Recipes to Try

Recipes I’ve made and would make again. Jump to: Brunch  | Snacks + quick breads | Lunch | Dinner | Dessert (Also: saved recipes to try.) (Add “cooked.wiki/” in front of URLs) Breakfast / Brunch Pancakes Tall, fluffy buttermilk pancakes Smitten Kitchen Coffee cake + muffins Blueberry Coffee Cake Smitten Kitchen 3/22 8/21 7/21 Can…

Stuff I did this week

Published my 20 favorite books I read in 2022 📚
Finished my Q1 writing plan 🙌
Worked on my 2022 reading stats 📊
Wrote a 2000 word blog post that needs editing to come together coherently 😭
Baked lemon blueberry bread and an apple crisp 🍎
Went to IndieWeb Create Day and Homebrew Website Club
Walked with a friend (on a different day than usual which totally messed up my sense of time lol) 🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
Hung out with a friend on Discord
Rehung a bunch of art in my office I’d had sitting on old hooks and a painting in my bedroom

Business

Wrote a bio for a consulting partner
Edited some old portraits for my consulting website, but I didn’t really like any of them, so I shot new portraits
Updated my consulting webpage and fixed a redirect issue

Reading

Read Sailor’s Delight and For the Wolf
Skimmed through a book on African fashion that has to go back to the library
Added 6 books to my TBR

Website changes

Ported my 2022 reading onto its own page and set up a new page for 2023 reading
Changed the URL of my reading page from /reading-list to /reading (which will surely break a lot of past links 🤷‍♀️)
Added “recipes to try” to my menu so it’s easy to access on my phone
Tweaked wording on my resume and portfolio pages and included a link to LinkedIn

In response to Sara Jakša’s call for blog posts about cooking 😀

I’ve gone through many phases of cooking and food over my adult life, including a number that I’m quite happy to have moved past, ranging from my college era “salt is bad for you so I just won’t use it” 🤦‍♀️ days of flavorless food to attempting a zero waste locavore diet (easier today than in 2008, I suspect, when I created a wiki for finding bulk food) to the exhausting fiasco of “whole food is healthier therefore I must make everything from scratch” 😒
At the start of the pandemic, I gave up on cooking dinner altogether, switching to mostly ordering takeout / delivery (a very expensive habit, but what I was mentally up for at the time). I also started working with a nutritionist to address digestive issues and medication that suppressed my appetite, so my eating habits changed some.
Over the past few months, prompted by my husband getting laid off, I’ve been cooking dinners again. We’ve transitioned to a new food system that’s working pretty well so far.

How I’m eating

Breakfast around 9:30-10 — usually scrambled eggs or oatmeal with blueberries (it would be even better if I ate earlier but I’m enjoying leisurely mornings)
Lunch at 1:30 — usually leftovers, or lately I’m playing around with the concept of “adult lunchables”
Snack at 4ish — preferably something with protein like yogurt or nuts (or ice cream 😉)
Dinner at 6:30-7ish
Sometimes dessert or evening snack between 8-10ish

oatmeal makes a good winter and spring breakfast
“adult lunchables”
finally tried “bowls” like ten years after they were a thing
baking lots these days
What I’m cooking
In the past, I leaned too hard on pasta and my husband (fairly) revolted. Lately I’ve been making more dishes with lentils or canned chickpeas. My friend remarked that I don’t use meat alternatives much for a mostly vegetarian pescetarian — I stopped buying tofu and tempeh because they always went bad in the back of my fridge. Beans are more my jam as a protein source, or throwing an egg on it 😉 I’m also into veggie sausage, which is easy to add sides and turn into a meal.
I’ve appreciated Virginia Sole-Smith’s writings about processed food, which helped me recognize I’ve had some classist attitudes about it 😬 and also making life harder on myself by not using it 🙃 So, I’ve been buying more helper and premade items like canned crescent rolls, frozen pie crusts, and boxed brownie mix. (I started moving that way over the past couple years but have amped up recently.)
I’m baking a couple times a week these days. Because I sometimes have a hard time making myself eat enough, I’m listening more closely to what I want to eat. A lot of the time, that’s something baked — scones, biscuits, cake, quick breads. My nutritionist just has me consume a source of protein with any carby food I’m eating, like yogurt or ice cream with an apple crisp or milk and butter with banana bread. I started adding pecans to my morning oatmeal too.
Deciding what to make
I’ve been working on lowering my self expectations around meals. I have a lot of internalized BS about what it looks like to be a good caregiver and what makes a good meal. After talking to my husband about it (and him reiterating that he doesn’t expect me to cook anything, let alone something fancy), we’re incorporating more simple meals: beans on toast, breakfast for dinner, baked potatoes. (The downside is these types of meals don’t usually have leftovers for lunch!) He’s also been sous-chefing for me more, which speeds up the prep work substantially.
To simplify the decision making process about what to make — easily the hardest part of cooking dinner for me — I set up a family OneNote and dumped in a bunch of cheap and easy recipes from Budget Bytes. (I also have a list of assorted recipes to try here on my site, though those may be more involved.) When I’m not sure what to make, I can browse that list. Then I’m saving recipes worth making again with my notes.
What we’re trying right now is sitting down over the weekend to pick out four or five dinner recipes for the upcoming week. That means I can order groceries specifically for those meals, and the nightly decision-making process is easier: which of these do you want today?
Buying food
Where I get my groceries
Today I’m getting most of our groceries from two sources:

