How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
First of all, I've replaced the old header text on the site with a new handmade graphic! You can tell it's handmade because it looks like a 5 year old wrote it (well, a 5 year old that likes loopy l's). Even so, I took an embarrassingly long time working on it. I'll probably try to make a nicer graphic in the future, but this is good enough for today. Oh, but it only shows up on larger screens, so if you're on a phone, please check out my site on your computer!
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
Shortly after my dad's and cousin's visit to help me move into my apartment, I was left with a slightly-larger-than-usual amount of ginger. And I was talking to my sister about it:
It's like, too much ginger for most stir fries, and not enough ginger for chicken, but the right amount for salmon
Jeje姐姐 - big sister, I know exactly what you mean
I'm glad she gets it, because I'm not sure anyone else would.
I normally buy ang heu紅魚 - 'red fish' (salmon) from Aldi, but I was feeling a little fancy (and a little lazy) and I wanted to actually be able to eat the skin. The Aldi skin-on salmon is never de-scaled and de-scaling fish is kind of a mess. So I went to Giant Eagle, and I saw that their frozen sashimi grade salmon was on sale for $4.99 for an 8oz fillet!
I'm used to eating steamed salmon with ginger, but I decided I would try something a little different and cook it on the pan. I followed this crispy scallion ginger salmon recipe from Woks of Life because it sounded pretty straightforward, and I swear I've successfully luah烙 - pan fried salmon before, even though I cannot find evidence of it on this blog. 🧐
Well, I must have forgotten, because I totally burned these. I think I was still getting used to my new stove being hotter than I expect. I also didn't make it easy on myself because I used my stainless steel pan instead of my non-stick. I was so worried about it sticking to the pan (but it didn't!) and I think the recipe calls for way more oil than you need because I ended up with a splatter-y mess and I was kind of freaking out.
Okay, maybe the mess was actually because I didn't let the salmon fillets fully thaw before cooking them 😬 Man, what am I even doing?!
Hey, but when you throw all the toppings on top, you don't even notice how burnt it is! And even though the skin is overcooked, I actually way undercooked this salmon. It's basically raw in the middle. But this is the same salmon that I use for poke so I don't really care. In fact, it's preferable this way. (Side note, I dislike seared tuna. Why even bother searing it at all)
I thought the recipe was way saltier than it needed to be, but the fish itself was ho jiah好食 - delicious.
I wanted to try making this again, with adjustments. I figured it would be easier if I just cooked one piece of salmon and cut the recipe in half. But when I got to Giant Eagle, the sashimi grade salmon was on sale for EVEN CHEAPER! It was now $3.99 a piece! pin si便死 - extremely cheap! I had to buy two!
I still only cooked one of them though. I had to make this a little easier on myself. But I still used my stainless steel pan, and I really should have just gone with the non-stick. So I completely omitted the salt, and I also cut the amount of oil in half, and I think those were good changes! But I still ended up burning the salmon!
I did some researching on Reddit afterwards, and it sounds like it might have been better if I cooked the salmon on medium-low instead of medium-high or medium. I'll have to try that next time, but e jua下匝 - next time might be a while from now because I got a little sick of seared (burnt) salmon. I did still have that extra salmon fillet though, so I made some poke! I could never get sick of poke.
And I didn't want to be wasteful, so I took the unused piece of salmon skin and I even fried that up! Using my non-stick pan!
It was hoh sou好酥 - quite crispy and a very nicely cooked piece of salmon skin.
Hello! You probably noticed that my blog looks different! About a year ago, I asked my friend bogo if he could make some fan art for the blog. I didn't really give him any guidelines, except that I wanted eggs in it, and I think he did an amazing job!
I wanted to incorporate this art on the website, but it also felt like the whole site needed a facelift. Recently, I've grown to really dislike the color green. A few people know why, and if you don't, feel free to ask me about it. It's just the type of thing that I don't want to air on the public internet 😬 But the old design had lots of green, and I wanted something very not-green.
Speaking of eggs, one of my friends told me that if I have some heavy cream, that I could use it to fry eggs, and he told me to look up Kenji's video on fried eggs. Well, for some reason I had leftover heavy cream, and I decided it was time to fry up some eggs.
I don't really have much to say about this, but I love eggs, especially for breakfast, and I love it when I find a new way to cook them. This was no exception. I don't think I would ever go out of my way to make heavy cream eggs because they're well, heavy, but it's great when I need to use up extra cream.
I paired the eggs with a slice of seedy, Bistro Multigrain Bread from Aldi. I'm usually not a fan of bread with all the extra seeds and grains in it, but I really like this bread from Aldi! Sometimes I just toast it and drizzle some extra virgin olive oil and salt on it.
