2.5 months and not acceptable!!

I do feel stronger though, especially with my legs - I can go a bit faster and much longer than ever before on hikes. I've started some interval training for a 5km run. I started going to the gym this week too. So lets see how it goes, my target is to lose 20 lbs in the next 20 weeks - which falls exactly on my birthday. So the race is on.

The plan is to get a decent bike and start swimming again too. Olympic Triathlon is my new goal for next May. Can you imagine? 2 doing a triathlon? :) Well, I'm sure I'll write more about that as soon as training kicks in. Right now I'm just making sure that I don't completely hate running.

I've got to take pictures along the seawall for you to see how beautiful it is to run from my house (by Science World) to English Bay. And seriously, I could not ask for better weather from Vancouver.

I live near that ball at the center of the picture:


English Bay:

Greek Salad, Spinach and Cod

So I've arrived in my new home after an awesome road trip up the West Coast. The one week road trip included Burney Falls, Crater Lake, Oregon Sand Dunes, Mount St Helen's and finally Vancouver. I'll write more about that as soon as I get pictures up.

I apologize for the break in blogging but I'm baack and have an amazing dinner to share with you. After a month of traveling, eating out, packing, unpacking I have been itching to cook sooo badly. So here it is, my first (very delicious) meal in my new city!

Traditional Greek Salad
I've always enjoyed greek salad but have never tried to make it !! It was definitely delicious.

Dressing: combine olive oil, squeezed lemon juice, crushed garlic, pinch of sugar, salt and pepper.

Cut up cubes of feta cheese, green leaf lettuce into strips, roma tomatoes sliced into fourths, round slices of cucumber, pitted black olives, chopped basil/parsely.

Mixed it all up and seriously it was better than any greek salad I've ever had in stores. Actually I thought that the recipe was missing onions and that it was rather odd to see lettuce in a greek salad, but the flavours and textures really worked well with each other.

Cod with Spinach, Pine nuts and Raisins
I was not impressed with the expensive piece of cod we bought but that's ok. To cook fish, I just put it in some aluminum foil and soak in some olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, garlic, basil - essentially everything I needed for the greek salad :) Preheat the oven to 350 and baked for 20 min.

Now the kicker is the spinach side, it was soooo delicious. We washed a big bag of spinach (1-1.5lb), soaked raisins in water, toasted a gigantic pile of pine nuts (1/2 cup). Cook the spinach with oil until its wilted (5 min) and add the drained raisins and pine nuts. Keep cooking till the water evaporates.

All I can say is, yummmmy.