Television Hilarity

A friend of mine from work let me borrow all three seasons of The Big Bang Theory. This is a popular television show on CBS that I had never seen before due to having many other shows that I already watch regularly. However, being that I was able to borrow the set and watch a couple per night before bed, it worked out for me to catch up on them easily. The show is about four friends that all work at a University and are "geniuses." They are into engineering, physics, Star Trek, comic books, and video games. This makes them very socially awkward and nerdy, but hilarious to watch!

It's clean and family friendly, so I would def recommend it to anyone!!! One actor on the show (Jim Parsons), who plays Sheldon, has won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for his performances on the show. I only mention this as tonight is the Academy Awards (also referred to as: The Oscars), and I'm a huge fan of these three award shows. Happy Sunday everyone!!

Facebook Phenomenon

I watched The Social Network (the movie about the back story of facebook) and have to say, I didn't really care for it. It actually made me wish I didn't have an account. Since I do, I won't get rid of it though. {haha} I had no idea that the creator of facebook had pretty much taken the idea from someone else and made it his own. He deserved to be sued, but I know that they didn't really sue him because they were mad about the idea stealing so much as they were pissed that they could be making the money he is making. The way the film was made was good though as it went back and forth between the law suit taking place and what actually happened, which made you really have to pay attention to what was going on. I wouldn't watch this again, nor am I sure that I would recommend it to anyone else.

In addition to that, I watched Easy A & Red. Both of which are comedies and equally not worth watching again. Easy A had a couple of funny lines that I laughed out loud at, and Red had some humor as well, but both just could've just been better. So, I wouldn't recommend either of these either. This weekend I'm looking forward to watching another new film that a friend from work let me borrow and getting some homework done. Enjoy it everyone!

African Food

While I have had many types of food in my life, I have never had African food. Now that I am dating someone from Nigeria, it will become a larger part of my diet. Last weekend, I went to visit my boo and he cooked me a delicious dinner as part of our Valentine's day celebration. I wish I had thought then to take a picture of it! Luckily I found this one on google:

This is a Nigerian beef stew. What I had was not as liquidy, but is very similar and was over whole grain rice. To prepare it, he parboiled the meat and then added it to a couple of red peppers, 4-5 small habeneros, beef bouillon, a couple of roma tomatoes, & some water to finish cooking. All of the peppers and tomatoes are blended or food processed to make it kind of pasty and the water is added to make it as runny or thick as you would like. If you want to try it with another kind of meat, just use that type of bouillon flavoring. You can add any type of vegetables that you would enjoy, but a common addition to this "stew" is fried pieces of plantain. I am not sure what this would taste like, but I am not a fan of bananas, so I don't know that I would like it, being that they are from the same family. On Saturday evening, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant in the area to finish our V-day plans. We had an appetizer of little pastries that had meat and rice inside:

For my main course, I had beef kabobs with white rice and spinach. Both of these were served with sides of hot sauce. It kind of looked like this:

And finally, this past weekend I was visiting him again (I attended a friend's baby shower in the area and it was nice to see him two weekends in a row:)).This time one of his roommates made a common bean dish. It consisted of black eyed peas with spicy seasonings (just as with the stew above)and corn over rice.

I have never had black eyed peas before, and I thought they were very delicious!! As much as I enjoy hot food, I think the spice was a bit much, but they also commonly eat their food with bread and that helps with the burning. Of the two kinds of food, I enjoyed the Nigerian food more. I think that the Ethiopian food was good, but just maybe not the best, but it was from a restaurant and I may be bias to home cooked meals. Also, the Nigerian food used whole grain rice rather than white, so this was healthier for me being that I am attempting to eat healthy and stay fit. And though I loved the spinach at the Ethiopian restaurant, it was very salty. However, all of the meals are easy to prepare, even though they may be slightly time consuming and in a couple of weeks when he comes to visit for my birthday I'm going to surprise him by attempting to make a dish myself. Wish me luck!

Yummy Goodness

One weekend each month, my friend Sarah & her husband Bryan host a movie night at their house. We all get together and eat dinner & then watch two flicks, with a theme. This last time was SNL movies. So, we watched Coming to America (surprisingly, I have never seen this before) & Anchorman. I only stayed for the first movie this go round, but it was highly entertaining. My boo is from Nigeria and is fond of this movie as people assume he is from the jungle, because he is from Africa. I enjoyed the comedy in the film as well as being able to laugh at some of the inside jokes I have with Tunde because the movie too.:)
I decided to bring a chocolate bundt cake with cherry whip cream in order for it to be a semi-Valentine's themed dessert as it was the month of February. I googled Valentine's desserts on google and was directed to cdkitchens.com and found the recipe. The cake called for sour cream and was delicious! (Since Sarah and I are trying to eat healthy[ier], I used fat free sour cream instead of regular.) I sprinkled it with confectionary sugar after it had cooled and it was ready to eat. I will say that I was disappointed in one part of this recipe. I bought heavy whipping cream to make my own and then follwed the recipe directions. When I last checked on my mixer, it was starting to whip up nicely. Then, when I thought it would be done a minute or two later, I checked on it, and it had completely separated! Luckily, I had a container of frozen whipped topping (fat free as well!) that I grabbed and put the marachino cherries in. This leads me to another recipe that I used from the same website for chocolate cream cheese cupcakes. Since I love cooking, but I wouldn't be able to eat the whole batch myself, I wanted to make something for the holiday for work. So, last Sunday, I made those for Valentine's day for the office:) This recipe was really good as well, however again, there was just a small problem with the consistency of the cream cheese center. I'm not sure if it was due to the recipe, or me not letting it sit out long enough and soften. This is the final result:

Everyone at work thoroughly enjoyed them:)
Since I was making cupcakes for work, and my Monday night Bible study was having a little party to celebrate, I made cupcakes for them too. This recipe I made up on my own though:) I had grilled some chicken not too long ago and used sage to season it. I loved the flavor from it, and thought it would be amazing in a dessert. I just took a box of lemon cake mix and made it as directed. Before baking, I added 2 teaspoons of sage and a cup and a half of cut blackberries. I frosted them with cream cheese frosting and a blackberry.

