I’m hungry

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Five Food Related Topics for Friday

1. First Attempt at Tuna Salad: Bolstered by everyone’s suggestions Monday, I bought some solid white tuna and made tuna salad. I used the America’s Test Kitchen recipe as a jumping off point, and then added red bell pepper. I also substituted pickle juice for pickles (I don’t like pickles in my tuna salad, although I do like celery and red onion), ignored the request that I add fresh parsley (parsley can die in a fire), and squeezed on some lemon juice. I also add capers to my sandwich before eating, although I don’t like mixing capers into the tuna salad itself for reasons I haven’t fully excavated from my soul. I sort of squinted so that the tuna in the can was blurry, and then added it to a mixing bowl and immediately put the other ingredients on top of it and stirred everything together so I didn’t have to think about the color of the tuna. It turned out okay. I think the tuna salad I love has more mayonnaise than I am willing to add to my own tuna salad, because I ostensibly don’t like mayonnaise. 

Next time, I will use more mayonnaise and less mustard; I can put mustard on the bread. I also want to make this mini focaccia because I like tuna salad on focaccia. 

2. Finger Food: In addition to tuna salad, I have been thinking about food a lot this week because we are having guests for the Super Bowl. There is almost nothing I like better than an excuse to make a bunch of fun and tasty appetizers that can be eaten in front of the TV.

We are having two guests, which brings the total of people who will presumably be eating food to five, although counting Carla is probably dumb because she will only eat chips and guacamole, nothing else. (She asked me to buy TWO bags of Lays and TWO bags of Tostitos because she is anticipating a LOT of chip eating.) Keep that in mind as I lay out all the many, many things I am slavering over. We will probably do one of the below things, plus some veggies. Our guests are bringing meatballs. And my husband is making seven layer dip (with taco meat and without olives) because that is the food that is calling to his heart. 

  • Air Fryer Bang Bang Salmon Bites: At various points my Instagram feed seems FULL of people making delicious looking salmon bites in the air fryer. I would love to try these and they seem perfect for a party. 
  • Bunless Cheeseburger Bites: These are adorable and they have the added benefits of being carb-free AND something that Carla would potentially eat. I am not crazy about making burgers in a frying pan though… if only I had additional air fryers to call into service.

  • Air Fryer Buffalo Cauliflower    : I am not much for buffalo wings, but I do love spicy cauliflower.
  • Mini Crabcakes: I really, really want to eat some crabcakes on Sunday and found a package of mini ones in my grocery store’s freezer section. But the price is deterring me. I could make them on my own. But… after the cost of crab claw meat and then making them myself, I wonder if it might not come out to more hassle than it’s worth?
  • Air Fryer Artichoke Hearts: Why does this sound so delicious??? I think only I and one of our guests will eat these, so probably they won’t make the final cut. But I am eyeing them!
  • Endive with Goat Cheese and Candied Nuts: I had this appetizer at a party a million years ago and it was so fresh and delicious and it is VERY EASY to make. You dollop some goat cheese on an endive leaf, add a few candied nuts, and then drizzle with balsamic reduction. This recipe that includes blood oranges sounds appealing, too. 
  • Spinach Artichoke Zucchini Bites: YUM. If I can find some pre-made spinach and artichoke dip at the grocery store, I might do these in addition to whatever else I choose. 

Are you planning to watch the Super Bowl? If so, what kind of snacks do you hope to eat? If not, what’s your favorite party appetizer to make or eat? 

3. Valentine’s Sweets: The Super Bowl will be followed closely by Valentine’s Day. Carla is SO INTO Valentine’s Day this year, and I love it. She and I scrolled through a billion options online for her to buy for her classmates and then she also made everyone a friendship bracelet. She filled all of them out the day they arrived in the mail. She also wanted a special Valentine’s Day outfit, and, while we were unable to track down the ideal dress she had in her mind (which I think was a floor length gown of tulle and sequins, which I expressly said she could not wear to school), we did find some adorable pink clothing at Target that she has already set aside for The Day. 

