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Category: Food

More lists than my average food lists

So a while back, my grocery store had a (no entry fee) sweepstakes where the grand prize was a big ass television or some such. Luckily, I won a secondary prize: $100 worth of groceries to be bought all in one go, with no change given.

So, of course I’m going to list every item (39 of them) for you:

  • Things to use/serve socially
    • 2L A&W Root beer
    • 1 jar salsa, medium
    • 2 bags Herr’s potato chips (of which I have already eaten one *facepalm*)
  • Potentially healthy diet-ish foods
    • 2 jars salsa, hot
    • 1 lb whole wheat rotini (pasta)
    • 2 5oz packages of sexy spring mix lettuce (because I am a total sucker for spring mix)
    • bag of Carolina brown rice
    • *multigrain* tortillas (yeah, I don’t even know if they fit in this category, but I have developed a passionate love for tortillas based on their infinite shelf/refrigerator life and tastiness)
  • Kitchen staples
    • 5 lbs granulated sugar
    • 1 qt 1% milk
    • 2 boxes gallon ziplock storage bags
    • 4 jars pasta sauce (so one is vodka cream sauce, but the other three are perfectly respectable)
    • jar of pimentos
    • 3 cans coconut milk (and I had a complete brain fart and got the full fat variety because I can get cool international brands)
    • 1 can of red salmon
    • 2 jars of peanut butter (crunchy for eating, creamy for cooking)
    • bag of chocolate chips
    • dishwashing soap
  • Random sauces/condiments for fun
  • Impulse purchases
    • 1 qt whole milk yogurt (I hovered between nonfat and whole milk yogurt for a while, but I couldn’t ring myself to do it yet. Now I need to think of something to cook with it)
    • 1 gal orange juice
    • a flour sifter
    • 2 (small) containers of Edy’s Dibs
  • For the person accompanying me on the expedition
    • bag of generic frosted cereal
    • Carr’s Whole Wheat crackers

And what did the total come to with tax and all? $100.89! I have a feeling that I should have been able to make it stretch a little farther, but I got it right on the nose. Yay math!

But you know what? I was totally virtuous in not buying the velveeta, but I have just remembered that I promised to make my sleazy cheezy dip this weekend, so I have to go in and buy some anyway.

And I also have stuff in my fridge
produce
string beans (I don’t really feel like eating string beans, but my mother bought a ton of them and split them with me – feel free to inspire me)
broccoli (+1 stem because I used the other head for dinner last night)
hot red peppers
3 small zucchini
2 packages of lettuce
2 tomatoes
some baby carrots
2 limes

meat
duck stock
4 oz tandoori turkey that turned out rather well
bacon

dairy
a little bit of roasted red pepper cream cheese
1% milk
1qt yogurt (unopened as of yet)

Meal Planning
I have no plans!

Ummm… Tomorrow (Thursday) I’ll blow everything on lunch with my mother and the neighborhood ladies at Buca di Beppo (I want cannelloni and the escarole side) and there will probably be leftovers to bring home and add to this list of food

Friday – I guess I’ll be eating the tandoori turkey (with one of the green things as a side – maybe also a salad so the lettuce doesn’t go bad before I can eat it)

Saturday – I’ve plans to go to a barbecue (taking sleazy cheezy dip) And if I haven’t eaten them yet, maybe I’ll slice (lengthwise) the zucchini and marinate it in olive oil and Penzey’s pasta sprinkle for grilling… maybe.

Sunday – Eep! I am hosting people. I have made no food plans. Maybe I should start a soup on Friday so that it’ll be especially tasty by Sunday. That would give me something to do with the stock… I need to check and make sure the stock is still good. I’ll boil it tomorrow morning and set some aside for my mother (assuming it’ll be good since it should still be happy)

Healthiness is only vaguely like truthiness

So today I took the plunge and went to a Weight Watchers meeting.

