I had fennels for the first time last Christmas at SO’s parents’ house, where SO’s mom simply roasted fennels in olive oil and pepper while the ham was being cooked. It was delicious, and I had been wanted to make it again for some time.
Then I came across this roast chicken with fennel recipe from The Kitchn and wanted to try it right away.
The cafeteria at my work does a monthly cookbook drawing. I usually enter without really knowing what cookbook it was.
One random day I got a voicemail from the cafeteria manager, whom informed me that I won a cookbook. It’s not just any cookbook, but Pure Vanilla by Shauna Sever.
I had been craving to buy this cookbook for quite some time, but couldn’t justify myself to purchase it, so I was super excited when I won the book.
Over the past couple of weeks SO started one of those “nutrition plans” in which he consumes minimal calories during the week and then consumes more on weekends. It is somewhat similar to my “vegetarian weekdays” thing a while back except much harder. No bad carbs. Pause on pasta and rice. You can tell I’m not very happy with that.
Regardless of how much complaining I’m doing, I know it’s good for the both of us. I know I eat way too much, and SO snacks too much. I’ve also been working out much less – taking the entire weekend off if I don’t have a race, or I have been doing more yoga, so I definitely don’t need as much calorie consumptions.
For dinner, we wanted to go heavy on protein and light on carbs, yet still filling. We went for fish, spinach (since we can both each have a whole field of it in one sitting), and some quinoa.
I have a soft spot for non-traditional pasta sauces. Though I love my tomatoes, I seem to be enjoying more non-tomato-based sauces lately.
As work was getting more hectic, I made larger meals so that I won’t worry about making dinner when coming home late. It’s been a while since I’ve had any pasta dishes, so I decided to make a large amount of sauce.
As a ATC/Cook’s Illustrated recipe tester, I received this recipe for a slow-cooked beef ragu. I’ve never had ragu before – I assumed it would be something similar to bolognese but with more vegetables.
Gosh, I can’t believe I haven’t written a post in 2 weeks! Sorry about that. I’ve been quite swamped through work I guess. I did work close to 60 hours a week the past couple of weeks. My diet had been awful, mostly consist of noodles in chicken broth with an egg.
A while ago I bought a bag of lentils without any idea of what I was going to do with it. The only time I’ve really had lentils was in Indian restaurants. I must’ve thought I was going to attempt curry with the bag of lentils.
There was a crockpot potluck event at work a couple of weeks ago, and I had wanted to make something gluten-free and vegetarian, as one of my coworkers has celiac. He ended up going on vacation during the potluck, but I made something vegetarian and gluten-free anyways 
The first time I made polenta was during culinary class 4 years ago. I added the cornmeal too slowly or that I wasn’t whisking fast enough that the mixture was becoming lumpy. I got yelled at by the instructor as he tried to salvage my dish. He did, but it scarred me for a while.
Until this day, when I decided I need to overcome this “fear” of “making a lumpy mixture”.
I actually almost screwed up again. The first few minutes of mixing in the corn meal I was getting the lumpiest mixture. Then I slowly added more liquid and that seemed to remedied it.
I feel like I have been baking every day for the past few weeks – or at least baking enough that I don’t have enough time to update my blogs (one of those days when I wish cooking is my full-time job).
While most of my coworkers had asked for my Guinness cupcakes, one had asked me to make her some piggy cookies that NPR had talked about a while back. She said that listening to the segment had made her mouth water and she was determined to try them. I offer to take on the challenge and make her these cookies.
I am a full-time chemical engineer and a part-time cook/photographer/runner. Here you will find me experimenting different dishes and hoping to turn a simple meal into something delicious! Happy browsing!
