Paper Gangsta Chicken

Every once in a while, Richie gets really hungry, and decides we need to get back to some semblance of living in a civilized society and eat a full meal for dinner instead of sitting on his bedroom floor eating leftover soup (which we did on Monday). Yesterday was one of those days.

Over time, these "full meals" have come to include these basic components:

• Spinach- Hot olive oil and garlic in a pan, add lots and lots of spinach, allow to wilt. Deliciously simple. An alternative here is stuffed mushrooms or asparagus, but spinach is easier and doesn't take up room in my tiny oven. Richie makes this part.
• Stove Top stuffing- Chicken flavor. No exceptions.
• Biscuits- Typically the Grands layers, but it varies.
• Mozzarella cheese- A perfect appetizer. Just slice pieces off the ball of cheese and consume.
• Some sort of chicken.

The chicken is almost always my responsibility, and it's always a pain. Since I don't eat almost any other kind of meat (and fish is wicked expensive!) chicken is my go-to protein. I usually just end up breading, pan-frying, and baking it with sauce and/or cheese. Simple, and always good. But I'm getting sick of the same old thing, and I guess Richie was too. So he came up with a brilliant idea: "Do you have shredded cheese? What if you mixed the shredded cheese with the breadcrumbs?"

Glorious. I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it myself. Fried cheese is one of the best things in the world. I'd tried it with parmesan with good results, but I had just never thought of the shredded cheese.

So, long story short, it was delicious. And all delicious new meals deserve their own name. So it was decided (for reasons that still elude me somewhat- I think it has something to do with the fact that it's really simple and there aren't any ingredients that wouldn't already be in your fridge) that it shall be known as "Paper Gangsta Chicken", after the song by the magical Lady Gaga.

So here, for the very first time, is the extremely simple and extremely delicious recipe for the extremely unhealthy Paper Gangsta Chicken:

Ingredients:

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• breadcrumbs and assorted breadcrumb seasonings- this time I used Italian seasoning, garlic salt, and a little bit of cinnamon
• a spoonful of mayo
• a handful of shredded cheese
• olive oil

Prep:

• Make sure your hands are clean (I know, this is obvious, but I still feel like I should put it, just in case someone doesn't know the basic laws of cooking).
• Put the mayo in a bowl. Throw the chicken in the bowl. Mush it all together until the chicken breasts are relatively evenly coated with mayo.

Side note: I know that mayo is not

absolutely necessary, but I think it's

really helpful, especially when working

with a heavier coating like the cheese.

And you're already eating fried chicken

with cheese. You're not being healthy.

Don't kid yourself into thinking that

excluding the mayo is going to save

your diet.

• In another bowl, you should have mixed your breadcrumbs, seasoning, and cheese. Put your chicken in this bowl and coat them with the mixture.
• Pan-fry in hot olive oil.
• Place in glass dish and bake at 350 for a while (typically this is just until the biscuits are done baking). Throw some cheese on the top, too, if you're feeling especially deprived of clogs in your arteries. Serves 2.

The best thing about this chicken is that when you're pan-frying it, the cheese doesn't have time to get gooey (make sure that oil is hot before you put the chicken in), so it just gets crunchy and delicious.

When I Grow Up...

I read a post this morning on the lovely Ms. Jenson's blog, Daydream Believer about what her top career dreams were when she was a kid, and it got me thinking about everything that I've wanted to be through the years. I know I'm still pretty young, and my goals may change again within the next few years, but it's funny to think about some of the ideas that I had. My dream careers through the years have been:

-Baker. This was the first job I ever remember wanting; I think it was because I liked helping my mom in the kitchen, and at five I realized that if I was a baker, I could have cookies and cake whenever I wanted! What a life! I've since realized that me having a bakery would be the worst idea ever, since I hate waking up early and I don't want to weigh 300 pounds.

