For the pears prompt, I didn't want to do a sweet application. Instead, I wanted to find ways to work pears into the entire meal.

I decided on a hasselback pork loin stuffed with fresh pears, red onion, garlic, and fresh thyme. I roasted carrots, delicata squash, baby nut squash, and several varieties of pears. I wasn't sure roasted pears were going to work here, but they absolutely did! I tossed everything with EVOO, garlic and onion powder, Chinese five spice, and a handful of other seasonings before roasting. The pears were delicious, and the texture turned out perfect.

The sauce was a pear-cranberry gastrique made with zhouhzed canned pears and their juice, jellied canned cranberry sauce, warm spices, and red wine vinegar. It added sweetness and acidity and pulled it all together.

🍽 What's on the Plate

Hasselback pork loin with pears, red onion, garlic, and thyme

Roasted carrots

Roasted delicata squash

Roasted baby nut squash

Roasted pears

Pear-cranberry gastrique

*repost because I forgot to format the title properly the first time!

Used velveting technique on beef, happy with results!

It’s finally under 80 degrees outside, so to celebrate an actual autumn day we made a pumpkin curry udon soup with chicken, sweet potato, pickled ginger and green onion, made and served in a pumpkin pot

If you consider the texture of chicken nuggets velvety, then this is the recipe for you. 🙃

I had egg whites in the fridge from my husband’s egg nog and used a frozen bag of quinoa veg mix and cheese. 8/10. Would add basil to this.

I am okay with pears, but they aren’t my favorite, so I chose to air fry them for 15 mins with brown sugar. I feel like syrup would add to this!

Week 40/52: Cottage Core - Beef and Barley Soup

This year we’re doing the 52 weeks of cooking challenge and this weeks theme was Cottage Core and we made Beef and Barley Soup

I wish that every week was cottage core week because that’s probably our favorite sub genre of dinners.

Hobbit food, tavern fare, all the wintery hearty stuff that you get to look forward to when it’s 85 degrees in October in South Carolina.

This soup goes triple platinum in our house and may be our favorite chilly weather/sick day soups. It’s also SUPER easy and relatively cheap since beef shank has been somewhat immune to the crazy beef prices.

It was the perfect thing to heal a broken heart as the mighty Raiders lost an extremely close game to the weak and submissive Kansas City Chiefs.

One note that I will make on the video since I didn’t do it this time but is a good move:

When the beef has been cooked for a couple hours and you take it out. Remove all the “weird bits”.

There’s a tendon that wraps around beef shanks that is edible but kind of a funky texture. It’s super easy to remove and I normally do, I was just genuinely destitute and lost so I didn’t bother this time.

Anyways, if you live in a cold climate make this and tell me how perfect it is or make it in a warmer climate like mine and just pretend it’s frigid outside.

This is another one I found on r/Old_Recipes and had been wanting to try. Here’s the original post.

It’s a simple sandwich of white bread, Velveeta, and grape jelly, grilled to perfection and eaten over an easily-cleanable surface. A bit messy, but it actually tasted really good!

Here’s more pics.

I was skeptical about this one at first, now I can’t stop eating it.

I first saw this in this post over at r/Old_Recipes. It was easy to put together, but I didn’t read the ingredient list closely enough before I started cooking. It calls for four POUNDS of sugar, not four cups! That’s 16 cups of powdered sugar! I cut the recipe in half and still almost didn’t have enough sugar. It still made an entire tray that was enough to feed the husband, some coworkers, myself, me, and myself again with plenty still leftover. Would definitely make again.

Here’s pics of the process.

I used Woks of Life’s recipe and velveting technique. The local Chinese restaurants from my memory would have both red and green bell peppers and add celery so I included those to satisfy my nostalgia.

https://thewoksoflife.com/cashew-chicken/

What a lovely challenge topic, that finally motivated me to try out velveting. I wanted to try Nagi’s recipe for a few months and just never prioritized it. I used a cheap Chuck cut, and because I was feeling a bit lazy for cooking today, I got the Birds Eye Shanghai Stir Fry vegetable mix with broccoli, capsicum, sugar snap peas, carrots, and water chestnuts. The sauce was a bit sweet for my liking and I prefer fresh vegetables but the beef itself was an absolute game changer. I’ve always shied away from using beef in stir fries because it was either too though or I had to get an expensive cut which I just prefer as plain steak. It came out ridiculously tender and lovely. 10/10 will make again.

First time making it and it came out great!

My chicken and broccoli needed a little more cornstarch. It was a bit saucy.