Thanksgiving Eating Festivities

Back from a great thanksgiving weekend, I basically let my healthy go out the window for the weekend...but it's still lingering around today (I finished a half bag of chips while watching TV...) Anyways, my family had the classic turkey dinner, prepared pretty much by my brother. He likes to cook off of www.foodnetwork.ca and surprisingly does a pretty good job :P Saturday night was turkey night, so he let the turkey sit in a brine bath overnight, seasoned the outside, and roasted it for 4 hours I believe.

It came out a little burnt...but the meat was delicious (and the skin's got all the fat anyways :P)

After "carving" the turkey with an electric knife (we didn't really need the formalities of traditional carving), we amassed a huge plate of turkey meat :)

As a side, my brother prepared a roasted root vegetable dish, and the recipe can be found here: http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/Side/Vegetables/recipe.html?dishID=8640 so, thank you chef Michael Smith. We didn't have any maple syrup so it was substituted with brown sugar. It was still really good.

And here's one of four identical servings I ate that night (minus the corn for every plate). As you can see, we're super Asian when it comes to our plates for holiday meals.

After dinner, we were sentenced to chop up and freeze A LOT of root vegetables (sweet potatoes, yams, beets) since both my home and my apartment were running low. I wish I took a picture of just how much we chopped, but I didn't. I'm pretty sure it was a good 30-45min of peeling and chopping....yay! (However, the convenience and meals I make with those ingredients later will be the "real yay")

I swear it's not blood....it's just beet juice....

The next day, we decided to make chicken wings and poutine. The chicken wings came in a box from Maple Lodge Farms already marinated with BBQ and honey garlic (separately). Honestly, they took FOREVER to crisp up, and I didn't feel like waiting at the time to wait for the honey garlic wings to crisp so we just pulled them out as such:

For our poutine, we sort of followed this recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/Cheese/recipe.html?dishid=11311 by letting the Yukon gold potatoes soak in water overnight, but we didn't deep fry them so it didn't really matter much. We just baked them in the oven. I wanted to have wedge-style poutine but it doesn't really work because it's just to big to fit in your mouth alongside cheese curds. Next time we're planning on super skinny fries (that we'll pan fry....we do have a deep fryer but it's so unhealthy....) and the use of sweet potatoes. Maybe another type of cheese? (I've done blue cheese before). Can you tell I really like poutine :P

Later that night, as a mahjong snack food, my brother and I made some salsa :D This time, we cut the tomatoes a lot smaller, and used a jalapeno pepper to spice it up. Also added were onions, cilantro, lime zest, lime juice, salt, and pepper. Tortilla chips were provided by Costco, the brand of which I can't recall. It looks like there's a Mayan drawing of a bird on the bag...which is also a tan coloured bag....anyways...

Hope you also had a wonderful thanksgiving and coming soon will be a post on what I'll be doing with all the leftover turkey :D

What happens when you run out of fresh food?

So the last time I went to the grocery store was September 29th, so I've been filling up on Subway, campus food, generally unhealthiness, and frozen/canned food at home. It's been crazy with exams (I just wrote one yesterday, one this morning, and one more tonight!) and I'm sure everyone has those stints with other things that make food less of a priority. So, what did I do? 

I bought some canned diced tomatoes flavoured with garlic and olive oil and so I made myself a bruschetta with defrosted olive bread. I wish I still had cilantro to top that one off..

For one of my dinners, I had a steak dinner, and every ingredient was from the freezer. I still didn't manage to cook the steak fully through without adding water at the end so it wouldn't burn...gotta turn the temperature down next time and cook it for longer (my new stove is super-powerful). I marinated this steak with some steak spice and finally with BBQ sauce at the end (thank you Ribfest :D)

For the veggies I just boiled them in some chicken broth for flavour.

A nice pink on the inside :) mmm.....

And finally to today, this was my meal post-workout. The smoothie's got frozen mangoes, frozen raspberries, orange juice, and vanilla protein powder. My soup was also from the freezer, boiled in half water, half chicken broth. I modified this one so that I'd throw in the scallops, corn, and peas last. Before I threw in all the veggies together but had to wait for the beets and sweet potato to soften, and so the peas and corn would overcook.

 I'm looking forward to grocery shopping tomorrow and then back home for Thanksgiving for some delicious home food! Hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

Look Ma, I turned Breakfast into Lunch!

Today was another great day where I woke up naturally 3 minutes before my alarm would have gone off haha. So I got out of bed and went to my fridge, which is quite empty right now. I realized I still had a little bit of egg whites left in a carton (equivalent to 1 egg really), so I decided to have an omelette. Since I like my omelette (and most meals) with lots of veggies, I stir fried some broccoli with garlic and sliced an avocado to eat fresh (I didn't cook the avocado). I took out the broccoli, added some oil the the pan and cooked the egg. The best part is that the egg picked up all the flavour from the broccoli, garlic, and chicken broth brown bits at the bottom of the pan :D

Since I ate half the avocado waiting for things to cook (that's only the other half you see in the picture), I was feeling kinda full after eating the egg and some broccoli. My appetite for breakfast has never been huge. So, I decided to use the leftovers as my sides for lunch. I cleaned the same pan and cooked up a salmon fillet (after microwave defrosting).

The salmon's got a hole in the middle because I cut it in half to check if it was done (and as always, it wasn't). I added two slices of olive bread and now I'm set for my noon time lunch with a friend :D

Thanks for reading!