Category: Uncategorized

Fried Tofu

March 20th, 2025

I am not an expert at cooking tofu. I could probably be better if I had a tofu press (did you know you had to press your tofu?) I usually just by the extra firm, drain it and give it a little squeeze. This is…passable. I think the moisture is hard when it comes to searing. However, for scrambles (think for stir fry) it gets the job done.

Last night, after multiple videos over the past few weeks, I decided I would try to fry it. Not deep fry, just in a little bit of avocado oil in the pan. I squeezed out as much liquid as I could and did a light coating in cornstarch, then once my oil was heated up, plopped in my pieces. But not too many as I didn’t want to overcrowd my pan.

And, wow! I did it! The first couple of pieces stuck a bit, but I got my spatula out and scraped them around and then gave everyone a little flip. *SZZZZZZZZZLLLLEE* baby. They were crispy. And not oily.

Do you want to know what I served it with? A very yummy butter chicken sauce. They lost a little bit of their crunch, but they did not lose their shape and that was all that mattered.

You know what else made this dish delicious? Instead of rice, I made mashed potatoes. OMG. Game changer. Not saying I’ll make my curry and tikka masala with mashed potatoes in the future all the time, but I won’t think twice about it. They were butter and fluffy. I enjoy making my mashed potatoes with the Yukon Gold. I get a multi-pound bag at the store and just cook up a handful at a time. Perfect.

Unfortunately, I did not take any photos of this food fusion meal for you to feast your eyes on. I find it difficult to make some foods look appetizing through the phone. You will just have to take my word for it.

XOXO, potato girl
Smash (or Pass)

January 20th, 2025

Now you’re probably wondering from my last post, WHY would you take the time to make your own tortillas?

LOL sorry, all I could think about was someone saying it just like this scene from Gilmore Girls. Any fans? Yes? No? At least go find this episode so you know how you’re supposed to ask me, “Why did you make your own tortillas?”

BECAUSE! 1) I had to redeem myself from attempt #1, obviously, and 2) because I knew I could if I just gave myself the time to do it. Heck, if I can make chocolate babka buns, I think I can manage some measly tortillas.

Now, do you want to know what I made them for? Of course you do! Hint: there’s a clue in the title.

SMASHED BURGER TACOS!!

Beautiful plating of recreated Smash Burger Tacos

Okay, where do I begin? Other than this is the only picture I have of this meal (typical). Looks pretty good, right? One would even say reality met expectations maybe?

So here’s the backstory: A few weeks ago I started going through my backlog of magazines to cut up for collaging (a completely different arts and crafts story for another time); well, I decided I would also cut out the recipes I had previously saved. Reader, I had pretty much saved all the recipes, so a lot of these magazines are pretty bare-bones. Anyway, now I have a STACK of recipes. I’m talking about appetizers, dinners, desserts, and drinks. Too many to count.

Well, for another project (don’t worry, I’m getting there), it was a poetry prompt to create alternative New Year’s resolutions. Okay, bet. I decided that I was going to take 5 new recipes that I cut out from my magazines and actually recreate them!! So far we are two weeks down, and I have some yummy new recipes that I cannot wait to add to my rotation.

Circling back, now here we are with my smash burger tacos! As you can tell in the photo, there is a magazine beside my recreated dish. Not all of my recipes I cut out have their photos, or if they do, they are not on the same page (*cough cough* Better Homes & Gardens with their mini recipe cookbook). So far I have made recipes from Real Simple and Bon Appetit.

Now I did stand at the little tortilla stand and debated whether or not I wanted to buy tortillas. Why are there so many types of tortillas? So instead of debating any further with myself, I made the decision to make them.

And well, we know how that went 🙂

Now, caveat with the burger tacos. Firstly, I am now 1-year cow-free (*mostly, except I still have beef bouillon paste in my fridge that I have to use up, and that’s super rare, AND I still eat tons of cheese). So I used ground turkey. Couldn’t even tell a difference personally, because you mix the meat with a full packet of taco seasoning. Secondly, this version is definitely more Mexican-style than American-style. There are, of course, other versions of smash burger tacos out there that play up the American burger.

