i know i know, sometimes those two words just shouldn't be in the same sentence.  the thought of food makes you want to snuggle up more under those sheets and close your eyes in hopes of all the pain going away by the time you wake up.... 

anyone else have that feeling yesterday morning? that feeling where you start questioning yourself on everything you did the day before. why didn't i eat a solid breakfast? why did i drink champagne at work?  why did i accept that free shot of tequila from the bartender?  wait, why didn't i eat a solid meal all day on a day that i drank more than i ever do?

by the time you reach age 27, you should have this plan mastered by now, you KNOW how to avoid a hangover.....  but sometimes a big hangover creeps up on you like you just got smacked upside your head.

so here comes the best hangover food to the rescue.  i just thought it was a delicious bowl of rice porridge, until my mother-in-law convinced me it's hangover food. simple as this, she said "when my kids go out drinking all night, they need to eat this in the morning."  ok, we'll do just that.  mama knows best!




vietnamese rice porridge
(aka best hangover food ever)

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound ground pork
1/2 medium red onion, diced
8 1/4 cups of water
1 cup white jasmine rice
2 chicken bouillon cube
1 tablespoon sugar
3 cloves of garlic, grated
3 tablespoon fish sauce
2 teaspoon ground white pepper
3 stalks of green onion, chopped
heat large pot over medium high heat.  add olive oil, then add ground pork and diced red onion.  add about 1/4 cup of water to the pot so the ground pork gets cooked, but not browned.  while pork and onions are simmering, rinse rice in a fine mesh strainer.  when pork is thoroughly cooked and onions are translucent add rice, chicken bouillon, grated garlic, fish sauce and ground white pepper to the pot and stir.  once all incorporated, add remaining 8 cups of water and bring to a simmer until mixture begins to thicken, stirring every few minutes, about 15 minutes total.  once mixture begins to thicken, stir continuously until mixture becomes a porridge texture, almost like a thick soup or a runnier oatmeal texture.  should take another 5 mins.  stir in chopped green onions, then serve immediately.  sprinkle cracked black pepper on top if you want (or not, depending on your hangover situation :P)

the mixture will continue to thicken in the pot once it cools.  when you reheat for leftovers, you just need to add some water before reheating, and you'll be back to that silky texture from the first day!

sorry this wasn't given to you YESTERDAY, like when you actually needed it, but i'm eating it until the whole batch is gone, even though i'm no longer suffering from the nasty hangover.  i AM suffering from lack of sleep though.  i tried staying up until the end of the sugar bowl, slightly napping on the sofa until 1:30am!! yikes!  good thing it's friday, my friends (at least i have good leftovers to eat for lunch :P)

cheers.
jenn

june is an action-packed month for us, with no more weekend time to ourselves.  a few months ago i planned a DAY date exploring williamsburg and we loved it.  although I wanted to plan another adventure date, this month just wasn't going to give us the chance.  last tuesday i saw sam a.m. cafe's supper club menu posted for thursday (see it on their instagram , twitter , or facebook ), and the lightbulb turned on in my head... supper club it is!



last week's menu included lamb ragu. two of hung's favorite foods in 1 dish: slow-roasted lamb and pasta, so i knew it would be a win.  what i didn't know was how good the REST of the meal was going to be! lamb ragu was just the fourth course of FIVE.  i thought that because there would be 5 courses, the portions would be itsy bitsy.  hung ate a sammich before we left the house, and i had a few bites too.  i could have been rolled out of the place that night i ate so much.  normally i feel zero guilt asking for a box to take food home, but for some reason (i.e. the food was so good) i couldn't leave anything left on the plate.  i even consulted hung to take up the last bites when he knew i looked miserable but still eating.  first world problems? absolutely. 

my dinner: 1 bowl of soup (Ina Garten's Lentil Sausage Soup, cut down 1/3, and added potatoes and chili flakes)

First off, I think I jinx myself whenever I blog about my fall decorative plants on the stoop.  Mr P and I left the house to meet up with friends at Nha Trang for breakfast/lunch on Saturday, and we noticed that someone stole my kale!!!!  So now I'm down to two plants, when I started with 4.  People make me angry!!

Secondly, one day this week Mr P saw this article on thekitchn.com to make this sammich, came home with all the necessary groceries in his arms, and got to work making the sammich with homemade tomato soup to go with it.  It was kind of funny because he's always been the one to get started on working on the apartment right away after work, but I think he spent most of the night working on the food... signs of fall means heating up our kitchen will be ok which means Mr P is back in cooking season!! yayaya

Basically it's a grilled cheese sammich that tasted like a jalapeno popper, literally!  We only used roasted jalapenos, cheddar cheese, and cream cheese (and bread and butter), and it was still amazing.  We added djion mustard to the sammiches because we didn't have ranch, but next time we're totally trying ranch dressing!  Unlike most kitchens, we don't keep hardly any salad dressing on hand because we normally make out own.

