Things Cooked

I stupidly came to my local café to write emails to my estate agent, but my local café is in the inner west reception black spot. I can browse DW, but I cannot upload photos of The Creeping Mould.

So here, have a list of things I made on Sat-Sun instead. Context: a week or so ago, our household "everyone buys 2-3 l of milk a week" free-for-all failed, possibly because the chief Milk Drinker has been staying elsewhere many nights. We had 2L just on its useby date, as well as an open bottle also close to use-by. I chucked the 2L in the spare freezer. My housemate was sceptical of my chances of turning it into profitable food.

This past weekend I had two nights of bad / pain-disturbed sleep that both ended in me sleeping in way too late in the morning. I have not got much formal admin done, but I did use up 2L of milk on various culinary projects.

To whit:

Mexican milk pork (ad-hoc'd between my ex's slow cooker recipe and this carnitas recipe)

Corn and bacon chowder (ad-hoc'd between kayloulee's 2010-13 recipe, which was milk heavy, and this one)

Veggie stock in the slow cooker

Soaked black beans (half to freeze, half to use)

Black bean and corn salsa (from a recipe an LJ friend gave me on my first UK trip - in 2024 I can easily find chipotle in adobo, unlike in 2011; I had not actually made it until 2023, due to the adobo problem)

Pear and custard impossible pie (based on this recipe, using tinned pears instead and half gf plain flour half almond meal. I think I'll use a bit more flour in future.

Impossible spinnach and fetta quiche/frittatta/thingy, using this recipe as a guide. Ditto on the more flour next time. And I don't think it will freeze as well as traditional quiche (pity, since I was batch cooking) - too fluffy. Some of the other impossible quiche recipes in this taste.com.au list use cream or yoghurt, and if I were not trying to use 2L of milk in 24 hours I would have gravitated to them instead - I suspect the result will be a bit denser and freeze better.

Of course, in the process of making nachos from the pork, I discovered I have nearly 400ml of greek yoghurt that's past use by but not actually expired, so maybe I should have made a yoghurt-based impossible frittata. Certainly, I now need to find a way to use up all that yoghurt ASAP as well. Muffins? I'm working tomorrow, I could make muffins today and feed my colleagues tomorrow.

Further complication: I used up (on the beans) the last of my previous batch of veg stock and the 2l of milk, thereby clearing most of my stuff out of the spare freezer (which is 3rd housemate's designated freezer space + ice cream storage). And then of course I made more stock, and soup, and so on. And now my freezer drawer is groaning and I'm taking up a lot of the spare freezer and I obviously need ice cream to eat with the impossible pie.

Good thing: if I'm starting the Coping Mechanism Course next week, and going back to German classes, and trekking up the coast every 2-3 weeks for the next while (teenage school musical; mum's surgery; etc), at least I have a a lot of freezer food. I can probably freeze a couple of containers of soup at work, in fact, if I can find space in with Well Dressed M's supply of popsicles.

Addenda: all of this was too lactose-y to take to K's place, as was my remaining "dish I have ingredients to make" (brown butter and sage mushroom gnocchi - K can do a moderate amount of butter but apparently brown butter is lactose too far). But I had leftover cabbage/bacon/mushroom sautée, so I toted that over there, and we ate kranskies with Two Veg. By a very Germanic fluke of our veggie drawers, the veg K provided was also cabbage. But green. Mine was red. That's two different colours of veg, prepared ... slightly differently... I swear...

I do not know how it has come to pass that I often go to K's place and eat what is, bascially, Swiss Pub Food (sausages, cabbage, potato), but I'm not complaining. Sometimes we do dumplings with rice and Broccolini Gomaae, just to balance out the "things we would struggle eat together in the country of origin because of one or both of our dietary conflicts" menu. I wonder if one can air-fryer Rosti or Okonomoyaki?

Goddamnit

I was all prepped and on time for German class at 6pm.

... class was at 5pm.

I have reminders set up on my phone! And by email! And yet. I didn't see them, I was too busy doing the things I planned to get done before class.

I am no longer using the "special amy moment" tag, trying to leave that particular genre of self-deprecating humour behind with the name change. And yet. It is very difficult not to create an alternative.