This is all to say that I am very into making Valentine’s cookies this year. I really want to make two kinds of cookies. Well, in reality, I want to make three or more kinds of cookies and then make up Valentine’s Day cookie plates for all our neighbors but that seems a little extra even for me. So I have reined it in to two varieties. I am pretty sure I want to make these stripey heart cookies because they are darling. However, I have made them in the past and if memory and my blog serve me, they were somewhat prettier than they were delicious. 

I definitely want to make something chocolate. Carla’s old standby is the chocolate snickerdoodle, which I think is delicious and also fun because it is unusual. But my husband isn’t a huge fan of them. Perhaps these brownie crinkle cookies would be good instead? The idea of a brownie in cookie form is delightful. These cinnamon cookies with Red Hots are very appealing to me as well, not in small part because they have cream cheese frosting and I adore a frosted cookie. But I’m not sure where I would find Red Hots? They aren’t something I’ve seen in awhile. I have been tossing around the idea of making raspberry macarons. I haven’t made macarons in a long while and they are delicious and festive. (But also kind of fussy.)

I could always go the cupcake route instead of cookies. Carla has been talking about Nutella quite a bit lately, and these strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate cupcakes are filled with Nutella. I would vastly prefer to make vanilla cupcakes with raspberry filling and raspberry buttercream – but maybe if I make the Nutella ones I won’t eat them all. 

If you make sweets especially for Valentine’s Day, what is your favorite?

4. Grocery Store Swap: Since I have successfully reintroduced yogurt into my diet (hooray!!!!) I have been testing out different yogurt varietals. My current favorite is the Fage 0% blended cherry yogurt. (I cannot stand fruit on the bottom yogurt.) But I can only find it at one specific grocery store, so I have completed rejiggered my shopping schedule to make that store my preferred store. Fortunately, it is near my friend’s house, and we usually go to her house once a week for a writing session, so it’s not wildly out of the way. But I feel slightly neurotic for rearranging my grocery shopping life around yogurt. It’s better than going to multiple stores, right?  

5. Feedly: Okay, so this isn’t TECHNICALLY food-related. But I have been noticing that Feedly is increasingly unreliable. I completely missed a post by Nicole yesterday because it didn’t show up in my feed. Sometimes people’s posts show up late or three times in a row. Sometimes I will see a week’s worth of posts all in a row, as though someone posted them all in one day. A few commenters have noted that some of my posts don’t show up until a day or two later. (Edited to add: I follow my own blog on Feedly and as of 6:00 pm on Friday, my post still has not shown up in my feed. SIGH.)

This all sounds like a really good argument to finally add an old-school style blog roll to my blog, so I don’t miss anyone’s posts. I have been thinking about doing it for a long time, more than a YEAR… but haven’t, mainly because I’m afraid of missing someone and hurting feelings. But that’s silly, right? If I miss your blog, you will know it’s purely a brain failure and not that I don’t adore you and your blog? And you will alert me immediately? My current “systems” – the unreliable Feedly or having everyone’s blogs bookmarked in a browser – are not working. And I don’t want to miss your posts!

How are you keeping up with the blogs you follow?

That’s all I’ve got for this Friday, Internet. Hope you have a delicious weekend. 

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Dinners This Week

After a VERY frustrating month and a half of trying to lose any, any at all, of the weight I gained from eating my feelings all autumn (and, simultaneously, a month and a half of reminding myself that weight has nothing to do with my self-worth and that maybe I am just This Size and should embrace it and worrying that I am setting a bad example for Carla by “dieting” and churning with ALL of the Fraughtness that comes with wanting to be a certain size in our society today and facing a truly insurmountable resistance to buying myself new jeans), I have persuaded my husband to try the Keto plan with me. This is literally Day Three, so please understand that I may give it up any second now and never speak of it again. (I mean, no carbs I can sort-of live with… but NO SAUCES? No BEANS? And the limit on Healthful Vegetables – like, I typically have to restrict myself to two cups of LETTUCE!!!!! to stay within my carb allotment – has me in a panic.) (I understand that I am CHOOSING this, by the way.) (I don’t really plan to speak of keto/diet stuff, that often, but it may shift the tenor of my weekly dinner plan posts and/or the tenor of my general complaining, so I am warning you about it now.)

