Tag: food

A favorite food that I need to restrain myself around

Taylor Burian3 Comments

What is a food you will always overeat, no matter what?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

Yesterday I took a peek at what my prompt for today would be, and seeing this one made me pause and think about a larger problem I have.

I just love food in general! I have bad habits about sometimes skipping meals so I can eat a larger meal later, and then I run into problems like overeating because I forget how many calories some foods can have, or their macro nutrient balance.

However, taking a more focused look at what foods I like and which ones I really do overeat every single time? It’s probably ice cream.

See, I can’t grab a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from the store and just eat the recommended serving size. I will, without fail, eat the entire pint in a single sitting. In fact, I bought two pints of their ice cream before I went on my vacation, and they sat in the freezer for a week waiting for me. Want to know what happened? I ate them both within 24 hours of each other. One at about midnight on Christmas Eve, and the other the evening of Christmas. One of those pints, according the nutrition label, is 1,210 calories for the whole container. And I demolished it while playing Phasmophobia with my family.

Granted, this happens when I buy my own ice cream from the grocery store, but if I were out and about doing things like hanging out with friends or family and we went out to eat? I wouldn’t be getting ice cream for dessert every single time. In fact, I rarely order dessert at all when I go out to eat, so it really is just a problem for when I decide to buy a pint of ice cream to stow away in the freezer.

Ice cream in a cup

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What is the best vehicle for ice cream: cone, cup, or popsicle? The other two will no longer be offered in this world.

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

Sorry, everyone, but unfortunately I’m in the bowl camp. Which means my vote is going towards the “cup” as the best vehicle for ice cream.

Cones get too messy, are never consistent in their flavor or quality, and most people don’t eat them anyway (from what I’ve seen, anyways). And popsicles? Those can be just as messy and disastrous.

So, in my humble opinion, cups all the way.

A food I like that others do not

Taylor Burian1 Comment

What is a food you like that many people don’t like?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

Honestly, I don’t really know! I can’t recall ever really being in a situation where I discovered that a food a liked is one that many people don’t. I could probably pick out instances of time where I learned that one particular friend disliked something I enjoyed eating.

Specifically, anything flavored vanilla, like ice cream. I have this one friend who thinks that, by itself, vanilla is not a flavor, and so doesn’t like anything that is just plain vanilla. Now, to be clear on my end, I like vanilla ice cream well enough, even if I don’t go out of my way to eat it regularly (because vanilla is boring) but to my friend’s credit, their argument is that vanilla is often used as a base or enhancer for other flavors and therefore isn’t itself a legitimate flavor (so it’s almost kind of like salt in that regard, that’s my interpretation of the situation, at least.)

Give me the meat sweats

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What are your feelings about eating meat?

First off, I don’t intend for this post to offend anyone that is not a meat eater, but simply put, I love meat.

That being said, I’m also very basic about it. Beef? Absolutely, but I don’t go for things like cabeza or lingua. I keep it limited to steaks and ground beef. Same for chicken and pork. No neck or gizzards, nor trotters or anything like that.

I like fish from time to time, as well, but in that realm it’s typically shrimp.

A few years ago there was a local smoked barbecue food truck that opened up a brick and mortar storefront where they offered a lunch buffet. I loved going there once or twice a week and putting myself into a meaty, sweaty food coma. I think they still operate in the food truck style of business but they moved down to Texas and don’t come back this way often. I miss their brisket.

Family specialties for the holidays

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Daily writing prompt
Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?
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My family has, for a very long time, stuck with more “traditional” holiday meal planning and dishes. Thanksgiving and Christmas are typically turkey’s with stuffing/dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, things like that. There have been a couple of times in the last ten years where we opted for ordering a catered meal that a local/regional grocery store chain offers for the holiday’s and we have ordered prime rib, but this was primarily to reduce the strain on the family trying to coordinate meal planning and expedite cooking so that we could be more efficient with spending time with my stepmom (may she rest in peace) when she was fighting cancer. Anyways, none of these are really “special” dishes.

There have been rare occasions where we opted to make our family recipe of töltött káposzta (Hungarian stuffed cabbage, there are tons of recipes out there with variations, so I won’t go turning this into a recipe blog) but it is more likely that we cook that outside the holiday time frame. So, I can’t really say with any certainty that we have any special dishes we make for the holiday’s.

Details everywhere

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What details of your life could you pay more attention to?

Among all the details a person can monitor in their life, sometimes I wish it were easy to stick to things that require tedious and consistent tracking, and to be more specific, what I eat.

I’ve used different apps to log my food intake so I can have a rough idea of how much I’m eating versus how much energy I put out. (Currently I’m using “Lose It!” to track my calories.) And sometimes I do good at tracking meticulously every single day, while other times I’ll use it for a day or two, maybe a week, and then fall off the wagon again.

The reason I wish I paid more attention to these details is because these food tracking apps are getting more sophisticated, and the more people that use them the better they get. There is a plethora of data to be found in them, although sometimes it’s behind a paywall. Calories. Nutrients. Macros. Fasting windows. Eating periods. There are details in there that take a bit to notice, but also require some out of the box thinking for the normal person and a little extra effort. What am I eating and when? How did it make me feel? Is there a pattern? If I eat specific things at specific times on a routine enough frequency, is there an explanation?

