Took a bunch of vegetables, steam-cooked them, scooped some onto rice, scooped some chicken onto the vegetables, added Triple Ginger Teriyaki sauce, and boom! Simple, delicious meal! Granted, the cooking and cutting of the chicken and the veggies was long and difficult work, but now I'll have a simple throw-together meal for when I have less energy and/or time! (The rice takes only 8 minutes in my microwave-usable rice cooker. And no, it's not instant rice, it's regular rice.)

Veggies I have in this batch:
Broccoli, green beans, sugar snap peas in their pods, three different colors of bell pepper (red, yellow, and orange), carrots, celery, mushrooms, and yellow squash (basically a yellow zucchini).

Later I might add a can of baby corn and a can of water chestnuts. And I have a bottle of orange sauce for when the triple ginger runs out.

So yeah there's another thing: you could buy canned veggies and pre-cut chicken and save time and effort.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1345210.html
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Back on the first, my birthday, my friend kengr took me to Chang's Mongolian Grill for the first time ever. A bonus was that because it was my birthday, I got my meal free!

Chang's Mongolian Grill is this awesome Chinese buffet place where they have the raw ingredients (including frozen meat slices) on a buffet, you get what you want in one or two bowls, including sauce, and you take it over to this huge round grill thing where the chefs cook it up for you and hand the finished product back to you. And it's an all-you-can-eat buffet, so if you're willing to stand around waiting for your turn to have your food cooked, then you can go up as many times as you're able (in theory; they might cut you off if you eat too much).

What's more, the food is AMAZING!! I tried a bunch of different ingredient and sauce combos, and nothing tasted bad or even meh, it was all "HOLY HELL MY TASTE BUDS ARE GOING TO EXPLODE WITH PLEASURE!" I think I went up four times, and when I was done I was stuffed like a turducken.

It's a bit spendy, but man, for food that great, and that much of it, it's worth the price! But definitely for special occasions.

I loved the food and the service so much I left a note of praise, with TWO SIDES! I never leave notes of praise! I usually just tip. But this place was worth tipping PLUS telling them in words and pictures how awesome they are.

Here's the note, under the cut:

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If you're blind, or just can't read my chicken scratches, here's the transcript:

First side:

This place is great! Delicious food, awesome chefs, friendly wait staff. Definetely will come back again when I can! - Fay [picture of a smiley face sun licking its lips, a couple heart shapes, and a peace sign] More on other side. --->

Second side:

Dear Chefs, You're awesome! Your job must be so difficult, but you make it look almost easy! And you make it all delicious! Continue being amazing!!! - Fay [picture of a smiley face grinning and holding its arms out.]

Also for my birthday, Brooke/kengr got me a pair of headphones and a bluetooth speaker thing that has powerful friggin sound!

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1344101.html
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The other day I was looking at the Greek salad in the deli section of Albertson's with a look of longing, because my IBS doesn't let me have it anymore. For one thing, the feta cheese is a no-no. So are onions.

Then it occurred to me, I could make my own version of a Greek salad. So I cut up some cucumber, green bell pepper, carrots, and black olives. I cut up mushrooms and cooked them. When they were cool, I poured shiitake mushroom dressing over it and mixed it up, then let it chill in the fridge. Yummy!

I think I will be adding zucchini next time. Definetely will add tomatoes and kalamata olives. Maybe even a little spinach. And I want to try a small batch with some of the Daiya cheese, see how that tastes.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1341444.html
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Look at all these yummy dandelion roots I got while weeding the garden! Couldn't use the leaves because they were black with aphids, but roots are a good consolation prize.
( Pic under the cut.Collapse )

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So I found recently - thanks to the food bank and then a trip to Winco earlier in the month - that chicken thighs are cheaper than breasts, and no more difficult than breasts to cut. Easier, in fact, because parts of them just kind of fall off when you push on them. They also taste better, too, IMHO. So I've been getting those instead.

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Eating only what you can afford and/or get from food boxes when you're poor is sucky, but sometimes it has interesting results. The last few days, I've been enjoying something I tossed together. I made some rice with mushrooms and cut-up carrot tops from some organic carrots I got from the food boxes. Then I added some carrots and hamburger, and soy sauce. Simple, balanced, tasty.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1338063.html
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At our apartment building, me and my friend Brooke have a garden plot. And since chemicals aren't allowed in the gardens, and the plots are separate from one another, the dandelions that grow wild there during the winter (yeah, winter in Portland is big on rain and not very big on ice or snow) are perfectly safe to eat. (Ah yes, dandelions, poor man's salad. But don't eat them if the soil they're in is chemically treated.) So dandelion leaves and sometimes roots in stews or the leaves in salads is something we do.

This year, the specific species/sub-species/mutation of dandelions growing there are a kind that grows DOZENS of leaves each, in this pattern where most of the leaves are fanned out along the ground like a green sun with myriad rays. I must have cut at least a couple dozen leaves off each one and didn't even get a third of the leaves growing on them! Salad and soups for days!

Also found out that not only are the leaves and roots edible, so are the flowers. I'm wondering if that includes the stems of the flowers, too? I wonder because when I was a kid, I had a habit of peeling apart dandelion flower stems and licking the bitter white fluid inside, and I never got sick from it. (Don't worry, we never lived anywhere with chemically treated lawns.)

There’s these other “weeds” called plantains that are edible too (as well as having medicinal properties), but I haven’t seen any of those in the garden plot yet this year.

Interestingly, you can buy seeds of a large plantain cultivar on Amazon: Here.

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Got some spinach wrap thingies the other day, they’re like green tortillas. They're huge, and I got them because I figured they'd be lower in carbs. Which they are. One of them has 58 calories, and at first I was thinking "Wow, that's a lot." But one slice of my favorite bread, "Great Seed" bread, has 110 calories. So wow, I can have two wrap sandwiches for 1/4th the calories of a single sandwich using regular bread. Holy moley!

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Got some ginger powder at Winco yesterday. I've been putting it in my soup. Chicken soup with ginger in it is AMAZING! Especially since ginger is the only really spicy spice I can have that doesn't bother my IBS. (I pretty much only use basil and oregano and ginger in stuff.)

Oh, and tried some shitake mushrooms. They're more expensive, because I only got like less than a dozen and that cost the same as three times as many crimini mushrooms, but shitake mushrooms might be good to get in small amounts in future. I like their taste, texture, and color better than crimini mushrooms. Also, they cook faster.

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Apparently, malt vinegar soaked into bread makes a great cure for upset stomach. This is amazing news, because for years now, I've had to just suffer when I got upset stomach, because nothing would settle it, ever since Pepto Bismol stopped being able to do it. (Why my body doesn't respond to Pepto Bismol anymore, I dunno.)

Only down side to this is I kinda have to have something to cleanse my palate between bites, because malt vinegar soaked in bread is intensely strong, if you have several in a row.

This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1312462.html
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