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Oven Roasted Aloo Gobi

This recipe inspiration is from The Delicious Crescent. I don’t follow them, but it seemed like a clever Idea when I tripped over it on the internet.

There’s the rest of the one cauliflower I grew!
And small yellow potatoes from Aldi’s
And all of the ripe Juliet tomatoes left from my garden
And an onion

1/8 size sheet pan with seasoned cut vegetables

They get tossed with vegetable oil, grated ginger, grated garlic, powdered coriander, garam masala, chili powder, cumin seeds, turmeric, and some salt

Everything gets tossed on the roasting pan (lined with a silicone sheet to make cleanup easier).

Sheet pan of vegetables after roasting

After it had been roasting at 400F for almost an hour (30 minutes and then I stirred everything and tasted. The potatoes were still pretty firm, so I stirred everything and put it back for another 25 minutes), the potatoes were creamy all the way through and the tomatoes had some lovely caramelization.

Dinner is served!

Then I put the aloo gobi on a plate with saffron rice. And for some reason I felt like it was missing a secondary vegetable dish, so I heated up a microwave packet of Indian tomatoes and eggplant (and after I put like half a cup on the plate, I put the extra in the refrigerator). And then I toasted up a couple parathas cooked from the freezer and put some yogurt in a bowl.

I think I liked the roasted version better than the times I tried to make aloo gobi using the recipes on the DVD extras from Bend it Like Beckham. I will definitely make this again.

Taco Salad!

Just as much work as a fully cooked meal.

Salad ingredients: washed lettuce, onion, mini bell peppers and salad dressing ingredients: yogurt, mayonnaise, and salsa

First I washed and spun the lettuce and pulled some ingredients together

A skillet of ground beef, onions and peppers is on the stove. Salad dressing is started in a bowl. And a few more salad components are on the cutting board: tomatoes, cucumber, and red jalapeño pepper

The salad dressing was about a Tablespoon of mayonnaise, half a cup of plain yogurt, and then I went in with the salsa but it wasn’t giving me either the texture or intensity of flavor that I wanted – so I switched to three packets of Taco Bell’s fire sauce. I don’t often eat from Taco Bell, but I have to every now and then because I haven’t found a better set of for sauces than their sauce packets for giving my lunches a variety of easy flavor boats that are each a bit different. Anyway – I also added some Penzey’s southwest seasoning, and that was it.

Also in the picture you can see that I’ve got some (1/4 lb) ground beef going in a skillet with sliced onions and orange bell pepper. The ground beef was marinated in Southwest seasoning, corn starch, a little baking soda, soy sauce, shaoxing wine, and some water.

The skillet with the beef mixture is mostly done. There’s a big chunky bowl where I’m assembling the salad. There’s a smaller bowl with the salad dressing. And a partial package of sharp cheddar cheese

I added some dressing to the lettuce and then added a sliced jalapeño and two sliced tomatoes #frommygarden . Also some sliced cucumber and cheddar cheese. Then I added most of the rest of the dressing and stirred everything together.

Finished salad is on the table by my laptop. There’s a bag of tortilla chips in the background

When I added the hot toppings (beef, onions, and peppers), the cheese got a little soft and the flavors came together. A drizzle more of the dressing, and it’s time to eat.

Easy filling microwave casserole

A plate with a rice based casserole topped with a melted slice of american cheese

My mother had a dish she would make when we were very hungry and very low on energy or interest in cooking – it was like a casserole you make in the microwave

Take 1 can of condensed cream of chicken soup, 1 drained can of tuna, and a random amount of leftover rice. Mix them together, microwave for 2 minutes, mix again, microwave for two minutes again, mix again, and then top with sliced american cheese and dust with paprika (cause that makes it fancy!), and then finish with another 2 minutes in the microwave.

Well, I didn’t make that tonight because at the moment I don’t have soup in my pantry or canned tuna, but I do have a pint of cooked rice, half a jar of leftover alfredo sauce, and canned sardines!

So I started off with a random bit of onion on my fridge waiting for a purpose, and I diced and sauteed that until soft (mostly just to give myself something to do so I would Wait until the pan was properly hot before adding the rice). Then I added the rice!  I cooked the rice until it was properly hot, but I wasn’t patient enough to wait for toasty bits.

I added some minced garlic and then all the alfredo sauce I had. Drained and added the sardines, mixing them to get them broken up and evenly distributed. I added half a teaspoon of ground chilies for fun.

Then when everything was ready, I put it on a plate, topped it with a slice of american cheese, dusted with paprika, and put it in the microwave for 40 seconds so that I could preserve the traditional presentation!

Miscellaneous dinners

Throwing together a few dinners I’ve eaten lately

Open hamburger. The left ciabatta bun has mayonnaise, parsley, and grilled onions. The right bun has hot pepper slices hidden by slices of sharp cheddar cheese slightly melted by the hot hamburger patty on top with a few slices of tomato on top

A pretty amazing hamburger


Stir fry of beef, mushrooms, and mini red bell peppers


Dried (reconstituted) wood ear mushrooms and scallions sliced and put together with some broad rice noodles. I pulled out a chili oil packet from a previous meal like this and made a small amount of salty/sour sauce to balance it out


Not the most attractive bowl of ramen

Ramen made with water I’d boiled hot dogs in (and I also dipped to hot dogs in the broth a bit) with scallions and radish in the soup, plus an egg added and a slice of cheese on top

Hot dogs. So I hate buying hot dog buns. I don’t eat hot dogs often enough to get through a package, and honestly it’s a lot of tasteless bread. So I’m making hot dogs with a lightly toasted (just because I keep them in the freezer, fresh if you’ve got it) whole wheat bread. And then I put the dijon mustard on the bread, a line a fresh parsley – and then I let the freshly boiled and steaming hot dog warm up and soften the parsley and wrap the bread around. It’s much more suited to how my pantry works.

