Tag Archives: #oliverlucky

The profound ups and downs of pork chops and pineapple

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Making this meal put my emotions on a roller coaster ride. Thankfully it was the type of ride that as soon as you’re finished, you run to get right back in line.

It started with the build up of anticipation. The second I saw this recipe for Pork Chops with Pineapple Fried Rice on The Pioneer Woman’s blog, I immediately posted it to my friend Oliver’s Facebook page with the question, “Should we make this?!” I got back an almost instant reply of “Yes. Like now.” Even though it would be pure torture to wait a whole week, we planned to make it for our next Gossip Girl extravaganza.

I was so excited by the pictures Ree posted, that the next day I couldn’t help but show all the girls in my office so they could drool with me. My friend Ariel, whose desk is right by mine, was immediately hooked. I promised I would tell her the following week if it lived up to the hype, but she told me, in no uncertain terms, that it looked so good, she was going to beat me to making it.

And she did. Two days later she was nonchalantly eating her leftovers for lunch while I hovered enviously near her desk waiting for her recipe feedback. In between bites of rice and pork, Ariel confirmed that the recipe was equally easy and delicious.

Oliver and I spent the next few days eagerly discussing how magical “pork chop night” was going to be. Then — finally!! –  the big day arrived.

If I'm cooking, you can bet that there will be beer involved. That is a promise.

We convened at my house, where I had the rice already cooked and cooled. Oliver arrived with pork chops (we decided to go for boneless chops just because) and a jar of pimentos. We got down to business.

I pounded the chops just a bit and Oliver started cutting the pineapple into chunks. We weren’t ambitious enough to grill it, so we just cranked up a heavy skillet and sautéed the fruit until it was tender with a nice golden color. While that was working, we seared up the pork chops in a separate pan, added the onions and let it cook down into awesome-ness. The smell was overwhelmingly good.

Then came the wet ingredients (honey, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar). The pork chops actually cooked pretty quickly so we removed them and let the sauce cook down with just the onions. Once it had thicken, we poured it on top of the pork chops in a bowl while we got rolling on the fried rice.

Look at how pretty this fried rice is!

Here’s where things took a sudden dive. We cooked the rice exactly as instructed and it certainly looked divine, but when we tasted it, the flavor was a bit flat. It just wasn’t quite snappy enough. We were panicking…well, I was panicking — Oliver wasn’t overly concerned. But after all the anticipation, I was not going to settle for sub-par fried rice. I threw in a bunch of chopped green onions, a squirt or two of sesame oil and reread the instructions. Sure, there was the sauce with the onions, but when we poured it in the bowl with the pork, it didn’t seem saucy enough to punch up the flavor in a full skillet of rice.

After a bit more soy sauce and some lime juice, I finally decided to stop tinkering. It would just have to do, I thought sadly. At least it looked pretty and colorful, and even if it wasn’t amazing, it would be good enough.

Then things took a final upward swing. When I pulled out the chops to slice them, the sauce seemed to have tripled. I felt a ray of hope as I threw half of the saucy onions into the rice and gave it a good stir. Then we plated up our rice, pork and finished it with caramelized pineapple, generously drizzling extra sauce over the top.

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I actually succeeded in making something crafty from Pinterest!

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About seven years ago or so, I helped start a crafting group with my friend Oliver Lucky. It was called the Crafty Bitches and consisted of the two of us and a mutual friend. As the Crafty Bitches, we would get together on Sundays (we tried to meet consistently every week, but then we’d fall off the wagon) and enjoy a day of eating, drinking and crafting.

While it was certainly a blast, the problems were plentiful and quite obvious. We were not that great at crafting — even though we had big dreams, we seemed to fall a little short talent-wise. We didn’t always have all of the supplies we needed and often had no clue how to go about actually making some of the things we wanted to try. We also drank a lot of wine when we crafted and our ambition tended to crumble. We once decided to mainline six consecutive hours of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge instead of learning how to mosaic a stepping stone.

As more people joined the group, it became harder to manage. Everyone’s schedules were so different it was difficult to find a time when we could all get together. It was also a pain to choose a craft we all wanted to make. Finally the group disbanded, though randomly small groups of us would meet up over wine and snacks to try our hand at something new.

I do have a couple of successful hand-crafted pieces from that time: wine glass charms, beaded napkin rings, a decoupage recipe box and some scented candles. Nowadays I stick mainly to crocheting and paper crafts, but I began to see some ideas on Pinterest that inspired me to branch out.

These little balls of joy were something that originally confused me. I wasn’t too sure what they were or what they were for until I clicked the link. Then I discovered they were styrofoam balls, covered in flat-headed thumbtacks, spray painted and used as a vase filler. I was dying to make them.

