What I hate about spring/summer: the extreme heat and blaring sun (oww, my eyes).

What I love about spring/summer: fresh herbs and veggies.

As a celebration of what I do love about this weather, I made some fresh mint lemonade.  I made mint simple syrup by bringing equal parts of sugar and water to a boil.  As soon as it did, I took the pan off the heat and threw in one part fresh mint. After I let it come to near-room temperature, I took out the mint leaves and transferred the syrup to a small bowl and put it in the refrigerator to cool.  I just made one glass of the lemonade, using the juice of half a lemon, ice, water, and the mint syrup to taste.  Quick, easy, and delicious.

I don’t usually post on Saturdays, but I had this one ready to publish on Friday.  So, of course, I forgot to post it.  Woops.  Have a great weekend!

While doing some grocery shopping, I came across some relatively well-priced ground chicken and decided to make burgers. I had access to a frying pan, and the process was painless. I mixed in red curry power, a bit of garam masala, seasoning salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder. The latter two seem a bit not-that-great, but I wanted to add a bit more flavor with my limited kitchen resources. They turned out quite tasty!

After mixing in the seasonings with the chicken, I formed the mixture into patties and fried them in olive oil over medium heat, 5 minutes each side. I cut the patties in half and put them in whole wheat pita bread with sweet baby lettuces and plain yogurt.

I like having a quick fix but delicious meal on a week night. Now on to the much-anticipated weekend!

Yesterday was my birthday, and Sarah and I had decided to make my birthday dinner for my family while we were at my house. After searching the internet for a recipe I wanted to try, I stumbled upon a super-looking chicken curry recipe at Rachael Ray’s magazine website. To go along with it, I cooked some basmati rice and chapati bread. For my birthday cake, we tried a recipe from Food Network’s Ultimate Recipe Showdown for Individual Molten Chocolate Coconut Cakes that had intrigued me. Sarah even made me some quick almond syrup to mix into Sprite to make Almond Sodas. (I have this weird obsession with imitation almond flavor.) Here are the pictures [and recipe links] to document the results of our two-hour long kitchen adventure:

The curry turned out spectacular–the taste was very similar to Chicken Korma, my favorite dish to order at Indian restaurants. I for sure will be making Chandran’s Chicken Curry once again! The Indian Chapati Bread recipe is one I discovered this past summer; it’s a quick fix and works well as a side-bread.

We already had some simple syrup in the fridge, so Sarah just added a bit of almond extract to taste and stirred it into the glass of Sprite. (So, umm…no real recipe to share.)

The cakes turned out delicious! They were really rich, but I highly recommend them. Check out the recipe from the Food Network website here.

The meal ended up taking a lot longer to prepare than we had anticipated, but we had a lot of things going on at once. At any rate, it ended up being really fun. It helped to make for a really nice birthday!

I do like green eggs and ham, Luke I am. Except I don’t really like ham very much, so I enjoyed replacing it with cheese. My girlfriend, Sarah, recently made them with a group of kids. She jokingly suggested making them for breakfast on Saturday, but she knew better to say the word green and have me not participate. So, green eggs and cheese for breakfast it was.

This picture simultaneously looks delicious and disgusting, in a way only Dr. Seuss could inspire.

We made them by beating 4 eggs with about 2 Tablespoons of half & half. Then, we added 3 drops of green food coloring and mixed it in. We transferred the oddly colored egg mixture to a lightly-greased skillet preheated at low-medium. After stirring occasionally for a while, we added some shredded cheddar cheese when they were about done. After they cooked a couple minutes more, they were deemed a little sickly looking. But they were good, and I do like the shade of green. They definitely provided nourishment for our day-trip to Cincinnati, which as I will explain tomorrow, demanded a ton of energy. (Hint: first time at an IKEA…need I say more? Well, I will tomorrow!)