As I’ve said, I’ve got some more recipes that I’ve recreated. My mom gets a new text every evening I do them, aptly named Expectation v. Reality. Of course, these would probably look a little better if I were a food photographer, but alas, I have too many other hobbies. Maybe I’ll do another post where I talk about those more in-depth instead of just the brief photo op they get over on Instagram.

Stay hungry!
xoxo, Gilmore Girl
Rolling With It

January 3rd, 2025

Happy New Year!

Let’s talk about everything I made in the last two weeks of 2024 instead of my lofty goals for 2025.

I made these Rosemary Potato Rolls from King Arthur twice. The first time was to go with my Christmas Eve lasagna. The inspiration was the recipe on the back of the potato flour bag. And wow, wow, wow, they were so good. Hence making them twice. I made them again for Friendsmas. The pro move there was to slice them open (still warm, of course), put a piece of brie and prosciutto inside, and add a drizzle of hot honey. And MAN! You are in business. The business of deliciousness.

Potato Rosemary Rolls straight from the oven

Let me briefly tell you about this lasagna, even though this post is cutely named “Rolling with it”. I got this lasagna recipe from a magazine. It uses no ricotta, which is great, because I invited my cousin over, and she does not like ricotta at all. Instead, it uses cottage cheese! Now, of course, me being me, I had to tweak it a bit. The original recipe just called for regular cottage cheese, but that wouldn’t fly, so I seasoned it with salt, pepper, and fresh dried basil. And instead of my cottage cheese going in cold, I warmed it up a bit in the microwave so it got a little frothy and melty.

And speaking of melty, those pools on top? Slices of mozzarella! Not only were they on top of the lasagna, but also in the middle! Don’t worry; there was enough of everything leftover. I made a tiny lasagna to put up in the freezer.

A bowl of rolls beside a pan of yummy lasagna

Now traditionally, I make a french toast casserole for Christmas Day, but there was a slight change of plans this year so I was unable to do that. Never fear, dear readers. I made up for it because after Christmas I made King Arthur’s recipe bake of the week features for Dec: Chocolate Babka Buns. OMG.

Please look at this chocolate perfection. It was a bit of a process, but it was so worth it. We ate them for 3 days straight.

Singular Babka Bun

I was smart and made the dough the day before, and then the day of, I rolled it out, filled it, shaped it, cut it, and waited forever before I could eat it. Making the dough ahead of time did help though. I will say it was maybe a tad tight while I was kneading it in the mixer and probably could’ve done with a pinch more milk. But overall they ended up rolling out just fine.

Rolled, but unbaked Babka Buns

I mean, you can’t even tell there were any issues! Look at those swirls!! Take that bakery cinnamon rolls!! I am a true wunderkind at rolling. And do you want to know what makes them so shiny? It’s a delicious sugary glaze that’s been infused with orange zest. DROOL. You have the hint of orange with the chocolate, plus the filling. OMG. Maybe I should make them again this weekend…

Baked and Glazed Babka Buns

So here is where I should probably maybe potentially set myself some goals for the new year, but as we are aware, I am not too good at doing that. So instead, I’m just going to hope for the best, and I will see you when I see you. I will say that I am feeling pretty confident with the writing and the baking, and I may or may not have added a few more arts and crafts and hobbies to my repertoire that I could blog about. I am brimming with creation.

2025 is for the arts people!!!
XOXO, gossip girl
Oops, I did it again

November 22nd, 2024

Look, I played with your heart in letting you think I would maintain this blog throughout the year. And I’m sorry I failed you. Again. But I’m feeling better about some things. I’m back to writing on the side—true writing, not blog writing (sorry to blog writers; this is real writing). So I think I feel ~okay~ enough to get back into this. And maybe dial it down with the need to try and tell you about everything going on with the world that I’m interested in. Maybe.

