Experiment

I took some videos while in Puerto Rico, and here I put together my three beach videos with a video from the car of where my mother grew up, ending at my grandmother's house. The song is The Album Leaf - Into the Sea. It's one of the corniest things I've ever seen, but the beach is so pretty.

You can't just use Futura like that.

Vampire Weekend made this new video while I was beginning to forget who they were.



It's not as good as the A-Punk video (correction thanks to miguel)... and I can't handle that font when I'm not watching a Wes Anderson film. It just isn't right.

Full disclosure: I once used that font for a PowerPoint presentation. But that was for the express purpose of mocking the use of PowerPoint. And it didn't even work, because I'm bad at PowerPoint.

Anyway, I'm back from Puerto Rico. Coming soon, an attempted ice cream cake. I hope.

P.R., pt. 3

1. We started the day at the Bacardi refinery. Free tour, free drinks. Not-free rum cake. These are delicious mojitos.

2. My next meal by El Yunque tropical rainforest, where I swam under a waterfall. Empanadilla de camarones (shrimp) and sorullos (fried corn sticks).

3. Agua de coco by the beach in Luquillo.

4. Frituras.

5. Raw clams + oysters

6. I did not enjoy those much.

P.R. pt. 2

Dining out. My parents used to come here on dates. "At the beginning of the month, when your dad got his scholarship check."

1. The place.

2. Dominican beer + garlicky-buttery bread before the meal. 3. Dad: Grouper

4. Mom: Cornish Hen stuffed with rice. She did not finish this.

5. Me: Asopao de Camarones. Shrimp + rice soup... kind of. Five hundred stars.

6. Little sister: Churrasco (beef)

7. Dessert + Coffee
This coffee is really great, but much stonger than I'm used to.

P.R., pt. 1

eating in Puerto Rico, at Abuela's house.

1. "No one... cooks like Grandma."

2. How she does it.

3. Deeeelicious vegetarian pasteles (just for me. these are usually pork-y)

4. The panaderia down the street. We buy sweet bread and quesitos right here every time we go to Abuela's house.

5. Quesitos.

6. My mami and I outside Abuela's house.

bon voyage

Tomorrow afternoon I'm off to Puerto Rico for a family vacation and reunion. I'll be updating periodically about what I'm doing (and eating!) with many pictures for all. It's going to be beautiful. And when I return... the birthday cake recipe experimenting begins!

pizza, from scratch

Monday night was pizza from scratch night with some lovely ladies (pictured above). You may be wondering, as my father was, where did I get the scratch? Well it turns out for all the high price we pay for pizza I had most of the ingredients for crust and sauce right in my kitchen!

I've made pasta sauce before, so that wasn't scary, but I was super intimidated about homemade crust. The yeast! The rising! The tossing in the air! But it was so easy to make, and not too hard to roll out. Yes... I resorted to the rolling pin. We ended up with one perfect pizza, one slightly messy one and one pile of cheese sauce and bread. I'm not posting my own directions because the directions for this stuff are long... so I'll just link over.
Crust from 101 cookbooks
Sauce from Martha Stewart

We topped one pizza with fresh mozzarella and basil, and another with the same plus pepperoni for meat eaters and green chile for New Mexican Adrianne. Tasty, tasty, tasty. It's entirely worth it to make your own crust and sauce.