Anyway, meal planning is newly challenging because I am trying to emphasize fat and protein over carbohydrates. Here’s what’s on the menu this week:

Dinners for the Week of February 24-March 1 (WHAT. HOW IS IT MARCH ALREADY SLOW DOWN TIME OMG)

Note: There were some absolutely beautiful tuna steaks on sale at Costco this weekend, so I snapped them up. We will not be eating the sautéed red pepper portion of this meal; instead I will be sautéing some green beans. This is because I already have the green beans and I don’t want to waste them, not because of some red-pepper-related bias.

Note: I fully realize that the Internet has been swooning over this recipe for eons. I have read about it with suspicion for many years and NOW is finally the time to try it out.

 

 

Note: I haven’t figured out what I will pair with this yet. Maybe some avocado?

 

  • Leftovers of some sort or possibly eggs

 

  • OUT

Note: My birthday is this week, so we will be going out to celebrate. I am already feeling grouchy about not being able to eat all the things I want to eat — solely because of completely voluntary and self-imposed restrictions! — but I think we have found a restaurant that serves some nice fish options. And the whole point of doing Keto is to reset my eating habits, so a little limitation on the all-out scarf-fest I would otherwise be doing on my birthday is probably not a bad thing.

 

What’s on your menu this week?

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Good Gravy!

Halloween is not even a week in the rear-view and I’m already dashing headlong into Thanksgiving preparations! It’s coming up in two weeks, people! This is not a drill!

This morning in a fit of… something, probably lack of desire to exercise… I took down and put away all the Halloween decorations and replaced them with my meager Thanksgiving decorations.

I love decorating for the season, and I really enjoy Fall Décor specifically, but I have a very hard time paying $25 for a wooden pumpkin, even if it’s handpainted, and even if I really like the pumpkin and pine for it each year at this time. Oh well. I keep it in my Etsy shopping cart for annual admiration, hoping each year that the shop will have a massive sale and I’ll be able to get it for $10.

You know who has surprisingly good seasonal décor? Michael’s, that’s who. I usually spend a morning in early fall, or, as seasonal buying seems to begin earlier and earlier each year, in early summer, wandering through Michael’s, admiring the stuffed scarecrows and fabric owls and tabletop gourds. Would my life be vastly improved by tabletops gourds? Probably not, but I imagine them in my life just the same.

(photos from Michaels.com; although they are all on DRASTIC sale they are not available online and very possibly not available in store either; cute nonetheless)

I don’t really know what more I NEED, by way of fall decorations. I have a plain orange pumpkin that I use to bridge the decorating gap between Halloween and fall. I have a table runner with leaves. I have a small wooden pumpkin. I have a small wooden “gratitude tree” from which Carla hangs little paper leaves on which she’s written things she is thankful for. I have a wooden welcome sign for my front door in the shape of a leaf. I removed the jack-o-lantern faces from the pumpkins, so they are sitting on the front stoop, pretending like they were meant to be fall pumpkins and not Halloween pumpkins. I have two or three ceramic leaf bowls that I can never really figure out how to incorporate; they are not quite deep enough to be candy dishes, so I think I generally use them to hold cashews or pistachios when we have Thanksgiving guests. I have a plastic Thanksgiving plate and bowl for Carla, although she may be too big for them. I saved the fall window clings from last year. I have some small wooden leaves that I don’t know how to use – but I’ll find a way, mark my words; I used small wooden pumpkins on all the windows for Halloween and they are fall-ish enough to stay through Thanksgiving.  I have a couple of fall hand towels.