-Teacher. This is a pretty common one, and it's come back to me a few times. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to teach elementary school. When I was in high school, I thought for a while I would be a high school English teacher. Now that I'm in college, I've considered the idea of being a professor. But I always realize that I would be a horrible teacher, because little kids would drive me insane and I really don't like teenagers that much (I didn't even like high school kids, really, when I was in high school). Undoubtedly, once I'm out of college for a few years, I'll realize that being a professor would be bad as well.

-Journalist/Author. This has been one that I've varied on throughout the years. I'm a strong writer, and I always thought I would do something with that, but I'm not good enough to make a career out of being a journalist, and I'm not creative or diligent enough to be an author. For a while I also talked about being an international correspondent (and this was at the time at which I was first picking a major, which was extra stressful), but I think that was mainly because I was so anxious to get out of Deposit and travel the world.

-Actress. For quite a while in late elementary and middle school, I was determined to make it in the bright lights of Hollywood. I did a lot of stage acting during this time, and I'm a good actress and I really enjoy it. But the logical side of my brain always took over, and realized that I would never make it as an actress, and that there's no job security in it. It's funny, because now a lot of my friends are theatre majors, and I admire them so much for being so dedicated. I'm also really glad I'm not majoring in it, because some of the things they do in studio are ridiculous, and the majority of the people would drive me absolutely insane.

-Singer. Similarly to being an actress, when I realized that I was a decently good singer, I thought, "I'm going to be a STAR!" Yeah...it's not likely.

-Cashier. Like Ms. Jenson, I always wanted to be the person running the cash register at the grocery store. The laser scanner was the coolest thing ever, and I always whined at my mom to let me use the self-checkout, once those came around. I got the opportunity to be a cashier girl when I worked at the Big M last summer. And you know what? When it was busy, it was just as much fun as I always thought it would be. I loved the pressure of a line, I got to talk to people, and check things out fast, and there's something so satisfying about bagging groceries properly. I'm weird, I know, but I honestly loved cashiering.

Right now my plan is to be a clinical psychologist. I think I'll be good at it, but who knows? My plans might change and I may end up doing something completely different. I guess we'll see...

What A Weekend!

This weekend has been a very...busy one. I had Friday off, so I got a lot of stuff done around my room, and took care of securing more work-study money and faxed my tax stuff to my mom, then hung out with a bunch of people Friday night.

But the most exciting part of the weekend was yesterday: I went to the new apartment to sign my lease and meet Emma, the third girl I'll be living with. I met my landlords, who are this absolutely fantastic couple, and who really seem to care about us and making sure we're doing well. We signed the lease at around 7:30, and then the three of us hung out talking until about 3 AM. I'm just so excited for this, and I'm so glad everything seems to be coming together well.

It's such a relief that things are kind of working out, because it's been such a stress for me for the past few months. Between stuff with the apartment, and money (as always), and some friend drama that's been happening, I haven't really been thinking about classes as much as I should. But this is the time of the semester that I really need to buckle down and get working on stuff. So today is going to be a homework day, where I really get stuff done. Hopefully.

Baseball

That's right, folks. It's baseball season once again. And while my Red Sox have been doing poorly (they're 5-9 as of right now), I'm still so happy that baseball is back that I almost don't care.

The beautiful thing about the beginning of the season is that anything can happen. Sure, we've gotten off to a rough start, but there are still 147 games left (after tonight's, which is currently tied) in the season. Anything could happen.

I know that a lot of people think baseball is stupid, but it really is my favorite sport. I adore football, I go kind of crazy when March Madness comes around, and I may have a crush on the Olympics, but baseball will always be my first love, and the love of my life. It's the sport I have the most experience with (I played softball for eight years, and I started going to minor league games when I was really young) and it's the one I care most about.

There's something about going to a game, about sitting in the sun with a cap on, eating cotton candy and spiedies, cheering, hearing the booming voice of the announcer and the hitter's music...I love the atmosphere of a stadium. There's nothing quite like watching a home run, or seeing a shortstop turn an incredible double play. I think I would probably live there, if it had cleaner bathrooms.

