Home-made Cool Ranch Doritos

These home-made doritos were based off of Macheesmo's recipe. Because I like his name.

Instructions: 

 1. Get your ingredients: oil (we used Smart Balance), corn tortillas (Aly suggested using mini ones, but you can use regular sized too), Hidden Valley ranch packet ($100 dollars - or more if you market it and sell the product - to the person who can make up this seasoning without the msg), paprika, and garlic (ours had parsley flakes in it because apparently the hurricaine wiped out ALL the garlic seasoning in the Acme. It's either that or everyone is super prepared for Halloween to ward off the vampires, my guess is 2.)  

 2. Heat your oil. *Don't pour too much oil in, just enough for a few chips to float. We used a wok because it has a lot of depth and therefore minimized any flying-bubbling-popping hot oil from hitting us or our walls. To protect our wall, we actually made a paper-towel-contraption-shield held up by boob-tape because we didn't have tape. It was a great idea until the paper towel slipped onto the burner and almost caught flame. (And as it turned out, no oil hopped out onto the walls anyway thanks to Aly's idea of using a deep wok.) Oh Life. When you're busy preparing and worrying about one thing (that never happens), it turns out your worries and fears can actually cause a whole other catastrophe. Moral of the story: stop worrying. Or worry, but realize it's not going to do you any good. Also, don't play with fire.

3. Cut your tortillas. If you use the mini corn tortillas, cut them into 4, but if you use regular ones cut them into 6. (You can stack them on top of eachother.)

4. Mix seasoning. Use the entire packet of Ranch seasoning, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tsp garlic powder and 1 tbsp salt. (Macheesmo used 2 tbsp, because he is a macho machismo and his heart can apparently handle that amount of sodium. We found that 1 heaping tbsp. was salty enough.)

5. Drop your tortillas into the oil.  

6. Prepare a DoritoStation with wire-racks if you have them, or if not just some paper towels is fine. You have to work quickly to make sure you cover those toasty babies in the seasoning while the oil is still hot. Thankfully, Aly and I had eachother and she worked the frying part (this girl is talented, did you know?) and I seasoned because I'm salty like that. Use tongs or a spoon with holes in it to pluck the chips out. You'll know when the chips are ready because they will float and bubble and start to brown a bit.

7. Make your own Dorito bags and enjoy the chips while they are hot and fresh! (But they are still so good the next day.) 

Thank you to Aly for making this all possible. Her and I both thought the chips were good but still missed something that made them "authentically" cool ranch tasting. Aly will be working on tweaking this recipe to make it more accurate as well as do more posts on Home-made Junk Foods - which frankly, I am so excited about.

I think making home-made Junk Foods is a great idea because often we think of those foods as "off limits" because of calorie, fat, carb contents as well as the chemicals added to preserve these foods in supermarket aisles. Not only does making these foods home-made cut out some of those preservatives, it also makes you aware of what you are eating. What I've learned is that there is no such thing as good or bad foods. It's how we eat them and approach them. If we say we can NEVER HAVE DORITOS EVER AGAIN, then we are setting ourselves up for a disaster. No food should be off-limits - this creates a love/hate relationship with food that is unhealthy. But, I do think that people should know what goes into their food. For example, I could eat my way through 10 bags of chips mindlessly without thinking about it. Or, I could have a small bowl of hot, freshly fried chips and truly enjoy them knowing all that went into the making of them.

A Birthday Post for a Cool Ranch Gal

A picture of me and The Birthday Girl, isn't she gorgeous?

Home-made Dorito bags for...

Home-made Cool Ranch Doritos!!!

Some people like to make their friends birthday cakes for their birthdays. I say, who says? It's time to think out of the cake box... and step into the chip bag.

