Chicken Thighs with Clementines, Limes & Onions

This weekend I tried this recipe from this Buzzfeed post:

I made some alterations, adding lime and reducing the amount of onions and clementines in favor of more chicken

Since I had to use white wine in the recipe, I fixed myself a glass while waiting for the chicken

Have a great weekend!

HelloFresh Review

Hello! A friend of mine sent me a free week of HelloFresh and the package arrived yesterday. Since I had previously used Blue Apron as well, I naturally compared the two and thought it might be worth posting about. I have not been sponsored by either company and these are my own opinions.


Pros of Blue Apron

I think the ingredients are more interesting, and are not ones that I might normally think to get myself while grocery shopping

Refrigeration of the meat products is better with Blue Apron - the insulated bag inside the box is actually sealed - the HelloFresh insulated bag was not sealed and as a result, the meat had started to leak juices while waiting for me outside my door

Below is the gyros recipe that was one of the three meals I received. I forgot to take pictures of the others (oops).

Pros of HelloFresh

Recipes come as a booklet, which I preferred to three loose sheets (but this may be a con for others, depending on preferences)

With Blue Apron, I had to run an entire dishwasher load of just the dishes/utensils, but with HelloFresh, I found myself only washing probably 1/3 to 1/2 the amount of kitchen supplies

 

 

 

I think I completely missed the mark on this cooking - my salmon skin wasn't at all crispy and my sauce was too runny - but it still ended up tasting pretty good

Also there was supposed to be bok choi in this recipe but I do not like the taste of bok choi so I chose to exclude it

Cooking with a Cast Iron Skillet

Hello! I recently moved and bought a cast iron skillet because I heard those things are all-around great, so today was my first time cooking with it. I had a bunch of chicken breasts and some tomatoes I had to finish, so I just threw in some garlic and made this quick, simple recipe:

Step 1: Cut up tomatoes and garlic

Step 2: Heat up oil and garlic

Step 3: Cook chicken breasts (add salt and pepper)

Step 4: Add in the tomatoes

Step 5: Enjoy!

Shiitake Mushrooms

Hello! It's been a while... I saw a good deal on shiitake mushrooms at my local grocery store and so I decided to make some mushroom miso soup and mushroom risotto.

I've never cooked mushrooms before, so I learned a lot. For example, you want to separate the cap from the stem:

 I froze the stems so that I could use them in a soup base later

I boiled the mushrooms with my rice cooker

Used half of the mushrooms + water for a miso soup base

Used the other half of the mushrooms + water for a risotto
 

Milk Chicken

A good recipe if you can never finish your milk (like me)

A nice bed for the chicken

Sitting in his milk bath

The finished product - pretty yummy and the house smells so good

Quiche Florentine!

I had a lot of leftover spinach, so I made my first spinach quiche, inspired by the delicious quiche florentines at La Madeleine

Simple Foods

My boyfriend and I now live across the country from one another, so I've had to fend (cook) for myself these days. 

I am not a great cook, so the food I make has been pretty simple:

Clam Chowder - My Dad's Recipe

Scrambled Eggs / Omelette

Leftover Clam Chowder, Cucumber Mango Salad with Lime, Riesling

MZ Feeds Herself!

It isn't as pretty as when my boyfriend cooks, but I made garlic chicken with lime today

 

mmmm

Valentine's Weekend

Happy Belated Valentine's Day!

My boyfriend and I stayed in for dinner on the 14th. We had oysters & prosecco, ribeye and pasta, and a white chocolate mousse with raspberry and peach sauces (dessert not pictured).

He both shucked the oysters and made the mignonette, both for the first time. Then we made a marinade for the meat together and he made a creamy sauce for the pasta, though I think the pictures don't show the sauce that well.

Sunday morning, we made blueberry and chocolate pancakes while listening to Maroon 5 and Jack Johnson :)

Here's me eating leftovers of the pasta we made

So yummy!

Scallion pancake croissants

It's almost time for Chinese New Year / Lunar New Year!

In honor of that, my boyfriend has made scallion pancake croissants, a French twist on a Chinese classic

He should post his recipe here soon, but until then, you can check out this post on scallion pancake waffles

--

Edit: He has posted about the making of these scallion croissants here

Magnolia Bakery Ice Box Cake

Happy belated Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

This past weekend also marked my boyfriend's birthday, so it was actually I who fed him this time. A good friend suggested the Magnolia Bakery Ice Box Cake to me and, using the recipe found here, I made it! Lucky for me, the cake was pretty simple to make, though mine looked quite different from the picture in the link.

No restraint. I forgot to take a picture before we all dug in.

Delicious! No leftovers

Apple Pie Mondays!

Happy Monday! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season!

Apple pie courtesy of my boyfriend (I helped arrange the spirals on top though):

 

 Before we put it in the oven

  A rose for love

Sad that it flattened out so much after baking

Still super delicious!