Enchiladas, Pizza, Cookies, and Books

I moved to Cambridge on June 5, 2012. Two seasons of Bones, four seasons of Burn Notice, three seasons of The Office, four episodes of Battlestar Gallactica and one mouse later, and I am just six days away from having lived here for two months!

I have been lazy when it comes to posting the last couple of days. I haven't really tried any new recipes, just some ones I've already either made before or are so simple that posting the recipe really isn't worth it. Here are a couple of the things I've made in the last few days.

These cheese enchiladas turned out okay. I didn't get the sauce right, so it didn't quite taste like my mom makes them, but they were good enough. It is really hard to find good Mexican food on the east coast, I've noticed. Italian food, Thai food, Indian food, Chinese food has been nailed down to a science, and its amazing--even better than home. But the only Mexican places I've even seen here have been Qdoba, Chipotle, one Taco Bell, and a place called Filipe's Mexican Taqueria, which is very similar to Chipotle and Qdoba except for that its local and they have flan (its pretty good flan, though). I found a recipe for enchilada sauce that is different from the family recipe (which I also cannot post due to Plankton) but looks like it would be good. On an unrelated note, I think Boston is one of the only places I've ever been (not that I've been to many, but I've been to enough) that has significantly few McDonalds.

The next thing I made was from last night, which was a pesto pizza (the picture is horrible because I took it at night and with my terrible camera), which turned out really really good, despite it just being pesto sauce over pizza dough with tomato slices, a little bit of onion and garlic topped with mozzarella and Parmesan cheese. I spread the dough out as much as I could to make it kind of thin crust, and I think next time I'm not going to use all of the dough so it will be even thinner, almost crunchy, like at Oregano's. I love love love Oregano's pesto pizza. Whenever Josh and I go there we always order that (and a pizza cookie, of course). Much to my chagrin there are no Oregano's here, but this tasted pretty darn close.  

And lastly, I made some chocolate chip-less chocolate chip cookies. The last time we went to the store I gave Josh a list of groceries that I felt he was capable of finding in the store without messing up--like buying chicken with skin instead of skinless chicken breast, that kind of thing--so as to expedite the shopping process. I know where everything is located in the Frys back home, but we are still learning the layout of this store so it takes awhile. Anyway, on that list of groceries was mint chocolate chip ice-cream, the best kind of ice-cream there is. Last time Josh bought cookie-dough, which although tasty does not compare to mint chocolate chip. I told Josh that instead of buying those amazing Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, I would settle for ice-cream. But he didn't get it! So a day later when I had a sweets craving to satisfy, I didn't have ice-cream. I decided to make crescent rolls and have those with some grape jelly instead. I proceeded to open not one, not two, but three tubes of crescent rolls only to find all of them dried out and moldy! And I had just purchased them the day before! So I was pissed, both at the waste of food and money but also because I needed something sweet. That's the story behind the cookies. They were good, but the dough was better. I always end up eating so much dough that I don't really want the cookies when they are done.

Tonight Josh and I are going to our (or perhaps just my--Josh never seems to get huge hankerings for foreign food) favorite Thai place, the Spice Thai Cafe in Harvard Square, for dinner. I'm excited because I plan to stop by The COOP (at right), which is this really cool bookstore right in front of the Harvard T stop. Right before I moved here my sister Hannah gave me a "steamy"--as she put it--novel to read on the plane, the book that the TV series True Blood is based off of. Having only brought a few of my many books to Boston (the rest are sitting in boxes in the closet of my old bedroom at my parents' house, since I had read them all, anyway), I needed something to occupy my time so I finished that book and now I need a new one.

When I was in high school, I tried to spend most summers reading two or three classic books, like Jane Eyre, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations (which was, ironically, a huge disappointment) and the like. I stopped doing that when I started college, and I'd kind of like to get back to that, if only for the edification that comes with reading great pieces of literature. But on the other hand, I can't help but wonder what is going to happen with my vampire friend Bill and his mind-reading cocktail waitress girlfriend Sookie. And then back to the previous hand, a little part of my soul dies every time I choose The Hunger Games over F. Scott Fitzgerald (although I really, really liked The Hunger Games). Now I can't decide if I should read for edification or for pleasure in the event that these are mutually exclusive. Book suggestions?