I keep telling myself I need to stop staring at my phone so much, so I've been trying to read during breakfast. This was from February and I was in the middle of reading The Three Body Problem. It was...alright. Tune in next time to see the book I'm currently reading!
So, I've definitely been slowing down the frequency of these posts. That was partly because I was sick recently, but also because I've spent more time on food blogging than is sustainable, and I want to give myself more time to focus on other things. And you know, I'm living my life inefficiently now.
Part of the other stuff I want to focus on is...making more updates to this blog? Well, not new posts, but updates to the site itself. This is also my tech project, and I've honestly been itching to do more coding. I have a fun little feature that I'm working on! If you want to follow along to see what updates I'm making, my flailing-in-my-kitchen repo is now on github!
I've also been re-making some of the same recipes, to just experiment and find what goes well for my taste buds, and I've also been working on some new (-ish) recipes of my own! I actually make brussels sprouts a little differently from the recipe that I've posted, so I want to update that eventually.
I mentioned in another recent entry that I want to post a recipe for my mayonnaise roasted potatoes. I've made it twice in the past week (where I actually made note of measurements), but it still isn't quite right so I'm tweaking it.
And, please bear with me if you try to access the site and it just doesn't work at all! I need to do some server maintenance, and that's going to require rebooting the system a few times and I honestly don't remember most of the things I did when I first set up this site. But I'm making progress!
So, I'll end this post with a few more photos of some tasty things I've made recently that weren't exciting enough to get their own post:
I want to bring the food blog back. But, I'm tired of Wordpress. I want to make something I'm proud of, and I'm starting from scratch. So here it begins, version 2.0 of flailing in my kitchen.
My sister had been staying with me for a while, and I don't know what it is, but I was being a complete bum with her here. I've been exhausted from work--so exhausted that I don't feel like cooking afterwards. So she would cook all the dinners. After that, we were both at home with family for a month or so. And then I become an ever bigger bum. A blob. A loaf of bread.
But now my sister has moved on to the next chapter of her life, and I'm back on my own! So, you know, I gotta cook for myself again.
And look at that! I can still cook! It took me a whole 30 mins to prep this. 7 mins just to mix the spices. You wouldn't think it would take that long to mix the spices, but I have so many spices that half the trouble is finding the ones I need.
It's okay. It was worth it. I love fajitas.
So, I came up with a great idea a few weeks ago. My little sister is staying with me for a few months, and she loves food photography. I like cooking, but whenever I take pictures of my own food it's super ugly, mostly because I don't know the first thing about photography, let alone food photography. But my aunt is always asking me what I'm cooking, and I want a better way to show her that I'm being a functioning adult. So I decided that I should create an Instagram and post awesome pictures of food that I make and my sister takes!
Anyway, I downloaded the app on my phone, created an account, and attempted to set a username. I kept getting an error, so I decided to restart the app and login again. Then I got this message:
"Your account has been disabled for violating our terms."
WHAT?! I didn't even post a single picture! I actually attempted to restore my account (the link to do so was super hard to find by the way), to which I received an email:
"Thanks for contacting us. Before we can help, we need you to confirm that you own this account.
Please reply to this email and attach a photo of yourself holding a hand-written copy of the code below.
[Redacted]
Please make sure that the photo you send:
Includes the above code hand-written on a clean sheet of paper, followed by your full name and username
Includes both your hand that's holding the sheet of paper and your entire face
Is well-lit, and is not too small, dark or blurry
Is attached to your reply as a JPEG file"
WHAT?! Now you need my face?! This seemed suuuper sketchy to me, so I did some googling and reading about Instagram on Reddit, and yes, this is totally legit. I actually started to try and get this picture of myself taken, until I realized that I needed my username in the picture, and I wasn't even sure if I had successfully set a username. So at that point I said "Screw this."
Yeah, I write code for a living, and yet I'm awful at technology. I should have let my little cousin create the Instagram account for me. But anyway, Plan B. I'm going to start a food blog. Food blogs are the reason I can even cook in the first place. (Perhaps a future blog post will explain my initial foray into cooking) And I love reading food blogs.
Now even though I like programming, I decided that this project will mainly be focused on food, sentences, and pictures. Not code. Not system administration. I've created a website on my own before, but I didn't want to deal with the overhead for this. So WordPress it is. Maybe once I have a decent amount of posts, I'll consider moving this content into my own domain and actually make the site look less generic.
Oh yeah, as I was creating a WordPress site, I realized I already had one. From over 5 years ago. Since then, I stopped using Linux desktop and have switched to a Chromebook. Hopefully I actually keep up with the blog posting this time.
For now, here's a poorly taken photograph of some tacos I made last year.
