Food entry!

Hello all! 

I've had an incredibly boring day. I woke up quite early, 5:30AM to be exact and since then I've switched from one activity to another every 30 minutes or so. It's a frustrating feeling when you have lots of time at your hands but don't know what activities you'd enjoy at that moment. I've tried playing The Sims 3, going through my Steam library, reading and watching Netflix. Nothing felt enjoyable so I decided to write a bit. Writing has suddenly become extremely fun!

Sooo, food!

Me and Rami have lived together for two months now and cooking has become an enjoyable every day activity that we share together. While living alone I rarely made any effort in cooking my meals and most of the time I was content with my instant noodles... But now that I cook together with someone I'm willing to try different kinds of recipes. Also, my cooking has a meaning now since I know that someone else is going to share the food with me and I definitely want them to enjoy it as much as possible! Like during the time I didn't have a laundry machine so I had to use my dad's; I was washing laundry at his and his fiance´s place when they decided to go grocery shopping and left the cooking to me. So, pasta and sauce. I was so nervous about cooking a good meal that I ended up overdoing it a bit but at the same time I probably made the best pasta sauce to day. To be honest it was a lucky experiment and they had just the correct ingredients in the fridge. My step-mum frequently asks me when I'm going to cook for them again, which is nice!

What I've also noted is that our cooking needs variety. I was partly vegetarian for five years meaning that I sometimes ate fish and chicken, but I avoided red meat. It wasn't a moral choice, I just felt like we ate so much meat at home that after meals I felt ill and tired. During the time I mostly ate food consisting of soy and veggies. I haven't cooked meals out of soy in a long time, until now. And I fell in love with the ingredient, again. When I suggested that let's use soy in our pasta sauce, just for variety, Rami was a bit unsure at first. He said he'd never liked the taste of soy but with proper seasoning I made him change his mind! I don't think he's lying either, since he's eaten my soy-filled meals with such ferocity! On top of that using soy is extremely cheap. Using cheap ground meat in our meals, like in pasta sauce costs between 2 and 3 euros. We eat that pasta sauce for two days and the package contains 400g of meat, a combination of pork and cow. 2-3€ doesn't sound that expensive but wait 'til you hear about soy. I bought a 500g pack of soy and so far I've made 4 meals using soy and it's taken aroung 130g. This package cost me 3,50€. So what do I choose? Red meat that is more expensive, or soy that is cheaper and equally tasty? I think you know the answer.

Picture time!

 

So the pot full of vegetables was actually going to be a 5 litre soup! It contained cabbage, carrots, paprika, celery, onions, tomato mash and spices. Unfortunately I think that no matter how much flavoring I added it didn't taste that good. If the ingredients sound familiar, this recipe is actually for a diet soup! My grandmother was talking about it so I decided to give it a try, but I must say that on the third day I told Rami that enough, we are getting a pizza!

 Here is a pasta sauce made out of soy. I still remember how incredibly good that meal tasted... The vegetables were especially tasty! Even though I'm always talking about pasta sauce we never eat pasta. We eat a lot of rice. I tried to eat brown rice for about a year since I thought it could be healthier, but I hate the taste of it so much that I decided to change back to white rice when we moved in together. I don't regret my choice since white rice is so amazing... I could eat it bare with only a bit of sriracha sauce on the side (done that a lot when tight on money!).

 It was actually this week that Rami introduced me to an ingredient called 'quinoa'. I was visiting my dad's mother over the weekend (my mum's mum is the one who recommended the soup) and I was positive that Rami isn't going to get any cooking done during that time. I was surprised to hear that he had eaten quinoa and chicken. At that time I had no idea what quinoa was, but after the weekend when he suggested we eat it again, I was introduced to one of my current favourite food ingredients! I don't know how to describe the taste of it, but it needs a bit of flavouring. It's texture is very similar to couscous. I ate this meal yesterday and it had quinoa with a creamy chicken and vegetable sauce. It's incredibly tasty! We already used up our package of quinoa and it's quite expensive to buy here in Finland. I'm not sure if any other company is selling it, but we had 'Go Green' labeled quinoa. We are planning on purchasing quinoa online from iHerb. It must be Rami's favourite site since we are constantly receiving packages from iHerb. And they call me a shopaholic...

Anyways, thank you for reading and I'll be returning with other topics in the future!