Good Times!

Last night we celebrated Lawrence's bday over at my apartment. We had a small gathering (just Lis, Lawrence and I) that started about 5pm or so. Lis made this awesome cake -- it was 2 layers and was RED! It was a goofy looking piece of food, but damn did it taste good. The whole thing was homemade (the cake, the icing, everything) and turned out great. I was in charge of making the salsa which turned out better than normal. I didn't leave it chunky like pico de gallo, but I didn't blend it either. It was basically hand-crushed salsa and it turned out awesome! It wasn't as soupy as it would be if it was blended and it wasn't as chunky had I just cut the pieces up. So... for your eating pleasure.. here's a homemade salsa recipe for everyone to enjoy:

Shopping List:
Chips to eat the salsa with
1 medium white onion
1 medium red onion
4 large tomatoes
1 garlic
3-5 medium jalapenos
2 small limes
1 bunch of cilantro
Salt & Pepper
1 small red bell pepper (optional)
Velveeta cheese (optional -- used for making queso instead of salsa)

Toys needed:
Sharp knife
Cutting board
A big bowl (like something you would mix a large cake in)
A garbage bowl or can to throw stuff away in
Vegetable Oil
Rags to wipe your hands on

How to make it:
1) Dice up 3/4 of each onion and place in mixing bowl
2) Dice up tomatoes and put in bowl. You can remove the juicy part if you want a more dry salsa
3) Crack open the garlic to get at the cloves inside it. Dice up 4-5 decent sized clove of garic (you can add more or less depending on taste and size). Using a garlic press helps a bunch with this
4) Take limes and press on table with some weight while rolling. Basically, roll them back and forth on the table with the palm of your hand to loosen the juice up. Slice limes in half and squeeze juice into the bowl. If you want to have more of a dry salsa, only use only one lime.
5) Chop the cilantro into fine bits and add to the bowl. You won't use the whole bunch of cilantro, but only about 1/3 - 1/2 of it.
6) (Optional) Dice up 1/2 of red pepper (make sure to remove the seeds, which are in a ball at the top of the pepper) and add to mixture.
7) Cover your hands in vegetable oil and dice the jalapenos (you do this so that the jalapeno membranes don't burn your skin if you have sensitive skin or open cuts). Be sure to remove all the seeds (unless you like hot salsa) and most of the membrane (which is the lighter-colored inside part of the pepper. You can leave it in if you like hotter salsa). Add to bowl.
8) Salt and pepper the mixture and stir a bunch

The finer you dice things, the less chunky the mixture will be. If you have it too chunky, you can stick it into a blender and it will liquify the salsa. I just use one of those hand-dicer dealies instead of a knife and it works slick. Once you have the mixture set, taste it to see if you need to add any more ingredients to it. Letting it sit for an hour or so in the fridge will give it more taste (because the lime gets the chance to soak in). When you're ready to serve, you can add it to melted Velveeta cheese to make queso.

The whole ordeal takes about 1/2 hour to make once you have the recipe down and will make enough salsa to serve about 8 people (so it's perfect for small parties). The recipe is very easy to double or triple (or half if you want to make salsa for just yourself). The salsa isn't that hot by default, but can be made hotter by using different/more peppers or leaving the pepper seeds and membranes in. Enjoy!

Anyways, back to the party... it was a small gathering but we had a blast. Ate pizza from Austin Pizza Garden, had salsa/queso and cake. We ended up playing video games most of the time (Lis and I played Age of Mythology and Lawrence played some Lord of the Rings RTS game). It was a ton of fun, so we're planning on doing it again sometime in the near future (probably minus the cake since that's a PITA to make).

Aside from the party, my weekend has been rather boring. I got a list server set up for the Win32 API Library and am starting to get things ready for working on that project. I still have to come up with a name change for the Win32 Declare Library... but I don't think I'll make the change until after the API library is getting close to having a milestone release.

What did everyone else do for their weekend? Anything fun and exciting?