Recipe: Butter Chicken

I am the absolute worst at controlling my spending when it comes to ordering Indian food. I love everything about it. Given that I am trying to not throw away all of my money, particularly over this summer, I jumped at the chance to try to make it on my own when I came across what seemed like a really manageable recipe!

Here is the recipe I used (mostly correctly, which is also a surprise when I make anything for the first time): The BEST Butter Chicken

So, the first step involves marinating chicken, and I marinated mine for 24 hours.

 I messed up and added ghee to the marinade because I misunderstood the written recipe, but it didn't hurt anything.

The next day, I just charred the edges of the chicken in a pan with ghee, removed it, and cooked down the tomato as directed.

I tend to have the hardest time being patient and I jump the gun in recipes and they don't turn out quite right but this time, I succeeded at resisting that urge! The tomatoes cooked for probably 25 minutes.

Such buttery goodness. Then, adding heavy cream told me what I always suspected but never REALLY understood: butter chicken is terrible for you. Next time, I would not add the full two cups though, I would try it with a cup and a half to make it a bit more tomato-y.

Once stirred together, the sauce becomes so silky and smooth! I added the chicken and let it simmer as the recipe instructs. It looked SO good and smelled absolutely amazing.

I couldn't find fenugreek leaves at any store around here, and ended up having to make a few changes. I used about a tsp of the ground seed, even though I know the taste is not quite the same, and instead of sugar I used plain maple syrup as the sweetener. At the end, the flavor was a hair flat, so I added another tablespoon of maple syrup and it turned out delicious. That being said, I plan to order fenugreek leaves so I can do this recipe properly soon!

It tasted so completely amazing. Not exactly like my local restaurant (unsurprisingly), but it was definitely as delicious. The flavor was just a bit different. I highly recommend trying this recipe if you love Indian food. I am trying chicken tikka masala next!!

Homemade Chai Update!

I woke up today, saw clouds in the sky and rain in the forecast, and despite it being summer my brain screamed "CHAI!!!!!!!!" and I knew today would be a homemade chai day. I shared a recipe a long time ago, and I still use that, but have made a few alterations to brewing to help things go a bit more smoothly.

As a recap, my ingredients have not changed but I do not measure them anymore. I use a bit of ginger powder (this dissolves quickly in the liquid) because I do not have fresh ginger in the house most of the time, four cinnamon sticks, a teaspoon of cloves, a tablespoon of black peppercorns, and maybe ten pods of green cardamom. Before, I bring about three and a half cups of water to a boil, then turn off the head and steep all of these whole spices for about 20 minutes. Then, I would bring the water back up to a boil and toss in about four tablespoons of loose darjeeling black tea and let it steep for 5 or 6 minutes like I would a strong cup of tea. Then, I would strain the mixture, return the strained liquid to the pot, stir in honey, add about a cup of dairy (anything from fat free milk to half and half, depending on how rich I wanted it to be), and heat it up on low.

A major change in procedure was containing my steeping ingredients in a strainer. I used to just steep them all freely in the pot, then I added the tea loose, and then had to strain my final product into another container and then return it to the original pot so I could reheat it and add the dairy and sweetener. It was messy, it dirtied up another pot, and I am not graceful enough to not pour the hot liquid all over me during the process. 

Since then, I have acquired several teapots that come with their own strainers. I love these not just because I love the pots, but because I often take out the strainers and use them for other things, such as this. This way, I can steep the spices and quickly remove them, refill the strainer with tea while the liquid heats back up, then steep that in the same strainer. Once everything is steeped, I can remove that quickly too. Then I can just put in sweetener, honey is my usual choice, let it dissolve, and add dairy without the extra steps.

