Mongolian Beef

A friend asked me today for a "kick ass mongolian beef" recipe. My current favorite recipe is a copycat PF Chang's recipe that I happened upon on Epicurious a while back. I think I may end up making this for dinner some night soon...

Sauce
2 tsp veg oil
1/2 tsp. minced ginger
1 tbsp. chopped garlic
1/2 c. soy sauce
1/2 c. water
3/4 c. dark brown sugar

Meat
1 c. vegetable oil (I would use less oil)
1 pound flank steak
1/4 c. cornstarch
1 large green onion

preparation

1. Make the sauce by heating 2 tsp. veg oil in med saucepan over med/low heat. Don't get the oil too hot or yhou'll get a major splatter when adding liquids. Add ginger and garlic to the pan and quickly add the soy sauce and water before the garlic scorches. Dissolve the brown sugar in the saude, then raise the heat to med and boil the sauce for 2-3 min. or until the sauce thickens. Remove from heat.
2. Slice the flank steak against the grain into 1/4 inch thick slices. Tilt the blade of you knife at about a 45 deg angle to the top of the steak so that you get wider cuts.
3. Dip the steak pieces into the cornstarch to apply a very thin dusting to both sides of each piece. Let the beef sit for about 10 min. so that the cornstarch sticks.
4. As the beef sits, heat up one cup of oil in a wok or skillet. Add the beef to the oil and saute for just 2 min. or until the beef just begins to darken on the edges. Stir the meat around a little so that it cooks evenly. After a couple min., use a large slotted spoon to take the meat out onto paper towels, then pour the oil out of the wok. Put the pan back over the heat, dump the meat back into it and simmer for one minute. Add the sauce, cook for one min while stirring, then add all the green onions. Cook for 1 more min., then remove the beef and onions with slotted spon to serving plate. Leave excess sauce behind in the pan.

Serve over jasmine rice.

via epicurious

breast milk baby lotion

People have long been touting breast milk as a cure-all for babies. Everything from baby acne to clogged tear ducts can be fixed with as little as one application of breast milk. I admit, when I first heard about it, I was skeptical. I thought those women were crazy for putting breast milk on their babies! 

I quickly got over my skepticism when Archer had a very bad clogged tear duct that massage and warm cloths just were not curing. His eye would matte over within minutes of my clearing it off, and when he would wake up from a long sleep, he wasn't even able to open his eye. It was painful watching my baby experience that, so when I read on a few websites that women were recommending putting a drop or two of breast milk directly in baby's eye, I decided to give it a whirl. If nothing else was working, why not, right? Oh man! Am I glad I tried it! I did two small drops into Archer's eye and BAM! The eye never matted up again. After I switched to formula only, I saved about 60 ounces of breast milk just in case I came across any other ailments that it could fix.

Unfortunately, if you have a baby who is dealing with skin problems, like baby acne, eczema, or just plain ol' dry skin, it can get kind of messy to just spritz on some breast milk, can't it? Luckily, I have a recipe for breast milk lotion just for these occasions! 

You will need-
3 tablespoons of oats (organic if you prefer)
5oz water
5oz breast milk
2tsp Bees wax pellets
6tsp Emulsifying wax
2 tablespoons sweet almond oil OR vitamin e oil
12 drops of chamomile oil
2 tsp vitamin c powder (crushed vitamins are an OK substitute to use as a preservative)
Clean jar or tub with airtight lid


Put oats into a pan with water; boil up until water starts to turn milky and thick. Turn heat off, add milk then set oats to drain in a muslin or on a piece of cheesecloth. When cool enough to handle, give the muslin a really good squish and mush to get all of the sticky liquid out- I found that using the back of a spoon to scrape the gloop from the outside of the muslin helped.
Add vitamin c powder and set oaty milky fluid to one side.

Melt in a clean pan 2 tsp of bees wax and 6tsp of emulsifying wax. When melted add the vitamin E oil and chamomile oil. This must be done on a really low heat.

While this is melting re-heat the milky oaty gloop do not simmer or boil just warm through nicely.

Keep both pans on a warm heat and pour a very small amount of the liquid into the oil. Give the mixture a very hard whisk. Keep doing this until you have no liquid left, then add the honey.
The honey makes the lumpy gooey mixture go really runny. KEEP whisking. When most of the lumps have gone and the mix is shiny and thick pour mix into your clean tub and allow to cool..

Throughout this process, the mixture went from smelling sweet to sickly to sweet, but the end product is a sweet scent of honey, oats and almost newborn baby breath smell. 

This cream will go a very long way if it is properly stored with an airtight container and in the refrigerator. 

notes on a death day celebration

osama bin laden is dead. if you weren't already aware of that, you clearly haven't been near a tv, radio, newspaper, magazine, facebook page, or, you know, human in the past 24 hours. he's dead and people are relieved. they are rejoicing. a man was assassinated and people are rejoicing.

assassinating a man and then rejoicing. that is terrorism. if people would stop their angry posturing and swearing and just…breathe, they might remember that we are all people, we are all entitled to own opinions, and we are not all bad people who disagree with the majority. Regardless of who you are, what you think, assassination is terrorism, just from a different angle. We think we are in the right. We are in the right. But those men who followed bin laden, they thought they were too. Too often, we forget that the people we are fighting are still people.

i am relieved as well to see that a bad man is no longer. i'm relieved, but i'm conflicted. i'm anti-death penalty but i was happy last night when i heard that osama bin laden died. i was happy but then i realized that there isn't anything to be happy about. US soldiers assassinated a man who was very evil, yes, but did they take out every other person on the planet who believes the way he did? the thing about retaliation is, it just keeps going back and forth until there is nothing left.

i have nothing profound to say, nor will i pretend to. i could write at length, beautifully, about what i'm thinking and feeling but i won't because i just want to get this out of my head as quickly as possible, without thinking too much about it. he's dead and gone and that truly is a win for the good guys, i just worry that, over the past 10 years, the lines between good and evil have started to blur a little too much.