What I have accomplished however is quite a bit of cooking and some documentary-watching.
Brian pays for Netflix, which was a big reason I wanted to start watching documentaries. Because they are "free" (for me, anyway) on his instant queue, because I haven't watched too many in my life and because they are interesting and usually somewhat educational (versus watching sitcoms on TV...)
I didn't realize how challenging it would be to find one that was interesting to me. The first one I watched with Alyssa, who watches a lot of documentaries and had heard of some good ones. But watching on my own the last few months has been kind of unsuccessful. My approach was to page through the "suggested" list until I found the one that looked the most interesting and then I watched it. This last week I started to watch one on alternative medicine with Justin, Amy and Brian... which I eventually stopped watching because it was boring. And another one on the sun with Brian, which I also eventually stopped watching because I was bored (although Brian seemed to really like it.) So finally, the other day, I decided to do some "research" and see what other people recommended. I watched one of them last night, and it definitely had my full attention the entire way through. Not necessarily because it was "good", though...
The one I chose was "Dear Zachary." The premise caught my attention, because I like to watch a lot of CSI and Law and Order and other criminal investigation shows. Whoever created the film had recently dealt with the death of his best friend, Andrew, who had been murdered. He had been involved in film and photography when he was in high school, eventually moved to Canada to go to medical school and then moved to the east coast and worked as a general practitioner. While he was in Canada, he met another woman in medical school (who was 12 years older than him and was a little bit off) and started dating her. She was somewhat obsessive and when he later broke up with her, she called him about 40 times and was kind of a crazy person. At the time, she lived in Council Bluffs, IA and after they completely broke up, she drove all the way to the east coast (I think he was in New York) to meet and "talk" with him. His friends warned him that he should go in a public place to talk, but he didn't think anything would go wrong. Well, they found his body the next day in a parking lot of a park with six gunshot wounds to his head, chest, back. When the police called the woman, who had driven back to Council Bluffs, she claimed that she was home sick from work. However, they had records of her making phone calls on her drive to the East Coast, and so she had to change her story, which was incredibly weak. She eventually fled to Canada, where she was from, and from there discovered that she was pregnant with her ex-boyfriend's baby. This baby was Zachary (the title of the movie) and the majority of the movie is about the legal and emotional battle between Andrew's parents and the crazy murderer over Zachary.
I don't want to have to give a spoiler alert, but I will tell you this. It was one of the most horrible, depressing stories I have ever heard. If it was a movie I would have said "You've got to be kidding! Why would you let that happen?" several times. But it was a true story. Which is even worse. Again, I wouldn't say it was "good" but it was reeeeeeally interesting. Brian tried to talk to me a couple times during the documentary, but I don't think I heard a word of it because I was so wrapped up in it. So watch it if you want to watch something interesting, but be prepared for an incredibly emotional story.
As far as food, I have been playing around with different recipes in the cookbook my mom gave me for Christmas over the course of the last couple of months (the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook.) This has been a "to do" for a while, actually (cooking new things out of my cookbook), but one I hadn't really actively acted on until recently. When I graduated from college, I decided that I would spend all my new free time working on 3 things: working out, cooking and reading. Which is why my mom bought me the cookbook. I didn't really do any of these things and, interestingly enough, they all made it on to my bucket list. The biggest reason, I think, that I had a hard time cooking elaborate things is my lack of money. I have been so incredibly broke since I started paying off my student loans and especially so now since I'm trying to pay off my credit card and car by this summer. But lately, I've been getting really sick of eating the same cheap things over and over, so I made the effort to page through the cookbook and find things that used similar ingredients and didn't call for too many that I didn't already have (honestly, it took a lot of effort...)
So two of my last projects involved potatoes. Cub had them on sale (buy one get one free), and since I love potatoes I saw it as an opportunity to learn more recipes. My original plan was to make several different potato recipes since I had so many potatoes, but I loved the recipes that I made so much that I ended up using the majority of the potatoes to make the same things over and over. :)
The first recipe I made was twice-baked potatoes. I've never even made baked potatoes before, so it was an interesting experience. I chose to make the one with cream cheese and chives, but when I had a hard time finding "chives" at the grocery store I ended up using green onions. They were so amazing, I ended up making them 3 times, later adding bacon. Definitely one of my new favorite foods.
My second potato recipe was homemade mashed potatoes. Which is basic, but I had never made them before. The experience was interesting, because it was the first "elaborate" meal I tried to make at Brian's new apartment (versus mac and cheese and frozen pizza.) This should be no surprise to anyone, but Brian has literally no cooking utensils and very few dishes, so I had to bring over some of mine. Since he has no chairs for his kitchen table, I ended up sitting on the stool for his piano and trying to peel the potatoes onto a paper towel. The curious baby kitten was interested and started walking all around them to sniff them and try to eat them and eventually resulted in a lot of the peels being knocked onto the carpet.
In addition to the potatoes, I wanted to make chicken, gravy and asparagus, all of which I have made before. However, I had forgotten to take the frozen chicken out of the freezer to thaw and Brian didn't have a microwave, so I decided to try to make baked chicken in the oven, which I have NOT tried to make before. I thought I had it timed just right. The potatoes were supposed to boil on the stove for a certain amount of minutes and the chicken was supposed to bake in the oven for a certain amount of minutes, and they should have been done at about the same time. When the timer went off for both I took the potatoes off the stove and they were perfect. I checked the oven however and the chicken was not even close to done. It was then that I realized that sometime after I had put the chicken in the oven I had turned the oven off... probably when I had been trying to turn one of the burners off for the asparagus or gravy. I'm not sure how it happened because I don't think any of the burners were still on. Regardless, the chicken was only partially cooked and since I didn't know when I had turned it off and because I had never made baked chicken before, I had a hard time gauging when it would be done.
The potatoes were amazing! The turned out perfectly. As did everything else, aside from the chicken, which ended up being incredibly dry. I don't know why the easiest things end up becoming so difficult for me... :) But since my original intent was to make potatoes, I'll call it a success.
That's all I have to write about for now, but there are more interesting blogs to come... :)
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