So let’s start with bread. And Brad! True to my word, I have been making bread for my husband’s lunch every week. I don’t do it every Sunday, but it does get done. There was only one week I didn’t do it, and that is because I was on family vacation for two weeks while he stayed home to work. Sorry for him.

Anyways, I’ve tried a few different sandwich loaf recipes. Now I’m making a Subway-style Italian loaf. So good. At some point I want to make ciabatta. I think that would be good.

For the upcoming holidays, though, I have set myself up to bake sourdough loaves for everyone. Now, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve made sourdough loaves. Because it got to be too much bread for the both of us (insane, I know. Too much bread? never heard of it.) So I stopped making the sourdough loaves, and wow, that was a muscle that needed to be worked.

I threw away 3 loaves before I ended up with these gorgeous two.

Two sourdough loaves. On the left is curry raisin and on the right is plain

Please don’t ask for pictures of the bad ones. I’ll tell you what went wrong. Or at least what I believe went wrong. I for sure know the last two were overproofed. They went slack and liquidy, and no amount of added flour and handling was going to fix it. I should’ve turned them into focaccia instead of forcing them into loaves. Please, if you decide to bulk ferment in your oven with the light on, do not do it for long periods of time or don’t do it at all if you don’t know the temperature. IT IS WARMER THAN YOU THINK!

For the first loaf, I think it was too hydrated, and I’m just not confident in dealing with that. Also, like I said, I had not been baking sourdough loaves consistently, so Brad could’ve been sluggish… Think of it like your first pancake. It was about the same in flatness. Except super stodgy.

Oh well, let’s hope these two are as pretty on the inside as they are on the outside because they are going far away from me, and it’s rude to cut into people’s gifts. While I wait, I have two new doughs that are in the middle of stretch and folds and I hope they will also turn out better. I definitely have a better feel for the dough as I remember what I’m supposed to be looking for. Feeling for? You understand. If not, I’m working on typing up a recipe for the curry raisin for some friends, and you’re in luck because I’m going to share it here. For all 22 of you (I think one of them is me).

So TTFN my fellow friends. I will chat with you soon!

XOXO, gossip girl
I am not a recipe creator

February 19th, 2024

but I sure am a recipe modifier. Which is super easy to do when it comes to cooking. I am often in the kitchen at dinner time, combining more than one recipe or adding a little pizazz. I guess in some circles this could be considered a creator, but I am not testing these recipes, and I could not recreate them because I am not usually writing them down, which bites me in the butt later if it comes out really well. However, usually I can retrace my steps and recreate something similar. But that is the joy of cooking! It’s always different, and it’s not always enjoyable, but it’s almost always fun to experiment and learn. Plus, you get better with practice and learn how different seasonings, herbs, and additions will make your food taste better. Or bitter if you’re not too careful.

Now this is something that is less easy to do when it comes to baking—remember our kitchen scale? Our loyal friend through and through, making sure we don’t have too much flour and we don’t have a million dishes to wash. Baking is definitely more of a science, and if certain ingredients are lacking or in excess, your bakes will either turn out flat, explode, be rubbery, or maybe even be a mixture of all three! Anyone can bake if they know how to read a recipe. However, I will admit, some individuals definitely have a flare for baking that others do not, which makes it seem like it is truly magic. One of those comes with practice. Two, that comes with NO FEAR OF FAILURE! Do I judge all my bakes? Of course. But it doesn’t stop me from trying. I worked at a bakery, and I still made many mistakes. Both there and at home. Need I remind you of the most recent bread I made, where I said it immediately got thrown into the bin? I’m still trying to find a way to make gluten-free sandwich bread that is enjoyable to eat and easy to make. I am also trying to find a way to make sourdough bread that is soft and not dense on the inside. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

As they say, the world is your oyster. Or, in this case, the kitchen. With the internet full of pearls.
Back to Brad

January 8th, 2024
So my first official bake back into sourdough were crackers, unfortunately not pictured because they are ugly, but also because I didn’t think about it. Instead, you can look at the second official bake which were these lovely, albeit slightly flat biscuits.