It seems silly, but pretty colorful vase fillers are a simple decoration that I love. They can be tailored for holidays and seasons, and there’s just something about a big vase filled with flowers (fresh, fake or dried), potpourri or sea glass that make the house seem more festive, no matter what the time of year. Plus I have a lot of lonely vases that are collecting dust in my cabinets.

This project is especially nice because, like crocheting, it’s fairly mindless. Put on a trashy TV show and stick tacks in styrofoam. Easy! It’s also fairly cheap, especially if you look at vase fillers for sale in stores. So I took the plunge, made my shopping list and hit up Michaels.

I bought: styrofoam balls (I went fairly small about three inches in diameter, though I’m sure larger ones would look awesome), flat-headed push pins, spray paint and Mod Podge.

First take your ball and stick in push pins. Let’s start with the multi-colored pins. Start at one end and just keep going in a snail-shell pattern, slightly overlapping, until you wrap around to the other end. Don’t worry about the order of the colors, it won’t matter.

They are really ugly at first. Don’t fret though, soon they will be pretty.

Like this…

Once you have completely tacked the ball, it’s time to paint it. I took out the bottom pin and stuck the whole thing on a kitchen skewer. I used a pretty green paint (color: celery, style: gloss) because I made these last fall and wanted something to contrast with all of the golds, reds and oranges in my house. I ended up loving this color although I won’t embarrass myself by telling you how long I hemmed and hawed before buying it. Once that first coat went on, I breathed a sigh of relief that the color didn’t suck.

In fact, I kind of loved it.

Once the green ball was done, I was out of tacks. These things take a surprising number of thumbtacks (like 150-ish per ball) so if you’re going to do a bunch at once be sure to stock up!

The next time I went to the store, I could only find silver pins which at least made me happier while I was still in the tacking phase. The bright colors were just so ugly! And the silver turned out so pretty, I couldn’t bring myself to paint over it.

I manged to get three of these done in time to nestle with my other fall decorations, which is impressive considering it was the height of pre-holiday madness. Though that’s really just confessing how much time I sat around watching television and sticking tacks in things. Whatever. My house looked pretty at least!

Now on to some helpful hints:

** The first ball I attempted actually started to disintegrate when I sprayed it with the paint. I also had some problems with the tacks coming loose. I went onto the original crafter’s website and saw a few other people had this problem too. I solved it as she suggested, by using a dear old friend of mine — Mod Podge. I did a couple of layers on the styrofoam before tacking it with pins and also a few layers afterwards to really seal everything together (only do this on the ones you will later paint). Worked like a charm.

** Be warned — this is not a project that will be done in an hour. Between the Mod Podge, tacking and drying, it will take a little while. The spray paint also took a few coats to get a nice even color so expect the project to take a least a day as the ball will need to dry in between layers.

Stray Cat Strut: Meet Friday — the prettiest kitty of all time…

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* Friday is the only one of our cats who did not actually come to me as a stray. But I saved her from the possibility, so I think it counts.

Back in the fall of my junior year of college at HSU, I was living in a house with five other people, one of them my former roommate Oliver Lucky. There was a knock on the door one evening, and we opened it to find a woman standing there with two small children holding a basket of kittens. All of us were enamored with their adorableness (the kittens not the children) but I was the only person who didn’t think taking one was a good idea.

This is surprising, I know, considering my serious cat obsession. But we were college kids with no jobs and no real responsibilities. Cats are certainly less maintenance than other pets, but none of us had even committed to living together for any longer than the year. Sure we were all friends, but senior year was completely up in the air. And none of us planned to spend the summer in Humboldt County, thus a pet would have to travel with someone during school breaks.

And yet, we took one. The little black one to be precise.

We named her Friday because she was a black cat born on Friday the 13th. She was a sweet kitten with a sense of adventure and undeterred curiosity — until she was stung by a bee. After that she preferred to stay inside where she became infamous at our small parties for her devotion to fetching everything from glitter ball cat toys to bottle caps.

One year later, as suspected, I was Friday’s sole owner (something Oliver has heard ad nauseam ever since). But I have to admit I wouldn’t have it any other way. After I graduated, she came with me to Portland, meowing the whole way, and was basically my best friend for the first few months I lived here.

Wait — that sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? Well, it’s true. I soon made friends, both in my neighborhood and at culinary school, but it was Friday who kept me company when I was home. No longer just a college kitty, she began to settle in to our quiet life in Portland. She had never been overly affectionate, but she developed the habit of sitting on my lap while I was on my computer, purring away. At night I would give her a little “tsk-tsk” and she would come running to cuddle under the covers.

This lasted until we adopted Lucifer. Used to being an only cat, she resentfully avoided us for a few months. Now she’ll come and cuddle but it’s always on her terms. If she’s in the mood for pets, she will meow and swat you. If she’s not — stay away.