However, using the strainer meant that my favorite ingredient, cinnamon, wouldn't be totally submerged. I knew I could probably stick those in the water outside the strainer and get them out with a fork, they are bigger and easier to fish out, but in a flash of g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶  basic logic, I realized that putting all of them in a plastic baggie and pounding them down would not only make them all smaller, but would open the spices and intensify the flavors! I used the base of a bottle of strained tomatoes as my mallet, but any firm jar will do, you don't need to hit any of it hard.

If you have a spare strainer, and a plastic baggie, take that extra step. It is SO much easier to clean and contain! 

Additional pro tip that normal people wouldn't need to be told: don't try to just dump your mixture from your pot to a mug, because you will spill everywhere. I have literally two years of experience attempting this. Just use a ladle. Easy peasy, no mess. Yes, it took me two years to have that flash of g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶ basic logic as well. 

Better late than never, right?

Swimming Day!

So, a friend came to visit this weekend and I promised them a trip to Lake Anna. I went a couple of times last year and it was a really fun place!

Alas, upon arrival, they were turning cards away because the parking lot was full. We were heartbroken, neither of us have been swimming yet this year. Luckily I remembered there was a little beach area along the Rappahannock, but I really didn't know if it was a swimming area or a wading area.

Luckily, turns out, it is deep enough to do some good swimming! Free, not as far from home as Lake Anna, and free to park. We couldn't get a space in any of those lots either, but we got creative and found a place to park and had an awesome afternoon. Thank you Falmouth Beach!

This is what summer is all about!

Tea Setup

One of the best parts about this move and moving in with my roommate is discovering a new option for storing my tea and other hot drink stuff. She is a primarily coffee girl who loves tea, I am a primarily tea girl who now also loves coffee, so we balance. She had this amazing cart that I just knew would make an amazing drink station!

Behold! I feel so grown up.

Now, it has taken this over a year to get this awesome. The cart and the way it is organized was one of the first things we set up in the new place, before we even had a couch for our living room. We always envisioned having shelving to display teaware and coffee items, but only had one smaller bookshelf that didn't really "go" with the color of the cart. In a stroke of luck, earlier this spring, some people were moving out of their apartment and put these two heavy duty bookshelves by our dumpster! My roommate and I ran out in the beginning of a hail storm to get the first one and when we saw the movers with the second, we directed them straight to our place. Given the age of my building and how most of my furniture is hand me downs, the old school shelves fit right in!

We still use the little kitchen cart, mostly to store my steeper on so it doesn't mess up the wood of the other cart if it drips, and our honey stash. I LOVE lavender honey and rose honey!

We use the lower shelves as a hodgepodge. I store the teas I am reaching for most often to ice, as I am trying to mostly whittle my collection down to near nothing before I rebuild with less old teas. I also store coffee filters, empty tea canisters of teas I plan to replenish in the fall (hello chai!), and we store coffee, the occasional coffee travel mug, and random teapots that don't really "fit" on our more nicely curated shelves.

We have a Chinese themed shelf, with a lot of red tones, and a brown/black coffee shelf with our most loved coffee preparing devices. A red stovetop espresso maker was in use at the time of this picture, but it usually lives here.

The top of the cart includes my mug of the day, the tea I am brewing, cups, Keurig, kettle, sugar, and the teas I am working on at the moment to finish. The cups are adorable, but really are so small I never personally use them. I have used them when we have guests who all want tea at once.

The bottom of the rack holds 95% of the tea in these baskets. The upper right hand basket holds scales mostly, and a few teabag teas I save to use at school. The middle top shelf are my absolute favorite teas, most of which I am working on finishing because they are getting old, and the companies no longer exist. The teas on the upper and lower left have not been tasted yet. The teas on the bottom right are teas I have tried before and enjoy, the basket in the middle contains tea I have designated as iced.

Ultimately, I would like to reduce the tea to one row, so I can keep extra containers and such on the bottom, and just have higher tea turnover.

These are my favorite shelves. A blue/purple focus, and a green/yellow/aqua focus. These items are a combination of mine and my roommate's. Temporarily, there are also green and yellow tea tins that will ultimately go live in my bedroom once I drink all the tea inside!