I also love baseball because it'll never leave you. Even if you miss a game, the team will always be there tomorrow, trying again to make history, or just the highlight reel. They'll be there every summer, ready for you when you get home from work at night, or on TV at just the right time when you've got the day off.

The bookends of the season (Opening Day until mid-May, and late August until the World Series) are always either really exciting or really tough. But the sweet spot, the middle of the season, when anything is possible...that's my favorite part of the year. It's hot, sunny, and my Sox still have a chance. To me, baseball and summer go hand in hand, and always will.

Being a Red Sox fan in NYC isn't always easy, especially last year when the Yankees won the Series. I walked through Union Square, past throngs of people celebrating and cheering, and I felt so disappointed. But I know that this season is a clean slate, and I can't wait.

Cooking.

Cooking is one of my very favorite activities. I find it so relaxing, just putting different things together to make a meal that is absolutely delicious. And my friends seem to appreciate it as well.

I learned to cook from my mom, someone who is no slouch herself in the culinary department. For as long as I can remember, I've been helping her in the kitchen- from mashing bananas with my hands for banana bread (something I still do today; don't judge me, it's fun to get messy) to learning to cut vegetables to making my first batch of edible pancakes. It hasn't always been pretty- there was an awful failed experiment with scones that even the dog wouldn't touch, and my French toast still leaves something to be desired, but I've got a few staples that I can always pull out that are delicious no matter what.

I very rarely cook from a recipe. I was taught to throw in "some" of this, "a little" of that, and to measure salt in my hand instead of with a teaspoon. I had a hard time "learning" to make chocolate chip cookies in eighth grade home ec, because I had been making them for years and hadn't used a recipe since I was ten. I remember telling my group to ditch the recipe, and our cookies were judged to be the best. I always think it's funny when people ask how much "a pinch" is- it's a pinch! Some! A bit! Cooking is always an activity that I feel my way along, instead of measuring and weighing and portioning. It's an intuitive thing, something you just do instead of thinking about.

That being said, I don't discount recipes. Sometimes they're necessary- when making something new, for instance, I'll always base whatever I'm doing off of an existing recipe. But I very rarely make anything exactly as the recipe specifies.

Tonight I'm making chicken kiev for a dinner party we're having. I asked my mom how to make it the last time I was home. While she didn't give me an exact recipe, she showed me how to do it. So here's my attempt at a recipe for some of the most delicious chicken you'll ever have (and that's saying a lot, because I eat a lot of chicken):

Ingredients:

4 boneless, skinless, chicken breasts

butter (~half a stick, give or take)

mustard (I prefer honey dijon, but almost anything works, as long as it's not that nasty yellow mustard that people put on hot dogs)

olive oil

breadcrumbs (you can buy plain and then mix them with whatever you like- I prefer italian seasoning, salt, and a little bit of parmesan cheese)

cheddar cheese (sharp, but not too sharp)

Prep:

Melt some butter in the microwave just until it's soft enough to be easily smushed with a spoon. You don't want it to be liquid. Whip it up until it's not chunky anymore, and mix in some mustard. You want it to be a nice mustard-tinged butter, not too much or too little. (Wow, this is harder than I thought it would be.) Refrigerate your mustard butter for a while, until it's hard again.

Take your chicken breasts and (this is the best part of the whole thing) whack them. Hard. Seriously. Put one of them in a plastic bag and smack it as hard as you want for a while. Then do the rest. Use any blunt object you want. My mom prefers an ice cream scoop- I personally am going to go with my metal water bottle- but whatever you're most comfortable with! You want to flatten the chicken out pretty evenly, until it's about as thick as an edition of Sports Illustrated. (Not one of their double issues, though, and not one of those skimpy issues they put out sometimes. A normal, average-sized issue.)