I would have made my best friend Elizabeth a birthday cake but after 12 years of knowing this girl I know one thing: she loves her chips. Her angel mother, who basically raised me and all of our other friends, always kept a stash of the Frito-Lay multi-pack assorted flavor chip box in the backroom of their basement. Countless sleepovers were spent munching our way through bags of Doritos (Cool Ranch being me and Elizabeth's favorite) while watching MTV and classic 80's movies - and in later years, watching the home videos we made at said sleepovers. (I would now like all of those videos burned.) At this point Elizabeth is not just a best friend - she's kin. She's the sister that I don't fight with (unless of course you count that one time we both wanted to wear the silky yellow tie-in-the-back shirt from Forever21 for New Years Eve that you probably couldn't even PAY either of us to wear today...) and the reason I have not yet boarded the Crazy Train to Crazyville, USA.

I will never forget how we became friends. It all started when Elizabeth invited me to her beach house one summer in Ocean City, New Jersey when we were 12 years old. Somewhere in between walks on the boardwalk, coming up with dance routines to 'N Sync's newest album "Celebrity," eating grilled cheese sandwiches (with what else, Cool Ranch Doritos), her teaching me how to properly wash my face and me teaching her how to straighten her beautiful curly hair (I don't think her mom has forgiven me for that one yet), falling in love with her older brother's friend as well as the Joe Boxer jersey-material sheet sets in our bed, we became best friends and have been ever since.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for being the coolest and best friend in the entire universe! AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!! Now, time to rock out to Hannah Montana... (don't lie, you know you kinda want to...)

P.S. - Next post is dedicated to the making of the Home-made Cool Ranch Doritos!!!! Stay tuned

Life's a Peach

Aly's postcard from Georgia.. check out that early 90's vintage photo-look

A peachy-punch sunset

Peach roses... yum!

The peach tree (another one of Aly's postcards from Georgia!)

The first (and only) time I visited Georgia was in my sophomore year of highschool. My family and I went to Savannah for my childhood babysitter's wedding held in a renovated, old, maroon-painted barn. I'm not sure if it was because it coincided with the first time I fell in love or if the place is actually as magical as I remember it (it probably is) but one thing is for sure:  I left my heart in Georgia. Among the weeping live oaks and brick-red cobblestone streets, the warm and thick almost unbreathable June air, the excitement of having my first love send me cute text messages for the first time, the historic Squares and homes reminiscent of colonial America, the stately maples, oaks and white hickories that shade the Savannah River and the wild growing yellow jasmine and mountain laurel. Anytime I see a peach or the color peach or taste a peach or smell a peach I think of Savannah and that oh-so-succulent time in my life. New love. New sights. Summertime. Sixteen. I've said it before and I will say it again, some memories in life are sweet and sour all at once. Like a peach. I've heard the saying "life's a beach" but more likely, life is no vacation. Life is sometimes sweet and sometimes sour, sometimes mushy and ripe other times hard and puckeringly bitter. Or as the Zen Buddhist saying goes "10,000 sorrows, 10,000 joys." But from which will you source your own life?

(I also like to think that if life is a peach left to ripen, then life just gets better as we grow up.)

Weekend Bits

Left to right, top to bottom:

~ Morning blueberry oatbran muffins (recipe and photos soon to come, here)

~ Pretty flowers and baby potted plants at Waterloo Gardens

~ Passionfruit-banana icecream from Parc

~ Blackbean and roasted corn burgers (recipe and photos soon to come, here)

~ Flaming birthday cakes for Christopher and Tori

~ Hurricane essentials: journal, Tolkien and The Power of Positive Thinking



Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

The dock at my Nana and Pop-pop's shore house.

Of course I am going to talk about the impending hurricane set to make its way on the East Coast. How could I not? I have never seen people so freaked out in my entire 23 years of life. Well most people - unless of course you are my brother. Who didn't even know there was a hurricane coming. Did I mention he is almost 21 years old? And in college? And is very intelligent? Yeah... I don't know either. Let's just call it "denial" and "minimisation" (hey, hey Freud!) Because this is the same guy who had a massive phobia of natural disasters as a kid. (I know he isn't reading this so I don't even need to apologize for the embaressment I might soon cause him.) One of my favorite stories of him is when he visited a colonial-era house for a school field trip in kindergarten. My mom was a chaperone so was thankfully a witness to preserve the story for all of history. When the tour guide asked if anyone had any questions (you know, about churning butter and the revolutionary war) my brother raised his little arm and said:

"Did they have floods back then?"