We finally got the opportunity to use our grill pan that has been lingering in the apartment for months now, which means we got nice grill marks on the sammiches.

Wait, it's already Thursday??  Where did the week go??

At least we are still moving forward with the renovations, even though it feels like we haven't done much this week.  Most of our time this week has been spent moving the rest of our things from Hoboken to Jersey City.  Though we only take 1 carload per day, it takes a good hour and a half at least just to pack up a carload, take it to Jersey City, unload the car, and put it in a place in the apartment where it won't be in the way (the "won't be in the way" part is getting tough the more things we bring!!)  Last night we brought all of the hanging clothes.  I've gotten pretty good at this part considering how many times I've moved.  I brought my rubberband ball home from work (that I worked so hard to get that big!!) and unraveled it to rubberband bunches of hangers together.  This is my easy way of moving hanging clothes.  The first time I moved I took them all off the hanger, folded them, put them in a box, then put all the hangers in a messy awkward mess in a trash bag, only to hang up wrinkly clothes again once I got to the new place.  Bundling the hanging clothes together by rubberbanding the hanger tops saves sooo much time!  It's a little riskier though, as some clothes may fall off the hanger.  Last night we only had one casualty, a cotton shirt of mine... Luckily it wasn't one of Mr P's expensive suits!!

As with all of the plumbing we had to do with this renovation, we ran into a few bumps while trying to connect the plumbing for the kitchen sink.  After making a few trips to our friend Danny at Home Depot, we finally have a working sink! 

Mr P has been taking good care of his butcher block countertops, oiling them multiple times a day like Ikea said.  I always had this notion that butcher block countertops were expensive, and maybe really good ones are, but at Ikea, it's the cheapest kind of countertop!!  Mr P loooooves this kind too, so it was win-win.  He says he will take care of it, oiling it when he's supposed to, sanding out any scratches, etc.  It's the prefect compliment to our otherwise drab cabinets.  Most Ikea cabinets are the same, just with different finishes on them.  Just changing the color or type of facing on the cabients can double, triple, or quadruple the price!  ....even though they are all the same particle board cabinets!!  Insane, right??  THAT'S why we stuck to white.  $46 for each of the smaller 12" cabinets, and $56 for the sink cabinet.  Not bad!

We have been trying to give things a "place" in the new apartment, but it's hard putting things away when we don't have much space to put it all.  We have a billion kitchen gadgets and tools, but we're not even going to start unpacking that stuff until we get shelving installed, the new stove delivered, and the new stainless steel island comes in the mail!  This coming weekend, our friend Zack is coming to build a bed "loft" for us.  Yes, just like college.  Though our ceilings aren't super high, we can still raise our bed high enough to put a dresser underneath it and have hanging storage underneath too.  This will free up a lot of space.  I know it's not ideal to have the top of the bed ~4' from the ceiling, but we're gonna have to deal! 

Last night we began ripping up the kitchen floors and installing the new floors.  We got really lucky having nice plywood underneath the ugly black and white diner vinyl (seems like a cool idea, but really feels like you are walking into a funhouse when you see it day after day), so we only had to rip up the vinyl sheeting, clean up the dirt and dust, and install the new peel-and-stick tiles.  Simple as that!  I told Mr P that laying these tiles are my favorite part of the renovation, because you can SEE such a big difference with not a lot of work.  That's why I don't really like doing the plumbing, or other hidden stuff, because it takes so much effort, and even though it's absolutely necessary, there's not much for the eye to see.




Though we can't use the stove, and we don't have many kitchen utensils at hand, we still were able to make our first real meal at the new place!  Perfect timing for a good, hearty, veggie and chicken soup.  So simple to make, nothing to cook, just throw it all in the crock pot!  I cut up chicken breasts, carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions, celery, and cabbage and put it in the pot.  I put in 1 quart of chicken broth, then added enough water to almost cover everything in the pot.  Mr P added spices (oregano, bay leaves, etc.), we set it to cook for 10 hours, and went to bed!  Yum!  Delicious soup ready in the morning!  Though, the potatoes and carrots were stilla bit hard, so I took some for lunch and set it for another 10 hours!  That was a little over the top, but it was sooo good last night for dinner!



Hopefully we can lay the rest of the tile tonight to have the kitchen all ready for the stove to be delivered this Saturday and the ugly old stove to get outta here!!

Toodles.
J&H

Where do I begin... it's been quite a madhouse around here!  But, things are looking up, and the new place is starting to feel like home.

