Pineapple Fried Rice

Obviously graduate school has taken priority over keeping up with this blog, especially on top of having to teach an undergraduate chemistry lab. I'm finally back though! Plus, I'm still cooking and baking when I have the chance, and taking pictures of everything...I just haven't had the motivation to write about it all. I recently started organizing all of the photos I have on my camera and transferring them onto my computer, and boy, hopefully I'll eventually catch up because I have too many food pictures.

Anyways, on to the food!

I usually have leftover plain white rice. I have a handy rice cooker and make about twice as much as I will be eating the day I'm cooking it so I have leftovers the next day to make fried rice. This is pretty much another variation of my previous fried rice post, link here!...which gives you helpful tips on how to make fried rice and prevent it from getting soggy.

There's marinated pieces of chicken, zucchini, pineapple, and egg in this fried rice. I suggest making sure the chicken is well done before incorporating it into the rice. If you refer to my other fried rice recipe, it teaches you how to incorporate each ingredient (typically the order is eggs, meat, seasoning such as soy sauce, veggies/fruit).

Leftover white rice doesn't have to be boring!

Merry Christmas: Cherry Cheese Pie

Merry Christmas!

I am celebrating a WHITE Christmas with my family today. I think I've only experienced one other white Christmas before, that I can remember anyways.

Even though it was cold, my mom's dog even liked the snow. She kept eating it.

Now onto the food. I made a cherry cheese pie for Christmas. The inspiration for this was whatever I could find in my mom's fridge and pantry, heh.

Ingredients
Store bought pie crust (if y'all have been following my blog for a while, you have probably noticed that I'm not a big fan of making dough from scratch, much less dealing with it in general)
1 can of cherry pie filling
1 package (8 oz) of cream cheese
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
1/3 teaspoon vanilla extract
(I pretty much just cut the recipe for the base of my cheesecake fillings that I typically use for all cheesecake recipes into a third)

Directions 
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Roll the crust out into a 9 inch pie pan/dish. The reason this is the first step is that I like to let dough come to room temperature before baking it.
Prepare the cheese filling by creaming the sugar and vanilla extract into the cream cheese with an electric mixer until smooth. Then beat the egg into the mixture until everything is combined and smooth.
Pour the cherry pie filling into the crust first, then layer the cream cheese filling on top. You can also combine the cherry and cream cheese fillings together for a different taste and effect.
Bake for about 15 minutes at 425 degrees F, then lower the temperature to 350-375 degrees F and bake until the center is almost set (approximately 20-30 minutes). To check if the center is set, I always jiggle the pie and see if the center still moves, like jello or not. Remember that typically baked desserts like pies and cheesecakes continue to bake when taken out of the oven, so it's good to take it out when the center is ALMOST set, but not completely.

Don't be afraid to experiment with recipes you already know by creating new recipes from what you have already available in your kitchen. Especially if you're snowed in or can't bare to be out in the cold to go to the grocery store. You never know when something will turn out horrible great!

New goal for the next year: start trying to make dough for these kind of recipes from scratch!

If you have a SWEET tooth

Cold sweet treats are always great if you don't want something too heavy. Rita's Italian Ice is just the place to satisfy that sweet tooth and to cause a brain freeze.

Gelati = frozen vanilla custard and key lime Italian ice and mango Italian ice

Their Italian ice is made fresh daily with fresh fruit, which adds some dimension to the texture and flavor. It doesn't taste fake like many ice cold treats. They also have a good variety of frozen custard flavors compared with other places. The frozen custard is very smooth and creamy, but it's a bit too sweet for my taste. I can only take small doses at a time.

The highlight of Rita's is definitely their Italian ice!

Soup and Salad To Go

On days when I leave work really late, I like to stop by Market Street and help myself to their amazing salad bar and soups. My favorite soup from them is the loaded baked potato soup. It's soooo good!

Market Street's salad bar has a great selection of whatever you can think of to put on a salad with a variety of different types of lettuce, cold pasta salads, unique items like tabbouleh and hummus, and mixed fruit! One of my favorites is the mixed tortellini and chicken pasta salad (shown below).

Mixed fruit, tortellini and chicken pasta salad, and spring mix salad.

And if you're wondering why there's only one pickled okra all by it's lonesome, it's because I was curious about what it tasted like. I've never had okra in pickled form. The verdict: yum!