food | Michael's Blog

Eggs – February 10, 2016

Posted on February 10, 2016 by mepples21

I haven’t written anything in a while, and I’m not really sure why. It’s probably mostly laziness, and also a little bit of reluctance since I’m not very confident in my writing skills. Once again, I’m trying to get things going on here again.
I’m going to Nicaragua with the wife and two friends in March, and I want to feel good about myself when we hang out on the beach…I certainly can’t let myself be the most out of shape person on the trip! So, I’ve been trying to get back into working out, which is a lot tougher this time of year than it was last summer. My apartment building has a treadmill, one single treadmill. When it’s too cold outside I like to run on it over lunch (when I’m lucky enough to work from home), but everybody else around here has the same idea. I much prefer to run outside, even in the winter, but when it’s below 20˚ outside I just can’t swing it. Last week was warm enough that I managed to get my lazy ass outside three times to run 5Ks. This week it’s a lot colder, so to the treadmill it is…

I hate running on the treadmill. When I run outside there is enough distraction that I can do 3+ miles, but on the treadmill the best I can pull off is 2 miles, and that’s on a good day. Today, like most days I’m stuck inside, I ran 1.5 miles and called it quits. Even with podcasts to distract me I can only stare at myself in the mirror for so long.

The part of my workout that I do enjoy doing inside is lifting weights. I don’t do any crazy weight lifting, as I don’t have much of a desire to get “ripped”, I just want to be more in shape than I used to be. My lifting routine primarily consists of doing 10 minutes of ab workout and then using dumb bells.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to what I did tonight that is actually interesting, which is making eggs! I like to eat eggs after I workout, because it probably makes me feel a little like some body building bro :-). We had a Super Bowl party at my apartment on Sunday, so our grocery situation is a bit odd; this forced me to make some changes to the usual egg recipe. Normally I cook up some onions, throw in whatever is in the fridge, like mushrooms or jalapeños, crack in the eggs, and call it a day. If I’m feeling really ambitious I’ll grate a potato and turn the whole thing into a hash. Today I didn’t have most of that stuff. I did have some leftover stuff from making super spicy Super Bowl chili though.

So after improvising, this is what I ended up with:

My improvised ingredients included:

– Chopped shallots

– Chopped fresh parsley

– 2 garlic cloves

– Chopped jalapeño

– Italian sausage

– Frank’s Hot Sauce (of the Roundy’s knockoff variety)

– Pepper

– Shredded cheddar cheese

– Eggs (duh)

Basically, I threw the shallots, garlic, jalapeño, and sausage into a pan with a little bit of oil, let it all get nice and hot, and then sprinkled it with pepper and the hot sauce. Then I cracked in two eggs, added more hot sauce, and then finished it off by sprinkling in the parsley and cheese. They were probably some of the best eggs I’ve ever made.

Food Update for October 5th through 10th

Posted on October 6, 2015 by mepples21

October 5, 2015

Manda and I made another visit to the grocery store today after we got her set up on my Paprika account. She did some scouting earlier in the day and found some dessert recipes she wanted to try out. We also bought enough food to make some meals for the rest of the week. Today’s dinner was Steak with Mushroom-Sherry Sauce:

Raw meats!

The sauce was made of mushrooms, onions, beef broth, cooking sherry, flood, and a little thyme. It was very savory, I wish we had more of it. Manda even said she would just eat it without the steak.

Manda also worked on making Acorn Squash Pie:

October 7, 2015

As one of our attempts to eat healthier I rolled out a new recipe, chickpea stew. Chickpeas aren’t my favorite as they don’t seem to have a ton of flavor, but trying to be healthy requires sacrifice sometimes I guess.

At least there was chicken to put in this stew…a vegetarian version of this one probably would not have tasted like much.

Makin some stew…

Still makin some stew…turns out making soups and stews has this long boring part where stuff just sits in a pot and gets hot.

The final product looks really good, but it actually didn’t have as much flavor as I would have liked. Next time around I’ll need to experiment with ways to add some kick to this stew. It would have been better if it was spicy.

And that’s pretty much it for the week. I ended up having too much going on this week to cook as much as I would have liked to. Oh well, I’ll keep it up next week.

