I love cooking! I definitely get too lazy to cook some days, but I usually find it enjoyable and fun. Especially when I'm cooking something new or tweaking a recipe. Since school has been out and I've been less busy and stressed, I've been cooking a lot more and finding it's a really satisfying use of my free time. I cook for my roommates when possible, but it's still fun by myself. I get more food that way anyway.
Here is some recent food:
Salads with fruit are the future. I've eaten several of these since I made this first one. I make a basic vinaigrette with red wine vinegar and olive oil.
beef recipeThis recipe is always a great use of ground beef. I halved the recipe because I only had half a pound of beef, and instead of 1/8tsp ground ginger I used about a teaspoon of grated fresh ginger because crazy gingery food is awesome. I chopped up the kohlrabi bulb thing and its leaves and sauteed them separately, then threw on some mushrooms. Once everything was done I mixed it together and put it on some red quinoa. Red quinoa looks similar to cooked ground beef and like 95% of the quinoa is covered in that picture so you can't really see it. This was a lot of food.
Kohlrabi is pretty good, though I'm not sure what else to make with it. I tried deep frying some sliced kohlrabi to make fries, but they just got soggy.
waffle recipeIt was a while since I deep fried something, so I decided to try this PB2 stuff out. It's like dehydrated powdered peanut butter, and it seems like it would be useful? I made the breading for this with 50% powdered peanut butter, 25% white flour, and 25% cornmeal. The chicken was some chopped up thigh meat, which I let marinate in buttermilk for a couple hours. The peanut butter breading held up pretty well, but only tasted kind of nutty. There was not a strong peanut taste. It was still good because come on, it's fried chicken.
Later that night I made some more chicken with a 100% powdered peanut butter breading. It crumbled off a bit while it was frying and didn't stick to the chicken as well. It only tasted slightly nuttier than the half peanut butter breading, so it wasn't really worth it.
I could eat a different kind of chicken and waffles every day of the week.
These chicken bits were some strips of breast meat, which were dipped in egg, then coated in the peanut mixture (like 80% chopped peanuts, 20% panko bread crumbs, plus some salt). Then they went in the oven at 350F for around 15-20 minutes. The waffles were made from 6 potatoes that were peeled, boiled, and mashed. I added a lot of cheese (while they were still hot so it melted in), some salt and pepper, three eggs (after the potatoes cooled a bit), then threw scoops of the stuff in the waffle iron. They take longer to cook than normal waffles.
Both parts of this meal were great. Mashed potato waffles are a staple in my apartment - we pretty much only make mashed potatoes for me to turn into waffles. The best thing about the chicken was that the peanuts got roasted a bit. This was very peanutty and I would recommend it over the fried chicken if you are looking for this flavor combination.
recipe (warning: lame paleo site)
I scaled this recipe down slightly since my sweet potato ended up being like 2/3 of a cup after being baked and mashed. I used peanut butter instead of almond butter because fuck almonds, and buckwheat flour instead of coconut flour. Regular wheat flour would definitely work there, but these had to stay gluten free.
These were also very good. I am happy to add another waffle variant to my repertoire. I do not have a waffle problem.
recipeI made some meusli because Loud Whispers mentioned it in another thread and it was a funny looking word. The grated apples I used were gala, and I got some nectarines, bananas, and strawberries for the chopped fruit. I used walnuts instead of almonds because fuck almonds. The picture was taken after it had chilled overnight, when the flavors from the fruit (and some of the red color from the strawberries) had soaked into the oats and stuff more.
This is pretty good, though I think the recipe could use some tweaking. It's a little heavy on the OJ, and I don't know if I like nuts in this stuff. They just have a weird texture with the apples and oats. Maybe I'll chop them up more finely next time.