Szechuan Green Beans and a messy desk

Hi All,

The other night I finally got around to making some szechuan green beans. They taste exactly like the ones you get at a restaurant and are delicious. My picture isn't the greatest, and I overcooked the beans by accident so they got shrivelly lol, but it still looks good!



Ingredients:
1 tbsp of fresh ginger, minced
1 tbsp of fresh garlic, minced (about 4 cloves)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup rice vinegar
2 tbsp's hoisin sauce
1 tbsp mirin
1 tsp peanut oil
few squeezes of Sriracha chili sauce
green beans (not sure how many I used...a few handfuls)
lots of canola oil

To Make:
1. Heat up some oil in a pan and saute the garlic and ginger until lightly browned and fragrant. Add the soy sauce, hoisin sauce, mirin, peanut oil and chili sauce. Lightly simmer.
2. In a seperate larger pot heat up enough oil to fry your beans in (1-2 cups). Make sure it's really hot then add the green beans and fry for about 1 minute until they turn dark green. Take them out and add them to the sauce.
3. Simmer for a minute then serve.

Once you have your asian sauces stocked up this recipe is really cheap to make, and fairly quick as well.

So the other day I finally got around to cleaning off my desk, it's amazing how much shit gets lost in the pile! After midterms and after finals I usually try to clean off my desk, usually because I have flashcards, study notes and like 30403 drafts of papers mixed in with pens and textbooks and I can't find anything so I get frustrated and clean it all off. Yes, I know. I shouldn't let it get so disastrous, but trust me, any University student will tell you it's impossible to keep a tidy desk.

Here's everything useful that I had to find a place for back on my desk. I managed to do it too! The main surface of my desk is rather empty now, yay! I don't know why I had a screwdriver on my desk, I put it back in it's lovely toolbox house.



And here is my garbage/recycling pile. Haha. I'm so ashamed.



Now I can eat at my desk without teetering my plate on a pile of crap and worrying about the food or fork sliding off the plate and causing a disaster haha.

I started my 7-day juice detox this morning. I'm rather excited about it. I'll post my feelings about it as I progress. I've never done a juice detox before so I don't really know how my body is going to react. I'm most worried about snacking.

I also finally got around to transferring my computer to the external hard drive so I can reformat. I'm probably going to try out Windows 7.

I'm going to watch American Idol now. Bye all.