This is just an example of one thing I could do to pay more attention to the details, but it’s a good way of looking at things in other areas. Reading between the lines, so to speak, to figure out the causal relations between everyday choices and actions.

It just takes a lot of work.

Unintentional Mochi

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Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

I’ll be honest, it took me a bit to think through this prompt. I, personally, alone, have not had any baking or cooking fails that I would count as “epic”.

I do, however, have one with my siblings for a family holiday meal.

Some brief background: while my brother has not been diagnosed (to my knowledge) with any sort of gluten sensitivity, he has noted that he feels better when he doesn’t have any gluten products and made the choice to go gluten free.

So, every family meal we have typically has some gluten free component, which in general is easier than you think. This has been going on for several years at this point and is part of my family’s new normal.

One Thanksgiving my sister and I were trying to follow an instant pot mac n cheese recipe using gluten free rice-based macaroni. She said she had made it before, and I had no reason to doubt her, so I followed her lead.

We measured everything out, and placed the pasta and liquids (I think it was a combination of water and milk, but I could be misremembering the milk part) into the instant pot. She hit some buttons, started the timer, and went to work on some other dishes while we waited.

It can’t have been more than 10 minutes, MAYBE 15 at the most, and the noodles should have been done and ready for us to add the sauce ingredients. Unfortunately, we  made a mistake somewhere, and when my sister went to vent the instant pot it started spitting a milky liquid (maybe that’s why I thought milk was involved) which caused us to panic a little and carefully throw a towel over it to prevent the hot liquid from getting everywhere.

As soon as the spitting stopped, we opened the lid. The pasta was still swimming in water. My sister said it should be fine and that we just needed to drain them, so she got a large spoon to try and get some out to check that the noodles were cooked appropriately before moving to the sink. To our horrible surprise we found that the noodles basically collapsed and rapidly turned into a mush. My sister quickly dug in to see if she could find any noodles that survived, but she only made it worse. She mixed the rice pasta macaroni too much, which in its current state didn’t take much at all, and the whole thing turned into a hot, sticky, homogeneous mass.

We looked at each other in mild shock and disbelief before we started laughing at the absolute disaster. We immediately wrote it off as a failure and played with it for a couple seconds. I tried poking it with my finger and it was almost like Oobleck the way it stuck to me.

As it cooled down and solidified more, I noticed the change in firmness and bounciness was almost like what I had seen in those videos of people making mochi. Then it dawned on me why. Mochi is made with rice flour, and as I had mentioned earlier the box of gluten free pasta was rice based.

We more or less made instant pot mochi.

Burritos and more

Taylor Burian1 Comment

What are your favorite types of foods?

I’m a sucker for a good burrito. Not the frozen microwavable kinds you get from the store that are usually like 50% tortilla because they don’t have a lot of filling. I’m talking about the kind that risks falling apart or exploding.

They don’t have to be filled with anything crazy. Simple fillings like ground beef and cheese, carnitas and guac, or shredded chicken. As long as those simple fillings are done well and taste great then I’m good, however, I do enjoy a good burrito with interesting fillings like brisket and mac n cheese (again, provided they’re done well.)

Burgers fall into this same general area. With the right toppings/fixings, they’re good. Just don’t go overboard and do that stupid “cheese bomb” shit. I might be getting a little messy from eating a good burger, but I don’t want one that is intentionally made to not be eaten with my hands unless it has no bun (I’ve tried the bunless option at Five Guys before. Not the lettuce wrapped, it’s literally just all your toppings and patties in a foil tray. Makes for a good “salad” of sorts!)

Really, though, anything that is so highly customizable is good in my book.

Food for comfort

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What’s your go-to comfort food?

First off, what is “comfort food”? According to 15 seconds of research on the old Googles, it’s about consolation, nostalgia, and/or feeling sentimental.

On the thought of consolation, I don’t really feel like there is any that qualifies as comfort food because I usually just eat whatever I want regardless.

For nostalgia, though, that’s a different story.

Turkey legs from the Renaissance Festival were something we always looked forward to whenever my family went.

Funnel cakes with only a dusting of powdered sugar from one of the food stalls at the annual city parade and festival in my home town.

Those are probably the best examples I have, because they’re so heavily tied to those events in my memories, and I don’t get to eat them all too often these days.

Making delicious food

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What foods would you like to make?

So many things.

Cookies, cakes, brownies, ice cream.

Casseroles of so many kinds.

Pot roast and veggies, steak and potatoes.

Burgers with interesting toppings. Home made buns, too!

I really could go on and on about the many different foods I would like to make. The most important one right now is Red Beans and Rice, because I picked up most of the ingredients already. I think I’ll make that tomorrow.

I also really want to make pretzels and beer cheese dip because we’ve had a can of Guinness in the fridge for a while leftover from the time my roommate made something for St. Patrick’s Day back in March.

Honestly, I just need to get back in the kitchen a lot more often.