Chan's Personal Blog

On Christmas Eve's Eve, I was invited to a friend's place for a Christmas dinner. It was quite fun because I was invited to help cook a turkey dinner which I haven't done before. So, we were cooking for five people at the dinner, and there was two of us doing the cooking.

The menu was:
Roast Turkey Breast
Ham
Stuffing
Whipped Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Baked Dill Carrots
Seasoned Brussel Sprouts
Cranberry Sauce
Turkey Gravy
Tossed Salad
Apple Pie With French Vanilla Ice-cream

We didn't do everything from scratch, but we did do all the vegetables from scratch. The thing I was most proud of was the whipped garlic mashed potatoes. We didn't actually have a recipe, so we improvised. It also helped that I have encyclopedic knowledge about food from watching the Food Network all the time . After it was all said it done, it turned out as good as The Keg's garlic mashed potatoes (completely unbiased opinion ). Let me tell you, it was smooth and silky as a baby's bottom.

Cooking the meal took about three hours to pull off. We started at 4pm, and we were done at 7pm, which is when the guests just finished arriving. It was fairly low-intensity cooking for the first two hours, as we were just prepping vegetables, and putting things in the oven. We actually got to sit around and watch TV for a bit. It's the last hour where we geared up because everything had to be put together. In the end, we sat down to a nice candle lit dinner. It was a lot of fun cooking with friends. We have to do this again some time.

After dinner, we had our present exchange. Some notable loot I got was the Family Guy movie on DVD. I also got the book, "Shaking Hands With The Devil," which was written by a Canadian general who was a peacekeeper in Rwanda, and witnessed the genocide. I've been meaning to get this book for a very long time.

I got one of the couples there a board game, Apples To Apples, and we played that afterwards. It's a fun light-hearted party game which is really easy to pick up, and very funny. It wasn't easy to find this game since all the online board game stores I looked at was completely sold up of this game.

All in all, a very fun night. Anyway, Merry Christmas to all.

I was over at a friend's house tonight, and he was making a skillet potatoes. Meanwhile, I was washing something in the sink for him. I hear him put something into the pan and it starts sizzling quite a bit. A few seconds later, my eyes start to water a little bit and I start coughing. What's going on? It's like someone hit me with pepper spray or something. We're both coughing at this point, and rubbing our eyes.

Turns out he put jalapenos into a hot pan with oil a few seconds ago. I guess that vaporized some of the jalapeno into the air or something, and when you breathe it in, it starts irritating your air passages. I had no idea that cooking jalapenos would do that. Crazy stuff. Next time, maybe we'll put a lid over the pan if we're frying up jalapenos.

In either case, all my clothes smell like jalapenos as well. Lovely.