Actually, good question, bud. Did they? I mean I'm sure they did but it seems like Mother Nature has been particularly kind of pissed at us lately. But can you blame her? I think that Mother Nature is trying to tell us something and my guess is that it might have to do with one or maybe all of the following:

1. It's time to slow down.
2. It's time focus on what truly matters (*hint: it isn't external, tangible or on a computer screen.)
3. It's time to just be.
4. It's time to get in touch with ourselves, our families, our loved ones.
5. It's time for us to start respecting and appreciating Mother Nature a little more. I can picture Mother Nature looking a lot like Aretha Franklin and saying R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me!

But in all seriousness I truly hope that Irene's, that is the name of this hurricane, powerful hurling energy goes UP into the solar system or someplace where it can get dried up by the sun and some meteor dust. I pray there is no devastation. I pray everything turns out OK for all of us. I especially pray that my Nana and Pop-pop's shore house will be safe and sound. The house is the most tangible manifestation of my Nana, who recently passed on, that my family has left. The house was her sanctuary. I truly believe that wherever my Nana is right now, she is probably making some negotiations with Irene about this one. She might even be sending swarms of angels to blanket the house and surround it like a big, warm hug.

The dock in the picture above is the dock at her house and it has provided me with over thousands of sun-soaked memories as a child. To this day, I have no fonder memories than the ones I made on that dock playing in the bay with my siblings and cousins - pretending I was a mermaid, drying off on the hot wood planks in the sun, cannon-balls, back-dives, diving contests, searching for clams in the muck at low-tide, putting on water-ballet shows and "commercials," watching the tide move in and out as the bulk-heads went from stubby to tall, watching the dock ramp move from horizontal to practically vertical, using kitchen tongs to pry the crabs off the bulkheads so that we could "play" with them (read: torture them), spending endless hours jumping into the water and climbing up the wooden ladder (and pulling down eachother's bathing suit bottoms as the person before you climbed up), swatting greenheads and yelling "greenie!" a hundred times a day, finding minnows, spotting the occasional snapping turtle, watching seagulls dive-bomb for fish and for the most breath-taking memory to date  - spotting a magnificent and mysterious long clear needlefish with strings of electric blue on its insides slithering in and out of the serene, deep green water.  The memories that dock has soaked into its wooden planks and barnacled onto its underbelly are the highlights of my life. I pray that dock and all the creatures (those with feet and no feet!) weather the storm.

Stay dry :) ...and for your listening pleasure,

Not Yourself You See

When you look     kool uoy nehW
into a mirror      rorrim a otni
it is not     ton si ti
yourself you see,    ˛ees uoy flesruoy
but a kind     dnik a tub
of apish error     rorre hsipa fo
posed in fearful     lufraef ni desop
symmetry    yrtemmys

~John Updike, "Mirror,"
Telephone Poles and Other Poems



*This is because.... sometimes, the inner critic likes to use the mirror against us. Don't let it win! Remember that when you feel ugly it is only a mirage. Remember that we are more than our physical selves. As Geneen Roth says "we are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around."

Silence the Inner Critic! via the Break Up Club

"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds." - George Santayana

photo courtesy of one of my favorite websites, The Atlantic

In other words, chaos is really perfect order in disguise. Only we've got our ignorant-human-people goggles on so we can't see the master plan. We don't have the perspective yet. Maybe in 10 years. Maybe not. But the point is, from far away everything seems smaller. And when we have distance from our problems, our minds, our own little words, our own thoughts we realize how tiny they all are.

We also realize that a lot of little things can add up to one big thing. So choose your thoughts wisely. Choose them with care and remember that you are creating clusters of energy with each little thought. Also remember that nothing is ever as big or as devastating as it might seem.

Happy Thursday :)