Salmon and green beans
October 5, 2020 5:49 PM
The other day I saw salmon on sale for $5.99/lb. I didn't have salmon on my list of things to cook for the week, but I can't say no to cheap salmon. So I walked to the grocery store and bought two pounds of salmon. That's it. Just salmon.
My aunt makes this great salmon dish with lemon pepper and mayonnaise. I always look forward to eating it when I visit her. It seems so simple to make, but for some reason, every time I try to make it, it doesn't turn out right.
And this time? It's no different. It wasn't great. I don't know, I think I need to watch her make it. I have all the ingredients written down, but how much of everything do I need?!
Also, do you see that salmon? I cooked it UPSIDE DOWN. How the heck did I do that? I didn't even notice it until I took it out of the oven. It was overcooked, but the breadcrumbs weren't browned, and it wasn't seasoned enough, but I think I put too much butter, but I didn't even use salted butter so it was weird...
It's alright. Next time, cook it for like 10 minutes and then broil for a few more minutes. Use more lemon pepper. Use more mayo. Use more chicken granules.
At least my green beans and eggplant turned out well.
Yeah, 5/5 for the veggies. 2/5 for the salmon, but I'll try the salmon again another 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.
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.
Kitchen Mishaps
May 18, 2019 7:35 PM
My fridge has got some serious issues lately. I impulse bought that expensive dark chocolate ice cream last week, and when I went to go eat it, I realized it was completely melted because my freezer wasn't cold enough. I decided to treat it like a computer, and I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Amazingly, that worked, because the next day my ice cream was frozen again. BUT, then I wanted to eat a salad and my lettuce was frozen! Why is my freezer not cold enough and my fridge too cold?!
Now my toaster oven, on the other hand, has been finicky for the past few months. I've had this toaster oven for many, many years. I had it in my first apartment, but I'm pretty sure it was my family's toaster oven before that. Clearly it's dying because it's caught on fire several times this year. Now it doesn't even close all the way. Sometimes it gets stuck when you try to open it. But it still does a perfectly good job at warming up my tortillas so I'm gonna keep using it until it completely breaks down.
And do you see this? This is what happened after I attempted to turn on one of the lights for my light box. The lightbulb just broke and fell! The other part of it was still screwed in and I stupidly tried to unscrew it with my fingers, which resulted in a cut on my thumb.
Bánh Xèo
March 3, 2019 10:20 AM
My friend came over and we tried to make Bánh Xèo. We used this recipe from Hungry Huy. Here is a progression of how things went as we tried to make yellow pancakes.
Attempt #1
We poured too much batter in this.
Attempt #2
I don't know, we probably still used too much batter again. And the heat may have been too high.
Attempt #3 & #4
Heeey, look the third one didn't totally fall apart. And I think we finally figured out that the meat and onions needed to be on only one side of the pan, so it was easier to fold the pancake in half.
Many attempts later...
Yeah! We finally made it look nice! I'll have to make this again in the future, but I'll probably see if I can find a different recipe. Or at least cook the meat separately from the pancake.
Oh yeah, we had extra batter so we cooked the rest of the pancakes the next day.
