Life Update 10/12/2020

 Hello, it has been nearly 6 years since the last time I wrote a blog post, but have had the urge to do a little writing so thought I would give it a shot again.

So many things have changed since the last time I wrote a post so I figured it would be a good refresh everyone about my life. I figure I could hit the important points from the last 6 or so years.

I met someone! This isn't news to anyone who I have done a good job keeping up with, but I will be honest in admitting that I haven't been all that great at keeping up with people in my life. Something I need to do a much better job of. We have been together over 5 years now. Hannah is a brilliant and kind person, who works as an RN and her patients could not be luckier to have her by their side.

We adopted a cat together a few years back, his name is Albus, to go with Astrid who I had prior to our relationship(see older posts). Albus is the brown and gray tabby, and Astrid is black and white.

They are wonderful company and will even snuggle with each other from time to time. That leads me to the next big life event...

We got married! I figure it will be good to include a picture, professional photos are still being worked on.

While this year has been difficult, there have been some amazingly bright spots as well. We were lucky enough to be able to have an outdoor wedding in the back yard of my now in-laws. We weren't able to have a larger gathering right now as that is just not safe, but we are so lucky to have had the amazing event with direct family and close friends. While it was not our original plan, we are just amazed at what we were able to do, we are also lucky to have been provided an amazing space by the Riggle family. We look forward to being able to throw a larger party once people can gather in large groups safely.

I am glad to get to share the good stories such as our relationship and wedding, but I also wanted to share the less fortunate things. Back in January I got laid off, this is not a post to trash anyone or anything like that, just to state the truth. Unfortunately some 9 months later I have still not been able to find a job, but I am continuing to hustle on that front. Over 80 applications and a dozen interviews, and still working at it. This is not a sob story, I was extremely lucky with how things went down. I got severance pay and we were able to prepare for the long haul while I am on the job hunt. Unfortunately for myself and the greater world the pandemic happened.

I didn't lose my job related to the pandemic, but I do think my struggles to find a job are related to the pandemic. I can't blame everything on the pandemic, I should have hustled more while I was still employed and even earlier on when I had just been laid off. That is purely on me. I think I let the negative feelings from getting laid off cloud my judgement, and I didn't put nearly as many applications out there early on as I should have. I figured with my management experience it would be easier to find a job, I am not all that picky in what I am looking for as far as work goes, I just thought I would like to see what it out in the world other than health insurance.

Well maybe changing roles entirely going into a pandemic isn't the best move overall, but I can't go back and change things right now, just have to keep moving forward. I would love to find a job where I feel like I can make an actual impact to the local community, which my last job was lacking, but I am willing to take almost anything that is offered to me going forward. I said it before and I will say it again, I am lucky as far as losing my job goes, we were able to save over the years, way more than enough to weather this storm. There are nearly 30 million people in this country who are also unemployed, and the odds are they aren't quite as fortunate, so to whomever needs to hear this, you are not alone going through this tough time, and if you need someone to talk to about thee struggles I am here. Also, Congress needs to get off their asses and take care of these people or the economy is really going to tank. I don't care if I get any added benefit from this at all, but every other "developed" nation in the world is taking care of their citizens right now, why on earth can't we do the same?

Wasn't planning on getting political right now, that is for future posts, it just didn't have to be this bad in the country, and especially in Northeast Wisconsin where I live, this all could have been reduced so much, but certain leaders chose not to, and some actively fought safety measures as well.

I guess that is the next topic to cover, what a year we are having huh? We have been mostly just been hunkered down since early March, we have only left the state once in this time, and that was for a very special occasion and was only really for a few hours. I am mostly a homebody so this isn't all that much of an adjustment, but even I miss getting out and spending time with friends, or going to a game store and playing games. To prevent cabin fever, I have been making sure to get out on walks almost every day, going between 4-7 miles daily, which has been nice as the weather has allowed for this, some mornings now I have to wait a while after Hannah leaves for work to go for a walk in a more comfortable temperature.