Biweekly-ish QFC pickup orders — pantry items and produce
Weekly milk service delivery (Smith Brothers) — eggs, coffee beans, bread, assorted dairy, mushrooms, blueberries

Before my husband was laid off, I also used two other grocery delivery services:

Biweekly produce and pantry box (Full Circle)
Monthly-ish local food delivery (Pacific Coast Harvest)

I also order selected items online that aren’t available except at specialty stores. Despite seeming kinda bougie, my closest grocery store has pretty poor selection and pricing on certain types of items. Apparently the suburban bourgeois are into fancy deli snacks (which I’m snagging for my adult lunchables 😎), not lentils and rice 😂
Although society has largely moved on, we are still taking precautions around COVID — I have multiple factors making me high risk for long COVID and am concerned by the increased risk of heart issues after sickness. Using delivery services allowed us (and the drivers) to have less human contact than at a grocery store, so I’ve been happy to pay a premium for groceries throughout the pandemic, especially since they curated and sourced from mostly local and independent food producers. But once we needed to save money, it was back to the normal grocery store. The one benefit of shopping at a grocery store is that there are a lot of staples the service didn’t carry or charged an outrageous amount for.
Our nearest grocery store offers a free pickup service. It honestly takes me longer to shop online than in store — the search is terrible and the interface slow — but I would still prefer to avoid crowded indoor spaces, so for me it’s worth it. I do the time-intensive shopping part, then my husband takes the exposure risk to pick it up. I’m cognizant of the privilege we have in doing this, but really appreciate having this service available. (Oddly, the people who fill our orders seem to be encouraged to promote it / reward us by the store? One time they gave us an avocado slicer (🤔 I hadn’t bought any avos) and this time they broke a few eggs in the carton so just threw in an extra dozen? (I assume it’s to compete against Instacart 🤷‍♀️)
Changing my shopping habits
When we switched our food ordering system to save money this spring, it was like a reset of twenty years of grocery shopping habits. Suddenly, I wasn’t automatically choosing the local, organic, fair trade, or higher priced product (I am kind of a food snob 😅 but also had the disposable income to vote with my spending 🤷‍♀️). Instead, I have been defaulting to the cheapest option except for select treats (my husband’s coffee, the fancy Greek yogurt, and my favorite jam). Now that he’s in a new role, we want to continue cooking our own food, but I’ll need to decide whether to return fully to my purchasing habits or keep buying cheaper versions.
Shopping differently these past few months, it’s been interesting to see which higher priced items taste significantly better. I made tuna salad with cheap canned tuna and we could barely eat it, it was so watery and flavorless. Amazon carries the fancier tuna at a discount so I’ve switched to ordering it in bulk periodically. This week I baked coffee cake and I can taste the cheap canola flavor. But mustard? The cheapo store brand dijon tastes like the organic dijon, especially since I mostly use it for cooking.
Eating out
We’ve cut back on eating and ordering out, and switched to getting cheaper options when we do. During the first three months of the year, we got takeout 35 times (6 from fast food), and from April through June 27 times (17 from fast food).
Food costs
Our food spending from April through June is two-thirds of what it was from January through March. The amount we spent at restaurants dropped by more than fifty percent — two Crunch Wrap Supremes for $13 is way less of a hit to the pocketbook than $50 of Thai 😉 Getting takeout for lunch instead of dinner has also helped.
What we’ve spent on food for the first six months of the year is also two-thirds of the previous six months. Changing my shopping habits has reduced our grocery costs some, and we’re making more meals from that lesser total. Since I now have both the time and energy to cook more often, it feels like a worthwhile way to cut back on our expenses.
Thanks Sara for the prompt!