Potato lamb cakes

It occurs to me that I need to start coming up with more clever names for the stuff I make. I guess in one sense the name should correspond with the actual awesomeness of the dish...which is pretty low. I could theoretically name things classier or more exciting, but I find the short, blunt, straightforward approach a thing of personal endearment.

Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be simultaneously undergoing the experience of preparing royal poison and being the royal taste-tester first-hand. Today's dish is a plate of lamb patties fried in oil and mashed potatoes powder.

This picture pushes the limits of Yifan's aesthetic sense, which aptly demonstrates how very limited it was. It's all downhill from here, which means, quite literally, that it won't be pretty.

I did promise everyone that I'd make something unhealthy, and I did. Today's dish, by the way, is partly thanks to my roommate Feng's deft hands and love of oil. What you see above is a lot of oil. Quite a lot of oil. Worked out great though - turns out mashed potato powder absorbs oil like a kitten absorbs mental energy from everyone in a radius of sight.

The idea is, and I hesitate to drive in this point every post, simple. Shape ground lamb into patties, layer on some mayonnaise (yes, it's that idea again - Yifan has limited creativity), dunk the patties in mashed potato powder. There's the crux of this dish. Using mashed potato powder in conjunction with oil is basically delicious for your mouth and disastrous for your heart. Toss on spices (I know people might be tired of my cumin by now, but cumin on lamb is actually something of a necessity), and dunk in oil. Just watch that oil disappear and don't think too much about how it'll be disappearing into your arteries soon.

I want to make a point about the creation process. This thing looked disgusting while it was being made, and I had some serious doubts whether it would work. Mind, it didn't look that great even after being cooked, but at least I could taste it to check.

Covering lamb meat in white was meant to make it return to its lamb state and frolic around but instead it just looks like a dead piece of meat...covered in potato powder.

It also felt disgusting. When you're using your fingers to slather on the mayonnaise, the potato powder loves your fingers more than it loves the lamb, which means it'll stick on you like bloodthirsty leeches on a hemophiliac. Has anyone played with glue or starch so much that eventually you just get this dry, crusty white stuff all over your hands? Imagine that except now you're forced to rub it on your soft, gooey, mildly bloody food. I now know why people enjoy cooking.

The asparagus was a rather last-minute decision. It soaks up the rest of the flavor nicely though, and of course it offers a better aesthetic appeal than just the cooked murdered innocence on a plate that this dish would otherwise be (those poor innocent potatoes - rest in peace). Also it gives me an excuse to call this dish healthier than it should honestly be.

Well, that's today's meal. Eventually I'll have to move on to dishes that don't just involve me using my hands and a giant knife for everything, but until then I'm honestly quite happy pretending I'm a mad scientist working with carcasses while I cook up a succulent meal for myself and my friends (who, curiously, never eat more than a bite of my stuff). Look forward to probably not a change of pace next week!

Chicken with pretty colors

Sometimes while doing odd things, I learn little life lessons. For instance, if you're going to cook meat, defrost it the day before! As a biologist working with bacteria, I know very well their resilience, and so I was in quite the panic as I improv'd my defrosting as quickly as I could in less-than-ideal temperatures. This translates to: procrastination is bad for you and possibly for your physical health. Three cheers for salmonella!

Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be tossing ingredients into a pan wantonly and hoping they don't react, according to some protocol (or "recipe" as the experts say) I find online and invariably change due to laziness. Today's dish is a mix of chicken cooked with asparagus and red peppers.

Wait is Yifan using a camera here? Oh no, rather, Yifan discovered a cell phone camera that can take slightly better, and easier, pics than a laptop's webcam. Silly Yifan, get a camera.

This week's dish is a trifecta of vibrant color, healthfulness, and of course, simplicity. Cook the chicken in a fair amount of chicken broth, toss in garlic, asparagus, and red peppers, season to taste, serve over rice, and you're done! I honestly can't think of even a single step along this process that was troublesome, and the recipe doesn't even call for much in the way of fatty goodness. Very lean, very light. Turns out heart attacks are actually harder to cook well than, you know, normal food.

