Cooking Tip: Bacon in the oven

I decided to make a bacon egg sandwich today! I usually have a hard time getting my bacon to be crispy. I've tried pan-frying bacon at high heat, which is a bad idea because it burns before most of the fat is cooked off, so as a result, the outside is burnt and the inside is still too fatty and moist. I've also tried pan frying the bacon on low-medium heat, but the bacon still ended up soggy because it'd just end up swimming in it's own fat. I read somewhere that you're supposed to continually pour off the melted fat as to prevent the bacon from re-soaking it in, resulting in soggy bacon. This was really hard to do. How are you supposed to drain oil out of the pan when you still have all the bacon on it?

Anyways, today I decided to try baking my bacon. I placed the bacon on top of a baking rack and placed it on a baking pan covered with foil (easier to clean!). I baked the bacon at 400F for 15min, and to my surprise, the bacon came out crispy and not burnt! So, if you're a fan of crisp bacon, this is one way to do it!

Stone Park Cafe: Steak Sandwich

Sovereign Grace Church is in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and in Park Slope, there are lots of nice places to eat! On 324 Fifth Avenue, corner of 3rd Street is Stone Park Cafe. I ordered the steak sandwich - 6oz New York strip, caramelized onions, white cheddar, and a side of fries. I asked to have it done medium rare, but it came cooked to more of a medium, but good thing it was still tender. The steak was nicely seasoned, and it, along with the caramelized onions, went well with the white cheddar. It was a little cold but we sat outside since the wait for an indoor table was going to be 35-45min (at least that means the place is popular!). Park Slope is a really nice neighborhood, so it was no problem sitting outside. Lots of people walking their dogs! The neighborhood definitely has a very upscale feeling to it, which means that I shouldn't be eating out every Sunday after church!

Anyways, here are a few more photos. I give the steak sandwich a 3.5/5, mainly because the steak was a little overcooked to my liking and the sandwich was good, but not awesomely unique.

Cake Decorating Competition: Winter Wonderland

So two of my friends and I entered a cake decorating contest hosted by the resident hall staff! I was quite surprised but the supplies we were given (all supplies were secret before the contest). I was expecting cupcakes or something, but each team was given a full sized plain white cake! Along with that, each team was given a large tub of white frosting, and we were free to get additional supplies from a table. Supplies included sprinkles, M&M's, gummies, etc. There were 5 teams total, with about 3-4 people per team.

Overall, I think we were all pretty happy with how the cake came out! It was a very impromptu cake design =) Snowmen were all molded using frosting, since that gave a rounder and fuller shape than using marshmallows.

Below are a few more photos of the cake!

Fire Hazard

My options for cooking have been very limited, especially with very little counter space, a relatively small stove top, and most of all, because there is a fire/smoke detector merely 14ft from the stove. Well, just having a fire alarm go off isn't so bad, it happened all the time back in my old apartment at UCLA, except the alarm would always be isolated to my apartment. Here, if the alarms go off in your room, the entire building needs to evacuate. How embarrassing right? I don't want to make people leave from their studies to stand outside in the cold for 10 minutes because I was cooking dinner!

I had suddenly started craving steak the last week, as the only type of  meet I had in the freezer was chicken and the closest thing to anything cow that I had eaten lately were the mediocre cheeseburgers from the campus cafeteria. So, since I was at Trader Joe's this past Monday, I decided to buy a few ribeye steaks! I thought, I'll just make them in my oven, and hopefully it won't be so smokey. Pan searing it first won't be an option, since it'll just be a mess of smoke, and it's debatable whether or not pan searing actually seals in the juices anyways (Steak Perfection)

Midblock, Di Fara's, 1040

So I finally took my musculoskeletal midblock exam on Friday! It was actually a little kind of a mess since some required pictures on some of the questions weren't showing up (our tests are computerized mutiple choice questions, kind of like doing the MCAT). Twenty questions into the test I was told that I needed to restart. Anyways, after the initial problems, everything else went smooth after that!

I went out with some good friends to try out Di Fara's pizza too on Friday night as a treat for studying hard and finishing our midblock exam! It was a small cozy restaurant with walls plastered with "Best Pizza in New York, 200-" awards. There were actually a lot of customers there ready to wait ~30-40 minutes for a $4 slice! We personally waited for about 40 min. It was good pizza! Very thin and crunchy crust but not burnt (minus one edge)flavorful with plenty of cheese, topped with lots of fresh basil and extra-virgin olive oil. I actually prefer it over Grimaldi's, but they are very close!

Midnight Snack! Trader Joe's Break and Bake

Midnight Snack!  Trader Joe's break and bake cookies are the best in my opinion compared to Nestle, Toll House, and even Pilsbury.  These usually sell out by the end of the day, so I bought 3 boxes to stock up when I went one morning to TJ's.

Great snack!  At home, Dad would always ask me if I wanted break and bake cookies to eat late at night while I was still up studying =)

Dessert Truck, Shake Shack, and hopefully much more!

Finding awesome places to eat has become I thing I do for fun whenever I can actually find the time to go out.  I'm starting to believe that an exceptional variation of anything in terms of food can be found in NYC.

Places I've been to so far include both of Food Network Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill and Bar Americain.  Both were exceptionally good, but are of the quality one should expect for the price you pay for your meal.

Dessert Truck and Shake Shack are the two places I've really liked and wouldn't mind going back to again and again.  Dessert Truck, which has both a truck and an actual store, beat Bobbly Flay in a throwdown making their bread pudding with bacon custard.  The bacon custard doesn't really taste too much like bacon, but gives the pudding a nice smoky scent.  So when I went, I of course got the bread pudding and opted for the bacon custard (choice of vanilla custard instead if you wish), and it indeed was gooooood - rich and smooth with a still very hot center!