On the topic of weight loss, which I previously wrote about at length, things have been a bit up and down. I probably reached my highest point in quite a while near the beginning of the pandemic, but that was my own fault for being to sedentary. We have been trying different things with some decent success in the last few months, currently doing intermittent fasting while also trying to keep our added sugar low. It has allowed us to make all kind of cool things this summer that we wouldn't have been able to do if we kept with just slow carb. Just wanted to include a food pictures for everyone to enjoy. First we have Alton Brown's Mr. Crunchy(Croque Monsieur), then home made gnocchi with kale, bacon, and creamy sauce, and finally we have a tuna poke bowl that we both really loved.

All things considered, life is good. I will definitely be writing more about the cooking that we do, as well as all kinds of things like sports, movies, games, and really anything else that inspires me to write.

Until next time! Thanks for stopping by!

What I Am Thankful For

I just wanted to take some time to write about all of the things that I am thankful for, and also share the food I have made for Thanksgiving. This is not an all inclusive list, but I just wanted to share some things.

I am thankful for all of my friends and family.
I am thankful that I am living a financially stable life, I never knew how wonderful being financially stable was until I actually was stable.
I am thankful for my job, which I look forward to every day.
I am thankful for my dependable car, after dealing with lots of crap from my previous car, it is nice to have a car that I don't need to worry about.
I am thankful for my love of cooking, which I believe I inherited from my family, I enjoy cooking and trying to make new things frequently.
I am thankful that the value of learning was instilled in me as a kid, we would go to museums and zoos to learn about all sorts of things, and this has stayed with me to this day, I still enjoy learning new things whenever I can.
I am thankful for my health.
And last but not least I am thankful for my wonderful cat Astrid who I adopted a few months ago, she has been a wonderful addition to my life. For those who haven't seen here, this is what she was doing while I was cooking today.

She slept like that til I gave her some food, she then immediately got up and ate.

This is my Thanksgiving dinner, roast turkey breast, chorizo brown rice dressing, brussels sprouts with bacon, apple, onion, cream, and parmesan cheese, and some cilantro lime corn with garlic butter.

I brined the turkey breast overnight, which made it nice and juicy. All of the different elements worked so well together, I was surprised by how much I loved the brussels sprouts dish, but I wanted to try some new things and it all worked well.

For dessert I made some apple crisp which I had some vanilla frozen yogurt with. It was a good end to a great meal.

I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

Peter's Cooking Diary #26

Well it has been a little while since I have written about my cooking, I honestly haven't been doing that much cooking, or at least not that much of cooking new things. This week I cooked 2 new things, or at least variations of things that I had never done before.

The first recipe that I will be making this week is slow cooker chicken meatloaf. I have made chicken and turkey meatloaf in the oven previously but I have never made either of them in the slow cooker before. I took a recipe for a tex mex meatloaf in the slow cooker with beef and changed it over to chicken. I had forgotten to get the beef I had originally planned to use out of the freezer the night before, so I made a dash to the store where they actually had ground chicken on sale for an amazing price, so I went with that.

One of the things that I love about my favorite slow cooker cookbook does is that it includes different methods for using the slow cooker. In this case the foil collar will help to diffuse the heat a little bit from the heating element and move it all around the insert.

After the collar, you add strips of aluminum foil going perpendicular to each other to help with removing the meatloaf from the crock pot intact and it also helps prevent the meatloaf from burning to the insert, and it even helps with the cleanup afterwards.

This is the selections of produce that I am using for this recipe, I want to start doing more before shots of things. Those are poblano pepper for people that are not familiar with them, they are a little spicy with what I consider to be better flavor than green bell peppers. The recipe called for a red bell pepper but of course I don't stick to a recipe perfectly. The garlic cloves are the last of what I got from my mom about a month ago.

Chopped up onion and peppers in the big container and the garlic in the other.

The recipe called for vegetable oil, but what better fat is there to use for this than bacon grease? I cooked the pepper and onions in a pan for about 10 minutes on medium high heat before adding the garlic.

Stirred the garlic in with everything else, and cooked for about 5 more minutes.

Added the seasoning of salt, chile powder, and dried oregano as well as some tomato paste, stirred all of the ingredients together.

This is what the veggies looked like all together after cooking. I let them all cool and worked on the other elements of the meatloaf.

This bowl contains one soft kaiser roll torn into little bits, one cup of milk, and one can's worth of beans that I rinsed and drained. I mashed them all together in this bowl until the mixture almost looked like blue milk.

The bowl of mashed up milk, beans, and bread, alongside the ground chicken in its own bowl, I let it get a little bit warmer than fridge temp so my hands wouldn't freeze when I mixed it all together.

