A productive -- if crazy -- day

This is my kitchen. I love my kitchen. It's one of my favorite things about this apartment. There's enough counter space to actually make things. The sink is large, there are lots and lots of cabinets. However, today, a war was waged in my kitchen that reduced it to looking like this:

What, you may ask, happened to the once brave and clean expanses of counter top? Where did the shining, empty sink go? I had quite a few adventures in the kitchen today, but I'm happy to say that all of them were quite successful. 

A good deal of what I did today involved stocking up my freezer with individual sized portions that I can just defrost after work. This was my freezer at the start of the day. Nothing terribly exciting. Pretty empty. 

This is what it looks like now. I'm excited!!

First off, I made a concentrate that I can use for broccoli soup. Basically, when I want to eat some, I just have to thaw the concentrate, heat it up and add milk and anything else that I want. My basic "cream of ______" soup recipe doesn't really use measurements. It's all about the ratios. So, you need three parts of chicken or vegetable stock, two parts of your vegetables, and one part of dairy. Your dairy can be milk, cream, half and half, yogurt, sour cream... Anything really. I also partially steamed several servings of broccoli and froze them. Maybe I'll make a stir fry or something out of them later on. 

I also made a base to use for tomato soup. I would just like to point out how neatly this tomato continues the apparent tradition of MASSIVE produce in South Korea. It's as big as my hand, and I have pretty big hands. Since I'm apparently incapable of making soup in small enough quantities for one person to reasonably finish in a few days, freezing it seemed like the only option. In fact, I already have a large container of potato soup left over from my last soup making attempt in the freezer. 

While all of the soup simmering was going on, I baked two and a half pounds of chicken breast, lightly seasoned with olive oil, salt and pepper, then I shredded it to be frozen in smaller portions. I'll be able to pull it out and use it in a wide variety of dishes in the future. 

This is one pound of peeled fresh ginger. Apparently, when you peel an entire pound of ginger, the enzyme or whatever inside of the ginger that gives it a pleasant spice transfers itself to your skin in such large quantities that your hands will burn for the next hour, despite repeated hand washing. Just so you know :) I used this to make candied ginger, which was a first for me. 

The candied ginger is in the pot on the left. The pot on the right is Alfredo sauce that I also made to put in the freezer. A note to my future self: Don't ever make two delicate, time-sensitive dishes that both require constant stirring at the same time. 

When I was stirring the ginger in the pot, it was still a liquid. As soon as I turned off the heat and literally rotated to my right to dump the mixture out onto some aluminum foil, it had turned into something that was granulated and solid again. It was pretty amazing. Now I have a lot of candied ginger AND some awesome ginger infused sugar!

A close up of the ginger. It always reminds me of Christmas, somehow. Maybe it's the way the sugar sparkles like lights?

Next up was another new recipe. I'm going to a cookie exchange on Saturday, so I needed 3 dozen cookies. I posted a recipe for some red velvet cream cheese cookies on my facebook last night because they just looked so amazing. Unfortunately, that particular cookie recipe called for a box of red velvet cake mix. Which just doesn't exist in Korea. So I went to bed last night a little sad, as I contemplated my lack of red velvet. This morning, I woke up determined to find a way around this minor setback in my quest for red velvet cookies. I did some googling and found a recipe that I could make pretty easily here. I modified it a little bit, and decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. 

Here we have the finished product: Red Velvet Chocolate Chip Cookies. Oh. My. Word. They were amazingly delicious. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from a cake turned cookie, but whatever my expectations may have been, they were far exceeded. This recipe is definitely going into the notebook where I write all of my favorite recipes and cooking tricks. It might even be my new favorite cookie. 

Finally, I used some of that candied ginger to make ginger molasses cookies. This is an old favorite recipe of mine. I've made them lots of times. But it was exciting to make them with ginger that I'd made myself!

In the middle of this cooking frenzy, I got a text message from my school requesting my presence at a ceremony that evening, so I had to run off and leave my kitchen a complete disaster. This is one of those times I'm thankful that I live alone -- I don't have a roommate to drive crazy with stuff like this!