First, I had a little bit of heavy cream sitting in my fridge, and my go-to use for heavy cream is chicken tikka masala. Is that weird?
We also had some sweetened condensed milk because my sister used it to make her iced coffees. I honestly had only ever used it to make iced coffee in the past, but I remembered that she also used it to make a tasty sauce to put on some tacos. So I also made some tacos! (Shrimp tacos. I know it's hard to tell from the photos)
My sister is probably not the reason we had shredded mozzarella cheese and a tiny nub of parmesan. I pretty much always have some sort of cheese stocked. But I wanted to use up the rest of the can of tomato paste that I bought for the tikka masala, and I thought these cheeses would be a great addition to it.
And just to pile on with even more dairy, I had about half a quart of milk that was getting very close to its expiration date. I think I may have made mac n cheese just a couple of weeks ago, but that was stovetop mac n cheese, so I went with a baked mac n cheese this week. And I also had some breadcrumbs, which was perfect for topping. This was the first time I had ever made a white cheese sauce, and I think it turned out pretty well!
Finally, I made some dessert! I had a few carrots in a bag, which my sister had bought an excess of because she told me "you wanted to make some carrot cake!". Yeah, I did tell her that I wanted to make some. Unfortunately I didn't get the time to do so until she had already left :/
What will happen next? Is v4 of the blog going to be crochet+food?!
Man I have been so busy with work and various trips that I have not been doing much cooking. And I can feel it. So much eating out and eating junk food. But it is now February 2023 and I am finally feeling a little less busy.
I don't have a nice theme to tie these all together, but here are a few meals that I cooked this past week:
I had four pieces of rice paper left in my cabinet, and while I don't have a picture of the spring rolls I made, I do have a picture of the salad I made with all of the same ingredients. I cooked some pork butt, and tossed it in toasted rice, which is something that my aunt taught me how to do. One day I'll post a recipe for that pork.
One of my friends has really been in the mood for "savory bread" lately, but I was definitely not prepared to make bread. She looked up a recipe to see if she could find something easy, and we decided to make this savory quick bread with cheese and olives, which is bread in the same sense that banana bread or zucchini bread is bread. Basically, it's cake in the shape of a bread loaf.
We added a bunch of extra things that the recipe didn't even call for, like green onion and sun dried tomatoes. I think we went a little overboard. This recipe also called for four eggs, which is way too many eggs, especially considering how expensive eggs are nowadays. But what we didn't add was salt. Bad decision. You always need salt. The recipe simply said to "salt to taste", but how am I supposed to salt to taste when there's raw flour and eggs?! I can't taste that!
I was a little worried I was going to hate this because I don't like egg-y things, but it turned out to be...okay. Not great. Would not make this recipe again. I'd probably try a different bread recipe though.
And finally, here's my breakfast from this morning that I spent way too much effort on. It was worth it though. My family gave me some beef jerky, and I just love the combination of beef jerky and white rice. I also added a marinated soft boiled egg and some cucumber slices to trick myself into thinking this is a well balanced meal.