It sounds like more than it is.

Oh! I also have a handful of colorful cloth leaves that I usually toss onto the Thanksgiving table. But this year, I used putty to stick them to my kitchen walls.

I don’t know if I love it; give me a day or so to think about it. (Who am I kidding? Now that they are up they aren’t coming down unless the putty gives up and they fall off themselves.)

What else could I possibly want, right? Especially because I am picky about decorations. I don’t like anything that’s made out of that scratchy material – what is it, sisal? I don’t like anything with words (my “welcome” door sign notwithstanding). I don’t generally like turkeys or pilgrims. Really, I’m a leaf and pumpkin girl, and I tend toward wood. And there are only so many wooden leaves and pumpkins a person can scatter about her house without feeling like they’re closing in.

It’s not just the decor that has me in a frenzy; it’s the food. Thanksgiving is so early this year! My parents arrive a week from Friday, which is very exciting but also makes me feel a little panicked. I need to come up a meal plan for while they’re here. The one thing I know for sure is that we’ll have this chicken, mushroom, and wild rice soup for dinner the night before The Big Day. At least I have already ordered my turkey – which reminds me, I need to call and request that my turkey arrive a day earlier; DONE. – and I have dusted off my Thanksgiving Timeline. That helps a teeny little bit. I can’t really do much more until my first round of Thanksgiving shopping.

I am feeling a little bit devil-may-care this year about the food. If you know me at all, you know that I am a Huge Kitchen Control Freak and do not like anyone else in the kitchen with me. But I am also realizing that I don’t actually like any of the food on Thanksgiving – except for the garlic goat cheese mashed potatoes and gravy, which I make by the bucketful – so why should I care so much about working myself to exhaustion while insisting on making the entire meal without ANY help from my family lovingly preparing it all on my own? My mother and father both like to help. Why not let them? Such a novel idea! However, jury’s still out on whether I will actually be able to turn over the reins.

While I am throwing Thanksgiving caution to the wind, I am also contemplating doing things differently. Perhaps if I made a pie I actually like – apple, maybe! or a fall version of this plum torte that I have been dreaming about since I made it this summer – I would enjoy pie! Maybe if I made some sort of wonderful Brussels sprout recipe or a delicious mushroomy mac and cheese, I would be able to fill my plate with more than my traditional pile of mashed potatoes and a slim slice of turkey!

This is not new; I have contemplated doing things differently in the past and then stuck with our family traditions. Therein lies the problem, of course: our traditions are so ingrained beloved that we’re not going to change them. Which means that I wouldn’t be lessening the cooking load at all. I am still going to have to make dressing, because it’s my husband’s favorite. I am still going to have to make pumpkin bars, because people want something pumpkin-y at Thanksgiving. And I don’t know that I have enough bandwidth – not to mention enough oven space – to add something else to the mix.

So probably all this wild and reckless and altogether deviant thinking won’t go anywhere, and I’ll do what I’ve always done. It’s fun to think about, though.

The one shake-up I am contemplating that stands the best chance of actually happening is the gravy. I love gravy so very much. And the last time I made it, it was amazing. It was this deep mahogany elixir of the gods that I would have been happy to drink by itself. But it’s finite, you know. And you have to share it with the other people at your Thanksgiving table.

So I’m wondering if I might try to make some gravy in advance. I keep seeing suggestions for doing this, and it doesn’t look terribly hard. I mean, you have to procure chicken or turkey parts/carcass in advance, which troubles me a little. But I could probably buy some chicken wings or legs for not too much money and roast them for the gravy. And I would still make gravy on Thanksgiving Day, don’t you worry. This plan is designed to produce EXTRA gravy, not less work. I want to be eating mashed potatoes and gravy well into December, is what I’m telling you.

Well, I have a little time left to fit it into my Thanksgiving Timeline. If it works out, I’ll let you know.