Toast

February 6, 2025 1:22 PM

Some time last week, I bought a sour dough round from Aldi. I don't eat a lot of bread, but I figured it's good to switch up my grains. So here are three different dishes that I made with this bread.

First, a breakfast. There's this really expensive cafe that makes a delicious smoked salmon toast, but it costs over $16 and I'm not about that life anymore. So I'm making my own for an eighth of the price.

I actually really like toast, and I should make more of it. Smoked salmon is a bit bougie, but I also like hummus or an avocado spread on toast!

Next I have a chicken salad. I really just wanted to use up some relish because I bought some to make a hamburger sauce a while back, and now I kind of regret it. The hamburger sauce was just okay, and now I have a jar of relish that I don't know what to do with.

I've put relish in tuna salad a bunch of times in the past, but I had never actually tried making chicken salad before. I tend to like tuna salad better, but for the sake of variety I decided to try to make a chicken salad. What I probably should have done was follow a recipe, but I decided to just wing it and throw stuff together! I added mayonnaise, sweet onions, green onions, dijon mustard, relish, cranberries, poppyseeds, and even some honey roasted peanuts.

The end result was...eh. It wasn't awful, but I didn't really have a desire to keep eating it. I'm really not good at the whole "throwing things together" thing. But I did finish all of it over the course of a few more breakfasts because I am not wasting food.

And finally, I was able to use up the rest of my jar of pizza sauce by making some pizza melts! When I was younger, my dad would sometimes toast some sliced bread with pizza sauce and cheese and give that to me as an after school snack. I liked it at the time, though it didn't really sound quite as appealing to me now. Honestly, a pizza sandwich is the type of thing that barely sounds like a recipe to me.

But oh my god, this sandwich I made last week was SO GOOD. The herb parmesan butter really takes it over the top. The first one I made had mozzarella since that's your typical cheese for a pizza, but I ran out of that and tried taco cheese and pepperjack as well and they both still tasted great. Now I'm never going to have trouble finishing leftover pizza sauce.

I made the kimchi pasta again

February 5, 2025 6:37 PM

I wasn't actually going to make a post about this. I just wanted to try the kimchi pasta recipe again, with some tweaks. I used some pork loin instead of bacon, and cream cheese instead of heavy cream because that's what I have. And I was having a chill afternoon, prepping all the ingredients in advance.

In the youtube video, Aaron tells you that rather than use a knife and cutting board, you should probably put your kimchi in a bowl and use scissors to cut it, so you don't stain your cutting board. Well, I was trying to do that, but then I somehow dropped the bowl 😱

and kimchi spilled all over my cutting board! And my clothes! It's a good thing I didn't actually start cooking the pasta yet because I had to wipe the kitchen floor and wash and change my pants and tide pen my sweatshirt. I've been saying for years that I should get an apron.

Oh, the pasta ended up looking like...every other pasta I make. 😅 But it tasted different! It was more kimchi-y, which was good!

Faux pho

February 3, 2025 7:50 PM

The other day, I was at my friend's house and I was looking through all of her Hello Fresh recipe cards. She mentioned that she really liked the "Pho-Style Beef Noodle Soup", and I looked at it skeptically because almost nothing about it resembles pho. It comes with ramen noodles. The only thing about it that made it seem like pho at all was that it contains "pho stock concentrate" (whatever that is). But honestly, it still sounded like a tasty noodle soup, and she had two copies of the recipe card, so I took one.

I wasn't sure when I was going to make this, but just earlier this week, I saw a post in the "Aldi Aisle of Shame" Facebook group raving about their limited time offering "Pho Broth"! This is perfect for my fake pho. I told my Vietnamese friend about this and he just shook his head disapprovingly. Hey, not all of us have Vietnamese relatives that can make pho.

