Social Distancing: Days 49 - 51

May 11, 2020 8:00 AM

Day 49 (Wednesday): I actually felt a little better today, but I still ended up working way way too much. So of course my sister took care of dinner.

We had some mango that was ready to eat, and so my mind immediately went to shrimp tacos.

I love tacos. Tacos are always a good choice.

Day 50 (Thursday): Holy crap, day 50 already?! Anyway, we had some chickpeas sitting in the fridge that I felt needed to be used, so I figured we could make some falafel.

This was a little bit of a struggle, as the falafel patties totally fell apart when we tried to fry them. It's alright though. My sister managed to salvage them, and at the end they came together nicely. We also had some roasted eggplant and leftover orzo pasta, since that seemed appropriate. Overall, a good meal even if we had to go through some mishaps.

Day 51 (Friday): The end of a stressful work week. I was very exhausted by now, so I was definitely not in the mood for cooking dinner. However, my sister is always up for cooking dinner. And she decided to go all out for dinner by making some hand-pulled noodles.

My sister told me that this was harder than she expected. But I think she did a fantastic job. The noodles were delicious.

I have the best sister

May 12, 2020 8:00 AM

Seriously. She cooks and bakes several dishes in a single day, and they're all delicious. She made sourdough bread, and then made grilled cheese using that bread.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in this grilled cheese. You can barely tell there's cheese.

But whatever. It was amazing. You know what else she made with her sourdough? Avocado toast. I didn't really understand the appeal of avocado toast before (or even the appeal of avocados at all), but my sister converted me and now I love avocados.

My sister has been making me these wonderful, aesthetic lunches which give me a nice moment of happiness during my stressful workday.

She even made me poutine! My family went to Canada for vacation and we never got poutine, and I was so annoyed, and ever since then I have been wanting poutine. I don't know how poutine normally tastes, but this poutine was delicious.

And finally, I needed to show off these hot dog buns. For some crazy reason, none of the Asian bakeries in town (okay, there's only one) sell hot dog buns. My sister has made this recipe a few times, and I think this her best batch yet! It was sooooo good.

Social Distancing: Days 52 - 56

May 17, 2020 11:32 AM

Day 52 (Saturday): It's the weekend! Which means no work! Which means I actually had time to cook!

Yeah, that's right. I did the cooking. I really wanted to make some shrimp bowls. Of course, it ended up taking me forever, and it really felt like I made four different things: shrimp, rice, pineapple salsa, and black beans.

But whatever. It was worth it. Absolutely delicious.

Day 53 (Sunday): My sister was feeling lazy (and I've been feeling lazy for the past three weeks), so we just ate leftovers. We had too many leftovers sitting in the fridge anyway.

Day 54 (Monday): We bought this big thing of pork butt in our last grocery shopping trip and I think it may have been sitting in the fridge for just a little too long. So we decided to cook it.

I really wanted to try another pork loin recipe (but using a pork butt), and this honey garlic pork loin sounded really good. Using pork butt for this was definitely a good idea. We also needed a veg and some starch, so we roasted some brussels sprouts and potatoes as well. Overall, it was a good meal.

Day 55 (Tuesday): My sister made 韭菜粿 and I think it's worthy of its own post. So you'll see it in the next one.

Day 56 (Wednesday): When we went grocery shopping earlier this week, we stopped in the Italian grocery store, and decided to look all the different fancy pastas they had. Both my sister and I really like wide noodles, and I normally find fettuccine not wide enough.

But the Italian grocery store had some really nice fettuccine. The one we bought was completely in Italian! It was also a whole $2! I think paying that extra dollar was worth it though. The recipe we used was a bit weird, but it still tasted good.

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!

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.