As a young girl I loved flying on the airplane through the clouds, whether on the ascent or descent.
It scares me a little more as an adult for some reason, but I still love it!
Flying through the clouds
Month: December 2021
No cooking week and start of a small project
I am sooo done with cooking, for the time being anyway. I mean I love cooking and I even find washing dishes meditative (I don’t have a dishwasher). But I need a break. But before I take a break from cooking, I need to cook. Have to cook potatoes for potato salad. I need to cook sausage and eggs so I can assemble more breakfast burritos. This is all simple cooking. So then from Sunday through Thursday, no cooking, except maybe to fry an egg on occasion. I know, not a full week, but then of course, I am visiting family for the holidays.
I don’t like tuna (unless raw in a Japanese restaurant), so I will buy canned chicken and mix it with mayonnaise. Maybe avocado toast. How do people have avocado toast everyday? So hard to find a ripe avocado the exact moment you need it. I will snack on tomatoes. Of course there are any variety of sandwiches that can be made. What are your ideas?
All the cooking I have done in the last week or two means all my spices got all messed up. So I am reorganizing them. Put warm spices together (nutmeg, cloves, allspice, etc), Indian spices, Mexican spices. Cumin, my favorite spice, is multicultural, so I will have to figure that out. This is just the start, the photo maybe shows 55% of my spices! Every one essential and necessary! 🙂 And yes, my baking stuff is there too as I house it in the same area. Perhaps more photos on Saturday.
December 2021Vegan for a Week Day 4
Breakfast was toast. But by lunch I decided I had it with tofu and got tater tots. Still vegan but that isn’t why I am doing vegan, more on that in a bit. Dinner was Barilla Red Lentil Rotini pasta with a pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, spices, tomato sauce. Next time I will use canned tomatoes. I love red lentils and I cooked the pasta two more minutes longer than the package said, but the texture was still harder than Al dente in my opinion.
First let’s talk about emotional eating. Today it was like everything was being thrown at me and I couldn’t dodge any of it. I wanted all the food in the vending machine. Of course I didn’t have any. I am sure emotional eating is how I get to be obese and diabetic. Vegan is a tool to eat more fresh foods, though it can be done unhealthy like those tater tot’s. Still, how to deal with stress when you are chained to your desk with too much work to do.
My history with tofu. Before this year I had it 3-4 times at people’s houses and just HATED it. People would say oh you haven’t had it cooked right. Like how many times do I have to eat it before you leave me alone! This last year I have started following a lot of vegans on YouTube. One of them is Nisha Vora of Rainbow Plant life with her crispy sesame tofu. It was sooo good. But I made the mistake of making three dishes that featured tofu and it turns out I have my limits. I would be okay never touching tofu again. But it is good to know there are ways I can tolerate it.
I may get through all vegan tomorrow, but then I am done. I still want to incorporate more vegan meals in my life though and with the new breed of vegan YouTubers, I think that is quite possible.
December 2021 Vegan for a Week Day 3
I didn’t take so many photos today because it would turn repetitive. Toast for breakfast, ground tofu bulgogi for lunch, snack of gingerbread pancake square with peanut butter, dinner was a roasted potato with ketchup.
Should I do this next month, and I likely will, there are changes I would make. One problem is I made three very similar recipes and I am getting bored. These are recipes I have been itching to make and they are all incredibly good, just should have only done one for this week. That is why I threw together the potato in a quick sloppy hurry. Turned out good though.
For next month I want to plan more variety, meals that can be frozen so I can make them 2-3 weeks ahead. Remember that this does not have to be complicated. I am still planning on doing four more days, but I did myself in a little by really wanting to try all those recipes.
The only thing I am really missing so far are eggs, mayo, and my home made breakfast burritos. Junk food too, but it has been nice to consider junk food off limits because I don’t know what is vegan. Don’t tell me. I am doing this for health reasons.
December 2021 Week of Vegan Day 2
I started off with toast for breakfast, but this morning I tried the vegan butter. I am a girl who loves real butter and won’t touch margarine with a 10 foot pole. I tried the Earth Balance butter and it was quite good. I also put some peaches on top. I probably won’t keep that up.