All of the ladies loved them...and because they had fruit, I tried to reason that they were healthy. {grin}
On a side note, I am attempting to switch this blog over to a wordpress site rather than blogger due to a friend's suggestion that it has more options for me to possibly make a small amount of money off of it. So, if that happens, I will let you know as it will be the same blog title.
Stay tuned as I have more to write about, including: Nigerian food, Ethiopian food, a movie, & a tv show.

Background

Ok, so I have turned in to my mother and typically go to bed at ten pm so I am not dead the next day. I ended up spending more time at my church community group tonight chatting with some ladies, so I am home later than I thought and won't be able to write as much as I want. I do want to write something though! I had such a great weekend trying new food, finished an AMAZING book, and watched a new movie. I decided that what I most want to talk about is my book because it inspired the name of my blog and is the second in a trilogy that will also become movies, with the first one coming out in 2012.
So, to begin, I read this book called Hunger Games,  by Suzanne Collins last month. An old college roommate of mine is a writer and an avid reader, like myself. (She has her own site and is publishing a chapter a week of her book online~tarrynfisher.com~ SN:she is an excellend writer, but she does have cursing in the book.) Also, while I was watching the Today show right around New Year's, they did a segment on what was hot in 2010 and what will be hot in 2011. The books that were the most popular in 2010 were the Twilight series and the woman predicted that the Hunger Games series would be this year's next big thing. Of course, I wanted to know what they were all about. So the book was amazing! It took me a chapter or two to get into it, but after that I couldn't put it down. The books are written for young adults, but even older adults read Twilight and Harry Potter:) Basically, the book is about 12 districts run by the government, or the Capitol, and those districts decided they didn't want to follow the government's rules anymore and they attempted to overthrow the Capitol. They lost, and their punishment was the hunger games. This means that a boy and a girl from each district (age 12-18) are each picked to be involved and put into an arena. There can only be one winner, so they have to kill each other off! It may not sound good to some, but I loved it.
So the second of the three books in this series is called Catching Fire. I read this book in just a few days. After the first one ending so good, it took me a few chapters to get back into it, but again, once I did there came a point where I could not put it down. I even got up early Saturday (not that my body can sleep in anymore) and finished it. I don't want to say what this book is about as it would be hard to describe it without giving away some of the first book and I hate when things like that are ruined. I made the statement earlier this week on facebook that reading a good book is like a catch 22; It's so good while you are in it and you want to read it so much to see what happens, but when it's over you feel a little empty. Now I am torn with wanting to read the last book (already have it uploaded to my e-reader!) or postponing it to live in the thrill of the series. Fortunately, between Tarryn and Melisa (my friend that recommended Water for Elephants) I do have several other books they insist I read, but what should I do about Mockingjay? (that's the 3rd book)
All that to say, I had wanted to name my blog a critical critique because I am very opinionated and if I don't like something, I am not afraid so say so. That name was already taken though. Since I was in the middle of reading Catching Fire when I started this blog, I looked for catching critique and clearly was successful. In my mind I saw it in two ways. 1. Maybe other people will see my critique and my opinion would catch on, and/or 2. Because I am trying to do so many new things in life (i.e. this blog and also due to reading Crazy Love, by Francis Chan in my community group, live my life so others can see Christ through me) and I want my passion for Jesus to catch on to other people.
So, this has been significantly longer than I had thought, but I still have plenty more to write about. Thanks for reading!

Water for Elephants

I suppose I should've written about the book that I most recently read, since that's the point of this:). I recently read the book Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen. I should say, I didn't hear about this book on my own. A fellow lover of reading suggested it to me and notified me that it would soon become a major motion picture with Robert Pattinson playing the star role. (Side note: I'm not a huge fan of his.) The story begins with a man in a nursing home. He sees that the circus has come to town and begins to reminisce about how he spent his younger days working in the circus. I found myself strangely intrigued by this book and despite the swearing and slightly graphic content, I wanted to know how it ended. This is the first book that I completed on the new e-reader I got for Christmas. I tend to be a fast reader, so it only took me about five hours spread over a couple days to finish it. So, if you like to read and you like the circus this book is for you. If you are offended by swearing, then take a pass on this, and you should probably avoid the movie as well. Happy reading bloggers!

First Attempt

Well, I recently have found myself enjoying reading some good friends' blog postings. I'm not going to pretend that I have a great writing style, plenty to say, or even that people will read my posts. However, I have always been a big fan of reading, cooking/baking (of course eating:)), and watching TV/movies. Because of this, I have always thought how great it would be to get paid for doing it! HA! Well, I don't think that's anywhere in my future, but I still have an opinion about all of those things, so why not share it with someone? I won't be updating daily, as some do, but I will attempt to write about trying new recipes, when I finish a book, and after I've seen a new movie (new to me too!). To those that do read, please give feedback & share your opinion on the things I mention! Thank you:)