Day 21/365: Chinese Soup

Secret soup ingredients

It's been awhile and I'm long over due for some good ol' Chinese soup.  I should have been making this when I was deathly ill (ha ha) with the flu.  Oh well.  I've got a variety of dried herbs, roots, spices and other goods in my pantry for this.

Funny how I used to hate drinking these soups when I was young.  My mother would make me choke it down after I was already full from my dinner.  Of course, she also used to make it taste really strongly of ginseng (bitter) and that was part of the reason why I didn't like it either (and I was, literally, choking it down).  Anyway, somehow I really appreciate it now.

Soup fail:  I was so busy typing up my blog that I didn't pay attention to the soup at the beginning.  I didn't scoop out the nasty scum (boiled out from the chicken fat/bones), so the soup became cloudy.  Bah!  Oh well, next time.

What's awesome?  Vacuum sealers.  I've been lazy to make soup simply because I buy whole chickens and freeze them without preparing them.  Therefore, they need to get thawed, then skinned and halved before I can use them.  So...they sit in the freezer and I don't make soup.  This will now change.  :)

Day 16/365: Taco night!

Venison tacos :)...

Really, this isn't as much food as it looks.  ;)

Day 15/365: Yummy delicious sardines

Sardine salad, anyone?

I've only recently begun my love affair with canned sardines.  They're wonderful little protein packets, filled with the oh-so-important Omega-3 fatty acids, but without the worry of high levels of mercury.  True, they probably are a bit fishy for the uninitiated.  If you don't like fishy things, you probably won't like canned sardines.  You probably don't like tuna, either, though I haven't done a direct comparison between the fishiness of canned tuna vs. the fishiness of canned sardines.  I personally prefer the savory goodness of sardines (which taste great with crackers, veggies, cottage cheese, etc.) over tuna, which is really only palatable (in my opinion) when mixed with mayo or some other such thing to make it less dry.  I think sardines taste better too.  If you were raised in a non-white bread American household and exposed to all manners of tastes and smells...sardines probably won't even make you blink an eye.

Day 14/365: Hot Wings!

Baked hot wings!

Tonight I made some hot wings.  Courtesy of this recipe here.  I can't say my wings were super crispy but I was afraid of overcooking them, so I didn't bake them quite as long.  Still good!  :)

Day 13/365: Coconut coffee

I like to have just a little coffee with my coconut milk.  Yes, the thick stuff that comes from a can like this.  Actually, I first tried this with coconut cream from Christmas leftovers.  I decided I'd just drink it with some coffee before it went bad.  So I had a mug almost full of coconut cream, mixed in some coffee and it tasted like these Chinese coconut candies from my childhood.  Coconut milk isn't quite as good but I figure it has good fats for me.  Considering I didn't eat much today, the fat probably kept me going.


I may have to try this bulletproof coffee sometime too.

Day 12/365: Beef pot roast

Tonight's dinner:  a lovely beef pot roast with mashed sweet potatoes and green salad.  I got avocado oil today and used it as my dressing oil.  Yum!

Day 6/365: Paleo Keema Kari

Actually, paleo-ish because I had it on a bed of quinoa

I made this from the recipe here.  Instead of beef, I used ground venison.  This dish was actually really, really yummy!  Indian (or Indian-inspired) food isn't top on my list of favorites, because I didn't grow up eating it, but I do enjoy it.  I also didn't have spinach, so the greens are actually frozen collards from my garden last summer.  :D  They fit perfectly into the dish.  Love collard greens!  Honestly, I think it's amazing how a few simple spices make food so delicious.

This needs to go into (semi-) regular rotation.

Day 1/365: Happy New Year!

Ribeye = Yum!

Not the most interesting picture to start off my Project 365, but at least it tasted good.  :)  Ribeyes are definitely my favorite cut of steak, cooked rare.  The fattier, the better.  Though lately I've been avoiding eating too much of the fat because these aren't grassfed cows and the fat is where all the nasty stuff builds up (hormones, antibiotics, other toxins, etc.).

Funny thing about steak (or beef in general) is that I never really liked eating it when I was young.  I didn't like beef much and definitely wasn't interested in steak.  Usually if there was beef in some kind of meal, I would eat the bare minimum and give the rest to my mother (same with chicken skin...).  But somewhere around 2007, I just...got into it.  I prefer my steak rare, where I can still taste the bloody goodness of it.  Does that sound gross?  A nicely seared, rare steak is just....excellent.

Note to self:  need to expand my vocabulary.