I really want to be more mindful of what I eat and what I cook. And since traditional journaling doesn’t work for me (never has), but blogging certainly does, I thought I’d take pictures in my kitchen every day (or so) and share kitchen notes regularly.

So here’s what’s been going on in my kitchen lately:

:: I have been making salads and experimenting with new (to me), different ingredients (beets!), but I could use more options.

:: I’m thinking about trying this recipe (or something similar, without the cheese)

:: I did some experimenting with arepas (cornbread).
* Baking them in the oven instead of in a frying pan works (just turn them once after ten minutes).
* Adding oil to the dough instead of baking them in a layer of oil doesn’t work
* My first try to make sweet arepas (with cacao and sweetener) was a total miss. It hardly had any taste. Next time use more sweetener (or add banana?) and cacao

:: I’m thinking about adding spices, onions, mushrooms and maybe even a bit of bacon or ham to them so we can eat them as is something instead of using them as sandwiches

:: A few weeks ago I made this very simple dinner that tasted really great, so I’m writing it down to help me remember: 2 boneless chicken thighs, 1 small can of corn, 1 small can of peas, 1 larger can of lentils, fajita seasoning.

:: Last week I found myself preparing a lot of raw veggies for a beach bbq and ended up eating them myself at home

:: I wonder if I could prepare smaller portions like this for a few days ahead to help me eat healthier (I usually don’t feel like cutting stuff when I’m hungry/craving, I just want to eat)

:: I’m thinking about meal planning a lot. I usually just buy a lot of staples and decide how to use them when it’s time to cook, but I feel like I got stuck in eating the same things over and over. And that’s not helping with the whole “don’t snack between meals” thing (if I look forward to a meal, it’s easier not to snack). There are also a lot of veggies in the supermarket that I don’t have the faintest idea of what to do with, so I never buy them. And I tend to buy things and then forget about them. So yes, doing a little bit of meal planning might be nice.

Next week could look like this (though I might switch days here and there):

Monday: steak/ pointed cabbage something (I just realized I bought one last week and forgot about it) I’ll probably combine it with minced meat, onions etc.

Tuesday: chicken, broccoli and probably some other canned veggies, rice (I have a bag of broccoli in the freezer, but it’s a lot of stems and I don’t like to eat those as a single vegetable)

Wednesday: Casabe with this corn/zucchini salad (sorry, Dutch recipe) and some meat (T. doesn’t do vegetarian – maybe chicken or bacon in the salad?)

Thursday: BBQ (2 types of meat, corn, salad)

Friday: fries, snacks (I’d like to add a salad to this and maybe make sweet potato chips) – we eat this every week before we go out and meet friends at Happy Hour (you can get food there, but it’s expensive and not quite tasty)

Saturday: easy meal (probably combining some meat and canned veggies into something edible, like the dish I described above)/ eat out

Sunday: BBQ (2 types of meat, corn, salad)

Well, let’s see how it goes…

What’s happening in your kitchen?

Lately, in my kitchen, I have been…

:: thinking about that other kitchen a lot. Each time something drops out of my very limited storage space and each time I have to move things around to create workspace on the tiny counter I think ‘just wait until we’ve moved’.
I’ll build a big pantry and if that counter isn’t big enough, I’ll just add something else to work on (I’d like a big butcher block that I can still move around).

:: wondering if it’s that prospect alone that brought the fun back in cooking

:: experimenting with spices I found in the supermarket

:: inventing new dishes that we loved very much.
The one pictured above: I combined diced bacon with a (big) yellow bell pepper, a sweet potato, and a leek, added two teaspoons of the shawarma mix and let it simmer until the veggies were soft(ish). Ate it with rice. Simple, but so good!

:: writing it all down for when I lack inspiration

:: enjoying making coffee with my mother’s old coffee set. She got it when she got married, but it was in her cupboard for decades, because she uses a machine now. She decided to get rid of it when she and my father moved to a smaller house, but I like making coffee like this, so I took it with me to Curaçao.

:: trying to work out a way to stop eating gluten. (I didn’t test if I am celiac, but my grandfather was and my brother and two of the girls are, so it’s a family thing). I was doing great at breakfast (I have been starting the day with two boiled eggs for years now) and dinner (at home, that is. When we eat out I still have to tell myself pizza is not doing me any good), but lunch was hard. Basic Dutch lunch is just some slices of bread, usually with butter or margarine and topped with thinly sliced cheese or meat (ham, sausage, bacon) and we actually prefer to lunch like that.
I already ditched the butter and the cheese (dairy – got that from my mother’s side of the family), but oh, the bread! I love bread so much). My problem is that I can’t eat glutenfree bread, because it usually contains soy (allergic to that) and sugar (I have hypoglycemia). T. eats rice cakes instead of bread, but those have a high glycemic value and my blood sugar went off when I tried that. So now I’m on arepas, Columbian cornbread. These are prebaked from the supermarket, but I plan to try and make them myself in the future. I like how they taste and I can even prepare them in advance when we take lunch to the house.
I’ve been eating arepas for a week now (and thus I’ve been almost gluten-free – I ate a wrap for lunch on my birthday – for a week) and I think my body likes it.

What’s going on in your kitchen?

If you have followed Soulemama in the past, you may realize that posts like this are very much inspired by the way she used to blog. I’ve been missing her blog more than I should (get a life of your own, M!), but a few weeks ago I realized that if I want ‘old-fashioned’ blogging to continue, I’d better start with my own blog and write the kind of posts I want her (and some others who have gone missing) to write. 
So, I’m not trying to be a copycat, I’m just inspired by her blogging and I’m hoping to channel what I miss since she stopped writing into my own blog and into my own way of recording my life – if that makes any sense. I fear it doesn’t, but I wanted to get this out in writing just once. 
Oh well, carry on…

This week in my kitchen:

:: I experimented with adding radish leaves to the spinach I was stir-frying. We didn’t taste anything different, so I guess that’s good.

:: there was even more stir-frying later that week. It’s my favorite way to cook. I love gathering ingredients, cutting and changing plans half-way because I find something that needs to be used up first (in this case some mushrooms).

:: I made pasta sauce. I learned how to make ‘real’ Italian sauce from our Italian landlord in Curaçao. It’s a simple recipe, but it tastes oh so good (forgot to take pictures of the sauce though).

:: I added a can of sweetcorn and some corniches to our salad for a change. Everybody loved it, so I’ll do that again (forgot to take a good picture again – need to work on being a better blogger).

Some things are so easy to make that you can’t imagine why you didn’t try it before. Like making chickennuggets. We’ve missed them since we turned glutenfree, but I’ve been thinking about making them myself for some time now. Last Friday I finally got my act together. It worked. It’s so easy. And it tastes great! Even my husband, who doesn’t really like chickennuggets, loved them, since these still have the taste and texture of real chicken.
Recipe? Well, it’s too easy actually, but I’ll try to explain what I did.

Cut up chickenbrest
Beat an egg and put the pieces of chicken in it
Mix breadcrumbs (I used this*) with spices to taste and cover the chicken with it
Fry in oil (I used a deepfryer), about 10-12 pieces at once. I did them 2 minutes first, and then all of them together for another minute.
Enjoy!

(*of course you can make these with normal breadcrumbs. It’s still additive free and you can use free range chicken)

:: old fashioned Dutch mash dishes

:: and some stir fry

:: wintertime means lots of potatoes

:: brownies are good any time of year

:: onion stew

:: cookies