Foodporn Monday – more sushi sandwich and mover’s meal prep

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More sushi sandwiches! The reddish one is made of kimchi fried rice plus a fried egg and asparagus. I’m a little in love with these and I’m planning to serve these when I have my house warming party. 😛

Half of the stuff are packed in boxes, but I still had enough things to do a simple meal prep so I don’t have to eat unhealthy food during lunch at work. So I made some Japanese curry with chicken, potatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach. For sides I fried up some tofu and then just some sushi rice. I actually prefer sushi rice to just plain jasmin rice, cos I enjoy the stickiness. I plan to eat a lot of junk for dinners this week, mainly pimped out instant noodles. 😀 Short and sweet this week. 🙂

Foodporn Monday – falafel, arctic char and sushi sandwich

This is so late! I’m super busy with the move coming up and I’m seriously thinking about taking a couple of weeks of break from posting and I will start posting again with a house tour! 😛 Well, we shall see, but do expect irregular posting the following weeks. But now, some foodporn.

I was left day-dreaming about good falafels after the Sandro burger, so I got myself some falafel balls from my local supermarket. They turned out pretty good, I mushed them up with a fork and jammed them between a pita bread, with some cucumbers, tomatoes, hummus, coriander and tzatziki sauce on top. It had some good flavors but turned out that I didn’t like pita bread, at least not plain ones from the package. 😛

Foodporn Monday – curry, pesto and hamburgers

*pretending it’s Monday* I hope you have a fantastic start of the week. Let’s jump right in cos the food situation was awesome last week.

For lunch meal prep last week, I made Panang curry with meatballs, green beans, and butternut squash. I found some black rice ramen noodles from the supermarket and I figured it would taste good with curry. And they did taste pretty good. And what a lovely dark violet color, almost black. They were also bouncy in texture right away when I ate them after cooking, but I knew they might stick together later on, so I added a generous amount of sesame oil. They still kinda did stick together but not that much. Don’t forget to rinse under cold running water too after cooking. I bet they would be quite delicious as cold noodles in the summer then, can’t wait to try it out. The Panang curry I got back on my Whole30 month from a store that sells organic stuff, and the sauce paste tasted pretty bland. I’m not a big fan of Panang curry anyways. But for me curry is like pizza, even when it’s just okay, it’s still good. To add some contrast color to make the lunch box even more appetizing, I sprinkled some green onions on top and threw in a few cherry tomatoes and voila! 😛

Foodporn Monday – grilled chicken and Irish breakfast

Last week’s lunch meal prep was pretty boring cos I was just lazy. I got a whole grilled chicken from my local supermarket and just made various veggies to eat with the chicken I shredded by hand (which is so freaking fun). I made some juicy eggplants (find recipe here), fried up some zucchini in garlic, salt and oil. Into the frying pan went some kale sauteed in beef stock and goose fat. And then some carrot and celery sticks stir fry, plus some broccoli cooked in the oven. Most of the time, I like to cook veggies separately, because veggies cook in different time, so to make delicious veggies that are all cooked to perfection, you gotta do them separately. I love to have lots of different colors on my plate because in my head, colorful means healthy and appetizing. That’s why I usually get different colored veggies and fruit, because presentation is important. And of course, they make a prettier Instagram picture. 😛 However, the chicken and veggie thing got a little boring towards the end of the week, so I made some corn soup with the left-over grilled chicken. Can’t go wrong with cream of chicken canned soup that Sir Atticus brought me all the way from the US. One can left! I have to treasure it.

It’s one and a half months later from my Whole30 diet, and I’m still trying to keep most of my main meals mostly low carb, some protein and more fat than ever. I wouldn’t say I’m keto, because I eat too much carb to be keto. I still treat my phase to be experimental as of now, I haven’t settled on anything permanent yet. I guess what I eat is going to be an ever-changing and evolving thing. But I really treasure the food freedom that Whole30 made possible for me, as in I didn’t crave carbs and sugar as I did before. The reason I’m reluctant to go full-keto is because I don’t want to live in restriction. That is why I went on to fasting, I fast around 16-20 hours at least four days a week. On days I don’t do workout in the morning, I would fast. And I’ve gotten so used to the fasting that I wanted to bring back certain carbs I craved during the diet for my eating window, and high fat yogurt and rye bread are my priorities. So after this long intro, here’s two pieces of tuna rye break smothered in cheese and tomato and broiled into perfection in the oven. And I sprinkled some chives on top to make it look real pretty. But the best thing on this rye bread is unseen in the photo, there was some heavenly Irish butter spread all over that rye bread and that’s what made the bread so freaking delicious.

