Too...much...breakfast.....

Let me start off by saying that I am a big fan of breakfast foods. Oddly enough, I also don't really eat breakfast often, let alone cook it. I also tend to sleep through breakfast, which doesn't help.

Well, this time, I cooked a meal early enough in the day to be considered breakfast.

You can see everything in that picture: toast, scrambled eggs, breakfast sausage, canadian bacon, and a salad, which I almost put there out of humor. You know, like someone getting a double six dollar burger at Carl's Jr. with a diet coke--not out of preference of taste, but for "health."

The sausage side.

Closeup of the salad. It was a bit dry, probably because I didn't add enough extra virgin olive oil.


The whole thing.

Yeah, I actually didn't finish everything.

Sandwiches, along with more sandwiches.

So for breakfast (more like lunch), I wanted to use the canadian bacon that we bought from the supermarket the day before. I also had english muffins, eggs, ring molds for eggs, and a block of sharp cheddar cheese. Guess where this is going?

If you guessed eggs benedict, you're wrong. I just made some kind of homemade egg mcmuffin-type sandwich. Cheddar was shaved off the block from a vegetable peeler.

That same night, we made sloppy joes--sauce is from a can though, so this hardly counts as homemade...I'm just too lazy to cook a substantial meal.

That vegetable peeler trick is actually pretty handy.

Almost like a Carl's Jr. commercial, except these aren't fat enough to kill you onsite.

Curry

Well, Japanese curry. From a curry block. So that makes this dish pretty easy to make, provided that you have basic knife skills and you're not an idiot.

Looks pretty similar to a beef stew, eh?

A closeup of the curry inside the pot.

I know it kind of looks a bit watery in the pictures, but it wasn't at all--turned out great.

Moved in!

And finally, I have moved into my apartment at Vista del Campo. Which, by the way, is a really nice apartment.

A really nice apartment.

I'll just let the pictures do the talking:

My room.

My sink, inside my private bathroom.

The kitchen! It's pretty darn nice. It's spacious, there's lots of counter space, there's a bunch of cabinets, etc. This place is too nice for college students.

The living room. There will soon be a TV on that stand.

View of the sunset from our half-patio thing.

Another view of the sunset, looking another direction.

Since I can't get a good picture of the whole room, taking a picture of the mirrored closet gives a good idea of what the whole room looks like. Also note the sunset from my windows. Ohh yeah.



Oh right, this is a food blog.

Well, I didn't cook in the kitchen yet, but my family brought takeout from some place in Santa Ana: rice with grilled pork (known in Vietnamese as com thit nuong) and a fried egg on top.


I'm also not using the crappy phone camera anymore.

Smothered Pork Chops

Hold on a second. Before I talk about this dish, let's take a step back and look at all the food posts on this blog so far.

Steak and eggs. Steak and potatoes. Philly cheesesteak.

You know, I really don't eat steak this much.

Anyways, today we're going to break that chain. This is a recipe from an Emeril cookbook (save your breath), and it's called smothered pork chops.
It's really just pork chops, potatoes, some form of smoked sausage (I used kielbasa), and other stuff, simmered in a "gravy" made with chicken broth added to roux, reduced, and thickened again with potatoes. It's pretty good, although the simmering part takes 1 hour and 15 minutes total.

I'm still working on plating...these nice white plates are brand new (see last post), so I pretty much just started caring about plating. The gravy became pretty thick since it was thickened essentially three times (roux, reduction, potatoes), but it sure tasted great. Unfortunately, it also looks like crap.

Well, practice makes perfect. At least everything tasted great.

And once again...

Steak and eggs. I must have steak as much as I can while I'm at home, because you know I won't be able to afford that at college.

Well, maybe once in a while, I might.

This time, it's a sirloin steak--a cheaper cut than that new york steak, but still nice and tender when cooked medium (not a fan of medium-rare). Cooking this was pretty easy, too! I used my Calphalon hard anodized everyday pan--just sear for 90 seconds per side on crazy high heat, then put the whole thing, pan and all, into the oven at 450, for 3 minutes a side. That'll actually get you a medium-rare steak, but this sirloin was so thin it turned out to be medium.
Oh, I also got a square plate at Ikea, cause everything looks good on a square plate. Really. Now I just have to learn how to plate food...

Oh, just a typical breakfast.

Yup, just a good old, normal breakfast. I don't move into my apartment at UCI until Sept 22nd, as I said before, so I'm still at home. You know how you can tell that I'm still at home?

Cause of this:

Steak and mashed potatoes for breakfast. Sorry for the crappy phone picture, I'll get a new camera sometime. I was going to do steak and eggs, but we ran out of eggs, so I used leftover mashed potatoes that I made last night. Actually, that's a leftover new york steak as well. Salt, pepper, montreal steak seasoning. I had such good looking grill lines on it last night (really! no, really!) but since I reheated it on a skillet this morning, it kind of went away. Oh well, better pictures next time.