Journal

2024 - Week 9 Cooking Results

Sausage

Restocked, All pork hot dogs, good things.

Creamy Chickpea and Sweet Potato Stew

Vegetarian, a nice combination of flavors and textures. The temperature dropped midweek to be quite a bit colder than I think we all expecting after cresting tot h lower 70s. Warming and good. I ate leftovers on Saturday after taking a break from cleaning.

Brown Butter Shrimp Noodles

Ended up making this on Saturday, relatively simple to do and a decent interpretation shrimp scampi. Made after a day where I kept looking for my camera stands, so I ended up cleaning out and organizing the front hall closet. While I didn’t find what I was looking for, it does look a lot better now which is nice. After a nap, a shower, I made this up and it was pretty good.

Taco Salad

Verde Sausage, a new version from Crooked Gap, is quite nice, and is nice and stands out, but added a lot less than I normally do for the purpose. It worked out quite well. I think I need to find some other purpose for this that can allow the meat to be more forward. Good add to the line up, though as I understand it takes quite a bit more effort to make, thus a bit more cost. Worth it, good taco salad.

Grilled Cheese with Mortadella

Cheese, Mortadella, butter, and a good bread. A good standard thing.

Sous vide Pork Loin (Saturday)

Plan Changes! I’ll make this on today.

2024 - Week 8 Cooking Results

Hamburgers

Lamb! Added a bit of herbs and spices, salt and pepper and some deliciousness.

Baked Potatoes

Used the rest of the potatoes that were in the bag I bought, before things started to grow to much. Bacon, butter, sour cream, salt and pepper.

Mac & Cheese

They had some Beecher’s Hatch pepper mac and cheese at our last visit to costco, so we picked it up. As a note, Beecher’s is part of the Sugar Mountain family of companies, which includes The Butcher’s Table, where my brother has worked for quite a while.

It was quite good, they make a pretty good mac and cheese.

Grilled Cheese

Much to my own failing memory delight, I accidentally ordered 3 loaves of bread. I knew I would have bread to make the grilled cheese, but as things started to come together on Friday, I had one through the food coop and two directly ordered from a baker. So I dropped two in gallon freezer bags then put them in the freezer used the third to make grilled cheese with beef bologna. Good sandwich.

One-Pot “Mary Me” Chicken and Noodles

I skipped over a couple of items. The sun-dried tomatoes, the chives. I replaced the heavy cream with half and half, cause I thought I has already used the only recipe that needed it. I got annoyed by the directions a bit. I juiced the lemon in and poured it in a glass, with the intent to mix it with some elderflower to have a nice drink, only to find I needed about half of it. But since it says, one lemon, zested, I just assumed it wanted the zest only and not the juice.

Even so, it was a pretty good meal. Since we are already married, I guess it works?

Buttermilk Pancakes

Good as always.

A conversation with a friend reminded me that I had some cinnamon soaking in vodka for a bit. My notes about it were simple:

83g cinnamon sticks
706g vodka
Started late 11/21/2021

I took them out on 2/23/2024, meaning it was soaking for 823 days. I sampled a bit and it has a strong cinnamon scent, but is not as spicy as cinnamon “whiskey" I’ve had.

2024 - Week 7 Cooking Results

Hamburgers

Beef, a bit of simple seasoning and good to go.

Taco Salad

I used the last Guacachile on mine between that and the leftovers, it was a nice add. I may have to thing about making the salsa my own.

Egg & Sausage Muffins

Good as always.

Breakfast Egg Bake with Sausage and Potatoes

The nose tickling continues! Even so, this came together well. I threw in some of the leftover jalapeño and green peppers from, the taco salad. Everything else came together quite will. I also used the green onion sausage, which is not quite breakfast sausage, but it still worked.

Creamy Peanut Noodle Soup

Made quickly before heading off to area 515’s game night. It was quick, easy and pretty good. The game night was fine, meet some of the people there, got a tour.

2024 - Week 6 Cooking Results

Sausage

I guess this turned into hamburgers which got delayed. Oh yeah, cause I’m out of sausages, at least ones to use for what I mean by this.

Chana Masala

I ended up taking Friday off, between the long term outage and some other general nonsense it was nice to have a day with almost no plans. I exercised, payed some video games, got in a nap. I started making this around 4:Pm debated on using rice or flat bread, and went with rice. Good things. I used some of the salsa I made on it.

Hot Honey Peanut Noodles

I had planned on doing Chana Masala, but I was working on something later then I intended so I threw this together earlier in the week and went from there.

Baked Potatoes

A nice starchy dinner, fried a bit of bacon, sour cream, butter and salt and pepper. Good things.

After a bit of convincing, I flip-through one of my ebook cookbooks I have, Oaxaca: Home cooking from the Heart of Mexico, and found a nice simple recipe for Guacachile (Creamy Serrano Salsa). After Shannon went to bed on Monday, I did the dishes and then started making this with my fancy new blender (not that fancy). I got the onion, lime juice blended up a bit, then I started to fry the chilies in avocado oil (modification from this recipe but called for in others). I became a bit worried that I would create a cloud of capsaicin, so I didn’t use the high heat like it called for, but I did fry them and only had a cough or two myself, so luckily I didn’t wake up Shannon.

I let the peppers and oil cool a bit, then blended everything until it was nice and smooth. Tasted, added a bit of salt, tasted, added a bit more salt, and tasted, and then a bit more (3/8ths tsp per doubled recipe). I was happy with the flavor, the heat and texture. It does tend to break a bit if you leave it to long, but it’s supposed to be served very fresh and it doesn’t make to much. I did win one of the many awards for it at work (though I think mine was the only one in this particular category).