crazy month, slow morning

The month of April has been...crazy, to put it lightly.

I'm officially moved in to our Brooklyn apartment - got some awesome movers last weekend and they were done in ~2 hours, for $250 (including tip). Tomorrow, I'm going back to Astoria one last time to do a general clean up, pick up anything I forgot, and give the girls the keys.

Work is oddly slow this morning, but both Tom and Sue aren't in today, and Lori (supervisor) is in a meeting. It's been somewhat nice to relax this first hour.

- Aaaand, just as I said that, I was given stuff to do. Which is fine by me! -

Yeah, so there's not really a lot to blog about - busy but nothing remarkable. I did slice my index finger nicely a week or so ago with an exacto knife. Fortunately, no stitches were needed but it took the corner chunk of my nail with it.

I've been doing some cooking and plan on doing some more this weekend. The only remarkable thing from this week were some delicious ginger poached noodles inspired by Heidi at 101 Cookbooks from last night. Wednesday night, Omar cooked up a flank steak marinated in soy, sriracha, garlic, and ketchup I think, roasted some asparagus with olive oil, salt and pepper and topped with lemon zest and Parmesan, and did a simple olive oil based potato salad with scallions and parsley. With the leftover steak and asparagus in mind, last night I cooked up some noodles.

Basically, I boiled up water and vegetable broth cube, tossed in ~2 oz sliced ginger, 4-5 smashed garlic cloves, 1 jalapeño cut into thick rings. I was lazy and didn't want to seed it, but the pepper was a lot hotter than expected, so I recommend seeding. I let it boil and infuse for probably 5-10 minutes, while I chopped up 3 scallions and a handful of cilantro, shaved some carrot (literally whittled at a carrot with a knife - hey, most of my utensils are still packed up), cut up the roasted asparagus (8ish spears?) and sliced up 2-3 oz of the flank steak.

Toss in drained shirataki noodles and let boil. They only really need 2-3 minutes to par boil, but I let them go for at least 5 (maybe 10?) minutes in hopes to infuse them with the flavor. I didn't know if they would absorb any flavor because I had never tried this method.

I added a few handfuls of frozen peas into the mixture a minute or two before draining. Drain, pick out whatever big chunks you can find, particularly the pepper. I saved some of the broth, following the original recipe, but because I didn't seed the pepper and it was QUITE hotter than I ever expected, the broth was too hot to use. Advice: don't expect the jalapeños at the Korean market to be as wimpy as Key Food jalapeños!

Throw the noodles and peas in a bowl, add the other veggies, and toss with 2-3 tbsp soy sauce, a drizzle of sesame oil, and lemon juice. (Lime would be better, but they were still packed too. Oh, and I used about half the life of one half of a juicy lemon.) I added the steak to my final plate, on top of the mixture, because there was more noodle salad than one serving.

Om nom nom!

Ideas for this weekend? "Stuffed shells" meatballs - ground beef, chopped spinach, either ricotta or cottage cheeses? (Just an idea I'm throwing around in my head because of slightly freezer burned 85/15 ground beef waiting for me.) Some of Eggface's protein muffins - but maybe mocha chip? Hazelnuts, coffee, some nsa dark chocolate? If anyone has any other cooking ideas, pass them this way. I have some red and green curry pastes I picked up from a great Thai place in Chelsea Market that I may have to play around with some too, especially since Shira has been raving about the curry she made (which I made in February).