The chicken bowl to which I added the milk/bean mixture, cheese, corn, eggs, and the veggie mixture.

Mixing the whole thing together, it is a messy job, but I don't mind it at all.

I added the meatloaf to the slow cooker and evened it out. After this picture I added a layer of barbecue sauce to the top of this, I put the lid on and cooked it for about 5 hours on low.

This is what it looks like once the meatloaf was done, then you take the pieces of foil sticking out and pull them all together and you can lift the meatloaf out. I actually let it cool down a bit before removing it from the pot.

The other recipe I made this week, is something that I had never made this way. I have made roasted cauliflower in many different ways, but this one was actually brown butter roasted cauliflower. To start I preheated the oven to 425. I removed the stems and leaves from the heads. I then rubbed them with vegetable oil and stuck them into the oven to bake for 45 minutes.

After the 45 minutes in the oven, the recipe called for butter to be smeared all over both of the heads, I did this as best I could as they were hot. I then popped the cauliflower back into the oven.

During the last stage of cooking I took the cauliflower out and basted it with the browned butter that was in the pan. This made the cauliflower taste amazing overall, my favorite preparation yet!

Peter's Cooking Diary #25

I have to admit I have been a bit uninspired with my cooking lately, I need to start making some new recipes or something, because it seems like I have made a lot of these recipes before, and I want to keep making some new things. I will have to start brainstorming new ideas for that, I kind only have a set of a few low carb dishes that I like to make.

The first dish I wanted to make this week was a semi homemade type of thing that I did with things that I made with things that I already had on hand. A friend had left some Ninja Turtles Mac and Cheese which was the start of the dish.

I started off by mincing some garlic and some onion, to add more of a depth of flavor to the dish. I enjoy Kraft mac and cheese, but adding more flavor definitely helped.

I took the butter that would be mixed in with the sauce, and I cooked the onion and garlic down in it until they were softened.

I added a can of tuna to the pan and let it incorporate with all sorts of flavors as well as some oregano and some red pepper flake.

I melted some more butter and tossed some panko bread crumbs in them and just tossed them until lightly toasted and the butter was absorbed.

The last thing I did was chop up some string cheese which I had on hand.

The cooked noodles, some of the pasta water, and the cheese sauce in an oven safe dish.

I stirred in the onion, garlic, tuna, butter, spice mixture and stirred everything together well.

I mixed in the chopped up cheese bits, and then topped the dish with the panko bread crumbs and baked the dish in the oven at 425 for 7 minutes. I went until the bread crumbs were toasted on top. One thing to mention is that I intentionally undercooked the pasta as I knew it would cook more in the oven.

This was the finished dish, my semi-homemade baked tuna mac. It was amazingly delicious and quite possibly the best mac and cheese I have ever made. You could add just about anything you want to the mac and cheese. I really did have all of the things sitting around and threw them in, you could add bacon, you could add any meat you wanted. You could add corn, or peas or any vegetable you wanted to this as well. You can also add whatever spices you want to try in this dish, I just don't like to make things exactly as stated on the box.

Something I never really discussed previously how I use bacon in my dishes. I always keep the bacon in the fridge until I am able to use it. If you are slicing the bacon, it cuts much more easily when it is cold or even frozen than when it is allowed to reach room temperature.

 I slide the bacon because it cooks much faster than cooking it in strips, and I also can get the whole package in the pan rather than doing a few strips at a time.

This is just the normal bacon cooking shot that I have in here quite regularly, I love the smell of bacon, and I love draining it as it cooks. I feel like I can get more grease out of the bacon this way rather than through strips.

The bacon is getting used in this dish, well a portion of it is anyway. I removed it from the pan and drained off all but a few tablespoons of the grease.

I added the onions and garlic to the pan and let them sizzle for a little while, the liquid released from the onions is great at loosening up. The little bits of bacon are definitely good for the flavor of the dish.

You can tell the onions and garlic have picked up some stuff from the bottom of the pan. This is about half way through the cooking.

This is when the onions were about done, I added some thyme, red pepper flake, and some flour and stirred it all together, then I added some chicken stock to get up any last bits from the pan before transferring to the crock pot.

This is everything from the pan plus about half of the cooked bacon, some soy sauce, the rest of the chicken stock, and some bay leaves.