I am so confused by the core plan. My head says, “Oh, well that’s what I’ve been doing all along and maintaining, so that’s no good.” So I really think I should have planned ahead and done a food log for this past week so I would have written down the fried egg and bacon on rye bread with cream cheese sandwich I had for breakfast yesterday. I mean, sure, I had a nice moderate lunch and a pretty healthy salad for dinner, so it really might have still fit within the plan, but I’d at least have something I could compare either way.

And there are the random whole chocolate bars. Nom nom nom…

So I might have to do the point system… which is sad, since one of my secondary reasons for leaving Weight Watchers last time was that I was just obsessing over food way too much, and you all know that I love obsessing over food (but, man, there wasn’t much room for obsessing over anything else!).

*waffle*

So here are my thoughts on Weight Watchers –

  • the main reason why I quit last time was that I ended up feeling cold and getting sick more, but that was only after I had lost 60 or 80 pounds (I forget – this was more than 10 years ago, but it was some nice round number like that)… so I am thinking this time that I only want to lose 50 pounds and then maintain that for a year or so before even considering whether I want to lose more.
  • $15/week is a decent-sized chunk of money to just do what I’ve always been doing.
  • While I am only mildly thinking it wouldn’t hurt to weigh less, I certainly don’t want to weigh more than I do right now… and that means that failure doesn’t get to be an option… and I don’t like that type of scenario very much. It’d be safer not to mess with things and know that I can just stay at this same weight that I have managed to keep perfectly stable ever since I got my own apartment and settled into my current lifestyle.
  • On the other hand, not trying is for cowards. Grr!

~*~

And I am having trouble figuring out walking. Who knew it could be so hard? Okay, so I did – I have always suspected that I had no idea what a proper stride was supposed to be like, but I never had anyone to tell me.

Well, in physical therapy (for my knee), I have had someone tell me! It’s been awesome. Apparently, my toes are supposed to come up and hit the ground last. And, yeah, when my knee is better, I do have a little bit more of a heel strike, but when I’m limping I set down with the ball of my foot first… which has saved me from many a fall, since I can adjust a lot better to uneven ground that way. But she told me to walk around on just my heels, and I gamely went ahead to give that a try and found that I just don’t have the muscles to do that! A whole set of muscles in my leg completely unused ever. So we’ve been working on that. And my therapist keeps looking at me and sighing, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try walking in sneakers?” And I am all, “Sneakers are the work of the devil – they weigh a lot, don’t bend enough, and when I go to sit on the floor they get all in the way and dig into my thighs and feel, in general, like lead weights.” But it comes out more like a bit of a wince and, “Yeah, sneakers and I don’t get on so well.”

So then I went and read a timely article on New York magazine on how to walk… and they are all – sneakers are the work of the devil, and everyone walks with way too much of a heel strike.

*flail*

So I’m not really worried because I figure it’ll all even out and all of this heel walking will eventually mellow out into a more proper stride, but what I really want is a walking coach who will walk next to me and give me pointers on every pitch and yaw of my feet. And how much my knee should bend. And how fully should you straighten your leg while it’s in front of you before you put your foot down? Do you balance the forward and backward extensions? Why do I get this weird wear pattern on the bottom of my sandals? Really – I have no idea how to walk.

Asian-ish food fortnight – Dipping Sauces, and many ways to eat a Pork Roast

So it all started when I was hosting a bridge night at my house, and I thought that a nice low-work thing to serve would be various frozen dumplings steamed and fried. Turns out – this was an amazing plan!

And I made several dipping sauces to go with:

From The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook by Gloria Bley Miller

Mustard Dressing (p.717)

1 Tablespoon powdered chinese mustard
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
2 Tablespoons vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
a few drops of sesame oil

1. combine in a jar, cap tightly, and shake well to blend
2. refrigerate 3-4 hours to develop the flavor.

