I had a craving for peanut butter cookies and this recipe was recommended to me. Of course I made them. They are quite delicious but it has to be said this recipe makes a ton of dough. Like I baked not even half of it and that’s already so many cookies. The other thing to note is that the cookies came out very crumbly despite being baked longer than the recipe asked for.

I had a lot of pasta sheets leftover from yesterday’s Lasagna-feast. Like a lot. But sadly no more meat sauce. I figured there’s white pizza so I could definitely make a white lasagna. The overall idea was to make a Bechamel sauce but infuse it with shallots and leeks, just because I had some in my fridge. I think sun-dried tomatoes would have been really good in this, but I didn’t have any, so I went for roasted red peppers.

Just a picture of some leeks I’ve cut today. Thought they looked very pretty, I love the color gradient from white to dark green. That’s all.

I made lasagna al forno today. I made the meat sauce as usual, except I added some pancetta. This actually was really good except it rendered a ton of fat into the sauce that I had to skim off. Next time I should probably render the fat first before adding into the sauce. The other difference was that I used Kirkland brand canned tomatoes and they didn’t cook down as nicely as San Marzano tomatoes.

A coworker of mine posted a mouthwatering picture of crispy tofu in sauce. So obviously I asked for the recipe. I only had soft tofu which didn’t work out too well, I had trouble coating the tofu because it kept falling apart, so next time at least medium or hard tofu. Overall the flavor was not bad, but next time I’d throw in some green onion, garlic, and ginger before adding the sauce, just to give it a more complex flavor.

Made Chicken Cacciatore using Cafe Delites recipe and creamy zucchini to go with it.

Something different today. Picked up this curry paste a few weeks ago at Walmart. It caught my eye because of its ingredients: shallots, chili, coriander, etc, all things I would use in a curry paste as well. It came out pretty good. You simmer this paste in coconut milk with your favorite cut of meat, potatoes, and I just added some cauliflower. You finish it with fish sauce (good that I had some at hand).

Felt like making Schnitzel so I got some pork chops. Had originally planned to serve them with a mushroom sauce but ran out of time, so we had them with Spätzle sauteed with butter. Spätzle Notes Batter was too thin initially, had to add more flour and mix a lot more. Not sure if the eggs added more liquid or if I didn’t work it enough. Process was messy, need to improve my workflow here.

We felt fancy (and I bought steaks from Costco) so we had ourselves a nice steak dinner. First time making steaks in a while and I really enjoyed the process. Proper Mise en Place before I started, got the cast iron pan to the right temperature , timed everything well and as the steaks rested I made a mushroom pan sauce that was pretty good. Served the steaks with steamed green beans and leftover lemon potatoes.

Greek Lemon Potatoes Last night I finally tried making Greek lemon potatoes with lots of helpful input from some culinary folks at work. They came out pretty good, though not quite as lemony as I would like them to be. Baking time was also a lot longer than expected, maybe because I didn’t have enough liquid in there at the beginning. Ingredients 2 or 3 pounds of potatoes, cut into thick wedges 2 or 3 cups of chicken stock half a cup of olive oil 4 cloves of garlic, minced plenty of oregano lemon juice - I eyeballed that one, maybe half a cup?