We had them with some homemade apple butter that I had made late last year. Let me tell you that apple butter was delicious—not too sweet and perfectly spiced. I made it with Arkansas black apples, a not-well-known variety, that are very crisp and slightly tart, but if you wait long enough, you can make great apple butter. I had a little over 2.5 pounds of apples, and if you have never made apple butter before, just know it’s an all-day affair of cooking, and you don’t get a lot out of it. But boy, is it really worth it? I had to make two quart jars—one for me and one to give to a friend. This was totally fine because I really didn’t want to get into the whole business of canning a whole batch of apple butter.

Brad IV showing us how he would win his 5th grade science fair if given the opportunity

Anyways, I had mentioned in my New Year’s post that I was throwing caution to the wind with Brad IV, and if you look above, this is day 8, and we are surely doing something right compared to my last journey with Brad III. Some of the new things I’m trying this time around are:
- I did not discard ANYTHING the first 5 days. Usually you feed, you discard, you feed, you discard—rinse and repeat. This time, I just fed, fed, and fed.
- the type of flour I’m feeding with is Einkorn All-Purpose Flour. I’m sure, if you recall, I strive to be gluten-free. I am not diagnosed as celiac, so I can tolerate limited gluten, and I have found that this flour does not bother me, especially when it comes to feeding my sourdough. Now, when I do full-on baking, I still use gluten-free flour (I also just recently came across King Arthur Gluten Free Bread Flour! which may or may not have caused Brad IV’s explosive episode last night in the oven…)
- bringing me to my next point: keeping my sourdough baby in the oven at night after it cools from dinner. It’s winter time here, and it’s way too chilly in the house, so he’s been hanging in the oven at night, and that has helped tremendously.
- really paying attention to my ratio when I feed! This is where a kitchen scale is super important. I use this with feeding my sourdough and baking recipes and it’s just more accurate than regular cup measurement methods (especially if you are using international recipes!)
Now some other things that I have considered doing include double-feeding during the day and/or supplementing my flour with rye flour for extra ‘protein’ if it seems like my starter is looking a little “sluggish”. As of right now, it looks like I won’t be needing to do that, but I will be keeping those tips in my back pocket, especially as I will be sticking Brad IV in the fridge for a day or so before I can feed him and use him again.

Here’s to putting the DO in sourDOugh!
New Year, New Brad

January 7th, 2024
I won’t even go into the fact that I didn’t even blog at all last year, so I’ll hit the highlights:
- Quit my job at the bakery for a better job that’s more in line with what I went to school for and pays more!
- Went on my second cruise and got to drink a lot, eat some yummy food, hold a sloth, bring back some great tequila (one of which is hibiscus flavored, yum)
- Unfortunately, lost a lot of grandparents – I would rather not get into the details, but this did impact my life so it is in this list
- Got married! I had a small, intimate elopement style wedding in the Blue Ridge Mountains and it was picturesque and truly right out of a fairytale
- And lastly, if you couldn’t have guessed based on this title, say hello to Brad the IV
Brad IV, day 1

I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind and be a little more silly and throw out some rules that I previously did, which must be working because look at him today!

Brad IV, day 7

Anyways, I am hoping this year I’ll be a little more consistent and go back to blogging like before bringing you a little bit of art, a little bit of history, and a little bit of food –

Some would even say, a little bit of everything.
How To Make Friends – As an Adult

September 19th, 2022

Okay, say you’re in your mid-to-late twenties, no longer in school and you don’t like your coworkers (mixing friends with business isn’t always the greatest of ideas), but you’re feeling a little lonely, especially on Monday nights when your partner is playing online games with his friends. What do you do with yourself? Sure you could take up knitting, use the time to read, and maybe work on your blog, but what if you actually want to see people? Not only see people but actually, talk to them about things you both find something exciting and fun.

In school, most of your friendships are based on location and seeing them every day. This is a great and easy way to make friends. Some of these friendships even last after school is over and you don’t see them every day anymore. So how about making new friends when not in this situation? Maybe you see them sort of every day because they live in your apartment complex, but you don’t know if you would actually get along and you don’t want to be weird and just leave a note. Right? WRONG!

