Poke with friends

April 17, 2021 2:09 PM

The last time I made guacamole, I had to run to the store to buy some chips. I had only intended to buy chips, but while I was there I noticed that these little packs of sashimi grade salmon were on sale for $5! That's a steal for half a pound! And I found some other frozen salmon that was also really cheap!

I ended up leaving the store with 2.5 lbs of salmon, some ice cream, and the chips. The next day I decided that I didn't buy enough of the sashimi grade salmon, so I bought another pound.

What did I do with all that sashimi grade salmon? Make poke of course. But I can't just eat poke by myself, so I had a couple of poke nights with some very good friends.

This is the first time I made poke without my sister, so it was a little flail-y. I don't think I ever figured out how to make the sauce, but it doesn't matter. You don't need sauce. This is delicious as is.

My friend took that picture above (obviously, because I'm in the picture). Below is from a poke night earlier this week. Such aesthetic arrangements of food.

Poke is great because you have such a large variety of fresh, healthy foods mixed with sushi rice and raw fish. Mmmmm. And making it at home is way better than going to an overpriced poke restaurant. Everyone assembles their own bowls, and everyone feels very stuffed at the end. But it's a good kind of stuffed.

Easy rice meals

April 25, 2021 11:28 AM

Summer is fast approaching. Summer has my favorite kind of weather, yet it's my least favorite season. Summer means that my family plans all these vacations, and I get really overwhelmed and stressed out. Summer is when so much of my mental energy is taken up by other things, that my side projects take a back seat.

All that to say, things are slowing way down for the food blog. I won't say I'm taking a break, but I'm tending towards making easier meals and spending less effort on creating aesthetically pleasing photos.

I really really like making this chicken and rice dish, but most of the time when I make it, I use boneless, skinless chicken thighs. It's just easier. But this time, when I went to the store for chicken, the family pack of bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs were 50% off, so I had to get that instead.

And really, the dish is so much better this way. What's nice about having the skin is that it gets nice and crispy when you intially cook it. But the problem with this dish is that you later nestle the chicken in while the rest of the rice is cooking, and the skin gets all soggy again. And I think the skin still tastes good that way, but it's just not the same.

So what did I do? I ate a whole bunch of crispy chicken skin right after cooking the chicken. So no, I don't have a full picture of the finished skillet because it's a bunch of naked chicken pieces and it's weird looking.

This dish actually makes a lot of rice, much more than what's needed for four chicken thighs, so I later cooked some more asparagus and salmon to also eat with it.

I know, I have a salmon and asparagus meal just three posts below this one! And I took a picture at exactly the same angle! Well, asparagus is in season, and I still have a ton of impulsively bought salmon, and this is just all my brain can handle right now.

(Okay...that salmon above? That's not even from the same shopping trip where I bought 2.5 lbs of salmon. This post's salmon was bought two weeks ago, and it was also an impulse buy. I had to! It was also 50% off!)

This was all already delicious right after I cooked it, but reheating the leftover rice in a skillet is 👌.

Pasta with a friend

April 29, 2021 8:02 PM

When I was in college, well before I knew how to cook, I went on a spring break trip to Chicago with my two best friends. This was sponsored by the school and we stayed at a hostel. For some crazy reason my one friend really wanted to cook during this trip. I definitely did not, seeing as I didn't know the first thing about cooking, and even with the amount of cooking experience I have now, I still wouldn't want to cook during a vacation.

But that's what we did. We went to the grocery store, and my friend asked me "What do you want to make?" I didn't know, and she probably made several suggestions, and I probably seemed less than interested in every single one of them, which was just the first of many times one of us got annoyed at the others during this trip.

Anyway, we settled on pasta. A really simple spaghetti + pasta sauce + ground beef pasta. Of course at the time, I could barely boil water, so it still seemed really intimidating to me. But we managed. It tasted fine. And we did not cook again during that trip (thankfully). And that was the only time I had ever cooked pasta with my friend(s).

...until last week! I invited one of my friends over for an "easy" pasta meal, and since my initial pasta-with-friends session, I guess my idea of an easy meal has changed a lot. It ended up being more than he expected, heh.

But it was delicious and it is so worth it to make your own pasta sauce.

I'll definitely make more pasta meals with friends in the future (:

A surprising strawberry smoothie and a break from the blog

May 8, 2021 11:05 AM

Foods that I didn't care for when I started this blog, but have grown to love:

• Avocado
• Yogurt
• Bubble tea
• Berries and cream (!!!!!)
• Dessert

I mean, I've always loved frozen treats and warm baked goods, but I just never really saw myself as a dessert person. But man, I seem to really be developing a sweet tooth over the past couple of years.

Earlier this week, I invited a friend over for dinner, which of course meant I also invited him over for dessert. I have way way way too many dessert options in my kitchen right now, but we ended up making smoothies. And by "we", I mean I chopped up some strawberries, and he was the one who actually blended the smoothie and decided what to put in it:

• Fresh strawberries
• Coconut yogurt
• Mango smoothie drink
• Vanilla ice cream
• Pina colada popsicle
• Strawberry popsicles
• Sugar

Yup, that's right. A strawberry smoothie with dairy. If you've known me for long enough, you know that I've always hated mixing berries with cream. Whenever I go to smoothie or bubble tea shops, I always ask if they put dairy in their smoothies. I get my strawberry smoothies dairy-free every single time. Just two years ago, I'm sure I would have taken a sip of this smoothie and thought it was gross.

But oh my god, it was delicious.

(Hey, that's four entries in a row where I'm calling my food delicious!)

My little sister called me while the smoothie-making was in progress, and in a shocked tone she said "Jeje, you like pink things now?!"

Yeah, I guess I do.

And with that, I'm going to announce that it's time for me to put the blog posts on pause again so I can focus on other things.

v2! of the blog has been great. I've really, really been enjoying writing these entries. When I first started this blog, it was just a place for me to share photos of the food I make. Food blogs are known for having incredibly long personal anecdotes before every recipe, and I didn't want to be one of those obnoxious bloggers. But I later realized that I just need to write whatever feels right for me. I don't have recipes (yet!), so I decided to embrace the cheesy backstories.

Even though I won't be writing new posts for a while, that doesn't mean I'm totally putting the blog on hold. I've got some fun blog-related projects that I'm cooking up (heh). What will the blog look like when I write my next post? Will there be a v3?! Who knows.

But I will be back eventually.

No photos yet

November 10, 2021 9:19 PM

Some time earlier this year, in the midst of high stress, I did something to ease my mind: I erased my whiteboard, and I stopped meal planning.

Some times you just need to stop keeping track of so many things, and replace those things with drawings of fruits and vegetables with faces on them.

Maybe one day I'll post a photo of those drawings. But not today. Not yet.