I Missed Cooking

This past week has been the start of summer hours at my office. I am looking forward to getting out a little after lunch today, but I will be the first to admit, working 9 hour days sucks. It sucks the life out of you. Add in my commute and I am gone for 11 hour each day.
I know, boo hoo.

Luckily I live with a fantastic all around guy who helps me with this blog and also cooks dinner most nights. Now I am not complaining, nothing is better than coming home to dinner, but I enjoy cooking and sometimes I miss this.

I was able to cook dinner for both of us Wednesday and Thursday nights. I didn't make anything extraordinary or fabulous, but it felt nice to chop veggies and stir them around.
Wednesday night we had an Indian inspired dish.



In one pot I put some bulgur on and I threw some chickpeas in the iron skillet. When the chickpeas were almost finished I added some dandelion greens from this weeks CSA. I let those wilt then combined everything together. I added a little bit of coconut milk and a lot of curry and voila. It made for a nice dinner and I enjoyed the leftovers today.

Thursday night I wanted to get creative, but by the time I got home I was beat. I kept dinner simple with some roasted potatoes, red peppers and more dandelion greens.



I am really enjoying the dandelion greens, I hope we get some more next week!

bingo and burglers

for the past few weeks eric and i have spent our monday nights at a restaurant up the street from our apartment.



why have we been there every monday night?



bingo!
el camino real host a bingo night every monday and it's really awesome. the prizes are usually free food or drinks to either el camino or bar ferdinand.

el camino also has shiner as one of their beers! it makes me miss texas some.


we are sort of becoming bingo locals, and i was really excited when the bingo caller/hostess made me cookies this week! she ended up baking the carrot cookies from 101cookbooks.com, which just so happens to be my favorite cookie! it definitely made the night even better.



usually we both win a few times a night, but sadly last night it was only eric winning.

eric and i both worked out after work tonight and when we finished we were starving and ready to eat a lot of food.
eric has been making burgers over the weekend and then keeping them in the refrigerator. it makes for a really easy dinner when you need some filling and fast.


eric topped his black bean burger with a coleslaw of julienned carrots, cabbage, onions, jalapenos, avocado slices, and bbq sauce.





i had a different burger mixture and i topped mine with mustard greens, carrots, radishes, jalapenos, pickles, hot mustard and red hot all placed on an ezekiel burger bun.




quite delicious!

well keep your fingers crossed that eric and i both have snow days tomorrow! we are supposed to get about 15 inches on top of the almost 30 we got over the weekend.

a mexican fiesta!

our friend juli posted online a fajita recipe she was making for dinner last night. eric and i jokingly invited ourselves over for dinner, and we very happy when juli and her boyfriend adam actually did extend an invitation.

i love eating with friends, and it's even better when everyone pitches in and everything is homemade.



when we arrived juli was making guacamole and adam was finishing up the salsa.



eric had prepped some tortillas, so he got to work on finishing them.



i took on the job of making mojitos, but had eric help squeeze the limes.



mojitos in the middle of winter?



yes please!



we filled our tortillas with veggies and rice.



all the food turned out amazing (and the drinks too!).





juli and adam have cooked us dinner twice now, so it's about time for eric and i to cook for them!
thanks friends!

date night

wednesday, eric and i went to one of our favorite restaurants, the royal tavern, because they were having a vegan/vegetarian special night for their anniversary. they even had special vegan cocktails!


they accidentally skipped over our name when seating people, and the restaurant ended up buying our first round of drinks, which was awesome.



all the blackboard specials were vegan or vegetarian, but eric and i ended up getting stuff from their regular menu.
eric went for his old favorite, the tempeh club.


i tried something new, the grilled sweet potato bahn mi, which was excellent. i really want to recreate this at home.


i'd recommend royal tavern any day though, they always have a lot of veggie options, and great beer.

meal planning

moving in together was not a big adjustment, but we definitely had to get used to each others schedules and habits. it wasn't hard in the beginning because unemployment gave me flexibility and if something needed to be done, i had the time.
but now that we are both working we are having to readjust and work together.

one thing we are testing out is meal planning. i am hoping it makes everything a little bit easier, grocery shopping, having more creative and interesting dinners, planning for leftovers, etc.



right now i have all of our nightly meals on my google calendar, which eric has access too. we email a lot during the day, so any questions or suggestions are easily answered and the menu is adjusted. it helps a lot because eric gets home from work and starts prepping dinner, and when i get home we can immediately start cooking.

i really hope we keep this up, or atleast have a few meals planned each week. it seems to make everything go a lot smoother and helps us have stress-free dinners.

another quick and easy meal

if you know me, then you know i love potatoes. no seriously. they are delicious. they keep you full. and best of all they are cheap.
and recently i have developed a love affair with kale.
so i started mixing the two and deliciousness occurred!



after i slice the potatoes i throw them in the iron skillet with a little bit of olive oil. when the potatoes are almost finished i throw the kale in let it all cook till the kale starts to char. then i season and serve.
this time i added some leftover brown rice that i needed to eat.

bits of the weekend

wow, we actually had a fairly busy weekend.
friday night was low key. eric and i went out to dinner. the weather has been pretty rainy, so we had to get suited up in our rain gear.





we stopped by the foodery and picked up a bottle of beer for dinner.



i love byob.



and that was really it. we went to sleep early which was awesome.

saturday we went to wiz and d.marie's wedding! luckily it didn't really rain at all, but it was still pretty hot outside.





adam and juli


me and eric


rachael and kevin


me and juli


eric and his friends


eric and ian


they just had a bunch of cupcakes instead of cake.


which ended up on a lot of people's faces.


and congrats to wiz and d.marie!


sunday morning we met rachael and kevin for brunch at silk city. the outdoor part was pretty cool and reminded us of spider house in austin.


rachael ordered french toast scrapple. i took a photo of it since scrapple really isn't found outside of philadelphia. read about scrapple here. side note, eric and i actually found vrapple (vegan scrapple) which we have yet to try.




after brunch we decided to go to atlantic city and go to the beach! i had been wanting to go to atlantic city, and to the beach, so this accomplished both.


it is sort of like a mini-vegas.






the water wasn't too cold, which was nice. i lost my sunglasses though.


after swimming and hanging out for a while we went to the tropicana casino and played a few slots and ate some dinner. i successfully won 85 cents.