The most important thing when it comes to making new friends is to put yourself out there. You find one thing you might have in common, and you capitalize on that. The worst they can do is say no. Then you just nod, say okay, and move on.

If you want a friend IRL – not one you meet in your super niche online chat – you have to lean into what you like and just talk about it. Starting up a new friendship is just like dating, except you don’t have to think about if you should kiss goodbye on the first date. You ask questions to get to know each other, you laugh and smile when you’re having a good time, and you listen to what they have to say. Afterward, be honest with yourself. Is this someone I could spend my free time with? Is this someone I can invite out to brunch with? Are they nice? Would my partner like them and not be upset if they came home and found us watching tv and drinking wine? This is the same sort of process you go through with school, you are just a little more in touch with yourself.

By this point in your life, you are relatively set in your ways. Don’t be afraid to be yourself.
Weekly Update #2

September 7th, 2022

This is gonna be quick and wonky as I’m already in bed and doing this on mobile.

Okay I’m a little later than I wanted to be writing this, but my schedule has changed around due to my new part-time job. You are officially following a baker! There was a rumor that one of our local bakeries needed a part time person, I walked in and asked about it, a two-hour “interview” and couple weeks later and I started on Tuesday! So now I’m waking up at 4:30 every morning and it is a big adjustment. Today I got off at 10am and after soaking my feet in the tub (new shoes + standing for hours on end = sore feet), I decided I needed a nap!

So with that, my schedule is a little wonky and I’m having to shift my motivations around. I’m honestly surprised I was up to doing some household chores. However I did not have the energy to even think about making dinner (even though I’ve been trying to be good about sticking with a meal plan), plus the weather has been super icky, so the fiancé and I ordered delivery; it was delicious and well worth it. I don’t know what my week to week schedule will be like, but I’m looking forward to finding my groove.

So what’s on the agenda this week??

What I’m Reading:

(Still) A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J Mass

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

Okay that’s all I can think of for now; hoping to post something more substantial tomorrow.

TTYL!
TGIF!

September 2nd, 2022

A new leaf emerges on my angel wings plant!

I, like most millennials during the pandemic, love houseplants. To be fair, I loved houseplants before the pandemic, but there are a lot more people now who got into the houseplant game. Pictured above is my angel wings, proudly sporting a new leaf (this was very much not there yesterday before I watered it unless I was not paying attention). Something funny about that angel wings plant, I did not plant it. It shares a pot with some begonias that were transplanted from my front garden (that originally started as three tiny leaves). The angel wings were not in my front garden, nor did my neighbors have angel wings, that I could tell. They just, showed up one day and have been growing ever since. Truly a spectacular sight and I’m even more in love with them because I love elephant ears and I have never seen any that look like these. Fun fact about this plant, it is actually poisonous to both humans and animals alike and should not be confused with the state fair food of the same name. (A side note to this fun fact, elephant ear is grown as a food crop in Hawaii (and in southeast Asia) and poi is made from the tubers – it just needs to be cooked first!)

A fun friend (Anole) sitting on a begonia leaf, hidden by the angel wings.

Apparently, I am not the only one who enjoys the plant as I came outside to find a friend. This is not the first anole to pop up outside my door. In our previous residence, there were two different anoles that liked to hang out in between the front door and screen door (and even my wreaths much to my surprise). You probably want to know how I could tell it was two different Anoles and that is because one of them had two tails!
Anoles, part of the suborder Iguania and family Dactyloidae, are actually native to the Americas with more than 425 species! They are really cool because they change color like most lizards depending on if they are cold or hot and can voluntarily break off their tail to escape predators.
*A funny story: there is a small running joke between our group of friends that Draco is the fearless lizard leader and the reason why we keep finding Anoles around the outside of the house is that they know we have their leader inside.*

I hope you’ve had a wonderful Friday and a great start to the long weekend (for those that get Labor Day off in the US).

Hasta Manana, Iguana!