**verdict: nasty! Despite vigorous shaking, the mustard rose to the top and the whole thing tasted mostly of vinegar. This one got one taste and then wasn’t served that night.**

From Real Thai by Nancie McDermott

Nahm Jeem Gratiem
Sweet-Hot Garlic Sauce (p.189)

official proportions:
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 Tablespoons finely minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon chili-garlic sauce (tuong or toi sauce) or coarsely ground dried red chili

how I made it –
Brought to a boil:

  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar

And then added:

  • 2 Tablespoons finely minced garlic
  • 2 generous pinches of salt

Once it hit a rolling boil, reduced the heat and simmered until it thickened to a thin syrup (longer than the 20 minutes the recipe called for, but I didn’t make it too thick because it still had too cool and be dip-able).

Then I poured it into a jar already containing:

  • and the tail end of a bottle of sambal olek (I guessed there was about 2 teaspoons there, but I could have been off)

And stirred. Then I tasted it and said, “Oh, god that’s good, but hella spicy!”

So I mixed up another batch of syrup:

  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar
  • 1 Tablespoon finely minced garlic
  • 2 generous pinches of salt

and added that to the jar and stirred.

**Verdict: This sauce is amazingly tasty! It was also amazingly hot served the day I made it. Oddly, two days later, when I went to steam up some leftover dumplings, it no longer seemed so hot. So either the sauce mellows, or I just like spicy food and don’t have to notice how odd that is when no one is looking… la la la! Still, even the people who didn’t like spicy agreed that it was an awesome sauce**

From Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

Dumpling Dipping Sauce II (p.112)

1/2 cup soy sauce
2 Tablespoons Chinese black vinegar
1 Tablespoon chili oil
(plus a pinch of sugar)

**Verdict: I thought it tasted amazing and made a double recipe, but I was promptly informed that while it was tasty, it was too hot. So I sliced some scallions in this one to differentiate it and went on to make…**

Dumpling Dipping Sauce I (p.112)

1/2 cup soy sauce
3 Tablespoons Chinese black vinegar
(plus a pinch of sugar)

**Verdict: So this was judged not to be the dipping sauce found in every chinese restaurant, but it was still found to be quite acceptable and very tasty.**

But even after eating up all of the tasty dumplings we hadn’t gotten through at bridge and after giving away about a third of the sweet-hot spicy sauce, I still had a ton of these dipping sauces left over.

So I thawed a pork loin roast.

After one evening in the fridge, it was thawed enough that I could take it out of the plastic back and score it with cross-hatched knife cuts. I put it back in the back and added some marinade:

  • a couple ginger slices
  • some 5 spice powder
  • and about half a cup of the two dipping sauces combined (I just dumped the two containers together after people left, since I didn’t mind the heat)

And I left it for another night.

It still wasn’t completely thawed, but I went ahead and roasted it anyway – with three cloves stuck in the crosshatching cut into the fatty side, a light dusting of powdered thyme, and salt over the fat (because it’s tasty!).

I cooked it according to the directions in my Joy of Cooking. Pre-heat oven to 450F; insert roast and turn down to 350F; cook 30-35 minutes/pound. I was generous in my time estimate because it was still a bit frozen in the middle, but I ended up with thoroughly a cooked roast I would not have wanted to have in the oven all that much longer.

So that first night, I just cut off bites and ate it slathered in the sweet-hot garlic sauce to finish that off – they went together perfectly.

~*~

But now I have the rest of the (cooked) roast in my fridge. So I took a few slices of pork, cut them into strips and made wraps/quesadillas/soft tacos with them.

In a bit of olive oil, I grilled down

  • half an onion, cut into short strips
  • 2 jalepeno peppers with just the flesh (no seeds or white part) diced
  • 4 cloves of garlic, sliced
  • a little less that a tablespoon of pickled ginger, ripped into smaller pieces
  • a fistful of baby carrots cut into matchsticks
  • pork strips
  • shredded napa cabbage
  • and sprinkled over with black vinegar and some of the dipping sauce

Then I warmed a tortilla, piled on some lettuce from an oriental mix that had been on sale at my supermarket, and then put the pork/veggie mixture on top – and ate it. With a bit of homemade chinese mustard. Yum yum yum.