All of my cats have fairly distinct personalities and though Friday is easy to just pass off as just a slightly cranky and neurotic old-lady cat, she really has a lot more going on. She enjoys water — as a kitten she used to love to have the sink running so she could paw at the stream coming from the faucet. Now she still likes water, but mainly just drinking it out of things that are not meant as water bowls.

This has led these defiant acts of kitty thirst quenching:

She is also far from a pushover. Our other cats are boys who came straight from the streets, basically the unruly teenage punks of the feline world. Friday was declawed when she was only a couple of years old (a decision I still regret) but that doesn’t stop the other two from being terrified of her.

If they get too close, she gives them an earful — hissing and growling as if she was actually going to fight them. I think she sleeps with one eye open just in case they get any ideas. They might be rough-and-tumble former alley cats, but she clearly rules the roost. Lucifer gave up on trying to play with her years ago and Gus Gus gives her a wide berth, though occasionally his curiosity gets the better of him and he tries to initiate contact. This does not go well.

In fact here’s a picture from almost a year ago, when Gus Gus was still new to the household. He didn’t know that Friday values her personal space as much as she does her dinner time and tried to edge her out of the eating area. She showed no fear and, ears pulled back, taught him a lesson on who eats first in our house.

She’s still my sweet little girl though, and the first pet who belonged to just me. Not a family cat that my parents help take care of, but a pet that (after that first year) was actually my sole responsibility. We’ve been through a lot together in the past twelve years and I think we’ll always have a special bond because of that.

Speaking of Puff Pastry…

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I wrote a post not too long ago discussing my love affair with onions. While I also briefly touched upon my affection for puff pastry, it occurred to me I could expand on this subject. Looking through pictures from the past few years, I found some excellent examples of why it’s a great idea to always keep a box of puff pastry in your freezer.

First up are some appetizers I did for Oliver’s birthday party last year. Since it was  a potluck-style game night, I thought a vegetarian-friendly finger food would be fun. In my recipe folder (of course!) I found a tartlet that involved ricotta cheese, roasted cherry tomatoes and puff pastry — clearly it was perfect.

I rolled out one dough and, since I was feeling frisky, decided to tweak the recipe a bit. I added cloves of roasted garlic and threw some pesto in with the ricotta. Once the puff pastry was cooked and the toppings were assembled, the final result was impressive. Not only was it pretty, but it was also damn tasty. Don’t judge — I had to try a piece. Or two. It is irresponsible to bring bad food to a potluck.

In fact it was so good that I felt like I should make one more tartlet just for kicks. Since I was out of cherry tomatoes, I decided to go in a slightly different direction. I still had pesto, more garlic and some Parmesan laying around. Then a small bag of yukon gold potatoes caught my eye. While working in an Italian-influenced restaurant a few years ago, we used the pesto/potato combination in many different applications, usually in pastas. This seemed to be a prime opportunity to play around with it.

So I thinly sliced the potatoes, tossed them with some garlic oil, salt and pepper and then roasted them on a sheet pan until they were golden brown and tender. I did the same layering action, grated some parm on top and voila — tartlet number two was finished, delicious and ready to roll. And everyone loved them — hooray!

The tartlets are especially nice because you can cut the pieces as big or as small as you want. One large slice of either of these along with a small side salad would be the perfect brunch. Small squares were great for the potluck, as people could nibble on them throughout the evening. The best part is that humble ingredients can make a fancy-looking dish that people think you spend a lot of time preparing. In reality, once your puff pastry has thawed, this comes together quite quickly and you can use almost anything edible that you happen to have on hand.

Here’s a couple more appetizers I made with my friend Ariel for my parent’s housewarming party a few years ago. I got my inspiration from a Food & Wine recipe and played around with the flavors. We topped the cooked squares of puff pastry with homemade fig jam, Roquefort and toasted walnuts. We did another set with roasted diced beets and goat cheese. As a helpful hint, we did follow the instructions of cooking the pastry between two cookie sheets to prevent the “puff.” This made the squares more like crackers — crunchy, buttery crackers.

Another great use of puff pastry is for desserts. Besides your usual fruit tarts — here’s an example from one of my favorite blogs, The Pioneer Woman — there are hundreds of sweet recipes involving puff pastry. I came across one on Pinterest that I wanted to make as soon as I saw it — little golden-brown pillows, stuffed with Nutella, toasted walnuts and marshmallows. The toasty crispy outside and the warm gooey center was nothing short of amazing. They were insanely easy to make, instantly satisfying and, of course, extremely versatile. And they are also very popular — one google search will net you numerous recipes and variations.

Basically have fun with it — thankfully puff pastry is as forgiving as it is inexpensive. There’s no excuse not to experiment and see what goodies you can create. The possibilities are endless….and I promise you, they will be delicious.