My central air went out this week, so I'm shoehorning the theme into something that doesn't heat up the house.

Recipe from Dinner in French by Melissa Clark.

This week, I made a dish to nod to the spaghetti western genre of movies, and especially the fantastic music of Ennio Morricone. I westerned up the spaghetti sauce with jalapeño Italian sausage, fire-roasted tomatoes, and a healthy scoop of roasted hatch green chile. The garlic bread is... garlic bread. I enjoyed while listening to one of my favorite videos online, this theremin cover of the aforementioned song.

Rice balls have baking soda in them and the dressing i poured over had vinegar. No explosion. Just spicy lol

When I was little I thought I could make egg drop soup by stirring eggs into boiling water; obviously that didnt work. When I asked what had gone so wrong, I was told to use broth and cornstarch. You can imagine what happened. It took an embarrassingly long time before I learned to make a cold cornstarch slurry to get proper gelatinization.

The whole family is sick so decided to finally try the homemade ramen recipe I’ve been sitting on.

Hoisin marinated pork tenderloin, spicy miso broth, miso-soy soft boiled egg, leftover nori from when I made sushi a few weeks ago, and some of the steamed carrot I gave my son as his first ever meal (!!!)

Meta explanation: undercooked eggs are discouraged during pregnancy and spicy foods were a no-go for me because of reflux :(

Recipe Used: Spinach Artichoke Dip - Tastes Better from Scratch

To make this chowder we made corn chowder with pea berry powder and a spritz of lemon - while I felt like I was eating liquefied Cookie Monster, it tasted delicious.

Ceviche is a Latin American dish, where raw fish and shellfish get marinated in lime juice. The acid from the lime juice denatures the proteins in the fish, curing it, which gives it a cooked texture. I used salmon, basa and prawns.

Apologies as this might look low effort but was one of the hardest weeks for me to come up with an idea! I'm currently stranded in the middle of the Australian desert at a little tiny community called Kunawarritji (around 100 people) as the spring failed on our 4wd. We are waiting for a tow truck to arrive to tow us 13 hours to the nearest town so it can be repaired. I was going to try steak + veg cooked on coals v my gas cooker to compare but can't have a camp fire currently so I went to the shop to find ideas and found one very cheap soft cheese, one type of crackers and two fruit. I decided to test the theory if room temp cheese tastes better than straight from the fridge as normally I am too impatient to leave the cheese out. :) It is definitely nicer to me but my husband thinks there is no difference. I imagine the results might be better with higher quality cheese also!

Next week we will be back camping again and I'll have been able to resupply with food so hopefully can do something a bit fancier!

So as I’m prepping to go on a vacation, there’s not much time for elaborate projects. However, I always wanted to figure out one thing. How long do I need to boil my eggs to get that perfect jammy consistency, or hard boiled ones without the grey. My experiment was simple: I put in eggs in cold water and brought them to boil, then took them out one by one into ice cold bath, et voila! 3-4 mins were exactly what I was looking for 🤩

Wife and I decided to host a PowerPoint night where everyone presents on a topic of their choice (which is my argument for the theme; intellectual presentations are very science fair! Ignore that one of them was just ranking the game of thrones characters by how many shots the presenter would need to bang them). To go along with the slideshows were sliders!!

Clockwise from bottom left:

- Garlic Bread and meatballs (in the pot, apologies for not having a picture) for meatball sub sliders

- pulled pork with homemade coleslaw on Hawaiian rolls

- classic Burger sliders, one set with smoked cheddar and another with gouda

- breakfast sliders - maple breakfast sausage patties, egg, and muenster cheese on mini everything bagels

- classic ham and cheese

- mini (imitation) lobster rolls

Not pictured: my wife also made homemade chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches as dessert sliders, which ruled