Dear Clam Chowder, I Own You Now. Love, Charlotte

**I will update this with pictures alter, but it's basically just pictures of stuff in a pot, and a picture of the ingredients.***

 I have a really important announcement to make:

I FOUND THE SECRET TO HOMEMADE CLAM CHOWDER. Here is the story:

            About a week ago, David’s aunt asked for my clam chowder recipe. For as much as I love to cook, I haven’t quite mastered this one yet. So I did some research, I’ve started using food.com and not so much with the AllRecipes after seeing so many recipes get 5 stars with 10,000 comments below about adjustments. These are NRBs. As in, it’s Nice Recipe BUT… I don’t want NRBs. I want good recipes.                  
 So, after some hunting, I found a unique recipe with comments WITHOUT CHANGES. I, of course, changed it a lot. I made it less potato heavy, and substituted the extra taters with some vegetables to give the impression of healthy homemade food. If only my scale could speak to me, I would tell it how healthy I’m being. THEN it would have a different opinion of me, I’m sure of it.

           
So, with some hesitation, we went for it. Sometimes when I make soups, I like to chop everything up for extra easy eating, other times I leave it chunky because I’m lazy or because I want more STUFF in my soup. This one we did somewhere in between because both David and I were working on it. I swear, a little wine and a good country Pandora station makes the food so much better at the end.

Without further ado, here it is:

Charlotte’s Now Famous Clam Chowder

Prep/Cook time: 70-90 minutes ish (but don't be scared!)

Servings: 6-ish…probly

Ingredients:

4 pieces of bacon-cut up into little pieces

1 small-ish onion chopped

3 stalks of celery chopped

2 carrots (or ¾ C of baby carrots cut up) chopped

2C cubed potatoes (We used tiny red potatoes, use whatever kind you want though. This usually measures out to 2 regular sized potatoes. Just keep the cubes small.)

1/2C white wine

1/2C heavy cream

1C milk

2 cans of clams in clam juice (they were kinda big, maybe get minced clams if big clams freak you out or bother you)

½ tsp dill

ARE YOU READY FOR THIS??????

1 CAN CONDENSED CREAM OF CELERY SOUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I know. I didn’t even know that was a thing. P.S. when you open the can, it’s going to look NAAAAYASSSSSSTY. I almost didn’t add it, but then I decided to just GO FOR IT. WORTH. IT. BRO.

Salt and pepper

Directions:

1. Chop everything up. Usually I’m a proponent of preparing ingredients as you go, but you almost dump everything into this at once so just chop ahead of time.
2. In your favorite large soup pot, cook bacon until it’s sizzley and done and has attracted all the noses in your house to the kitchen.
3. Add in the onions, carrots, and celery. Mix around so that it’s all covered in bacon fat (add a little butter if it doesn’t feel like enough) and cook until the onions are transclucent.(I also added a good amount of salt and pepper here)
4. Add in Potatoes, clam JUICE and wine. Cover and let cook for 15-20 minutes until the potatoes are fork-able (or whatever consistency you are comfortable eating them at).
5. Add in the milk, cream, condensed soup, and clams. (I added more salt and pepper here because it felt bland.) Mix and let cook 30-40 minutes.
6. THAT IS IT. FOR REALS RIGHT NOW.

I can't even believe this. No extra ingredients laying around after, like 3 dishes to wash. a-mazing. I could die. So great. My next adventure will be figuring out how to make cream of celery so that we aren't using canned soup that bothers our stomachs for the rest of the night. (I mean, it was obviously 400% worth it, but I'm just saying.)

SHA-BAAAAAAMMM. CLAM CHOWDER. 

BJC February 2014

This past February, we spent 200% more time at the BJC than ever before (I guess David went there for a career fair....doesn't count for this math lesson).

THON

For those of you who are not familiar with the cult of THON, it is a Penn State thing. I could potentially get tackled for saying this, BUT, in a nutshell, 3,000-ish students plan for a year to raise millions of dollars to support around 700 dancers who "dance" for 46 hours straight in the BJC. They raise money for the Four Diamonds Fund which helps support children with cancer (and their families). There is MUCH more to this, they have a dance, they have followers, they have alumni who are more dedicated to THON than to Penn State. See THIS LINK for more information, or to donate, contact me and I will forward you to my sorority. it's a competition and my chapter always owns. (MY chapter. HAH- the chapter I advise.)

 

This particular moment was one of the emptier moments- 8am on Saturday (the event is Friday night to Sunday afternoon)when we squeezed in to take a looksy-poo.

Me interviewing The Man about what's happening at THON.

After THON, I was put into a group for a group project in my LAW class with one of the Grad assistants of the Basketball team, who also used to be ON the team. he got us free tickets to the second to last game -AGAINST OHIO STATE. spoiler: We won.  I love beating Ohio State, at anything. Much like all other humans on the planet in 'murica who aren't ohio state or bama fans. (#rolldamntide)

Oh, did I mention our new football coach was sitting 3 seats in front of us? David saw him outside before the game and I MISSED him. If any of you know anything about my relationship with basketball, it will come as no surprise that my goal in going to the game was to solely to hunt down Franklin (I had a hunch he would be there...it's recruitment season and it's a sport to show off. Good thing we won lolz). 

After David saw him outside and told me, I was basically devastated because David doesn't care about celebrities and almost never gets starstruck.  Celebrity-ism is wasted on him because he doesn't think he should care about someone just because TMZ and People and Teen People and USAToday and E! and the Today Show and Perez Hilton and SNL and the government and every living human in America tells him he should care about them. I mean, I respect that; it just gives me an excuse to be extra crazy, you know, to make up for his lack of crazy.

