お楽しみはこれからだ！

I've been making a lot of cold-brew tea lately, and I'm really happy I decided to start using the French press for it! I have a lot of loose leaf teas that are a giant pain in the ass to make ice tea with (do you say iced or ice?), so this has been a huge quality of life improvement! My favorite has been this nice, pearled Jasmine tea I got and having that with some soy milk. And I can re-use them leaves like three times! Love it! I also finally got to try this rose hibiscus mint tea I got at a farmers market back in May and I LOVE IT. It's so pretty too when it's blooming in the water and turns this really nice magenta color. I need to see what other teas I might like to have like this and maybe buy some boba again for it.

I said I've been cookin a lot, and it's been really nice to let the ghost of a line cook posses my body and snap out of it to realize I've made a delicious dinner. Here are some of the things I've made in the past couple weeks that I'm really proud of & would highly recommend.

Soba & Sweet Potato & (failed) Pan-fried Tofu

Unfortunately, this was an original creation that I literally can't remember how I made. I know the soba had some sesame oil and rice vinegar and ginger powder (lazy). I think I was in a rush to make this, so the tofu suffered and stuck to the pan. But at least I was able to get the crispy skin off and throw it in there! I tend to make things like this that are like bowl full of carb with misc veg that I need to get through/leftovers I somehow make all work together a lot during weeknights. The sweetpotato was really nice with this and I think it had some berbere spice blend on it (these were leftover from a sweet potato salad sorta thing I made a few days earlier). Fuckin love soba in the summer!

Kale and Carmelized Onion Pasta

This was really fuckin good and I highly recommend this recipe!!! I always vaguely follow the directions, so there were some changes I made to this as I went, especially when cooking the onions. I didn't have time to let the onions caramelize for like an hour, so I used the baking soda cheat and it made it go HELLA FAST. Like probably not as deep of flavor as if I let em have their time, but good enough. No dairy, so that's some nutritional yeast on top cause I was too lazy to make almond Parmesan. I made this literally as my mattress was delivered (SURPRISE), so I was having to run around the apartment and lug that bitch up 2 flights of stairs in the middle of making this. It turned out really nicely though! The kale chips on top for the garnish were so fuckin good. I love crispy things just thrown on top.

Tofu Pad Thai

Realizing I was really in a noodle mood last week lol. So this is another dish where I just kinda winged it cause I've made this so many times and we also didn't have everything needed for REAL pad thai, so I had to improvise. Don't do fish, so soy sauce was used in its place. Didn't have oyster sauce (usually would have this, but I'm having to slowly rebuild my pantry) so I tried using some of the dark mushroom soy sauce. Good enough! Did have tamarind though, so that flavor was there. Didn't have peanuts cause I ate em all on the drive, so I put some peanut butter into the sauce to sub for it. I can't remember if I had to make any other substitutions, but I basically follow this recipe more or less. Recipe Tin Eats is the fuckin best.

Buchujeon

Followed this recipe to a T cause it was my first time making this. Really simple and easy and tasty! Made the recommended dipping sauce for this too. Really quick dinner in the middle of the week.

Garlic Pull Apart Bread, Marinara, and Bean Balls

Ended up using a lot of the chives to make this really good pull apart bread! Baking is absolutely not my strong suit, but this was really easy and the dough came together really well! God these lil breads were so fucking good. The bottom really crisped up when baking and had this really nice, buttery crust at the bottom. Tried to use some vegan cheese ontop (different brand I tried--some store brand stuff) and I think it would have worked better with a different brand. Vegan cheese is like some weird, freak science shit, so it always acts differently depending on the brand and temp you're using. I think this would have worked better with Follow Your Heart or Violife or the newfangled Daiya that isn't weird and gooey in a lava sort of way. But it still all tasted really good! I have no fuckin idea what I did for the marinara. I just like used some canned tomatoes and onions and oregano and basil and garlic of unknown quantities. I think some red pepper flakes? Idk when I make red sauce, I kinda just go on auto pilot.

The bean balls are this recipe I've used for a few years now (since 2019 I think?). Really simple lentil-based recipe. I don't have a food processor anymore (🫗 pourin one out for the Cuisineart I had to abandon with the move), so I didn't make oat flour. Just used all purpose and it turned out fine. I also don't have a shredder anymore and haven't had a chance to get a new one yet, so I just did a really fine dice with the carrot. Turned out great! Didn't have flax for the egg replacement, so I used some sweet potato for it and it turned out great! Will have to remember that for the future.

I ended up having all of this together for dinner on the same night, but I made the bean balls in advance and froze most of em cause I'm trying to plan ahead for my inevitable return to work. M'partner said this reminded them of like 70's dinner party finger food lol. Sometimes we like to just be a lil messy and eat with our fingers!

Completely unrelated to the food...

I watched the other movie named Hellhole (2022) (not to be confused with the 80s lesbian exploitation film of the same name--that's also a fascinating piece of cinema lol) while eating my 70s finger food dinner. It was basically about this dude that was literally assigned cop at birth who is also the antichrist??! I thought several parts of it were funny, intentionally and unintentionally. There's a lot of like gross, gelatinous oil soup these monks eat, and watching this man have to eat it again and again made me think of this meme like the whole movie. Was not a fan of the force feeding bit, so I just looked away. But damn these Catholic monks were also exploiting women in a completely different and unsexy way than the other Hellhole! I found it really funny when these satanic cultists had an existential crisis when the antichrist didn't like immediately pop out after their month long ritual bullshit. Their disappointment and coping was very silly. Loved the Polish discotech the monk was drunkenly drowning his sorrows to. Visuals were cool at the end. I really liked the design for the antichrist at the end. Fav part of the movie was when my own lil antichrist was LOVING Jesus at the end of the movie.

Praise be, gord!

Braised Seitan Roast

The last thing of note that I made for the week was this roast and HOLY ANTICHRIST was this good!!! This was a combination of a couple of recipes on my quest for the best and easiest seitan recipe. I ended up using this recipe for the seitan and this recipe for the braising liquid (I've used the seitan recipe in this before and liked it enough, but didn't have any mushrooms so I was browsing around for something else). The seitan cooked up nicely, though I do think it holds its shape better when steamed inside tin foil or cheese cloth. However, it felt a lot more meaty like this and less??? Dense? Seitan can sometimes take on this almost chewy texture I've noticed but this one didn't have that at all. Very nice to carve into at the end! I'm excited for the leftovers with this one!