Weekly Eats: A Tale of Instant Pot Redemption

A weekly roundup: eats, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition we finally FINALLY found a good use for our instant pot.


Breakfasts

I'll spare you the picture of my pre run morning cup of coffee & Cliff bar that's serving as breakfast most days.  Instead I'll give you a picture of a Rest Day Omelette.  Filled with mozzie, Trader Joe's frozen mushrooms, and fresh garden basil.

Lunches
The week started with a brand new batch of Pinch of Yum's Spicy Sofrtias Tofu. Seen here in a salad (roasted potatoes, rice, salad mix, avocado, and dressing)

And seen here in taco version

The final lunch entry this week for your approval is a random pairing of leftovers.  We had tomatoes and green onions left over from our taco dinners earlier this week plus leftover garlic sauce from takeout night.  I grabbed a tortilla, got it nice and crispy in a skillet, and then topped it with the garlic sauce, veggies, and a little mozzie.

Dinners

Monday: leftover steak kabobs from Sunday

Tuesday: grilled chicken

Wednesday & Thursday: tacos! A.k.a I cooked up a pound of ground beef and called it dinner;-)

Friday: takeout from the Lebanese place.

Saturday: burger night!

Sunday: Instant Pot redemption night c/o Gimme Some Oven's Instant Pot Barbacoa Beef.  The switch has been flipped from "um I have an Instant Pot and don't know what to do with it" to "OMG OMG OMG everyone needs an Instant Pot if only to make barbacoa beef".

Stuff that I did:

• Used more meat but did not increase the sauce (recipe is written for a 3# roast and I had a 4# roast).  
• Only used one Chipotle for the benefit of the mild palates in my house.  
• For beer, we had a random can that someone left at our house from a party a while ago, so I put half the can in the recipe and the rest in me.  In the future I think I would probably use beef broth instead of sacrificing one of our favorite beers.
• Used a hand mixer to shred the beef, ain't nobody got time to be messing around with forks.

To be honest, this was a gamble since I knew that *I* would like it but wasn't sure if my family would...no worries, everyone loves it.  In the past the kids have disliked shredded chicken but for some reason shredded beef is acceptable in their world.  We'll get a few more dinners out of this and then package up the rest for freezer leftovers.

Watching
OMG Shtisel on Netflix is such a good show.  I'm about halfway through season 2 and torn between binging it and making it last.

Reading
I'm in a reading dry spell.  I started in on a Best Seller from last year that everyone was crazy about, and man it is just doing nothing for me.  I tried to force it since I mean with all the hype surely it's a great book and I just need to stick with it for a hot minute?  Nah, I'm not in school anymore, I'm allowed to break up with it and move on.

Extra Curricular Activities Update (a.k.a. 🚨🚨🚨Nerd Alert🚨🚨🚨)
As I mentioned before, shelter in place means a somewhat more relaxed lifestyle but not an abundance of free time.  However, I've made great progress on my one "quarantine" extracurricular activity of relearning to solve the rubix cube.  Since we last talked about it, I can do this:

And booyah, this:

IMO, the place to start is with the 3x3 cube and then move to the smaller 2x2 cube - smaller isn't easier.  The 5x5 is a lot easier to solve than the 4x4 but you need the skills that you learn by solving the 4x4 to move up to 5x5.  Just be patient, sometimes you have to do a step many, many times to get it to work, so if you're looking to kill time the Rubix cube is definitely for you.  The guides that I learned to solve the 2x2 and 3x3 are here and they now have a 4x4 solution guide as well which I'll be interested to look at.  These are the video playlists where I learned the 4x4 and the 5x5.