Cookin' and wooblin'
May 24, 2024 11:32 PM
I picked up a new hobby: crocheting! But this is my food blog, so here are five meals that I made this past week, featuring some things that I crocheted. My sister had been staying for me for a few months, and she just went back to the west coast. So now I'm using up some of the leftover ingredients from her stay.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?!
Carnitas tacos
February 26, 2023 3:10 PM
It's been a series of cooking fail after cooking flail, so I had to take a break from trying to clear out everything in my pantry to make something that I knew would turn out well: CARNITAS.
And oh my god, was it delicious and exactly what I needed. This recipe from Cafe Delites is my absolute favorite carnitas recipe. The only thing I do differently is that I omit the jalapeno and poblano peppers.
I usually just throw everything in the slow cooker, let it cook on Low for 8 hours, then I transfer the meat into a bowl, and I shred it all up. The recipe states that you should broil or pan fry it for better texture, but the meat is already so good as-is. This time I did broil it though, and it was absolutely worth the extra five minutes of cooking. The crisp edges were 👌
I served this on some mini corn tortillas that I lightly fried on the pan with a little bit of water and oil. I topped the tacos with some cilantro lime rice, sweet onions, cilantro, and freshly squeezed lime.
SO GOOD. And SO BEAUTIFUL. So beautiful, that I had to take a whole bunch of pictures and post them here.
I even went back for a fifth taco!
Chipotle beef tacos
September 18, 2022 10:39 PM
I'm going to take a brief pause from my Teochew work to show you these tacos that I made last night.
They were so good. Also so much work. So so much work. I used this crispy braised chipotle beef taco recipe that I found on Half Baked Harvest (my co-workers rave about this site). I opted for the slow cooker version of this, which I think is less work than using the stove and oven, but it was still a lot.
I had planned to go play DDR that morning, but I wanted to get the beef cooking first, so I got up early and bought ingredients, prepped the sauce, and cut up the meat. The recipe says to use a blender to blend up the ingredients, but my only blender is a single serving size Nutribullet, which definitely was not big enough for this. I used my food processor instead, and it made me wonder why this recipe specifically called for using a blender.
Well, I hit the "LOW" button and suddenly a bunch of sauce spilled out of the container and went flying everywhere! 😱 And then when I went to pour the sauce into the slow cooker, it was splashing all over the place!
Okay, I guess that's why they say to blend liquids in a blender.
It all turned out well though. If I ever make this again, I'll want to use a fattier cut of meat, and I would probably forgo the blending altogether. Just dump everything in the slow cooker, and I'm sure it would taste just as good.
Enchiladas, twice
August 7, 2022 2:59 PM
I had COVID a little over a month ago, and I was mostly confined to my aunt's guest room for five days. I ended up staying at my aunt's house for a week longer than I anticipated, so once I got back to Pittsburgh I was itching to cook again. I actually only had a week before having to go back to my aunt's house again, but now, NOW, I'm back in my apartment, and I am doing lots of cooking.
I'm trying to remember why I decided to make enchiladas, because I'm not the biggest fan of them. I think I had tortillas in the fridge from a while ago. I also had some of that dry pulled pork that came from a pork loin. Yup, that's why. I wanted to use the rest of that.
I decided to try this vegan black bean and avocado enchilada recipe from Budget Bytes, but of course I substituted the corn for pork in it which made it very much not vegan anymore.
But who cares! I wasn't looking for a vegan recipe. I was looking for an enchilada recipe. And I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how this turned out. After I had prepared the filling, I took a bite and I thought "Wow, this is pretty good". The fact that I could munch on the filling before I baked it in the oven was great, because man, this recipe took a really long time to make and I was getting hungry.
I ended up having a lot of leftover enchilada sauce, so once I got back to my apartment the second time, I decided to make more enchiladas. But I didn't really want to make pulled pork again (and I guess I could have actually gone the vegan route, but uh...I didn't) so I tried a different type of Mexican meat and I made chicken tinga.
Yeah, this was...okay. The recipe listed several methods of cooking the chicken, and I opted for just throwing some raw chicken into the tinga sauce and letting it cook on the pan and then shredding it. I think I should have slow cooked it for a few hours instead. I probably cooked the chicken for too long and it was kind of tough, so shredding it was a pain.
I also had to buy another can of chipotles in adobo sauce, and now I need to figure out what to do with the rest of the can again.
But I was still able to make tasty tacos! Even if the meat is not the best, I can just throw it on a corn tortilla with some onions and lime and cilantro and it's a beautiful meal.
Enchiladas ended up being easier the second time around since I didn't have to make the sauce from scratch. I mixed some of the chicken tinga sauce into my remaining enchilada sauce from before and I think I like that it made it a little lighter.
Overall, I'm happy with it! I actually still have leftover enchilada sauce, but I think I'm all enchilada'd out for a while now.
Chipotles in adobo sauce
July 24, 2022 9:37 AM
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a recipe for spicy chipotle honey salmon bowls and it looked really good. It claims to be a good "weeknight dinner", but I found it to be way too much work, and it had too many components, so I don't think I'll ever make it again. I didn't even take a picture.
One of the ingredients that the recipe calls for is chipotles in adobo sauce, so I bought a little can of it. I tried a little, and it was so much spicier than I expected, so I didn't use nearly as much as the recipe said to. This meant that I had almost a full can of these chipotles left and no idea what to do with them.
But I thought, "I can improvise! I'll make some fajitas!" So I bought a pack of shrimp and some bell peppers and tortillas, and I tried to throw something together.
It was not good. Honestly. I know they look good in the photo, but tacos always look good. The shrimp just tasted weird. Maybe I marinated it and cooked it for too long. And the marinade I made was also bad.
Okay, so I had to try something simpler. I figured since these were so spicy that I could throw a couple of peppers into hummus and blend it up.
Well, it wasn't really hummus. I only had half a lemon and I didn't have as much tahini as I needed for a single can of chickpeas. And then when I was at Aldi, I couldn't find any pita bread, so I bought naan instead. But it tasted great when I dipped a warm piece of naan in it, and now I think I'll always get naan for hummus.
Finally, I threw some of the chipotles into a large batch of pulled pork for some tacos. This time I actually used a recipe that I know works well, and I just added the chipotles to it. (And sugar! I always add sugar)
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a small piece of pork butt, so I bought a pork loin instead, and man was it dry. But that's okay, it wasn't terrible, so I just decided to buy lots of toppings to put on top.
It also made for some good breakfast bowls.