My go-to meal

March 27, 2023 8:45 PM

Salmon. Brussels sprouts. Two things that I make so often, that I almost wasn't going to write another post about them. But I want to share more of my meals (and more photos of me prepping the meals!) so here I am.

I decided to make some brussels sprouts because I had some bacon left over from that pork sticky rice dish I made. And when I have a few strips of bacon, my mind always turns to brussels sprouts.

And then when I went to Aldi to pick up a bag of brussels sprouts, I saw that there was a bunch of salmon for 50% off, and I had to get one. That meant it was less than $5/lb! You don't see prices like that any more! Somehow I ended up buying like twice as many things from the grocery store as I intended to.

Of course that also meant that I had to cook it that day, because it was getting close to its sell-by date. That's okay. I can always come up with a way to prepare fish.

I decided to make a brown sugar rub for the salmon, similar to how I prepared it way back in this entry. Except I didn't include any of the citrus. And if you're wondering why I only zested half a lemon, it's because we didn't plan well, and we threw out the first half of it before I started zesting. But that's okay! Half a lemon is better than none.

We also had some white rice on the side. Very good meal.

Pasta alfredo

August 10, 2022 9:51 PM

What? Three pasta entries in a row? Is this all I eat now?

No. I swear I eat other things. I was totally going to make some fajitas tonight, but it's been three really busy days at work and I wanted some easy comfort food, so I switched things up last minute.

I mentioned two entries ago that I wanted to try the alfredo recipe from Sip and Taste. I tend to like white sauce more than red sauce for pasta, and I appreciate that the video uses my favorite type of pasta, pappardelle. I just really like wide noodles.

I know I complained about youtube recipes in general, but this video doesn't even have a text recipe in the description! I actually watched the video and furiously wrote down notes at the same time.

But my notes must have been good enough because this was really easy to make and I was very happy with it! The original recipe calls for chicken, but when I was at the grocery store last night I saw shrimp on sale for $5.99/lb and I had to get it.

Shrimp is probably my favorite seafood, but I find that if it's not cooked right it tastes really bad. So I kept this simple. I sprinkled a little bit of cajun seasoning on the shrimp and cooked it on the pan for a few minutes and it was perfect. High quality shrimp already has such good flavor that I like eating it even without anything added to it.

My cooking experiences aren't complete without some sort of flailing, and I may have dropped some pasta on the stove while I was taking it out of the boiling water and into the sauce. I liked not having to use a colander, but once I had gotten all the long noodles out, I knew there were still short pieces of pasta still left in the water and I was kind of struggling to fish it all out.

But other than that, it was smooth sailing. I think I'd make this again! Not anytime soon though. I think I should take a break from pasta.

Slow(ly) cooking

May 26, 2022 11:04 PM

Life is pretty good right now.

Work has been relaxing, but productive. Summer is approaching and I'm not getting anxious about it. I'm still cooking, but I'm doing it for fun--planning out one dish at a time, going to the grocery store four times a week, buying just the amount that I need, and not worrying about how much money I'm spending.

I planned to write a post like three weeks ago, but I bought a new laptop, and I had to put that together, and then I had to figure out how to move over all the code for this blog onto the new laptop.

But I did it! And now I have some food photos to share (:

I was at Aldi and I saw that their ground pork had $1 OFF stickers on them, and I learned that seafood and ice cream are not the only things I impulsively buy. It was one pound, so I used a tiny amount of it for some stir fry and saved the rest for dumplings.

It had been a while since I made dumplings, so I wanted to put my not-yet-published dumpling recipe to the test. I decided to buy thicker wrappers this time so I could try using the leftovers for scallion pancakes. I think I prefer the thinner ones though. And it turns out I pretty much used exactly one pack of dumpling wrappers for this, so I really could have just bought one pack of thin wrappers and one pack of thick wrappers.

...but I'll get back to the wrappers later. I think I spent about two hours prepping and wrapping and cooking, and probably another hour eating and cleaning. Yup. That was a Tuesday night. You may think that three hours spent on dinner is way too much time, but it was relaxing and it was delicious.

A few days later, I made the scallion pancakes at my friend's house. My original plan was to make them with her, but she was busy with work, so I did basically everything except make the dumpling sauce. Not quite as time consuming as dumplings, but still pretty time consuming. I really enjoyed it though. There is something so nice about working with your hands and being in motion and not having to think or stare at screens. And then I have something I can eat as a result!

The thicker dumpling wrappers were definitely a good choice for these. I thought they were delicious, and my friend thought they tasted pretty good too. I'll have to make these more often.

If I had the time and energy, I think I'd spend three hours cooking every day.

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 👌.

Salmon and asparagus

April 6, 2021 6:16 PM

On my grocery shopping trip a week and a half ago, I impulsively bought some asparagus because it was only $0.99/lb! I figured this would go well with some salmon I impulsively bought last month.

Salmon is one of the easiest things to cook, but it is a little pricey, which is why I feel the need to impulsively buy it a lot. I love salmon, but I never order it from restaurants. I find that they never cook it right. It's always overcooked and dry and lacking flavor. But when I make it myself, it's always delicious.

My quick, go-to salmon dish is this Salmon with Dill. I first made it for a guy I was dating several years ago, and I remember it absolutely blew his mind at how good it tasted. I don't know. I didn't even measure anything. I did, however, cut the cooking time down to 10 minutes. 20-25 minutes for salmon is way way way too long. My other trick to cooking salmon is that if I don't want the skin, I just cook it in a crappy baking pan and I let the skin stick to the bottom of it.

I was going to also include potatoes, but then I forgot to buy some. I still needed a starch, so I made more hummus. It worked.