That being said, he was pretty excited to see Franklin, and he didn't even expect to see him, which made me frown extra big. As we're sitting in our seats having a conversation about all of this, (sandwiched between two sets of incognito Ohio State fans who actually CARED about the game, I might add), I said, "I wonder where Franklin is now, in this big giant stadium...thingy. he could be anywhere." And dear old David responds with, "Uhm...I think he's right there," and points three rows down and ten seats over from us. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!! We then spent the next two quarters (is basketball in quarters? I forget) watching people come up and take pictures with him. The poor guy across the aisle from Franklin kept being asked to take pictures or getting someone else's butt shoved in his face while they basically stood on top of the kid to take the picture. We were going to go up to Franklin and ask him to take a picture of us with the other guy (you know, to be witty), but then he moved and we literally chased him down to the floor of the arena (OH YEAH! THAAAAT'S WHAT IT'S CALLED!!! Arena.), tapping his shoulder,angering his assistant lady, begging for a picture like the fools we are. We never got to use our cool line and at that moment, we were literally the last people he wanted to take a picture with. Some poor soul undergraduate kid took our picture, expecting to get the next one, and then Franklin walked away.

SHUT DOWN.

Angry Football Coach:

  

At the end of sporting events, this really cool thing happens. The Band plays what we think is the  alma matter (we're not completely sure) and all of the students put their arms around each other and sing at the tops of their lungs. It pretty much makes me cry every single time, I don't know why. It's just adorable and moving and everyone doing the same thing that has literally been being done for over 100 years (I assume, since this school does everything first before anyone else, as a general rule). After they stormed the field, I mean court, they all got together in haphazzard lines and sang that wonderful old (sometimes silly) song. wait, so i just watched a video and apparently it's a new post-game tradition...whatever...it's the best tradition. 

WATCH THE ADORABLE VIDEO HERE.  

There may or may not be adorable swaying. Minute 3:01 is my personal favorite. 

Not that anyone but us cares, but my favorite part of this whole madness is all the people who, right before the swaying begins, scream (and i mean SCREAM): LEFT!!!!!! (as in, sway to the left first). it never really works out (mostly because of the average BAC of the student section), but it's so great that they're always so determined.

 

here is the actual alma mater and INFORMATION ABOUT IT HERE. 

I like it, but I'm a little biased. 

This picture is of before we won- IT WAS ACTUALLY A CLOSE GAME. 

My one artistic picture.

They didn't have a kiss cam, so not all my dreams came true that night, but it was close. 

 Add 5 lbs of chocolate and 4 boxes of overpriced girl scout cookies, and that's basically it for February!

The Big Plan

So, I fully intend to blog about healthy food more, but until I can actually write things up, here is the website that David found that we've been experimenting from:

http://www.whfoods.com/recipestoc.php?#recipes

Delish. As I've told many of you (ok like 3 people), all we added to our grocery list was fresh ginger root, white rice vinegar...and...I think that's it. OH, we bought napa cabbage and pot sticker wrappers. Those were new. AND THAT'S IT! You can make almost everything from this website using ingredients you already have! and it repeats ingredients a lot too,

WHICH IS GREAT BECAUUUUUUUUSEEE... New recipes always call for the most random crap and then it just sits in the back of my cupboard for months. I can't be the only one this happens to.

Peanut hates extra ingredients lying around. He is not impressed. 

Tasty Tomato Pot

Tasty Tomato Pot

This dish is best when you’ve been feeling negligent food-wise. We recently went away for a weekend and I don’t know about you, but eating at restaurants gets very old very fast. I can never find solid veggies, and when I do, they feel like they’ve been soaking in butter and salt for weeks before they finally get to my plate.

Ingredients:

Basically any veggies that you love. Here’s what we did with ours tonight:

2tbsp. olive oil

3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

1 small onion diced-ish

10 quartered baby carrots

4 asparagus, chopped

1 small zucchini, sliced

½ a bell pepper sliced

1 28oz can diced tomatoes (I meant to get whole and then chop them up, but this worked out okay too, just make sure you get the ones without extra salt

1 tbsp. honey (to balance out the acidity of the tomatoes)

½ a lemon

1 chicken breast

½ lb. shrimp

1/2C chopped parsley (don’t know if this actually made a difference or not, but it looked healthy)

1-2 tbsp. Cajun seasoning (or mixed salt and pepper always works great too)

1.       Preheat the oven to 350.

2.       Slowly add the bolded ingredients, giving them time to simmer between each ingredient (I chopped as I added as opposed to chopping all ahead of time and then adding at the same time).add most of the seasoning too.

3.       After you get a tasty smell going, pour in the can of tomatoes, mix and cover.

4.       Cut the chicken to your preferred size, add to a bowl, add parsley, little seasoning and squeeze the ½ lemon over the chicken. Mix with a little olive oil, spread on a baking sheet and bake until done (usually 15-20 minutes).

5.       As soon as you put the chicken in, put the rice on (if you’re eating this with rice)

6.       After you put the rice on, you have the perfect amount of time to shell the shrimp and add them to your tomato pot. Stand there and stir JUST until the shrimp turn pink. Also, I added the rest of the lemon to the pot, but that’s just because I was feeling fancy.

7.       Take the chicken out of the oven, drain the pan, and add to the tomato pot.

8.       What? Did you say that took you exactly the amount of time for the rice to be done at this exact moment? Check that baby!

9.       Pour over rice, or next to rice, and eat! 

Don’t you feel healthy? Me too.