Cooking for myself again
September 22, 2020 8:41 PM
I'm going to end up having three weeks on my own before I head back home to visit family again. And you know what I've realized? I don't actually need to cook all that much. I've also started timing myself to see how fast I can cook. Spoiler: I don't cook that fast, but I actually can cook faster than I thought.
I made this pasta since it's one of my go-to meals when I don't know what to cook. I've made it so many times that I'm actually able to beat the estimated time on Budget Bytes! It took me 24 minutes and the recipe says 25 minutes! Look at me shaving off one minute.
I used some of a tub of chive and onion cream cheese in this, which turned out fine, but this is way better when you just have a block of plain cream cheese. The spreadable tubs just don't give that nice creamy consistency that you want.
Shortly after that, I made this Shrimp Scampi Florentine which is another go-to. When I was visiting family, we noticed that shrimp was on sale for $5/lb. What a steal! They're never that cheap in the grocery stores I live near! Not even at Aldi!
I made it with rice since I didn't want to go overboard and eat pasta twice in one day (even though I have no problem eating rice three times a day), but I had some later meals with pasta, and I think this works much better with pasta than rice.
This also took me about 40 minutes to make, which is exactly how long the recipe said it would take. I don't know. I was going kind of slow and listening to a podcast at the same time. Feels like it should actually only take 30 minutes.
And finally, I made some Posole today. Back when my sister was still here, we tried a stove top carnitas recipe which was...lackluster. Anyway, I threw it in the freezer, and I figured this was a good use for some of it.
I don't know what it was, but I had a super potent onion, and I was crying just from chopping it up. My eyes were hurting so badly that they kept hurting for over an hour after I was done cooking. It took me just over 30 minutes to prep and cook, so I guess the name of the recipe was right.
What I'd really like to do is buy some more bowls. These Corelle bowls are just not suitable for picture taking.
Slowing Down
February 22, 2020 11:07 AM
You might be thinking, "Slowing down?! Aren't you already making new posts at a ridiculously slow rate?!" and yeah, I am. But that's because my life has been busy busy busy, and I need to slow down what I'm doing in my life. I had a realization while driving home last week that I've been doing way too much. drinking too much coffee, and not getting enough sleep. So, I've officially started a no-coffee diet that I'm going to try and keep up for the next couple of months.
No coffee obviously means I need to get more sleep, and because I'm trying to prioritize sleep, I might actually be cooking less. But we'll see!
One Pot Creamy Cajun Chicken Pasta - Budget Bytes
I want to say I made this because I had cream cheese that I needed to use up, and whenever I need to use up cream cheese, I look for a creamy pasta to make. All of the cream cheese filled pastas I've made have been great, even if the leftovers aren't my favorite. I think this pasta could have used more of the cajun-y taste though. I also think it might have been better if I added more cheese, as it still tasted very tomato-y. Still, this tasted good and I'll probably make it again at some point.
Sushi - Just One Cookbook
Okay, I know I didn't really need a recipe for sushi, but the recipe I linked is what I referred to for making the sushi rice. Of course I just cooked rice like normal and then stirred in the extra ingredients when it was done.
I wanted to make sushi because I had a bunch of those seaweed wrappers and I also had imitation crab in the freezer, and I'm really trying to use what I have instead of buying extra ingredients all the time.
I considered buying one of those bamboo rolling things that make it easier to make sushi but I just tried rolling one on my own and while it wasn't super pretty, it seemed to work well enough so I'll be sticking to my own hand rolling for now. Anyway, I didn't realize how easy it was to make sushi like this. I'll be doing this some more in the future.
One Pan Roasted Kielbasa and Cabbage Dinner - Budget Bytes
For some reason I really wanted some sausage the other day, and I also had cabbage I needed to use up. Kielbasa is basically sausage, right? I think I ended up having extra meat and not as much cabbage as the recipe called for, which isn't really the direction I like to take these recipes, but whatever. This was a nice, easy dish to make.
Posole - Budget Bytes
I considered not posting this because of how ugly I think this picture is, but this did serve me well for four meals. I had a bag of leftover pulled pork in my fridge, and while I did use some of it for tacos, I also used it to make this soup. It was delicious.
Spiced Fish Tacos - Blue Apron
Because I love tacos so much, I also made fish tacos. The recipe calls for catfish, but I use tilapia because I'm cheap. It's been a while since I've made this, but this is one of my go-to recipes. I've made this so many times, and yet, I still haven't tried anything else from Blue Apron's cookbook. Maybe one day.
I actually deviated from the recipe this time, and I used avocado in place of sweet potato. I do think sweet potato would have been better, but I'm really trying hard to use ingredients I already have, and I just happened to have a lot of avocados on hand.
Tomato Basil Pasta with Ricotta - Budget Bytes
Yeah, more pasta! Pasta is easy so I make it a lot. I was actually looking up recipes that use ricotta since I bought some to make ravioli out of dumpling wrappers (that was gross, I'm never doing that again), and I had half the thing of ricotta left. This was good, but I cut the amount of tomatoes in half since I was too lazy to cut up a whole 2 pints. I definitely should have use all of them though.