Friday night was a slow night, because after coming to Hoboken, changing clothes, and packing up our seemingly routine 1 carload to take to the Jersey City apartment, instead of going to Jersey City and working right away, we decided to take a small break for a drink and dinner at Zack's in Hoboken (and to watch Toledo get their butts kicked against Boise State).  After dinner we went to Jersey City, unpacked the car, and some other things that are slipping my mind right now because everything is starting to blur together.... 

Saturday we woke up early to be at the new apartment for when a guy came to turn on the heat in the basement and 1st floor.  Nobody lives on those floors, so if there was no heat, we would have pipes busting and our utility bills would be through the roof!  The movers were supposed to come between 2pm and 4pm, so Mr P went back to Hoboken to wait on them, and I stayed in JC to work on the apartment.  I successfully painted the pantry and the aquired pantry shelving unit and installed the shelving unit in the pantry so it's all ready when we move the rest of our kitchen things.  I painted the trim in the bathroom, and I moved everything out of the way so the movers could get the big things (i.e. couch) in the apartment.

Unfortunately, however, everything fit except the couch.  The 3 men from Alpha Moving we so nice and so helpful, and reeeaaallly tried to get the couch up the stairs, but it just wasn't happening.  It was pretty upsetting, considering we only bought the couch a year ago and it was the first real piece of furniture either of us have ever bought (besides crappy Ikea partical board stuff with laminate veneers on them).  Mr P and I went to Ikea after the movers to take back the cabinets and sink that didn't fit and to buy the new cabinets and sink.  While we were loading up the car, we began talking with a city commissioner who just happened to be walking by at the time.  When we planned to leave, Mr P let go of the sink (standing on end) to shake the commissioner's hand, and the sink fell crashing to the ground.  Luckily  it was only stainless steel, so it just dented and didn't shatter.... We got REALLY lucky that Ikea takes back practically anything, especially if it's still in the package!  Earlier when we had Plan A kitchen cabinets, we said to ourselves after packing up the car "Only at Ikea can you fit an entire kitchen cabinet and sink in a Yaris."  We totally beat that with our Plan B kitchen, and now we can say "Only at Ikea can you fit THREE kitchen cabinets and a farmhouse sink in a Yaris."


After returning home, our wonderful friend Nick came to help us put together the cabinets (who does that?  Nobody wants to put together Ikea stuff!!)  After putting together the center cabinet, however, we thought we had the wrong cabinet, so yet another trip to Ikea was planned for the morning.  We treated him to a pretty awesome Vietnamese restaurant, called Nha Trang, after helping... it was our first time there, and it was delicious!  Practically everything on the menu was $8 or less.  I knew I should have gotten something other than Pho, but I hadn't had it in a long time, so it was calling my name. 



Mr P and I went back to Hoboken to sleep since we didn't have a funtional shower at the new place, so we had to sleep on the floor in the living room (like the good ole days when we slept on the floor in the living room to keep cool by the AC!)

We tried to plan out Sunday so that we could get as much done as possible, and I deem it a success!  We got miscellaneous plumbing from Home Depot (thanks to our new Indian Home Depot worker friend who always seems to be in the plumbing isle when we go there everyday!), and then headed to Ikea.  After returning the assembled cabinet and ordering a new one, we realized we had the right one in the first place!!  The rest of the morning was spent assembling Round 2 of the same center sink cabinet (grrr!! at least we are good at assembling this stuff now!)

While I put together the cabinet, Nick came over again and he and Mr P strategically and successfully got the couch up the stairs!!  Though I wasn't happy with them trying to get it up there, afraid we would have a ripped up couch that we wouldn't be able to sell, I was ecstatic when they got it in the apartment!!



The rest of the day was spent installing the shower curtain rod, and installing the cabinets in the kitchen.  Thanks to Nick's expertise, we re-purposed our unused bed frame to make a bracket to attached the kitchen cabinets to the wall (we couldn't put them against the wall because all of our piping is outside the walls, and hence in the way).... then we had Nha Trang... again :D









We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!  The only things we have to do are install kitchen floors, paint the fridge, finish plumbing for the kitchen sink, hang kitchen shelves, and install all the light fixtures.  It doesn't seem that bad anymore!!  ...doesn't seem like a lot, but the kitchen is still a disaster zone!!


We are both really looking forward to having a nice place in the end :D

Cheesy quote of the weekend:
(as we are walking to the escalator from the parking garage at Home Depot)
Me: I heart you.
Mr P: I know.  It's because I'm so awesome.
Me: This is one of those times, when you are supposed to say something different back to me.
Mr P: (silence)....  You're going to put this on the blog aren't you....

Toodles.
J&H