 And talking about the Irish butter, which is truly the best butter in the world, I just had to treat myself to some Irish breakfast on the weekend. No, I didn’t have any Irish bacon (which is so good also) nor do I have any Irish sausages. What I had was only the butter, and in a generous amount of it I fried up some very good chicken bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes, sausages with three different seasonings (chili, cheese, chorizo) and some sunny side up eggs. And of course, some good old white beans in tomato sauce. I didn’t get any toasts though, because I still couldn’t bring myself to get white bread. Mostly because I didn’t really have an appetite for the toast while I was grocery shopping, but oh did I want some crunchy toasts while I was eating the beans. Damn you beans for going so well with white bread. 😛

Foodporn Monday – kimchi beef stew and a little piece of luxury

I did an epic meal prep where I made lunches and dinners and a couple of breakfasts too already on Sunday a week ago. For lunch, I made tonkatsu, which is Japanese style pork cutlets. I had some delicious fatty pork chops sliced thin and dipped in potato starch, then egg and then panko bread crumbs. I didn’t deep fry them, maybe shallow fried? 😀 I just used a half inch of oil and it did the job beautifully. I made a huge batch so it did take me a while but it was super crunchy the first time I ate them. Of course, they didn’t stay crunchy on the following days but the secret with Japanese panko bread crumb is that they don’t suck up the oil so even if they aren’t crunchy anymore late, they aren’t oily either. And I’m sure they could be made crunchy again in the oven but they were lunches and my office didn’t have other than a microwave. With the tonkatsu, I made some Japanese vegetable curry to accompany the meat. I used two medium sized potatoes and a small sweet potato, I left out the rice so a little starch didn’t make me unwell. I also added some celeries and spinach. For the curry, I just got a package from an Asian store, and the base I used some chicken stock. To top it all off, I put some shiracha mayo on the tonkatsu. I kept the salt on the minimum because I’m not eating any rice with it.

Then for dinner, I was in the mood for something spicy and warming and Korean spicy stews had become one of my comfort foods. This time, I added some beef, a lot of kimchi, some firm Korean tofu, four different kinds of mushrooms (shiitake, white, enoki and king oyster). I used more chicken stock as the base of the stew, and some Korean rice cakes as a thickener. The spice comes from a generous amount of Korean chili flakes and Koren chili paste gochujang. And of course, the spicyness from the kimchi. I find Korean stews very accommodating when it comes to ingredients, you can put basically anything you want in it. I usually just make sure it has kimchi, because some good kimchi would give the stew an umami and deep flavor that you really can’t get from anything else. If you don’t like spicy much, you can leave the chili flakes and paste out but keep the kimchi. Some kimchi in a big pot of stew wouldn’t make it that spicy. As a protein, you can use any meat you want, or make it vegetarian with just the tofu. Rice cakes are a perfect addition to thicken your stew, and when you leave out the rice, a little bit of rice cake would still keep your stew meal low-carb.

I happened to visit a store in the middle of the week that I don’t usually visit. It’s just a regular supermarket but it is situated in the center of the city so it has lots of exotic fruits and products to suit the diverse clientele that visit the store regularly. And I found some fresh figs! You have no idea how rare fresh and ripe figs are in Finland, it almost feels like that all of them are taken my various high-end restaurants and none of them are left to the regular consumer. It wasn’t cheap though, but I still couldn’t stop myself for buying a few, especially when I remember my little piece of manchego cheese waiting for me in my fridge at home. So in the middle of the week, I had a little piece of luxury as dessert. The figs were very fresh and quite ripe although they weren’t super sweet. But paired with the cheese, it was so lovely. 😛

On the weekend, I had some colorful omelette as dinner. I bought a whole grilled chicken from my local supermarket, shredded it and used most
of it for meal prep for this week and the rest I made into stir fry with some onion and paprika and spinach and stuffed it all into a cheddar omelet. Omelets are really my go-to whenever I just want to clean out my fridge of left-overs. Originally I was going to make some egg tacos, but like I always do, I made too much stuffing for the taco and it turned into an omelet. 😀

Another tasty week done, and another coming up. Have a nice week!