I should make a point about spices. I only have three - oregano, basil, and cumin. Furthermore, I intend to put all three in virtually everything. Originally I was going to see when people would notice, but now that it's the second week, I'm starting to realize that nobody is eating my cooking except myself. Oh well. I was extraordinarily disappointed tonight because in my rush to get the dish done, I didn't taste-test the spices enough. In other words, I could barely taste the cumin. That is basically unacceptable. The disappointment was tantamount to being informed that you did the puzzle on the back of a cereal box wrong. It's soul-crushing.

Yeah, something like that...

Also a word about colors. This dish would really have been only half as good as it was for me if it didn't feel like I was eating Christmas with every bite. As someone who eats pretty much brown stuff all the time (more on that in future posts), this was a refreshing change of scenery. How do I even describe it? The red was like the boldness of a weekly foray into the unknown, while the green was like the immense envy I have for people who can write better similes than mine. Something like that.

So that's that, a nice healthy dinner for this week. Maybe next week I'll finally get some bacon or something. And by the way, I don't really consider this a food blog as much as a blog blog, but if you're actually (mysteriously, inexplicably) interested in the specifics of the recipes I'm using, leave a comment and I'll reach deep into my memory to figure out what I was doing in my confused haze of culinary catastrophes.

Yifan's Workout

Alright, so this is my first real blogpost, and it's going to be about working out.

So yea, I used to lift weights in my highschool, but I didn't really work out in a year. Thus, it's safe to say that I'm a bit rusty.

Yifan on the other hand is a MASSIVE body builder. He works out like EVERY SINGLE DAY. He's so strong, he has MUSCLES on his MUSCLES on his MUSCLES on his bones. The man knows his weight lifting techniques, from tension training to the ultimate super-set. So for a day, I decided to go under his tutelage.

With a general two hour work-out routine planned, we headed off to the local gym. Personally, I've never really done any research on weightlifting, so I only knew the basics. Yifan however, was the MASTER. He knew which exercises worked out pectoralis major/minor, surrounding balance muscles, and the optimal combinations to go from primary-secondary muscle training to isolation training.

On our way to the gym, Yifan told me we'd be doing a general upperbody push day. To me, this simply meant work the chest, shoulders, and triceps. Boy was I wrong. This man redefined the common workout. What started as a simple benchpress become something I couldn't even possibly dream of. After benching 3 sets of 8 reps of 225 lbs, Yifan claims he is done warming up. He then proceeds to resume benching, only now throwing the barbell up at the apex of the press, propelling the barbell inches away from hitting the ceiling of the weightroom. He continues to do this for several reps. I lost count at about 25. He then goes over and repeats this process, but on an incline, to work out his upper pectorals and front deltoids. He then proceeds to the shoulder press. Unamused by the dumbbells that have weights of only two digits, Yifan grabs hold of two 110 lbs dumbells and begins his shoulder press routine. One dumbbell per hand, he starts punching above him at speeds I had never seen before. This fantastic feat of superhuman strength was only topped when Yifan began to take these 110 lbs weights, and started to dance, rapidly fist pumping as if he were in an overly Italian rave party. With these exercises finished, Yifan then continued on to his triceps. Rather than the conventional tricep dips, Yifan took a very novel approach to this workout. He set up two benches, as if he was going to do a dip. He then asks me to stack on top of his abdoman all the 45lbs weights I can find in the weightroom. When I told him it was simply impossible to do a dip in such conditions, he told me "NO... It is only impossible if you don't believe. A true man believes in himself, and thus, in his own muscles." Moved by the words of a true man, teas began to swell in my eyes as I placed all the weights I could find in the weightroom on top of Yifan. Totaling to over 500 lbs, this meter high stack of weights would be enough to torture any man. However, Yifan takes it with ease, as he does dip after dip.

After reading this post, you may wish to ask if Yifan takes performance enhancing drugs. Now, as valid of a question this is, I must ask that all readers immediately strike this thought from their brains, for no performance enhancing drug could possibly enable a man to do this. Yifan is simply the powerhouse product that is the human product of superman fused with a bull fused with Chuck Norris.

