Today is Sunday, but it feels like Saturday or Monday or Wednesday! Let’s face it — they all feel the same at this point.
Yesterday I decided I need to have a little more of a routine through all of this. I woke up at a reasonable hour today, and started my morning with some of the new assignments I have. I’m going to learn new skills in the kitchen a few times a week — two days ago I learned how to use the InstantPot, and tomorrow I’d like to learn how to make a quiche or other breakfast food involving spinach and eggs — and have a set workout routine that I must stick with. I decided to take up Pilates again, and found a good little YouTube video yesterday to begin. Something I really like about Pilates is that your workout just feels so dang good while you’re stretching. It’s composed of such tiny movements that Pilates work some muscles that you don’t even realize are there, and the next day you’re shocked with how sore some of your little muscles are.
Some things on my to do list this week are:
Finish cleaning out my closet, and find someone to donate all my clothing to.
Bake a healthy dessert that doesn’t taste healthy at all.
Find one new small business to support.
Spend 10 minutes/day refreshing my memory on some good, elementary US history.
Try a new food. This week I discovered that I do, in fact, like Caesar salads, despite refusing to try them for 29 years.
Call one friend or family member every day, just to catch up.
These are all super doable and will make some of the time spent indoors feel more productive. What are you doing to make your day feel worthwhile?
Man, I have a bad headache. I think it’s from my neck pain. Typically when it gets bad enough it goes straight up my vertebrae to the top of my head. Ugh!
I’m currently really in the mood to write, but not really equipped to sit at my computer that long right now. I also can’t think straight because of the aforementioned headache. I figured I’d tell y’all what I’ve been working on lately, though. I’ve been doing some more deep writing lately. I’m going to be posting about anxiety, social media, and how problematic I think Hollywood has become. Please hold me accountable to this. None of it is very fun to share, but I think it’s all important and there is a reason I’ve felt pushed to write about it.
I’m also working on creating a weekly email you guys can subscribe to — so I don’t have to do random little updates like this on here anymore. I am undecided between MailChimp and Constant Contact. Any thoughts on either?
Finally, I have a few recipes and shopping trips that are begging to be posted. Sadly, my local Trader Joe’s hasn’t gone crazy with pumpkin stuff this year and I’m just not feeling most of it. I got Jax some pumpkin biscuits the other day, but I haven’t gone crazy yet. There’s still plenty of time for that though, right?
No, this is not going to be a normal recipe post like I had been getting into before. I am linking it to Game of Thrones, once again, because I just crammed so much in to such a short period of time that I’m probably going to be overly-obsessed for a little while.
Anyway, I really wanted to make a fun dinner for the night of the premiere, but I was catching up on season 7 until the very last minute, so that was an unrealistic goal. It was too late to order anything GoT related, and I’ve looked all over for the themed Oreos with no success. On Monday, though, I did make a new steak dish, and it reminded me of something the Lannister’s might have had. I cooked some filet mignon with garlic butter, roasted potatoes, and carrots. It was so easy but tasted even better than filet I’ve had in restaurants, so I figured I would share. As always, I’m not going to give amounts of what I used, but I’ll describe it well enough that you can just make everything accordingly with how much food you’d like to make.
Garlic Butter Filet Mignon with Roasted Carrots and Potatoes
I got all of my ingredients at Trader Joe’s. You will need:
Steak filets – I like organic grassfed beef.
Butter
EVOO
Salt
Pepper
Garlic cloves
Fresh rosemary
Fresh thyme
Red potatoes
Carrots
Step 1: Preheat the oven to 415°F. I found a bunch of different temperatures to make your steak at, but settled in the middle at this. Take out the steak and butter from the fridge, and bring it to room temperature for 20-30 minutes.
Step 2: Chop the carrots and red potatoes and put them on a cookie sheet. Drizzle with EVOO, salt, and pepper, then stick them in the oven to begin roasting while you prepare the butter and steak.
Step 3: Chop the rosemary and thyme finely, and mince a few cloves of garlic. Mix it all together with the butter until you’re happy with the proportions, then stick the butter back in the fridge to firm a little.
Step 4: Dry the steak with paper towels, then put a generous amount of salt and pepper on each side. Note: Apparently the smell that hits you when you open a container of raw steak is normal. I was not prepared and thought we might be getting a legit medieval experience. YIKES.
Step 5: Drizzle some EVOO and melt butter in a frying pan, or, preferably on a cast iron skillet. I did the frying pan because we don’t have an iron skillet to use, but plan on investing in one now!
Step 6: Sear the filets for about 3 minutes on each side, until they have browned a bit.
Step 7: Move the iron skillet to the oven, or put the steaks on foil on the cookie sheet with the veggies. I poured the excess juice over top of the steaks so they’d be nice and juicy.
Step 8: Google how long to cook your steak in the oven. I am not a professional, and I know it’s a crime, but I like my steak medium-well. I cooked it for about 6 minutes in the oven, but it will obviously depend on the thickness of your steak and your preference for how red you like it. I think a Lannister would likely just eat it after searing lightly in the pan, but Joffrey might have just gone for the raw meat.
