The End is Near

Not to sound morbid or anything. What I intended to convey in the title is that the end of the semester is drawing near and we've been busy! Well...Michaels been busy, I spent most of the week either hugging the toilet (which I had thankfully cleaned the day before) or moaning in bed. But more on that later.

We made a first attempt at making the Indian fresh cheese, paneer, a couple of Mondays ago.

It's a component of our favorite Trader Joe's Indian-in-a-bag that we have been sorely missing.

Making it really made us wish we could attain some cheesecloth over here. It left one of our two kitchen towels stiff and smelly until the next laundry day.

But despite the smelly towel and the fact that it probably wasn't the most authentic paneer, it ended up turning this Paneer Curry with Peas into one of my all-time favorite Indian meals. 

My herb garden has been growing like weeds in all the glorious sunshine last week. Not that you can pick one bit of green apart from the other, but the plant on the far right is my bean plant. It is now 5" taller than the stick that is supporting it.

In my quest to convince Michael that raw veggies aren't the devil, we (read: I) decided to make ourselves some Vietnamese summer rolls.

 Don't ask me why our move to France spurred this intense yearning to make and eat all things Asian. I don't understand the correlation either. I just know that these were delicious.

We did indulge Michael's sweet tooth with these orange iced cinnamon buns for our usual Sunday brunch a few weeks ago. He still has one left to finish though and I want my tupperware back!

And we spent another day basking in the glorious sunshine. I read and Michael studied.

Then we fattened ourselves up again (must make up for all the lost calories in those vegetarian curries) with Thomas Keller's lemon-brined fried chicken. If you have a day, I'd highly recommend the recipe. However, unless you plan to make an early (2:00pm) dinner, I would suggest that you brine early in the morning for dinner later that day. The chicken ended up a little salty for us, and anyone who has eaten with us could tell you that the food would then be way too salty for the average human.

Just after the stalker incident, detailed in my last post, I took the little girls that I teach english/babysit to the Jardin Botanique (Botanical Garden) just down the street. I was attempting to take a new picture for the top of the blog but as you can see, my attempts were thwarted by Eleanora's Vanna While impression.

 Who knew of black swans' existence? I certainly didn't before our trip to the Jardin Botanique.

And later that night we made this deliciously ill-fated currywurst. Currywurst, for those of you who haven't been to Germany lately, is some sort of wurst sausage, fried then cut up and topped with curry flavored ketchup and a soft roll. It was ill-fated because I took some medicine later that evening that left me hugging the toilet while said currywurst came back up and subsequently led to me laying in bed, moaning about my burning stomach for the next 3 days. Sorry if that was tmi (too much information -- for the non 20 year old readers).

 This photo is just meant as proof of what an awful housewife I am.

 Oh, and I also rediscovered my love of drawing with this lovely rendition of

these sunglasses that Michael bought during last year's trip/wedding/honeymoon in Hawaii. Can you all believe that it's almost been a year?

*gasp*