These shelves are the remainder of the bunch. Leftover tea tins, tea brewing supplies, my roommate's stash of teabags, as most of the tea she drinks is in teabag form, and our handful of cookbooks.

Overall, I love our setup. I love the teaware being decor, I love having a dedicated brewing space, and storage that for the first time ever actually works for me! The kitchen cart was from IKEA back in the day. They have a similar cart, but it is not the exact same. The new version is a bit slimmer and shorter. That being said, if my roomie moved out tomorrow, the first thing I would do is go buy it! It looks great, fits baskets super well, and is a great size!

Book Review: "You Are a Badass" by Jen Sincero

Pretty recently, I have begun dabbling in the self help section of the book world. I have always silently (and sometimes not so silently) mocked the genre, but recently my thoughts have changed. I have watched YouTube videos that are essentially oral versions of a self help book in the form of TED Talks, or just videos of people I watch regularly. There were many book recommendations involved, and to be honest, I pretty much ignored them. It wasn't until friends began recommending certain titles I had heard of before that I paid any attention. After all, these women are educated, bright, socially well adjusted, and are not the "vision" of a self help book reader I had previously concocted in my mind.

The book You Are a Badass was not recommended to me by a human, but Amazon recommendations after I added a related book to my cart and to be honest, I liked the title. It was a worthwhile read, but overall, not life changing.

The Good: I really love the way Sincero speaks. I enjoy the casual conversation-like vibe, the swearing, and how realistic some of her examples really were. The kind of inner thoughts that NO ONE ever says out loud, and so you convince yourself you are the only one who has them. In that way, the book is very relateable. I believe the strategies around setting intentions are good, and setting appropriate goals, refusing to make excuses, are excellent.

 I may be guilty of secretly assuming my perfect man was a casualty of the good guy genocide. This page hit me home the strongest of any of the other pages!

I have not yet actually tried this strategy, but I plan to. Targeting the problem is one of the more difficult challenges in trying to change one's own thinking, in my opinion.

The Bad: This will not be bad for many, if not most, people, but there is a slight tone of religiousness that I personally very much dislike. Sincero makes it clear that when she refers to connecting to the "Universe" (for her, this would be God), it could be any sense of higher power one has. I think that is awesome, inclusive, and really great...if you have a belief in a higher power. I am agnostic but live in a rather atheistic way, and I do not personally connect at all with this idea. Unfortunately, a huge amount of the strategies in the book relying connecting to this "Source Energy" and relying on it's vibrations to give you answers. I am a more introspective person, and do not believe in vibrations. I personally would like strategies that I can implement that do not rely on religion or magic.

Sorry, not buying what is being sold here. Money isn't manifested, it is a product of working hard. If visualizing it is what a person needs to do in order to work hard, then this is great advice. However, to me it merely gives a chuckle.

In the end, it is all up to the Universe (code: God). Just manifest it with your thoughts (code: pray) and have faith. I don't need to elaborate on the issues a non religious person would have with this.

In all, this is a great book for a spiritual person. An atheist, or agnostic who is not searching for a deity in any way, might find this to be lacking. I would recommend it highly to a spiritual person actually, who is in need of some confidence boosting. So much so, I plan to pass this along to one of my closest friends, who is religious, and I hope will get a lot out of it. For me, it is a pass.

I am starting Daring Greatly soon, upon recommendation of an actual human I am friends with and who knows me. I am hoping that one will be more up my alley!

Been Awhile!

Well, it has been quite a long time since my last post. As it tends to be with teaching, and moving, things were quite the whirlwind. Combined with my first teaching year being (predictably) overwhelming, things like this blog got away from me.

I am hoping to restart posting here regularly, but first I should do some catch up first.