Step 9: Take out your steak and vegetables when you’re happy with the way they look, put them on a plate, and top the steak with the garlic butter. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper on it all and enjoy! If you really want to feel like Tyrian, you should help yourself to a glass of red wine — or maybe three.
I took a survey on my Instagram last week, and found a lot of people were interested in having me write about what I cook. Let me begin with this: I am not a chef, and before Robert and I got married we joked about how he would be doing all the cooking since I couldn’t even make simple grilled chicken without completely burning it. Like, I would char it completely to make sure it was cooked thoroughly. Now, though, I am all about creating recipes that are super easy, healthy, and tasty. I think cooking is fun, and I am surprisingly capable after learning more about different ingredients. I want to make recipes that literally anyone can do, and without all the work of measuring out ingredients and being hassled with following something exactly.
Today, I want to share my newest creation that I can actually take 100% credit for! I made it last night with some ingredients I picked out from the store, and I was actually anticipating to get a major fail blog post out of it. My coconut curry chicken is now Robert’s favorite dish I’ve ever made, though, and he said he gives it a 9.8 out of 10, which is the closest to perfect he’ll ever get. He said this was comparing it to restaurants and every kind of food he’s ever had. I asked if he’s ever had a dish that’s a 10 before, and he said no. Not to toot my own horn, but I am pretty proud that this was ranked as one of the best foods in his book!
Okay so it’s really easy to make, but before getting started I want to preface this post with something. I cook by eyeballing everything. I compare this to playing music by ear; you don’t need to have measuring cups or any sort of help reading exact numbers for my recipes. I’ll explain how I make everything based on ratios or describing how much flavor you want in a recipe. This, in my opinion, makes things a lot easier and more customizable from person to person. I typically make enough food for 2, so just add more however much you think you need when cooking for a bigger party. Here goes nothing!
Krista’s Coconut Curry Chicken
Ingredients:
Chicken Breast
Ground Turmeric
Curry Powder
Chili Powder
Chopped Garlic Cloves
Lime Juice
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper
Jasmine Rice
Coconut Milk
Carrots
Butter
Ground Cinnamon
Step 1: Preheat oven to 400°F.
No, I don’t believe in measuring cups, but this was a good one to display the rice in.
Step 2: make the coconut rice.
Coconut rice is one of my favorite things and is so easy to make! Literally all you do is dump the coconut milk (I love the organic coco milk from Trader Joe’s) into a pot on the stove, cover, and heat until it begins to boil.
Just a heads-up, if you get the milk with a normal amount of fat in it, it might be partially solid. The first time I made this I threw out the milk because I thought it went bad since it was solid, but it’s supposed to be like this! It will melt into a liquid once it begins to boil.
Once the coconut milk is boiling, add a pinch of salt, and dump in about 3/4 the amount of rice as there was liquid. An easy way to do this is just measure it in the empty coconut milk can.
Once you pour the rice in the pot, re-cover it, turn the heat to “medium low,” and cook without stirring until the rice is fluffy and has absorbed all the liquid.
Now, let’s move on to the main dish while the rice cooks!
Step 3: Put the seasoning together.
Seasoning chicken is surprisingly easy. The only things I used were turmeric, curry, garlic, lime juice (sorry I put a photo with a lemon, but I changed my mind at the last minute and am not professional enough to retake the photo. Plus, using a lemon instead will not kill you, and is a fine substitute I’m sure), salt, and pepper.
Start by putting three shakes of chili powder into a mixing bowl. Then, put in a very generous amount of curry powder. After all, the dish is called “chicken curry,” so we need this flavor to really stand out! Add about half the amount of ground turmeric as there is curry in the bowl. I just eyeballed all of this to be more than enough to season the chicken breast with, that way I didn’t have to make up a mixture again or have a naked chicken.
Add a few pinches of salt and pepper, then stir in enough EVOO to turn the mixture into a little bit of a liquid, but still smell primarily like curry. If it smells too much like EVOO, add more curry and turmeric until the marinade smells like seasoning again. Squirt in as much lime (or lemon) juice as you think seems good. I used one of those premade lime juices that you keep in the fridge, and put in about 6 drops. Chop up a few garlic cloves and toss them in there, too. I really roughly chopped it, which is why you can clearly see chunks of garlic on my finished product. I bet you thought those were peanuts or some sort of fancy topping. Nope, just good ol’ garlic!
Step 4: Prepare the chicken.
I always start off by patting the chicken breast dry with paper towels, and placing it on a cutting board. As I mentioned before, I don’t know a lot about cooking, so I probably hack off a little too much of the chicken. Are those white things veins that need to be gone, or fat that is chewy and gross? Or is it just part of the chicken breast? Regardless, the shape of my chicken sometimes isn’t very pretty because of my lack of knowledge.