Some small advice for people who get bored of cooking

As someone who lives alone and enjoys making food for myself almost every day, I thought I might talk about how that works

A few months ago, someone on twitter was asking – as someone new to trying to cook regularly, how do people enjoy that whole process. It seems very frustrating and stressful. What if you aren’t good yet and it’s terrible and then you’ve put all this energy in and are still hungry?

And that is stressful! And the advice I’m giving here is not aimed toward poverty and subsistence living. There is a lot of reassurance in knowing that if you end up making something absolutely inedible (yes, I’ve done it, too) that you can order last minute delivery or make a meal out of other food in your pantry.

After the covid lockdown, when I started going back to working in person, everything took more effort and energy. One of the habits I picked up then, which I’ve recommended to several people since, was ordering 4 or 5 soups (wanton, hot & sour, egg drop – the ones that are extremely cheap ($2-4/pint) from Chinese restaurants) on delivery at the start of the work week. And then when I came home too tired and hungry to plan dinner, I would have a soup and that would give me space to figure the rest out.

But there are also other ways to make the daily dinner making engine go.

Grocery shopping – Grocery shopping is stressful and has become more expensive and there are so many people. You can do delivery. But this tip isn’t about how you shop, but what you shop for. Because it’s stressful, it’s easy to fall into a pattern where you buy the exact same things every time and you have the exact same resources every week. I fully believe in keeping regular stocks of breads and grains and beans and sauces and the components that let you build a variety of meals. But for produce (and meat?) I recommend letting some things run out and letting some things be seasonal and trying one thing new. And let the change in produce drive variety and experimentation.

Freezer shopping – I have a chest freezer (again, these are not subsistence living tips). That’s why I put a question mark by the meats – Since lockdown, I mostly get meat delivered, and that makes it harder to build in experimentation. But I also make and freeze stocks, soup, shredded braised meat, and I have a collection of frozen items I inherited from my parents’ freezer when my mother died: vegetable soup, terrible chili, tomato puree, and marinara sauces. And I almost always have a meat pulled out to thaw (and have a bowl the meat will fit in just in case it leaks as it thaws). When I first use a meat: if it’s a pound of ground beef, I’ll use a quarter of it in that day’s dish and then either right away make hamburger patties of the other 3 quarters to freeze again or keep working through the pound, one quarter at a time; if it’s a steak, I’ll often cut it in half or thirds and slice the part I won’t use that day to freeze in bags for the future. So the cycle of having a meat thawed and available narrows down and targets the creativity from the vegetable choices.

And then I’ll also pull out one of those miscellaneous items: stock or soup or a thing from my mother’s freezer once every week or two. So that can also be either an easy dinner or a randomly generated challenge to do something different than usual. But it’s all supports that are planned ahead to make the process of choosing what to make more interesting.

Gifts for your future self: You can build in supports while you are already cooking and have the energy. If I make rice, I make double the amount, so in the next few days I can also have a rice dish, but I only have to wash the pot once. If I’ve got plenty of the base of whatever I’m cooking, I might pull out half a cup or so and just stick it in a container in the refrigerator. I won’t necessarily have a plan for it, but it will be a fun addition to a future dinner or a tasty side dish – maybe the sweet potato curry will get added to meat to make a hash as dinner, or maybe it will be a taco filling, or an omelet, or I’ll shred a quarter of a cabbage and add some canned tomatoes and have a whole additional meal with 2 fairly stable ingredients and spices. And you can make these gifts outside of your meal prep – if the mushrooms are going to go bad and you don’t feel like eating them tonight, but you have the energy to just cook them – then they will last longer and you have a gift for future you.

Leveling up – cascading meal prep: Here’s how I deal with making larger quantities of food – because sometime large cuts of meat or 5 pounds of potatoes are on sale, and I am still but one person. So first you cook the big quantity of food – and you look for something that will be fairly versatile and keep it mostly one thing. Roast the meat or braise/stew it. Then you eat a portion for your meal. Instead of freezing the leftovers whole, portion them into future meal sizes. If it’s a roast, maybe freeze some as slices, some as big chunks for soups or curries, and some diced for hash or other quick cooking meal. If it’s stew or braised and shredded, then freeze it in both pint and half pint containers. And then when you turn those leftovers into a meal, don’t forget to pull out some of that deliciousness to pop back in the refrigerator as a gift for future you!

[I’ve mentioned hash twice – for those who are unfamiliar, it’s a dish where any variety of meat and potatoes is cut into the same size dice and then they are cooked together (maybe with minimal vegetables) to make a hot filling, not super visually attractive, meal. (Example)]

So anyway – those are some tips. Have fun, good luck, and don’t despair.