Tag: Cooking

Experimental Cooking

When I’m having a particularly good week it shows in the kitchen. I love to cook. Growing up my family ate pretty traditional meals, meat and potato. Spices were not a thing I ever learned about, and we didn’t try a whole lot of cultural meals or really eat outside of our comfort zone. We had a lot of meat and potatoes, spaghetti, Sheppard’s pie and things like that. My family was also pretty strict when it came to meals. If we wanted a snack, we asked first. I didn’t experiment a lot with cooking, and groceries were not the exciting times that they are now. None of this is ‘bad’ per say, I know money was pretty tight and my parents both did the best they could with three kids but it’s the background as to why I get so dang excited now when I cook or buy groceries.

Lately I’ve been watching some pretty amazing ASMR type cooking videos on YouTube. Some are Japanese, some Korean. They’ve got millions of views and they make cooking look simple and relaxed which it rarely ever is in my house. Best of all, the food looks amazing.

With this newfound interest, I bought a bunch of basic Japanese cooking ingredients last week and I’ve been experimenting with my own flavour profiles. I made chicken tonkatsu, and udon noodle miso soup (pictured above) that turned out incredible. I made onigiri. I have plans on doing some fried rice, and some shrimp balls, and all sorts of other yums. I’m experimenting with different types of heat – the heat you get from one spice can be very different than another. Take franks buffalo sauce and sriracha for example. Both are ‘heat’ but they’re very different in flavour profiles.

It has been amazing to experiment and play and explore. Not everything turns out, I’ve definitely had some failures, but it’s all a lot of fun and I’m having a great time learning what types of food I actually truly enjoy vs. those that I’d rather stay away from.

Meal Prep

Since having 2 kids mealprep has become absolutely essential in my life. I’m not one of those people who has to eat a different dinner every single night, I’m content to eat the same thing so long as it’s something I find delicious. Pictured above is chicken tika masala over rice. Dinner for myself and my husband.

Day 9 – Caribbean-Spiced Veggie & Sausage Skewers

The final meal that I was trying out from Hello Fresh was these delicious looking pork sausage skewers. The potato salad threw me off because it’s made with very simple but odd to me items. It was mayo (real stuff, not miracle whip stuff), white wine vinegar, sugar, red onion, parsley, and potato. Red ones this time instead of the yukon yellows that I had in the first meal.

Still, the flavours were fantastic. It was a bit spicy for my husband, but I didn’t mind it too much. Since we don’t have a grill and I ended up ruining the oven temporarily, I used our little flat top counter grill to cook the kabobs. I did find that the meat portion was lacking slightly in this rendition. They give you 8 skewers, but I was only able to make 6 with the portions of meat I had on hand. Maybe I cut them too large, but they seemed to be the proper size for the item mentioned.

As I mentioned yesterday, it was $32 for 6 meals (3 meals for 2) and I couldn’t really go wrong taking it for a test. None of the meals were especially fancy, they were all easy to prepare, took 30 minutes or less to cook, and were all enjoyable. We’ll see how the next trial turns out (Good Food, which I have honestly never heard of before) and then maybe we’ll stick with one for a bit to make things easier at home while I continue to heal from my c-section and watch two children under two.

Bon appetit!

Day 8 – Zesty Hoisin Chili Beef

Meal two from Hello Fresh was hoisin beef, which I was really excited about. Some of my favourite flavours are right there on the plate, and unlike Chef’s Plate where I found the meals almost too small for two people, this one meal seemed gigantic. It could have easily created 4 meals for myself (but of course I shared with the husband, so it came to less than that).

It was easy to prepare, didn’t take many ingredients, and was still packed full of flavour. So far Hello Fresh is shaping up to be one of the better meal delivery services I’ve tried. I do have a basket order of Good Food coming in next week, a family member gave me a coupon for an entire free trial of food (3 meals for 2 people) and they look REALLY fancy. It’ll be interesting to compare and see how the food is. From my cousin’s description she enjoys the flavours of Good Food but the meats in Hello Fresh are incredible.

Either way, it’s great to get out of my comfort zone when it comes to food. Being pregnant and running after a 2 year old all day means that I tend to stick to simple meal plans that I know we’ll enjoy and I can whip up without too much thought. That doesn’t leave a ton of room for creativity. Trying new foods and new flavours is great. Portion size is under control since they send me all of the ingredients, and it’s cheaper than buying fresh produce where I live. I understand that the price of these services is not something everyone wants to pay for, but in my case some weeks it’s simply worth it (plus I’ve only been trying out these services when they’re on sale at a hefty discount. I paid $32 for both Hello Fresh and Chef’s Plate, and Good Food is free… you can’t really go wrong with those prices).