I'm leaving Swarthmore for cooking school!

Here is a collection of food I've made over the summer...

I apologize for intruding but Shilpa invited me after she found out that I have discovered...(drum rolls)...the JOY OF COOKING! I never would have thought that I would enjoy it but there is something really enjoyable about the slow process. It teaches patience, learning to trust your intuition and five senses, and creativity--all things that I'm working on. So really, I love it, and if you don't believe me, ask Liz, Urooj, and Tiff. I, Klambert, have become obsessed with cooking.

I'm a big fan of fresh vegetables! Yep, that's not even canned corn..it's corn that I cut from the cob. yum. Pasta makes multiple appearances in this series simply because it's so simple so I try to be creative with the other dishes.

Here's a typical dish..zucchini, bell peppers, chicken + pasta. simple and quick but still tasty.

Here's where I tried to copy a dish my sister made last summer. She fried mahi mahi fish with tom yum sauce with bell peppers and green onions. Above is a version of that but apparently I'm not great at cooking fish so it didn't turn out as well but it still quite tasty nevertheless. And anyway, the bell peppers make the dish look so pretty!

Mmmm, here's where the good stuff starts! My sister also made some tasty spicy salmon sushi last year, and I replicated it with some success last weekend. I cooked some rice, added generous squirts of lemon and a tad bit of salt, and rolled it into sushi with cucumber and smoked salmon mixed with green onions and chili-garlic sauce. Delicious!

Last weekend, Althea came over and I had been dreaming about steak for awhile so we decided to get some steak and green beans with red onions. I cooked it past the point where the steak could moo but it was nevertheless good for the first time I've ever cooked steak. The green beans, on the other hand, were amazing--crunchy and flavorful after having soaked up the steak juice. double yum!

Here is some baked salmon that was simple and tasty. Trader Joe's (now referred to affectionately be me as "Joe's") sells decently priced wild-caught Alaskan salmon. All I did was cover it in some olive oil, oregano, basil, chili powder, salt and maybe some pepper and stick it into the oven.

Ahh, and this is one of my personal favorites. When I was a kid, my mom used to make pico de gallo, and I was recently craving some so I decided to try it out. I got some tomatoes, red onions, bell peppers, limes, and green onions. All I did was chop the vegetables up and squeeze lots of lime into the mixture and add a bit of salt. Homemade, fresh pico de gallo really is a treat. If you want to make this yourself, I would suggest adding lemon, fresh chili peppers, and hard (less-ripened) tomatoes.