A quest for canned olives

June 2, 2022 10:23 PM

Speaking of eating food that's way too warm for the summer, I've been making lots and lots of 糜 lately. My aunt recently sent me a bunch of 鱼干 (I'm only about 60% sure I chose the correct Chinese characters there) from Cambodia, and porridge is really the only thing I ever eat with dried fish.

I do eat other things with porridge though. My aunt also sent me some 咸菜. Really salty foods go great with porridge. Salty eggs, salty fish, salty and sweet Chinese sausage, salty and sweet pork floss, and salty olives. It's childhood for me. Growing up, I was a super picky eater and all I wanted to eat was porridge with salty things. I've expanded my tastes a lot since I was 5, but I still love coming back to this.

While I do love salted hard boiled eggs the best, those take about a month to prepare, and I don't have that kind of patience. But I remember those salted olives just came in a can that we bought from the Asian store!

So I drove to my local Asian grocery store last week, and I looked for these canned salted olives, but the closest thing they had to that were dried olives, and I wanted the ones in a can, with the pits still in them. I then drove to an Asian store further out, which was pretty big for Pittsburgh standards, but they didn't have these olives either.

I ended up going to eight different Asian grocery stores in the area and not a single one had the olives I was looking for. One place had Mediterranean olives. Another place claimed that they sold olives, but when the lady went to her computer to check the inventory, she exclaimed, in an almost comical way, "We're sold out!" I'm not totally convinced they actually stock the canned olives at all since I didn't actually show her a picture of them >.>

And, well, that's it. I never got my olives. I also realized that none of my Asian friends have even heard of Chinese olives, so maybe it is just that rare. (But they're out there somewhere! I know it!) I think I've also hit my quota of porridge for a while, but I'll come back to it. Next time I'm visiting family I'm definitely buying some olives to bring back.

And maybe, just maybe, I can make those salted hard boiled eggs too.

Brussels sprouts, bacon, and onion

June 11, 2022 12:09 AM

This is exciting. I am finally posting one of my own recipes on my food blog. Honestly, it's not much of a recipe. It just happens to be my go-to way of preparing brussels sprouts. But I google searched the title of this recipe to see if anyone had the same idea, and while there are a lot of variations on brussels sprouts, bacon, and onions, none were exactly like mine.

Cooking almost every day

June 14, 2022 11:30 PM

I've been cooking a lot lately! Like, almost every day. I'm usually not thinking about the food blog every time I cook, but occasionally, I do take photos. I used to regularly make "Odds n Ends" posts where I would show a few different things I made, without really telling any sort of cohesive story about them. So, here's a quick glimpse into some of the foods that I've been cooking.

I ended up having a lot of that udon noodle soup. In the middle of a busy workday, it was nice to be able to take ten minutes to prepare my lunch.

I've been really into making rice dishes lately. They're easy, flavorful, and they taste even better after I reheat them on the pan. I really like making this yellow rice chicken skillet, but I also occasionally make ground turkey rice dishes too.

Another one of my go-tos is this Mediterranean hummus bowl, which I just took a picture of because I like how colorful this dish is.

I've also been trying out some new recipes! I attempted to make broccoli lemon carbonara, but I don't think I quite understand how to make a good egg-based sauce that doesn't just turn into scrambled eggs. I also really wanted to get that cute pasta shape that was in the recipe, but I couldn't find it, and I had to settle for boring old penne.

It's probably not going to be a recipe that I try to make again, but I still ate it all, and I even packed it for lunch when I went into the office last week.

Smoothies

June 19, 2022 11:23 PM

So I really like smoothies, but I haven't made them too often myself because I was always too lazy to take out my cheap $10 blender that could barely blend things and was a pain to clean up. But that's all changed now! My mom gifted me a Nutribullet last Christmas, so I've been able to make more smoothies!

Smoothies should be so easy. You just throw stuff in a blender, press a button, and voila, you have a smoothie. But smoothie making has been kind of a struggle for me. I buy so much ice cream and it's not always good. And every time I end up with ice cream that I don't like, I just think to myself, "I can throw this in a smoothie!"

Yeah, uhh, several not-so-great smoothies later, and I'm realizing that it really does matter what ingredients you put in. I am not good at just throwing things together when I make food. So I went and looked up a smoothie recipe. I haven't actually followed this exactly, but I did use it as a guide, and I think I'm getting better at the whole smoothie-making thing!

I'll still throw in some non-conventional items into the mix, like a mango popsicle coated with tajin, but I'm trying to not go too crazy. And I don't know, maybe these are more like milkshakes rather than smoothies because of the ice cream. Whatever it is, it's a very enjoyable frozen drink (: And it's a very good thing to sip on while I'm writing more code for this blog.

Two attempts at noodles

June 27, 2022 12:12 PM

Last week, as I was browsing through food blogs at night, I stumbled across a stir fry noodle recipe that looked interesting. The pictures looked really good, but the comments were pretty mixed. Quite a few people said it was too salty, but some people really loved it. I'm never sure about Asian inspired recipes from non-Asian food bloggers, but I gave it a shot.

I already had a bell pepper and some scallions. I figured I would just omit the hot peppers, zucchini, and carrots. I did want some basil, but my local non-Asian grocery store only had really expensive Italian basil. So I bought a tiny container of expensive Italian basil. The store does have an Asian section, so I was able to get an 8oz pack of rice noodles. I also bought a single shallot and a single piece of chicken breast. I was running low on soy sauce, but I did have a lot of Golden Mountain Seasoning Sauce, so I figured that was close enough.

The recipe claims that it takes 15 minutes of prep time and 15 minutes of cook time. I decided to time myself. It took me 52 minutes, 44 seconds to make the dish, prep and cook. That's actually faster than I expected!

Heeey that looks pretty good! Unfortunately it was way too salty, just like all of those commenters said it would be. I didn't even put as much soy sauce as it called for! I also don't think the Italian basil made sense, and the noodles from the non-Asian grocery store were...not great.

The peanuts were a nice touch though.

It wasn't so bad that I didn't finish it all. But whenever I'm trying out a new recipe, the cogs in my brain immediately start turning and thinking about how I'd modify it.

• Less salty components
• More sugar
• Get noodles and basil from the Asian store
• Don't bother with the shallot, just use more scallions

So, noodles take 2!

This second attempt was much better! And it was slightly easier for me to put together. I think it took me about 48 minutes, start to finish. If I made this a third time, I'd probably increase the amount of fish sauce a little, add a little bit of dark soy sauce, and decrease the oyster sauce. But I think I'm good on stir fried noodles for a while.

I'd say that the best part about making these noodles was that I got to share it with two of my friends, who both enjoyed eating it (: