Cooking for myself again

September 22, 2020 8:41 PM

I'm going to end up having three weeks on my own before I head back home to visit family again. And you know what I've realized? I don't actually need to cook all that much. I've also started timing myself to see how fast I can cook. Spoiler: I don't cook that fast, but I actually can cook faster than I thought.

I made this pasta since it's one of my go-to meals when I don't know what to cook. I've made it so many times that I'm actually able to beat the estimated time on Budget Bytes! It took me 24 minutes and the recipe says 25 minutes! Look at me shaving off one minute.

I used some of a tub of chive and onion cream cheese in this, which turned out fine, but this is way better when you just have a block of plain cream cheese. The spreadable tubs just don't give that nice creamy consistency that you want.

Shortly after that, I made this Shrimp Scampi Florentine which is another go-to. When I was visiting family, we noticed that shrimp was on sale for $5/lb. What a steal! They're never that cheap in the grocery stores I live near! Not even at Aldi!

I made it with rice since I didn't want to go overboard and eat pasta twice in one day (even though I have no problem eating rice three times a day), but I had some later meals with pasta, and I think this works much better with pasta than rice.

This also took me about 40 minutes to make, which is exactly how long the recipe said it would take. I don't know. I was going kind of slow and listening to a podcast at the same time. Feels like it should actually only take 30 minutes.

And finally, I made some Posole today. Back when my sister was still here, we tried a stove top carnitas recipe which was...lackluster. Anyway, I threw it in the freezer, and I figured this was a good use for some of it.

I don't know what it was, but I had a super potent onion, and I was crying just from chopping it up. My eyes were hurting so badly that they kept hurting for over an hour after I was done cooking. It took me just over 30 minutes to prep and cook, so I guess the name of the recipe was right.

What I'd really like to do is buy some more bowls. These Corelle bowls are just not suitable for picture taking.

I'm bringing back the food blog

September 12, 2020 9:38 PM

I want to bring the food blog back. But, I'm tired of Wordpress. I want to make something I'm proud of, and I'm starting from scratch. So here it begins, version 2.0 of flailing in my kitchen.

My sister had been staying with me for a while, and I don't know what it is, but I was being a complete bum with her here. I've been exhausted from work--so exhausted that I don't feel like cooking afterwards. So she would cook all the dinners. After that, we were both at home with family for a month or so. And then I become an ever bigger bum. A blob. A loaf of bread.

But now my sister has moved on to the next chapter of her life, and I'm back on my own! So, you know, I gotta cook for myself again.

And look at that! I can still cook! It took me a whole 30 mins to prep this. 7 mins just to mix the spices. You wouldn't think it would take that long to mix the spices, but I have so many spices that half the trouble is finding the ones I need.

It's okay. It was worth it. I love fajitas.

Taking a Break

May 22, 2020 5:19 AM

So, we're at about two months of this quarantine, self-isolation, social distancing thing. I don't know how long I originally expected this to last, and I don't even know how much longer I think it'll last now. Where I am, they've lifted stay-at-home orders, but social distancing is still strongly encouraged. All of the restaurants are still takeout/delivery only.

It's been such a weird time. Work has been incredibly busy, and it's been hard for me to think about food the same way lately. I don't ever want writing in this blog to be a chore, but right now it feels like more of an obligation than a fun side project. So I think I need a break from this. I need to take more time to devote to sleeping, exercising, eating well, having social interactions, staying away from the internet, and just relaxing.

When will I start writing blog posts again? I'm not sure. At least not until things "get back to normal", and even then I might take some more time. But this blog is officially part of my list of lifetime projects. I may take a super long break...but I'll get back to it eventually.

One more thing: I changed the tagline of the blog. It reflects my state of mind a little better during these times.

Until next time.

Social Distancing: Days 57 - 59

May 19, 2020 8:00 AM

Day 57 (Thursday): At this point we're just trying to clear some random foods out of our fridge. One thing that always works for this is pizza. We've already done "normal" pizza and BBQ chicken pizza, so we decided to have some Hawaiian pizza this time.

Oh, my sister also made some cheesy bread sticks to go along with it. I don't think she was terribly happy with this dish, but it still tasted good. And it made a great breakfast a couple of days later. I love leftover pizza.

Day 58 (Friday): For the first time in three weeks, I finally started to relax at work. I had been working so much that I actually ended the day at 2pm! This meant that I was able to cook dinner again!

We bought a few eggplants when we last went to the Asian store without knowing what we'd do with them. But eggplant is always good in stir-fry, and I haven't had stir-fried eggplant in a while. My sister really likes it with egg, so we used that instead of ground pork. We ate all of it that night! And since we had a lot of that honey garlic pork left, we ate that as well. Delicious.

Day 59 (Saturday): I was so excited to make some pork tacos, but when I took out the piece of pork, it smelled kind of funky and after pondering about it for a while, my sister and I decided it was best to just throw it out.

But obviously I still wanted tacos, so I walked to Aldi and bought a whole other pork butt.

Hey, I really wanted tacos. Pineapple and pork go really well together. I was also going to make some sriracha mayo, but I decided to make it interesting and put sriracha in sour cream instead. I'm never doing that again. It was weird.

The tacos were delicious though.

韭菜粿

May 18, 2020 8:00 AM

Garlic chive cake is one of my favorite foods. It is probably #3, right after tacos and sushi.

My grandma makes the best garlic chive cakes. I think I get more excited to eat this than any other food my family makes.

Of course, it involves dough, which scares me, but my sister is here! And she likes to try making everything. So we had to try making this.

And when I say "we", I mean my sister. But I'll try wrapping them! Next time.

Look how well they turned out! My sister is amazing.

We eat these with Shark brand sriracha. I feel like I could just keep eating these and not stop. We're gonna make more next week too!