Happy National Cheesecake Day!  That's right, July 30th is the unofficial celebration of America's favorite cake, er I mean custard.  Despite its name, cheesecake isn't really much of a cake at all.   Cakes require flour; cheesecakes don't have that.  Instead they're more of a custard as they are composed of mainly eggs, cream, and sugar. 


Last week, I had a friend from France come and say with me.  One night when we went out to dinner, she was excited to see Cheesecake on the dessert menu.  Apparently, in France (or at least the southern part) they don't have cream cheese!  Who would have thought that the country known for their over 360 different kinds of cheese, cream cheese is not among them.  We of course had to make a cheesecake at home before she left.


After gently folding through the pages on the internet, we finally found a quick recipe for cheesecake.  For you hardcore foodies (who aren't reading this because I know all two of my readers), I would not recommend using the recipe that we did.  That being said, we did successfully satisfy our cheesecake craving.


I'll write more on this post in about a week.  Hopefully I'll get internet in my apartment then.  Hopefully This tiny bite of what's to come will wet your appetite for more on cheesecake.

It has been said, "if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life."  When I was a sophomore in high school, my mother wanted to make sure that both I and my older brother knew how to "fish" before we left for college.  This meant learning how to cook (which I never got to do while I lived in the dorms).  When I look back at my and my brother's childhoods, we've always been somewhat involved in the kitchen.  We knew how to cut up onions, peel shrimp, and perform other menial tasks (we actually got quite good at that kind of stuff, I suspect it's because my mom didn't want to do those tasks herself so she made us do them).   However we never had to take a meal from grocery shopping to prep work to execution to eating.  In order to teach us, she made us make a full meal about 2-3 times/month and always on a Friday night.  Over the 3 years I did this, it grew to be a popular social event among my friends and laziness in creating the Facebook invitations branded the event as FND for Friday Night Dinner.  As it turns out, good food often leads to good friends.  I learned how to organize and plan a meal and my time spent in grocery stores looking for ingredients gradually declined.  I learned how to prepare many of my mother's family recipes and try to avoid chaos and her yelling at me in the kitchen.  Although the meals were often tasty, I still haven't mastered the whole avoiding chaos and yelling bit when I go home and cook.


My favorite part of FND happened each time just before the food was set on the table.  At this time, I would look around and see myself surrounded by friends and family all sitting down together for a meal that I toiled over for the past hour or two to prepare.  Funny stories and good conversation were about to be passed along with a side of gai-lan or mashed potatoes.  Although sometimes days would start out rather unpleasant or stressful, at the end of the night, after being with good food and good company, I don't remember ending a single one in a bad mood.  


While in high school, my parents footed the bill for each of these dinners (which sometimes fed about 20 people), needless to say, these did not continue after I graduated from high school.  However, this summer FND has been resurrected and re-adapted as TND, Tuesday Night Dinner.  Last Tuesday, July 6, was the first one.  My brother and I cooked Char Koay Teow for a few friends.  We created a running tab where we can track how much each meal costs and how much everyone owes.  With different friends and different food, I personally am excited to see this tradition carry on.  Next week we will be having German food prepared by my brother's roommate's girlfriend.  There is nothing quite like making friends over a good meal.  

This cut of meat is a the most inexpensive making it ideal for a poor college kid like me.  Although is called a "spare rib," this is not the rib that Adam gave up to create Eve (Sorry, that's a lame joke).  There are two predominant explanations for spareribs' name.  The first is derived from the German "Rippenspeer" which means "spear ribs," or ribs you roast on a spear/spit.  When translated to English, it became "rib speer" which eventually evolved into "spare ribs" or "spareribs," both spellings are generally accepted.  The other explanation is that this cut of meat is literally the spare ribs.  After the butcher cuts up the pig the last part is generally the ribs.  Baby back ribs are taken out first and whatever meat is left becomes spare ribs.