Take your now-hard mustard butter (bustard? mutter? hmm...) out of the fridge and spoon some of it onto the center of one of your pieces of chicken. A couple of scoops, not too much...basically divide your butter into four equal amounts and put one of each on each piece of chicken. Obviously.

Along with the butter, put a few pieces of cheese on each piece of chicken. However much looks right. Use your best judgement.

Then roll the chicken around the filling and secure the edges together with toothpicks. You want to close it up as tightly as it is possible to close chicken with toothpicks (i.e. not very, but as long as the major holes are closed it's all good). You can also use butcher's twine if you've got it, but I don't, so I use the toothpicks.

Coat the chicken with breadcrumbs- if you want to use something to make the breadcrumbs stick better, go for it. I personally prefer a little bit of mayo, but I didn't put it in the ingredients because I didn't want the very first recipe on my blog to include two kinds of cheese, butter, olive oil, AND mayo.

Drop the chicken into about a quarter-inch of hot olive oil, just long enough to make sure that the breadcrumbs won't fall off the chicken. Make sure all the sides get touched- you don't want to cook the chicken this way, though.

Once all of your pieces have been stuffed, secured, and taken a dip in the oil, put them in a pan, drizzle with a bit more oil, and pop in a reasonably hot oven for a while (until they're cooked).

Before serving, make sure you take out the toothpicks. You don't want people getting mouth splinters. Serves 4.

So there you have it: the most amorphous recipe ever. But it's delicious, and really bad for you, and I'm excited to make it for my friends tonight. :)

When Did I Become An Adult? And How Do I Make The Process Slow Down?

Well, I didn't want to jinx it, but it seems that as of now it's a pretty sure thing, so here's my big news: I've found an apartment!

That's right folks, as of May 8th I will officially be a resident of Brooklyn. I'm so excited and scared and weirded out by the whole thing! Signing a lease seems like such a huge deal- it's one of my first real big-time adult actions- but I'm so happy that I've found this place.

It's a third floor walk-up in the Bay Ridge neighborhood, which is a really safe, family-oriented area of Brooklyn. It's about 20 minutes from Union Square on the subway; pretty far, but considering I'll be saving over $1300/month, it seems to make pretty good sense to me. I'll be living with two other girls, Aubrey and Emma. I haven't met Emma yet, but Aubrey is really nice and seems like someone I'll really be able to get along with.

And the place! There are only two apartments in the whole of the building, so we have the whole third floor to ourselves. The living room area is huge, my room is bigger than my room at home, and it has an entire wall that's a built-in closet. The kitchen has a ton of counter space, a gas stove (thank goodness!), and a full-sized fridge. There's a dining room area with a full table, and we have a grill on the fire escape. Also, we can climb up the ladder and go on the roof- I haven't been up there, but Aubrey said there's a great view of the Manhattan skyline and the Verrazano Bridge, and that she likes to tan up there in the summer.

The lease that we're going to be signing (on Saturday the 24th, so soon!) is May 2010-2011. That means that I'm going to get to be in New York all summer, working full-time for my job in the Math department and hopefully picking up another part-time job waitressing or something. And what's even better is that almost all of my closest friends are going to be here as well!

I'm just so excited to be able to spend this summer working full-time, earning a ton of money, living in New York City, and hanging out with my friends. Also, I'll be starting my junior year in the fall (it's so hard to believe that I'll be a junior already), and now that I finally have my major completely figured out, I'm going to be taking classes that are 100% in my major. Finally, I'll be done with my LSP requirements once and for all (and I'll officially have an Associate's degree- my first college degree!) and be able to concentrate what I really love: Applied Psych. I met with my adviser yesterday, and she told me that I was pretty ahead in terms of credits, and that I may actually be able to graduate a semester early!

That of course got me thinking about what I would do if, come January 2012 (which is not that far away!), I was completely done with my undergrad work. I know that I've got plenty of time to figure it out, but it's weird to think that I might be done a full semester earlier than I had originally thought.