Location: I am still living in Virginia. It took me over a year to furnish this apartment so it looked like a real (semi) adult lived here, but I finally did it! I enjoy this area, and could see myself staying long term. I live with a girl I lived with in college, and having her as a roommate has been awesome.

Work: I have loved being a third grade teacher the last two years. Third grade is really in my wheelhouse as a great age group, and I have worked with some amazing people. There have been some issues with some coworkers and certain students, but such is life. I am excited to start a new year with a fresh batch of kids this fall.

Dating: I have been casually dating a man here for about a year, it is not destined to go anywhere, as he is a certifiable train wreck. But we have fun, he is a lovely person, and he provides companionship as I periodically attempt dating elsewhere. So far, my attempts have been unsuccessful, but school tends to be all consuming. I make stronger attempts during summers.

Tea: The tea hoard is actually getting under control. School has prevented me from being as active on Steepster as I would like, but school also prevents me from justifying new tea purchases. I have slowly but surely been working on it. New count to come soon, as well as pictures of my awesome tea/coffee setup!

Cooking: I have really gotten my shit together on the cooking front. I am no master chef, but I have mastered quite a few super awesome dishes that I can't wait to post. They are seriously amazing. I've been making a variety of deliciousness, enough that aforementioned man I date has no idea I am not a natural born amazing cook! I am still striving to improve, as I still stick to mostly simple things. No shame in my game, but I don't like the idea of being intimidated by anything, let alone a recipe.

Weight Loss: On January 1 of this year, I rejoined Weight Watchers. Things were kind of stressful at school, I was tired of how I looked and felt, and decided to just get serious and take the plunge. I have lost about 35 pounds since then, and am feeling great! Things have not always gone super smoothly, but I have stuck with it, and have every intention of continuing. My goal for this calendar year is to have lost 65 pounds total, which I feel is doable. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, but I am a big believer in challenging but achievable and realistic goal setting.

Exercise: I have always loved walking, but beginning Weight Watchers spurred me to kick up my exercise into high gear. I bought an inexpensive stationary bike, and went from walking three miles a couple of times per week to walking 5-7 miles five or six times per week. With the summer heat, I have not been exercising nearly as much, but I know come fall I will be walking like it is going out of style again. Walking alone or with my roommate is truly therapeutic for me, and I know I can't stay away for too long!

Well, that is the update. In many ways, things are exactly the same. In so many more, things are very different. My confidence is higher, I am healthier, and more adventurous. I am hitting financial goals, dabbling in the world of podcasts, meditation, reading for pleasure consistently for the first time in too long, and I've decided to start brewing my own kombucha. It is summer, why not?

I have made a particular effort to focus on myself these last six months after spending a year and a half totally immersed in my work, and I am looking forward to continuing to do so even more intentionally!

Revamp Winning

I haven't posted in a super long time because things have been an absolute whirlwind. I won't go too much into it because I am so super busy, but in the past month - actually 3 weeks - I got a job, moved to Virginia, began said job, and my third graders to arrive Monday for school to begin.

I am exhausted, super stressed, my apartment is in shambles as I have yet to unpack, I moved in a week and a half ago, but overall I am very very glad. I don't adjust super easily to change so I am proud at keeping up so far, even though I know it will be another month until I feel like this is really home and get into a real routine at school. I am so fortunate though - most of the team in third grade is new this year, and we seem to be meshing well. I feel comfortable with my mentor teacher who isn't in my grade, and overall feel good about asking for help when I need it, which is frequently.

I am not totally panicked for Monday which is a bit of a shock, but I t4hink those few months of subbing really helped prepare me to go with the flow. I don't know the school super well, but the kids will know where to go for most things. I have to walk them through a lunch line and eat with them for the first week, which is new to me. Dismissal and attendance and such are also some adjustment stressors I know I will get used to within the first week. All were my main concerns entering a new classroom to sub each day. I am confident in my ability to teach and manage my kids, particularly getting to know them over time, but the little things trip me up once in awhile.