The chicken before I did a lot of unnecessary choppingChicken after I got rid of the suspicious white stuff
Then, cover both sides with salt and pepper. This is a step I only take because I have watched enough of The Food Network to know that it’s an incredibly professional move.
After that, throw the chicken into the sauce and cover it completely. I mixed all the chicken around a ton so it would be evenly coated. Put it on a baking sheet and cook until the chicken is white throughout. You can Google “How long do you bake chicken?” to find more answers on food safety and such. I don’t want to be responsible for any food poisoning, and honestly I just cook it until it seems ready, then cut into it to be sure that it is no longer pink.
Step 5: While the chicken is cooking, you can take care of the carrots. These are literally the easiest thing to make of all time.
Start by chopping up as many carrots as you’d like. I did four for two people, but they were enormous since they weren’t organic and were likely genetically modified. I don’t typically go this route, but the organic bag was way too big and heavy for me to carry, so here we are with these four foot long vegetables.
Then, let some butter melt in a saucepan. Once again, put in as much as you’d like depending on how fattening you’d like this meal to be. You could also use EVOO or some other ingredient to sauté. I don’t think it really matters.
Toss a bunch of cinnamon and a pinch of salt on the carrots. I love cinnamon, so I don’t think you can really have too much of it.
Cook until soft, stirring on occasion. It takes maybe like, 5-7 minutes?
Step 6: Cook everything until it’s all done, then put it all together on a plate. I don’t really know how else to end this, but I think you are capable enough to finish dinner on your own. I certainly have no idea what I’m doing and was able to execute it alright.
I’d give this recipe an 8/10. I really liked it and am craving it again now that I’m writing about it and looking at all the photos. Minus the ones of the raw chicken — raw meat really grosses me out, which made me almost decide to not include those photos. I think they were necessary to break up the steps and make this an easy read, though.
Please let me know what you think of this if you decide to make it, and if you’d like to see more of this! Since I love to cook now I might be doing a few recipes each month, rather than a million Instagram stories that will disappear.
I’ve been on some great dates lately and am excited to write about them. I’m going to start with a kind of simple one, but it’s easily one of the best dates I’ve ever been on.
One of the guys I’ve been talking to and I made a bet. It’s not really important what it was about, but I was so sure I was right that I agreed the loser would make dinner.
We quickly realized that I was wrong (Girls, don’t worry — most of us are always right, I am just the exception to that rule) so I had to begin planning.
Being the great gentleman he is, my date said that he would go ahead and take care of most of the dinner anyway — all I had to do was make one of the three recipes I can actually cook. I decided to make fajitas, as that appears to by my fanciest dish.
The night turned out to be hilarious. When we got to his place he began preparing the appetizer he had promised. This turned out to be much more complicated than my entire fajita entree. I was such a goof and got too distracted talking to his roommate to help make the first course, so by the time I gravitated back behind the kitchen counter again he was all done and it was time to try the appetizer.
He kept working on cutting up chicken for our meal, so I began prepping the vegetables. My date quickly informed me that I was doing it completely wrong. He was worried that I would cut my finger, as I was holding the pepper in my hand and slicing the knife through to the other side. He was probably right, but I figured I could save us some time and chop the veggies while he finished using the cutting board for his chicken dippers.
I like living on the edge.
I asked him what he thought about my cooking skills after our date and he said,
“When I saw you over by the sink I felt like you’d never cut a pepper before and I was afraid you were going to stab yourself because you weren’t cutting it properly against the counter or on any sort of surface.”
Needless to say, he ended up taking over the vegetable cutting duty too.
As he was doing some of my work for me, I took my marinated chicken out of the fridge and started heating olive oil in a wok. Being the person I am, I forgot about the olive oil until it started making a lot of noise on the stove top. I hurried over with my chicken and before I could think about what I was doing I dumped it all in the burning oil. In hindsight I should have turned down the heat.
The entire dish started yelling at us and popping all over the place. Olive oil exploded onto the stove top, and I giggled as he ran over to fix my mistake. My date calmly and quickly turned the heat down and shook the pan back and forth to slow the burning process.
When asked about this incident, he said,
“I had to rush over and turn the heat down. I figured you probably didn’t realize how hot olive oil can get. You seemed to be kind of inexperienced at working a stove like that and I didn’t want droplets of olive oil to spray off and burn you!”
I definitely had a backseat driver while I was making my entree dish, as he kept waltzing over to add pepper or other little spices to the mix, but I certainly didn’t mind. I’m always game for extra help in the kitchen (And as you can see I kind of need it).
Our meal ended up being fantastic, but the best part was just having so much fun making it. I loved being able to laugh through cooking a ridiculous meal together, and we topped the night off by playing some Super Smash Brothers. I’d say that’s an overall win.
Today’s lesson: I’ve decided it would be really awesome to date a guy who can cook. Eating is one of my favorite activities, but I’m not necessarily gifted in the cooking department. My baking abilities paired with someone’s cooking abilities would make us an unstoppable duo.
Krista Lauren 