My good friend the lime

I love any cocktail with lime in it. Margaritas, mojitos, caipiriñas, and of course the pisco sour. For those who don’t know, pisco sours are a cocktail typical to Peru. It has lime, pisco (liquor from Peru), egg whites, simple syrup, and bitters. Actually Chile says it invented the drink but since I first tried it in Peru a year and a half ago, I’m convinced its Peruvian. I also tried to make it for friends but was too afraid of killing them with raw egg whites that I didn’t add them so of course it didn’t taste the same.

Today, we went to a Peruvian seafood place for lunch and of course I paid a visit to my old friend. Just as tasty as I remembered it.

Now when I say I like any cocktail with lime, I’m not kidding. When I feel a drink is missing something, a splash of lime makes it all better. Sometimes when I’m at a bar, I ask the bartender to just make something up, which I just realized must be extra annoying for them, oops. Every once in a while its good, mostly its boring or bad. However for Kelley's birthday, we went out and I asked the bartender to make us something with lime and coconut rum (another of our favorites) and it was divine! Haven’t tried to recreate it at home yet but it’s a must for next year.

Good Food Makes Me Happy

I admit I woke up a little crabby today. Waking up uber late made me feel like I wasted the day, but this delicious lunch made it all better. My mom and I shared a pitcher of sangria which I really need to start making back at school. Then for the main meal I had jamon serrano that was drizzled with olive oil and garlic with some bread. Tasty, simple food always makes me happy.

Yummy Potatoes

My mom recently received a goody bag of fresh produce from a friend. Among the treasures were some wonderful yellow potatoes. I never really feel like putting much effort into lunch, so for this day I kept it simple. Just diced up them up with some onions, red bell peppers, and garlic and mixed it all with some tomato paste and paprika, salt, and pepper. Simple, salty, yummy.

Fail

My "dash of this, dash of that" method of cooking really doesn't work when baking cookies. I tried to make chewy coconut lime cookies, key word TRIED. My cookies fell flat and don't have any cocnut taste :(
mistakes:
1. thinking I could add extra butter instead of cream cheese
2. thinking adding twice as much lime juice wouldn't do any harm
3. using pathetic coconut

Next time I'm just going to use a normal sugar cookie recipe and miking in GOOD coconut and some lime zest.

Ming's Cupcake #15

We've made cupcakes from this site before to much success. Thus when I found some extra pumpkin in my mom's kitchen I decided to make the Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting. Let me tell you, Ming knows her cupcakes.

Ming Makes Cupcakes

Jugo de mandarina

I realize making juice doesn't really count as cooking, but I wanted to share my new obsession: mandarin juice. It is so much better than plain old orange juice, it's sweeter and somehow more refreshing. Drinking juice in the states will never be the same, I've been spoiled.

(bellow is someone making juice on the street. They're everywhere here)