You Ate What...?

This past week has been a flurry of activity with getting a job set up as an independent contractor, being sick with a virus or maybe allergies that waxed and waned throughout the week, remembering how to knit (especially the casting on and purl parts of knitting), and just general gear up to a more structured time. All of that being said, I was unable to cook quite as much as I had been. Setting up shop and being sick was the biggest part of that, so hopefully I will be able to go back to some of it as things settle into a new normal. I did, however, have some time to cook. So, here are the feastings of the last week: Roasted Okra This is my absolute favorite side dish ever, except maybe mashed potatoes with my mom's roast gravy. I would seriously eat this every single day, and if I didn't live in an apartment I would totally plant okra for next year. Roasting the okra takes away a lot of the gooey-gummy fluid. It still tastes "green" but in the best way po...

Wow, it's been while. So, job hunt is taking longer than anticipated. We're kind of on money crackdown around here, and we've been needing to eat better anyway. All of this leads to a shift in the amount of "from scratch" non-fresh veggie food we consume. Sure, in the past I have cooked many things from scratch, but often things like desserts, breads, and condiments would come from a package. This past week I've been trying to make at least one major thing from scratch that I would normally have bought (or it's general equivalent in the case of ice milk). Much of it is bread-based. Normally we don't eat much bread, but it's super cheap making it ourselves and we don't seem to have any wheat or gluten intolerance. We can also flavor it the way we want (usually with Italian herbs), and it has so few ingredients that I feel it's fairly healthy. We have had: ice milk (a much simpler version of homemade ice cream that lack some of the cream...

So May 5th has come and gone and we are no longer keeping the fast. We found out after a couple of weeks that not eating meat was pretty simple, not eating any animal products was a little more than we could do at this time. Pretty early on we brought back milk, cheese, and eggs after having stomach cramps for several days. We did falter a couple of times when we went to cookouts, but the experience has substantially changed the way we view our eating. We have decided to eat far less meat than we were before the fast. In addition to our realization I heard at work about Bountiful Baskets. It's a cooperative food buying thing where you pay $15 for a basket of mixed fruits and vegetables, usually every other week. It's really a crapshoot on what you get, but I've found some interesting things that caused me to flex my cooking muscles. The first time we did this we also ordered an Asian vegetable add-on. We got bok choy. I have never eaten bok choy, so we were in for a ch...

Been a long time, hasn't it? The other blog sort of fizzled and everyone has alerts for this one, so I'm back here again. Once, a long time ago, I asked my mother if I could try canned spinach after watching some Popeye cartoons. With a look of revulsion on her face, she agreed. She hated the smell of it and I'm kind of surprised she did it. I probably was pretty adamant and threw a tantrum or something. Regardless, I tried it and absolutely was horrified by the taste and texture. Later, my freshman year in college, my roommate made it in the microwave from a can. I couldn't stand the smell then and cancelled it out with my own microwaved can of black eyed peas to which she felt similarly. I do, however, really like baby spinach fresh in salads and have learned to be okay with it cooked on pizza and with alfredo sauce on other Italian foods. We aren't eating most animal products right now (see the note below), so when I got a 2 lb. bag of spinach from the co-op y...

I have seen this drink a lot in some of the stores I have frequented, like Native Roots and Whole Foods. I was totally unprepared for this drink. I initially tried the Original Flavor Organic Raw Kombucha. I expected tea, some medicinal flavor maybe. It talked about probiotics and fermentation. I expected it to be nasty, but entertaining as a blog post. The first whiff was of vinegar and very off-putting. I think it was the fermentation smell that had settled on the cap, kinda had an apple cider vinegar smell. That's the best of the vinegar smells, but still...vinegar. I was totally not expecting the burst of natural carbonation on my tongue. It's powerful at first, but it calms down much more quickly than say the carbonation from a soda. This is more natural. It is sweet, but not cloyingly so. That makes sense. The whole bottle only has 4g of sugar in it. It is also tangy. There's still a medicinal quality about it, but it's not unpleasant. I don't know that ...

I'm moving my blog to more incorporate other interests (and maybe post more often). The new blog will be:  http://stitchbypen.blogspot.com/ Wednesday on the New Blog will be Weird Food Wednesdays and will also be posted here (at least for a while).

I just remembered that I was also supposed to do a thing on kefir, a drinkable yogurt, as a request of a friend. I typically do not drink anything more creamy than 2% milk, but I like a challenge obviously. Probably one of the healthier things I've had in my life Kefir is technically a fermented milk drink. It's described in all the things I read as "bubbly" but it's not any more bubbly than milk. I drank the vanilla flavor because the idea of plain anything doesn't quite sit well with my mental stomach (just like sour cream and mayo). It has a tang, like yogurt. I can drink a glass and feel fine about it after, but it would probably not be my first choice of drink. In my list of "yogurts" I would probably put it about the level of Greek-style yogurt, below skyr and above the artificial sweet of "regular."