Stir Fry

I'm not that big a cooking fan, but every so often I like to experiment. Usually, that takes the form of a big slow cooker full of chili. I have never used a recipe to make chili, and it has never been the same twice. And then there's pizza. I always have fun making pizza. Tonight, however, I thought I'd try my hand at making some sort of stir fry.

In my skillet I cooked up some zucchini, red and green peppers, and some tofu that was leftover from when I made my last batch of miso soup, and I needed to use it up soon. Then I added a sauce I threw together using plum sauce and the last of my miso paste. Finally, I thought I'd add a packet of Chinese noodles. You know the kind—the ones that come in the little packages that only cost 25¢. And when it was done (or I thought it was done—I'm not even sure if the way I cooked it actually counted as a stir fry), it looked great. But did it taste great? No.

Well, it wasn't exactly that the taste was bad, but it just felt weird once it started gathering in my stomach. I'm not sure what the problem was. Separately, before cooking, all the ingredients tasted good. Well, except for the tofu, which has no taste at all. But together, it really didn't work well at all. I'm thinking it might have been my sauce. Perhaps I should have just left it out and let all the natural vegetable flavours stand alone. Or used straight plum sauce, without the miso paste. I've tried something else before where I mixed miso paste and sweet & sour sauce and that worked great, so maybe there's something in the plum sauce that caused a weird reaction with the miso paste. It couldn't have been that it was undercooked, since all of the ingredients can be eaten raw with no adverse effect.

But in any case, maybe stir fries just aren't really my thing. I do have childhood memories of being disappointed whenever my mom made a stir fry for dinner, so I'm not sure why I even attempted it. Or perhaps next time I should, you know, actually follow a recipe. There's enough left for two more meals, but I think I'm just going to toss the rest. I don't like wasting food, but at least all the ingredients only cost me $3 tops, so I don't feel too bad about doing so. And to make up for tonight's dinner I'll definitely have to cook a pizza tomorrow.

How Do I Cook This?

A couple months before my parents moved away, my mom told me that I would get whatever they had in their freezer that they weren't able to use up by the time they moved. I promptly suggested that they go out right away and buy a side of beef.

When the day came, my dad brought up two good sized boxes, each about 1 foot cubed, full of... stuff. I honestly can't tell you what all is in there, as even though it's been over a month I have yet to look inside the boxes to see what I have. I keep forgetting all about it, until I go into my freezer for some ice cream or something, and notice those two boxes of stuff sitting there. But of course I'm always distracted with something else at the time and have forgotten about it again by the time I'm finished my bowl of ice cream.

Attack of the Killer Lasagne

Thinking about my broken coffee press reminded me of the last time I broke one of my dishes, a few years ago. And it was a rather spectacular event too; not one I'd like to repeat. It all began one Sunday afternoon when I decided to make a pan of lasagne...

Pizza: Nature's Perfect Food

This probably won't come as a surprise with me being a typical single male in North America, but one of my staple foods happens to be pizza. I rarely have pizzaria pizza though, primarily because of the cost, but also because it's really not all that healthy a thing to eat on a regular basis (but they sure do taste good!). Usually, I'll swing by the grocery store on my way home from work and pick up a nice, inexpensive, fresh deli pizza. Although occasionally, I'll have a frozen pizza. Last night, however, I decided I'd try something different and make one myself.