sorry i was away... but i made you dinner!

O hai there, all 3 of you who keep up with this blog.  As it turns out, it's been pretty easy to do so the past few weeks because I've been so busy working that I haven't been updating it.  Gotta start saving up for those med school apps! (And by saving, I mean buying colored, cropped jeans. So chic!)

Ok, maybe I'm doing both of those things.  But with the amount of time I'm working (I have no "weekend" because if I'm not working at one job, I am of course at the other), I think I am justified in giving myself a few indulgences here and there.  A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, right?

So since it's been so long I decided to try something new: 

Dinner-making post!!

To be fair, we had some help from the beloved Trader Joe's and Pavilion's. So this meal was kind of semi-homemade, but I had to have pretty sweet MacGyver skills to execute it.  So let's get started, shall we?

The inspiration for this meal were these cute little shu mai that we got from the freezer section of TJ's.  Trader Joe's hasn't let us down yet, so I was NOT going to let this be the night that it did. 

Shu mai are typically steamed, and although the package said these could be microwaved, I just wasn't prepared to compromise on my shu mai experience.  Unfortunately, being a recent college grad who is --as much as I try to forget it--white, I didn't have a bamboo steamer at my disposal.

This is where I had to get... creative.

Behold my makeshift aluminum foil steamer!

I stabbed little holes in it with a knife, scrunched it around the outside of my pot with water inside, and once it started boiling I actually had a pretty serviceable steamer on my hands!

Look at all that steammmmm.

Adding the first shu mai to the steamer! I started using chopsticks so I didn't burn myself and to set them down gently as I tested the durability of my aluminum foil steam basket, but I eventually had to switch to using my fingers.  I'm just NOT that good with chopsticks... yet.

Eventually, though, everybody made it into the pot! So I could switch to the second part of the meal: 

Pavilions' generic white-people version of an Asian salad.

Yes, the dressing packet is labeled "Asian Delight."

To be fair, though, it was actually pretty tasty.  It needed something else though, so I chopped up some extra chicken breast that I had previously made using this recipe (it really is fool-proof) and the salad was done!

As the shu mai finished cooking, we realized we still needed a dipping sauce for them... so I had some help making a simple sauce to dip them into.  Soy sauce, vinegar (we happened to have rice vinegar), and sesame oil in the ratios you most want at the moment. So simple it's perfect.

Then at last, the shu mai were done! And they didn't fall into the pot and meet some fiery (or, more technically, watery) demise, so I was prepared to deem them a success whether they actually tasted good or not.

After all that work, we were ready to sit down together and have a nice, perfectly staged meal.

So of course, I'm sure you're thinking we were eating at a table, or something.

But this is what how we actually ate:

Yeah, check out that messy coffee table.  If you didn't believe I'm a recent college grad, you definitely do now.

We had to catch up on the latest episode of The Voice!  We're addicted to it, and Carson always seems hilariously rushed at the end of the shows.  My favorite part is when the contestants who got kicked off are saying good bye and try to grab the mic, but Carson just stands there holding that mic as if it's the last thing he will ever do on earth.  Gotta love live TV.

So there you have it!  It was a pretty tasty meal, if I do say so myself, and it was even fun to make. :)  It's so relaxing to take the time to cook a meal after a long day of work, so I'm glad that my efforts are usually pretty successful.  Trader Joe's still has yet to disappoint us in providing us a great meal, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the streak continues.  Thanks for reading!