I seasoned the pork chops with salt and pepper and then pushed them into the other ingredients, from there I covered and cooked on high for 5 hours.

This is the finished dish, I removed the pork chops and let them cool, and then allowed the sauce to cool as well, removed some of the fat from the surface of the pan, and then stirred in some apple cider vinegar to balance out the sauce.

Since I have covered oven roasted broccoli previously I won't worry about that too much in this edition. I did get a small food processor, and I used it to make some smashed cauliflower, which is much lighter and fluffier when run through the food processor. I look forward to try to do all sorts of different things with it in the future.

Peter's Cooking Diary #24

Well I took a week off from writing on here because I made stuff that wasn't really anything new for me. This week I was feeling a bit more adventurous, I made something that I have never made before, and I actually didn't have a recipe, I just tried something out from my own brain and it really worked. My inspiration this week was Chipotle, I wanted to try to make the ingredients that I get in a burrito bowl. We will start from the bottom up.

This was the first thing that I made, 1 lb of pinto beans, 2 cups of chicken stock for flavor, and 3 cups of water. I added some bay leaves, oregano, cumin, coriander, and some mexican chili powder. The beans  cooked for 5 hours in the crock pot.

This was the finished pot of beans, I drained most of the liquid from them and put them in my container and placed them in the fridge.

The next item I was making was some slow cooked carnitas using this smallish pork roast.

I pretty much used the same spices for the pork as I did for the beans, plus I added some salt to this spice mix as well. I stirred everything to combine in the bowl.

I coated all of the sides of the roast liberally with the spice mixture.

I added the roast to the crock pot dry, to keep the spices from all getting washed off right away.

I poured about 2 cups of chicken stock to the side of the roast as a cooking liquid and also added a few more bay leaves to the pot for more seasoning. The roast cooked for 10 hours on low, or just overnight while I slept.

This is what the roast looked like when it was done cooking. I removed it from the pot and let if cook for about an hour. I let the juices stay in the pan and cool off as well. I removed any chunks of fat that were floating in the juices.

I hand pulled the pork into bite size pieces, and removed any pieces of fat that I found. I also poured the remaining juices over the pork to keep it nice and juicy.

So the final thing I made was some corn salsa, I have always wanted to make some corn salsa, and figured it would go well with the things I was making. So this is 5 ears of corn with husks and silk removed, on a foil lined baking sheet that is coated in cooking spray. I placed them under the broiler for about 10 minutes and rotated them and put them back in for another 10.

This is the final roasted corn, I guess my oven is a little bit uneven as some of the corn got way more roasted than the other ears.

I took a knife and removed all of the kernels from the cob, I also ran the back of the knife down the cob to get as much of the corn out cob as I could.

The next step was to roast the pepper that I was cooking with, I used the broiler to roast the peppers using a method I saw online, removing the stems and seeds from the peppers and flattening them out. If I had gas burners I would have used them to roast the peppers, but I had to use what I have.

I roasted the peppers for about 10 minutes, in retrospect I would have probably cooked them for a few more minutes and gotten them really charred.

While the peppers were still hot, I tossed them in a bowl and popped the lid on to steam from their own heat, this would help to loosen the charred skin from the peppers.

I let the peppers steam for a while in the bowl before removing the skins from all of them. When I said I would have cooked them a bit longer, it was because some of the skins were really hard to get off, a little more cooking would have made that a lot easier.

This is the pile of roasted peppers.

I took them one by one and chopped them very finely, cutting them in strips vertically and then chopping finely across. This might have actually been some of my best knife work and it was at like 11pm at night as well. I wish I would have taken better pictures to illustrate what I did.

This is the corn along with all of the chopped peppers. I also forgot to mention, I used 2 red bell peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers and 2 anaheim peppers. I really wanted to get some poblanos, but the only poblanos that were left on the shelf were super wrinkly and did not feel or look fresh at all.

To finish the salsa, I added some cilantro and some minced red onion, as well as the juice of one line and a little bit of salt for seasoning. This salsa could not have turned out better. I really like it and will definitely be trying to do things similar to this in the future, especially when local sweet corn is available.

I eat the bowls with beans, pork, and the corn salsa, as well as some guacamole and the bowls I have made have been very delicious.