It seems that a lot of my financial problems are going to be lessened, as well, since I won't be paying obscene amounts of money towards NYU housing anymore. They're not going to disappear completely, but they will certainly be a little less stressful, which I'm very much looking forward to.

All in all, it's been a pretty solid couple of days for me. It seems that things are looking up- finally- and I'm so happy about it!

Gone With the Wind

I wasn't planning on writing a post about my favorite book of all time, but I just read Ms. Jenson's post about To Kill a Mockingbird and felt inspired.

As you can imagine, I've read a lot of books. My mom taught me to read at a very early age, and I was always pretty far ahead of most of my peers (I read The Giver ,a novel that is on the eighth or ninth grade curriculum at my high school, when I was eight, and Great Expectations in sixth grade). I remember a lot of my elementary school teachers being frustrated by the middle of the year because I had already read all of the books in the class's little library. Library time was always my favorite, because the idea of going in and picking out whatever I wanted to read was wonderful to me (the librarian wouldn't let me have Pride and Prejudice until I was in fourth grade, which at the time annoyed me, but looking back was probably a good decision). For years in middle and early high school, I told everyone that I was going to become an English teacher. That plan obviously didn't work out (mostly because I would be frustrated with being around that many teenagers for that many hours per day) but my love of reading never changed. Even now, I don't go anywhere without a book. I check books out of the NYU library to read just for fun all the time, even though there's never a shortage of readings for me to do for class. Reading is relaxing to me, and even now I can't fall asleep without reading something beforehand.

All that being said, my favorite book out of all those I have read is Gone With the Wind. I know it's a very clichéd favorite book, but that doesn't make me love it any less. It's taken me a long time to figure out why I love it so much, and I think I've got a few ideas.

The first is, of course, the love story. Scarlett and Rhett are meant to be together. The reader knows this from the very first time Rhett is introduced. They're both selfish, rude, and uncaring.

They're perfect for each other.

I also like it because it's a real love story. The beauty is in the fact that they don't end up together. When I was younger, I used to get very angry at Rhett for not staying to love Scarlett when she returned to him at the end. But as I've grown up, I've realized that sometimes, no matter what, you can't wait any longer. Rhett had to leave, and I'm glad he did. I don't believe in fairy-tale, Disney endings for real life; Gone With the Wind is much closer to what really happens. And there's no way the story would be as wonderful and as much of a classic as it is today had he stayed. The most famous line from the entire story is Rhett's parting words: "My dear, I don't give a damn." (There is no "frankly" in the novel; that was added for the movie.)

I also have a strangely passionate attachment to my copy of the novel. I bought my own copy after the fourth time I had borrowed it from the public library and the librarian suggested I give someone else a chance. This book has been with me through some of the strangest, toughest, best parts of my life. It's dog-eared, yellowing, and the spine is completely broken, but I know I'll never get rid of it.

Oh, and anyone who knows me knows better than to talk about the travesty that is Scarlett, the so-called "sequel". Shudder.

Apartment Hunting

So this week's activity of choice?

Searching for somewhere to live.

I did the math (I know, me doing math...crazy!) and I've realized that I'm paying $1876.50 per month for NYU housing and ~5 meals per week. I know I'm living in an incredible area of Manhattan, but that's just ridiculous.

So, I've been perusing Craigslist ads for the past few days, trying to figure out if I can find somewhere to live, starting around the first weekend in May.

I've sent out a TON of emails (most of them tonight) about coming to see places, and I'm planning to do a lot of visiting this weekend and next week.

Here's hoping that I find something! I really want to stay in the city this summer, and I also really want to avoid paying ridiculously high prices to NYU.

I'll probably end up living somewhere in Harlem, but that's okay. I can live pretty much anywhere, so long as it's a little bit of personal space that I can come home to at night.

Also, this will take the whole "broke college student" thing to a whole new level for me, but it's okay. I can live my life on Ramen and no new clothes.

And if you've got any leads on cheap housing in NYC, let me know!