I didn't want to buy a bunch of stock concentrates for this, so I just used chicken msg. And I also had a single chicken thigh in the freezer so I used that instead of beef. So who knows what I'm even making at this point. But in order to stay somewhat true to this inauthentic recipe, I did use bok choy, mushrooms, and wheat noodles :P

What resulted was something that I guess kind of had the essence of pho? But it needed more flavor so I dumped in some fish sauce and extra lime at the end. To be fair to Aldi, I did essentially mix it with chicken broth, so I probably diluted some of the pho flavor. But if I don't think of it as pretending to be pho, it was a good meal. I don't think you can ever go wrong with a noodle soup.

Almost vegan chili

February 2, 2025 10:16 PM

It was a really bright and sunny day yesterday. But it was also cold. I mean, it wasn't single digit cold, but it was still pretty cold that I regretted not bundling up more when I went out for dinner last night.

So what's good on a cold day? Chili. I really like making chili because it's super easy, makes a big batch, and the leftovers are always great. But I also feel like I've consumed a lot of meat this week already so I wanted to make a vegetarian dish. One of my friends is vegan, and he'll often make chili, and it's always so good to eat at the end of dance game session.

Pick up Limes recently put out a recipe for spicy chili and I figured this was a good time to give it a try. In the past when I've made "vegan" recipes, I would completely un-veganize it by replacing some of it with meat or slapping some bacon on it. This recipe calls for "veggie ground", and I know I could replace it with some ground meat. But not today! I am actually going to try to make this vegan.

I don't really know where to get veggie ground though, so I decided to buy lentils instead. I had actually never cooked lentils before. But they're super cheap, and I just followed the package instructions. It looks like you just boil it until it's done.

And yeah, the recipe was very easy! I'd say the hardest part of all this was opening all the cans. I don't know if this is a common problem, but I have so much trouble opening cans. I can never make a single clean cut. The can opener always detaches from the can at some point while I'm spinning it. And every can that I tried to open yesterday took more attempts than the previous one.

Other than that, this was smooth sailing, and the chili wasn't too bad! But what makes it better are the toppings. I bought an avocado because it seems like every food blogger likes to top chili with avocado. It's pretty, but honestly, eh, it's not my favorite chili topping. The pickled onions were great though. Vegan chili is pretty good, but I still found myself missing something in this.

So I added cheese. Aaaand now it's not vegan anymore. But it's still vegetarian! I also tried toasting a corn tortilla and crumbling that up, and I really liked it but it kind of looked like a mess at that point, so I didn't take a photo of it.

Kimchi pasta

February 1, 2025 12:56 AM

It's kind of a gloomy day today. So, I don't have great food photos. That doesn't mean I don't have any good food, but it was already enough work to cook, and I think I used up most of my photo-taking energy on chicken and rice.

Anyway, as I was browsing youtube the other night, I saw a recipe for kimchi pasta and it looked really good. I mean, orange pasta always looks good. I also happened to already have kimchi in my fridge and half a box of rigatoni and some parmesan and some green onions, so I added this to my list of things to cook.

But that was last week. I ran out of all those ingredients, but I still wanted to make this pasta, so I bought more of everything today. Well, except for green onions. Aldi was completely out! I've watched enough Aaron and Claire youtube videos to know that Aaron's favorite ingredient is green onion, but well, we're gonna have to settle for cilantro.

I decided to double the recipe just so I would have plenty of leftovers (we'll see if I regret having too much leftover pasta). And this was actually a lot more work than I expected. There were a lot of things to cut up, kind of like stir fries. And it took me so long to grate the cheese, and my hand was so tired. Maybe I should invest in a box grater. Or maybe I should just buy a container of pre-grated parmesan.

Once I got to the actual cooking part of this, it was pretty easy. After I poured in the heavy cream, I thought it looked a little too creamy though. The youtube video made this look so orange! Mine was super pale compared to that. It kind of looked more like an alfredo or a mac n cheese. So, if I make this again, I might cut the heavy cream in half. It's probably healthier that way too.

I gotta say, even though I'm not too happy with the color, it doesn't taste bad! The kimchi, oyster sauce, mushroom, and bacon all add a lot of depth to the flavor and I was really digging that. I would totally make this again, but I'd definitely make some adjustments so it's easier.