For a snack I did the gingerbread sheet pan pancake with peanut butter on top.
For lunch I did the Miss Kim’s Fried Tofu. I brought in all the components separate, tofu, sauce, rice. Yes, I have a hot pot at work, microwaves aren’t good for everything. First put in the tofu to try to re-crisp it. That didn’t work so well but it did re-heat it. Maybe I need to add a touch of oil. Then I put in the rice and sauce. Most people are still working from home, but my coworker and I have to work in the office but we sit far from each other. She came to visit my desk and said it smelled good.
I came home to cook a couple more things I didn’t get to on the weekend. The blistered green beans. I would say where from, but I would make so many changes it wouldn’t be the same. It was still good though. Then I made Wil Yeung of Yeung Man Cooking’s Ground Tofu Bulgogi. Just delicious! I had it for dinner tonight but this will be my lunch the rest of the week. The recipe called for 200 grams of tofu but my tofu block was over 400 grams, so I doubled the recipe. So glad I did. I love all the cooking I did, but I love this one the best. https://youtu.be/bOpzP0ldlBI
I think I am done cooking for a few days. I will still be posting what I eat everyday. Later this week I will make a pasta sauce to go with red lentil pasta I bought. I am just going to wing the pasta sauce recipe.
December 2021 Week of Vegan Day One
I once did a week of vegan years ago. It went fine. It was easier than a week of paleo or three days of Whole 30. I have no intention of being 100% vegan, but I want to eat more vegan meals. For me it is a way to challenge my bad eating habits and eat more nutritious food. I wouldn’t normally consider this. One, I believe moderation is best no matter what or how you eat. Two, more importantly for me, there is a new generation of vegan food creators. I mostly watch them on YouTube. Nisha Vora of Rainbow Plant Life, Wil Yeung of Yeung Man Cooking, Joanne Lee Molinaro of The Korean Vegan, and Andrew and Larisha of Make it Dairy Free. While you might still have some unusual ingredients, at least for us non vegans, their foods look much more delicious and approachable than the vegan foods of old where you might think you are eating like a rabbit.
I am thinking once a month I will do a week of vegan and outside of that one or two vegan meals a day. For now don’t hold me to that. At least this week I will do vegan. As usual I am over planning and over ambitious and when it comes down to it I wonder what I am doing. But it doesn’t have to be hard, I made it that way because there are so many recipes I want to try. I did three of them anyway. Gingerbread sheet pancakes by Nisha Vora, Miss Kim’s Fried Tofu by Ji Hye Kim of Miss Kim Restaurant in Ann Arbor MI, recipe published by Food & Wine Magazine, and Spicy & Crunchy Garlic Tofu (Kkanpoong Tofu) by Joanne Lee Molinaro of The Korean Vegan. I will provide all the links I can for right now. Web site, YouTube, recipe links.
The gingerbread pancakes are a part of a pdf link provided in the description of the YouTube Video:
https://youtube.com/c/RainbowPlantLife
Pancakes https://youtu.be/LSiVJzaoej4
Miss Kim’s Fried Tofu https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/miss-kims-fried-tofu
The Korean Vegan https://thekoreanvegan.com/
Spicy & Crunchy Garlic Tofu (Kkanpoong Tofu) https://thekoreanvegan.com/spicy-crunchy-garlic-tofu-kkampoong-tofu/
The Korean Vegan YouTube channel https://youtube.com/c/TheKoreanVegan
Spicy & Crunchy Garlic Tofu on YouTube https://youtu.be/2VwK220z8Tc
Yeung Man Cooking web site https://yeungmancooking.com/
Yeung Man Cooking YouTube https://youtube.com/c/WILYEUNG
Make it Dairy Free web site https://makeitdairyfree.com/
Make it Dairy Free YouTube https://youtube.com/c/MakeItDairyFree
It is my intention to post daily this week what I am eating. And if you want to do a week of vegan you can also keep it simple like with toast with toppings of fruit or vegetables, a nice rice bow, a salad. These recipes looked so good I had to try them!
Rainy Saturday Creative 