Weekend Food

Posted on October 4, 2015 by mepples21

Manda went out of town this weekend to go to some wedding, so I was mostly left on my own the last few days. Originally I planned on going to Madison to see some friends, but lack of money (stupid expensive weddings) and my friends’ busy schedules meant that I stayed in Milwaukee. At my wife’s suggestion, I started doing some meal planning for the week ahead. Ever since the wedding we’ve been pretty bad about cooking at home – most of our meals have been take out, order in, or we’ve simply gone out to restaurants. Every once in a while we go through a phase where we actually try to cook for ourselves in order to save money and eat healthier.

One of my least favorite parts of this cooking at home thing is how much I hate grocery shopping. I truly detest the process of making a list, making sure I didn’t put anything on the list that we already have (a frequent occurrence), and going to the store. I really, REALLY hate going to the grocery store. I used to work at one, so you would think that I can navigate around pretty well, but that’s only half true. When it comes to obscure items I typically end up wandering around the store aimlessly until I either find what I’m looking for or I give up in frustration. Some combination of shyness and pride means that I won’t simply ask the staff where the item in question is.

This time around I decided to try to make my life a little easier, so I finally shelled out some cash for Paprika for Mac and iOS (Mac: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paprika-recipe-manager/id451907568?mt=12) (iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paprika-recipe-manager-get/id392408028?mt=8). So far the app is everything I could want, I can definitely see myself actually using it going forward. There are a few things that it does that will keep me coming back (I think):

Syncing between iOS and Mac
- Obviously this is critical
Pantry Management
- Basically, you create a list of everything you already own and it keeps track for you
Recipe website parsing
- This is the big one – Paprika has an in-app browser that allows you to go to a website with a recipe on it, click a button, and it parses the text of the webpage. If it finds a recipe on the webpage it imports a list of ingredients, creates a section with the recipe directions, and even tries to import nutrition info
Meal planning
- There is a calendar view that allows you to assign recipes to certain meals on certain days
Grocery shopping list
- Once you’ve assigned meals to the days of the week you can have Paprika generate a grocery list for you
- The iOS app shows this as a nice list with checkboxes that you can use while at the grocery store

Overall, these features seem like they can eliminate a lot of the pain points of cooking for me…that is all the planning and logistics that come before actually making and eating something tasty. They only Paprika can’t do for me yet is actually go to the store on my behalf.

So, with all that out of the way, let’s look at what I actually made this weekend!

Chicken Stir Fry

There’s not too much to say about this one. It had veggies (broccoli, onions, bell peppers, snow peas), chicken, soy sauce, and some rice wine. I forgot to make rice, which was dumb, but it was still delicious.

Cornbread with Jam

Manda and I received a dutch oven at her bridal shower, but we haven’t actually used it…until now. This is the first time I’ve ever made cornbread, but its super easy. The hardest part was preventing my pets from burning themselves whenever I had to take the dutch oven out of the oven.

After letting things bake for about 15 minutes I took the dutch oven out. At this point it was only partially cooked. I threw some jam on top, which was a smart move. It tasted awesome. I got the jam from my parents, who got it from one of my grandparents, who make their own from their garden.

The finished product.

The cornbread tastes wonderful, but that’s probably because there is an obscene amount of butter in it…

Breakfast Hash

This was another easy dish with too much butter in it. But butter tastes good, so whatever. I’ll go running this week to make up for it. The fun thing with this one is that I grated the potatoes myself rather than just buying some nasty frozen potato hash. Next time I need to use more potato (the recipe only called for half a potato) since I threw in 4 eggs rather than the 2 I was instructed to use. There were too many onions though, so I made things up as I went. For the meat in the hash I used some herby chicken sausages (pre-cooked because I’m terrified of food poisoning). Again, this recipe was delicious, but now I feel ill because I may have inhaled hundreds of Goldfish snacks while making this.

Shredded potatoes look kind of nasty. Shredding it was fun though. When it was all done I had to squeeze out a lot of moisture, which was certainly interesting. After squeezing it out I could tell there just wasn’t enough potato for how much meat, onion, and egg I was using. I didn’t have time to shred more potato though, so I just kept rolling.

Gotta add hot sauce!

I also made coffee! I recently learned how to make pour over, so here’s a bonus pic for no particular reason.

I’ve enjoyed my most recent foray into cooking so far. The next challenge is going to be making food that is actually healthy. I was starving when I decided on these recipes for the weekend, but going forward I need to actually take care of myself. I’ll work on that in the week ahead, but for now I have some leftover cornbread (filled with butter) to eat!