I will leave you with one simple piece of advice. When you see Yifan, do high five him... but be careful, or he may just break your hand.

Chicken slathered in mayonnaise

I've more or less decided that every Saturday I'm going to try out a recipe that I've never tried before. Being a first-time cook, this will be extraordinarily easy the first few times. But regardless, since I'll especially be focusing on how easy it is to make the dish, rather than on pointless things like how good it is or how healthy it is, I'll still be mostly doing easy stuff that anyone could do. So be on the lookout for that.

Welcome to the first Saturday Supper, in which your host, yours truly, I, Yifan, will be making something entirely new and foreign to myself (but still childishly easy to make), and try it out. Today's dish is a three-part: baked chicken, spinach, and rice.

Taken with a low-res webcam because Yifan's a terrible planner and has no camera.

The chicken is by far the hardest part, which is to say, on a scale of skill levels from "world-renowned chef" up top down to "newborn foal," it's around the skill level of "sheltered college student," which might be somewhere above "newborn foal" and below "horse." You read the title right - chicken breasts are slathered in mayonnaise all over, and then covered in spices and breadcrumbs.

May I just take a quick paragraph here to extol the glories of my favorite spice: cumin. Cumin is like powdered joy. It's like taking true love and grinding it into a fine powder, roasting it, and stuffing it into a bottle before smoothing it all over raw bloody meat. It's like crushing the wings of a fairy and capturing the pure flavored essence from the fairy's cries of agony. Do I get my point across about how I feel about cumin? Cumin is delicious.

So I covered the chicken in copious amounts of cumin, some other spices, and breadcrumbs and baked it. About half an hour does pretty well. In a spurt of utterly poor planning, I didn't have any oven mitts on me, so Darvin pulled off some clever engineering in order to fulfill his duty of not letting me catch fire.

The spinach is much easier. Get some garlic, get some spinach (fun fact Yifan didn't know: a whole bag of spinach actually doesn't amount to much...), get some oil, get some salt, combine wantonly in a pan, taking care not to have hot oil splash all over you. The last part is important. Take note of that. The rice is even easier. Darvin prepared that part.

So this first Saturday Supper was much more successful than either of us could have imagined. As Darvin put it: "Sadly, this is probably the best Saturday we'll have." He's probably right. Look forward to it.

Introduction

Y: FIRST!

D: Seriously dude? ... Seriously? Whatever... Anyhow, hey guys, my name is Darvin and this is my blog about my summer adventures! Be sure to check in every wee-

Y: ...

D: I don't think you understand the finer points of written humor. You were supposed to cut me off and mention how it's "our" blog... but you can't cut me off with an ellipsis... since... it makes no sound...

Y: But you never finished your sentence, so I did cut you off.

D: Okay, getting too meta for me...

Y: Dude everything I do I do meta. After like two days of blogging I will have deconstructed this entire thing into the skeletal framework of the futility of blogging.

D: ... Okay, well... this seems like a fun summer... Okay, well, basically this is going to be the blog of our adventures this summer. We're two college students who are summer roommates while we work in jobs on campus. We'll blog every week about some fun stuff we do and the food we make. Even though neither of us have cooked before, how hard could it be? We're both science-y people... we're used to measuring and mixing and whatnots... Right?

Y: So yeah look forward to loads of weekly adventures with us and our friends as we go through our lives. Fun! Friends! Fantastical failures that result in the loss of said friends!

D: ... I... don't know what to say to that... ... I like our friends, dude... Anyhow, tune in this Monday for our first non-introduction post. We're both going to move into our summer rooms on the 6th. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard of a move, so I'm sure everything will go just fine.

Y: Speaking of fine, how much do we get fined if we start a fire in the room?

D: Please... tell me you just wrote that for blog material... ...

Y: Well, I mean hypothetically, in a theoretical sense, some combustion event happening as a thermodynamic thought problem. Purely academic.

D: If you actually do damage... it'll be $300 PER OCCUPANT... plus other expenses... Well... with that covered and a lot to think about housing arrangements tonight... see you Monday!

Y: FIRST! Yeah that's right I got...hey where are you going?

-QED