Zibblog

I’ve been crazy busy with work and traveling (Hong Kong & Tokyo post coming soon), but I wanted to throw up a quick Happy Holidays post. For anyone interested, my holidays involved a few fun little items. On Sunday, Leslie, her roommate, and I went to The Village Pub for a holiday dinner. I will say that after watching a lot of episodes of Kitchen Nightmares (mostly, the BBC version), you see restaurants in a different way, but that just makes the restaurants that pull off a great experience that much better.

On Monday night, we opened presents and Leslie helped me finish up my xmas tree cupcake experiment. It has been awhile since I’ve done any interesting desserts, so it was fun to play around in the kitchen. For Christmas, we went to visit Leslie’s mom in the east bay. Thankfully, the family drama was kept to a minimum. The funniest event of the day was when shortly after we arrived, her mom started doing really really laud karaoke.

In an effort to get my blog post count a little bit higher, I decided to blog a little more randomly for a while. For some of you, this may even seem a little more “Zibblerish”. In the end, it mostly just means more head scratching for my readers and less links.

After many weeks of seeing quesadillas being made while I was waiting for my grilled chicken on a ciabatta roll at the company cafeteria, I decided that a quesadilla is probably fairly easy to make. After the superbowl, I decided to test this assumption. I’m one of those people who tends to eat food low on toppings, so I bought some chicken breasts, some pregrated cheese in a bag, some burrito sized tortillas, and a packet of taco seasoning. Personally, I’ve always been of the opinion that Una Mas quesadillas are pretty greasy, so I went with no oil in the final toasting of the tortilla with the cheese on it and I really liked the crispness of the end product. Everyone involved thought that the end product turned out pretty well.

On a totally unrelated note, if you haven’t seen it yet, here is a page of facts about Chuck Norris.

For anyone that hasn’t yet seen my condo, you can take a look at some of the photos here. I mention the pictures mostly to draw your attention to the photo of my oven unit. If you were just glancing at it (as I’ll admit that I did when I first started the process of buying the place), you might be tricked into thinking that the thing above the oven is a microwave. It is in fact another small oven (it’s really too big to be considered a toaster oven). At first, I had a hard time figuring out how I was going to live without a microwave. However, soon, I came to appreciate some of the things it does really well like heat up hot pockets (what can I say, I’ve got a thing for hot pockets). After a while, I realized the main thing that it doesn’t do well is cook microwave popcorn. There is really nothing better than combining microwave popcorn and NCIS late on a Tuesday night. Like Joni Mitchell always said, “you don’t know what you got til it’s gone.”

I was in the cafeteria at work today and I saw that they were selling bottles of Bawls. I got hooked on it after Chris bought some at the end of some release at work along with other energy drinks, but I have a hard time finding it anywhere. As I was drinking my Bawls, I decided to visit the website and noticed that they now have a sugar free version (the white bottle). I’m all for sugar free, but I’m kind of used to blue Bawls. However, I suppose white Bawls might be more appropriate for me.

Note: I’m really sorry for the above comment. It’s really only there because I feel like JB is disappointed by a lack of comments of that sort lately.