~*~

So last night, I not only still had leftover pork in my fridge (which I’ll get to next week), but also I had leftover wrap filling. So I put it on a salad.

Pretty much just more of that same salad mix, the rest of the filling popped into the microwave for a bit, and a salad dressing (made from a quarter of a teaspoon of chinese mustard, some plum sauce, some black vinegar, some more of the dipping sauce, and a dollop of honey).

The only thing I could have done to make it any better was slice up some more napa cabbage to refresh the cooked-down cabbage in the filling.

~*~

Now I have to figure out what to do with the rest of the roast (though sandwiches, with mayonnaise on white bread, are high up on the list).

ETA: There was also random fried rice (made from French red rice because I had acquired it randomly, and I thought its nuttiness would be kinda like brown rice and all that – it ended up being tasty food). It took a lot more work that brown rice to make the flavors play nice with the strong ricey ones.

food list

What I have
Produce
carrots
a few spears of asparagus
1 pt bean sprouts
1 orange bell pepper
hot peppers
broccoli
broccoli stems
3 small-ish eggplants
napa cabbage
limes
green beans (composted)
a very few snow peas
2 pears
scallions

Dairy
tail end of a container of heavy cream
1% milk
plain yogurt in need of being eaten
onion & sour cream dip

Meat
leftover pork roast
peking duck carcass (for stock)
a little chicken stock

Miscellaneous
Thai sweet-spicy garlic sauce
Dumpling dipping sauce
frozen dumplings
chinese mustard
plum sauce
1/4 pecan-topped chocolate pie

Meals
Monday, April 14
leave work promptly – stop by The Bridge and pick up comps from film festival
steam some dumplings – nom nom nom
cook up 1 cup of red rice

Tuesday, April 15
volunteer at closing night party, and fill up on free food.

Wednesday, April 16
make fried rice from veggies, pork, and red rice
thaw container of raw beef/pork

Thursday, April 17
Stir fry broccoli, meat, and cabbage, with black pepper sauce – with noodles.

Friday, April 18
random things dipped into onion dip – crackers & veggies

Saturday & Sunday
passover

Another food list

So I still haven’t emptied much from my freezer, but I did acquire more food when I was home this weekend. Therefore, more planning.

food I have
produce
1 potato
3 grapefruits
jalepeno peppers
[broccoli leftovers]

dairy
scallion cream cheese (1/2 – 1 bagel-worth)
a little whole milk
a little heavy cream
*plenty of cream cheese*

meat
chicken stock
a lot of ham
bacon
pork shank leftovers

miscellaneous
curry leftovers
1/2 blackberry pie
1 slice coconut cake

meal planning
Monday, March 24
skim fat from potato soup in process, mash a bit, season, and cook more
make 1/4c rice to package up curry into lunch
dinner: eat leftover broccoli & pork shank

Tuesday, March 25
7am – Pilates?
breakfast: coconut cake & grapefruit
adjust soup
buy bread
dinner: soup & bread

Wednesday, March 26
breakfast: bagel & scallion cream cheese
dinner: soup & ham sandwich

Thursday, March 27
breakfast: blackberry pie & grapefuit
pull out pork roast & stuffed cabbage to thaw
buy tomato sauce
dinner: soup & ham sandwich

Friday, March 28
8:30am – workshop
breakfast & lunch: included
dinner: with D&D peoples

Saturday, March 29
Can I adjust the oven racks so that I can roast the pork and cabbage rolls at the same time?
Cabbage rolls -> packaged straight to lunch portions
Pork – How do I want to make it? Do I want to have a marinade while it thaws?

Sunday, March 30
12:30 – astronomy lecture & star wars tour @ Franklin Institute
dinner with parents – Shula’s or Sang Kee

That’s still not putting a dent in the freezer, but it’s a whole week without buying anything except a fancy loaf of bread and possibly cereal, since I’m out and there’s a sale.