flailing in my kitchen v3

How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
How can I be sad when I have
tacos, fried rice, and quesadillas?

Updates in progress!

So, I've definitely been slowing down the frequency of these posts. That was partly because I was sick recently, but also because I've spent more time on food blogging than is sustainable, and I want to give myself more time to focus on other things. And you know, I'm living my life inefficiently now.

Part of the other stuff I want to focus on is...making more updates to this blog? Well, not new posts, but updates to the site itself. This is also my tech project, and I've honestly been itching to do more coding. I have a fun little feature that I'm working on! If you want to follow along to see what updates I'm making, my flailing-in-my-kitchen repo is now on github!

I've also been re-making some of the same recipes, to just experiment and find what goes well for my taste buds, and I've also been working on some new (-ish) recipes of my own! I actually make brussels sprouts a little differently from the recipe that I've posted, so I want to update that eventually.

Roasted brussels sprouts, bacon, and onion, on a baking sheet
I need to figure out how to make these crispier!

I mentioned in another recent entry that I want to post a recipe for my mayonnaise roasted potatoes. I've made it twice in the past week (where I actually made note of measurements), but it still isn't quite right so I'm tweaking it.

Potatoes, mayonnaise, and some herbs and spices all in a mixing bowl. They have not been mixed yet
It always looks nice when you can see all the individual ingredients

Roasted potatoes with some sliced chicken breast
I've been eating potatoes every day!

And, please bear with me if you try to access the site and it just doesn't work at all! I need to do some server maintenance, and that's going to require rebooting the system a few times and I honestly don't remember most of the things I did when I first set up this site. But I'm making progress!

So, I'll end this post with a few more photos of some tasty things I've made recently that weren't exciting enough to get their own post:

Mushroom curry and rice, with a slice of lime and some garnish on the side
Mushroom and kidney bean coconut curry (recipe from Pick up Limes)

Some broccoli, shumai, rice, and dipping sauce
I steamed up some frozen shumai from the batch I made earlier this year

Some cilantro lime rice, carnitas, and some cut up peppers, onions, cilantro, and lime
I made carnitas at my friend's house during our co-working day. It was delicious. I want to make them again for more friends

Filed under: extras

Braised tofu and broccoli

I've spent the past five days mostly at home, mostly not doing much, and it's really getting to me. Well today it finally feels like I'm getting over this cold. I saw this video for braised tofu a couple of weeks ago, and I've been wanting to make it. It's honestly a bit involved, especially since I also decided to make the broccoli, but I feel like I need to make a pretty dish after this dreary weekend.

An overhead shot of a plate of braised tofu, a plate of steamed broccoli, and a plate with rice, broccoli, and tofu
Thank goodness the sun is out today ☀️

There were a lot of steps to this, so it took a while, but honestly, I was pretty relaxed the whole time, even when my dad called me in the middle of my cooking session to ask me about trying to use TurboTax. (I hate TurboTax by the way. But it seems that everyone in my family insists on using it)

Anyway, the end product was very tasty and very pretty! Even though it's just garnish, I made sure to buy sesame seeds and scallions just for this dish. I don't even really like sesame seeds, but I gotta admit they do give a nice pop.

The plate of braised tofu and broccoli, captured from the side
I wanted to get a couple different angles of this

A closeup of a piece of tofu being held up by a pair of chopsticks
Mmmmm, tofu

If I ever make this again, I'd probably use a little less cornstarch and I'd use less chili flakes. I do seem to keep making things too spicy for me 🥵

Filed under: tofu broccoli way too spicy

Happy Valentine's Day

Unfortunately, I've been feeling under the weather for the past couple of days, and I'm taking some "sick days". I still wanted to do something a little special to celebrate Valentine's Day, so I bought my boyfriend a pepper grinder from Aldi, and I made some vegetarian shepherd's pie with a heart on it! Some of the filling ended up spilling out after baking it, but it was very tasty!

Some shepherd's pie in a pan. It has a heart on it
I tried to take a piece out an take a picture of that as well, but it just looked messy


细姑's salmon

Some cooked salmon in a baking pan

Okay, I don't have great photos (yet!), but what I do have is a recipe! I will show you one of my favorite ways to prepare salmon, which was originally introduced to me by my 细姑 (sort of pronounced "soy go"). She claims that she has since forgotten how she made this, which is why I need to make sure I've documented it!

Filed under: recipe

A very involved Taiwanese beef noodle soup

Every other Friday, I go to my friend's house and we have a co-working session. Technically, I'm not really working, but I do use that time to make updates to this blog! After work, we'll grab some groceries and then we'll cook something for dinner. We seem to have a tendency to pick dishes that take quite a bit of time to prepare, which was especially true this time.

My friend wanted to try the Taiwanese beef noodle soup recipe from the Woks of Life cookbook. I saw that it used spicy bean paste, which is great because I already have it, but it also called for a bunch of things that neither of us had. I went to three different Asian stores to look for cumin seeds, coriander seeds, whole white peppercorn, and pickled mustard greens. And I didn't even find the coriander seeds! My friend ended up getting that from a fourth store. And we still went to Aldi the day of to grab everything that we could get from a non-Asian store.

Unfortunately, after I arrived at my friend's house on Friday, I realized I forgot the spicy bean paste 🙃 It's okay, she had other spicy pastes that we used instead. I was just annoyed that we couldn't use mine.

My friend's bowl of beef noodle soup, shot from above
My friend took some photos! I thought hers came out better than mine

The recipe states that you need to braise the beef for 20 minutes and also simmer the soup for 90 minutes after that. So we tried to start prepping early, which was a little before 5pm for us. Even with that, it already past 7pm before we got to the "simmer" step. So we ended up eating dinner at around 9pm. (It's a good thing we ate lunch at 4 😅)

But the late dinner time didn't bother me! I thought it was a successful meal. We actually cut back a little bit on the amount of dark soy sauce, but I think it could have used the full amount. Or maybe just more regular soy sauce. It was a pretty dark broth already.

A side view of the same bowl of noodle soup, with some garnishes in the background
The garnishes are very important

Two bowls of noodle soup. Mine is in the back
I took this photo. My bowl is in the back

The recipe says that the dish tastes even better the next day, so I took some leftovers home and had some for breakfast a couple days later. It honestly tasted about the same to me, but I thought it tasted pretty good the first night, so I was still very satisfied.

Leftover noodle soup that I had for breakfast, with some coffee in the back
Yeah, that's udon, which is a little weird. It's the only noodles that I had


Hi! I like to cook, and I like to blog. This is where I dump out all my thoughts about food.

More about the blog...