Dinner

Happy Lunar New Year!

~ stephzuniga ~ Leave a comment

Gong xi fa cai.

It’s the Year of the Fire Horse which is meant to be amazing and life changing and all sorts of other things!  A year of transformation, fire, speed, inspiration, breakthroughs and travel.

I say BRING IT ON!  Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, or maybe I’ve just been watching too many instagram reels but I’m excited for the year of the Fire Horse.  I probably should have paid more attention to what I was supposed to do before the New Year and on New Year’s Day, but hopefully the year will be fully of luck, fortune, and all good things!  

One thing I wanted to do before the Year of the Horse is to get rid of things I didn’t need.  It didn’t really work, but a baby step was to try a cookie recipe which had literally been on a browser tab for a year.  No idea what I was saving it for, but I decided to try the recipe and close the tab.  Well, spoiler alert.  I should have closed that tab a long long time ago, the cookies were not good.  They were a copycat recipe of my all-time favourite American supermarket cookies, Soft Batch Cookies.  They used to come in a red bag and were the best cookies around. So so so good.  These cookies, these imposter/copycat cookies are not good.  At all.  In fact, I’m tempted to put them in the bin.  Not sure, we’ll see.

In contrast, the other cookies I made, 5 Spice Crackle Cookies  in honor of Lunar New Year were some of the best I’ve ever made. These are on par with the Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies.   So so spicy and good!  10/10 no notes!

Another recipe that I wanted to “close the tab” on was a Dark and Stormy Braised Pot Roast. I NEVER make pot roast, and I NEVER would have thought to make pot roast in the summer – It was in the oven for 4 hours.  But this recipe had been on my mind for a long time.  It didn’t disappoint.   The flavours were amazing.. And the meat was so tender.  It was a recipe the whole family loved and one I’ll definitely do again!

So that’s how we’re starting the Lunar New Year- with a big win and a big fail!  Hopefully I’m getting rid of the things that no longer serve me from the past, but also keeping the lessons learned and looking forward!

What we ate this week…

~ stephzuniga ~ Leave a comment

As promised in last week’s post, we did in fact eat Glazed Pork Cutlets with Japanese Slaw, the BLT Salad and Baked Chicken Taquitos from I Heart Naptime Cookbook…and Steak with leftover Bearnaise Sauce.   The salad was definitely the week’s winner!  

BUT the surprise was that I made Chrissy Teigan’s internet famous banana bread thanks to the child’s sudden dislike of bananas in his lunch.

Believe me, this banana bread is more cake than bread but it 100% lives up to its hype.  I don’t know if I’ve written about it before but honestly, walk, do not run to the shops to buy bananas and then wait all week for them to ripen so that you can make this bread/cake.  It is the reason I bring back Vanilla Jell-o Pudding Mix back from the US every time I go.  So good.  So so good. If you’re looking for a reason to eat cake for breakfast, this is 100% it.

Oh, and lest you think I was exaggerating about Burgerhead and Butter were last week, Concrete Playground published a list and they were both on it!


This week, we’re having Sweet Pork Hawaiian Haystacks (also from I Heart Naptime), Gazpacho with the leftover croutons from last week’s BLT Salad, standard Old El Paso taco kit tacos for Taco Tuesday, and All Day Noodles with Fried Egg and Furikake.

It will be a pretty easy cooking week since I’ll be in the office most days. The haystacks are made using slow cooked pulled pork and the other meals are pretty quick and easy too!

Oh- and the smallest member of our household won his very first Tennis Tournament! One more trophy for the trophy cabinet!

An unexpected benefit…

Aside ~ ~ stephzuniga ~ 4 Comments

So far, this little experiment is not only fun but is already yielding unexpected benefits:

1) An excuse to catch up with friends for dinner– did I mention I LOVE throwing dinner parties

2) A way to occupy myself while I’m in between paying gigs-  a lot more entertaining than some of the alternatives….

3) Dinner! Dusting off randomly picking up a cookbook, opens up so many more options for what to cook for dinner…. Thanks to my current position of being “job challenged”, I actually do have time to cook fun and complex dinners at night– except for Mondays and Tuesdays when I go to “dance” classes.

I’m the first to admit, I should be doing more baking and cooking while I’m not working, although considering I’m supposed to be gluten-free and with summer coming, I’m not sure having loads of tempting, tasty, gluten filled baked goods in the house is the right plan….  However, I digress.  The Runner was clearly not impressed with his toasted sandwich for dinner last night because this morning I awoke to find Apples for Jam open on the counter.   The Runner swears he was only “flicking through the book” and “wasn’t sure what page he left it on”, however  I will take the not so subtle hint and make the man his Spaghetti with Egg and Toasted Parsley Breadcrumbs for dinner!