Diary of Kindergartener: The 5th Annual Weekly Eats Roundup

 

How time flies!  Five years ago I transitioned from being an irregular recipe blogger to a regular weekly "what I ate" blogger.  The weekly eats post is now old enough to go to kindergarten!  Today we're here to do our annual look back and highlight the best of the best.

BTW, I'm also posting everyday in November as part of NaBloPo.  For the scoop on that, head over to The Inbetween in Mine

Weekly Eats Memory Lane

The First Weekly Eats Post

Year One Recap

Year Two Recap

Year Three Recap

Year Four Recap

 

Picking up from where we left off at this time last year, year four was kind of a bummer.  Cooking was a drudgery, I was trying to follow running nutrition advice which took eating from a pleasure to a chore, and I was so frustrated with life in general.

What happened since then?  Everything got better, slowly.  I (kind of) stopped cooking family dinner and let the three other able bodied members of the house pitch in.  I usually cook dinner on Sundays and pitch in here and there, but for the most part it's the guys taking care of themselves on weeknights.  We eat dinner together every night and we all eat chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese as often as we want to.  That's somewhat regularly for them and never for me.

Here are the Best of the Best Things that We Ate This Year

Damn Delicious One Pot Garlic Parmesan Pasta.  If you like elegant pasta dinners with minimal ingredients, minimal effort, and maximum taste this one is for you.

Jo Cooks Moo Goo Gai Pan.  While I'm very anti-chicken right now, I have to highlight this one for how easy it was to make and for how much everyone else in the house liked it.

 

Beef with Snow Peas.  Another quickie stir fry winner, and yes it's easily adapted to non-meat (case study here).  It's also the winner of Best Recipe that I Found Out About From Another Blog this year.

Jo Cooks Sesame Noodles.  Another candidate for the "so easy and so good that it's truly stupid" category and also the winner of Which Recipe Did I Interrupt Writing this Post to Make For Lunch Today award.

Gimme Some Oven Crispy Coconut Chicken Salad. Quick caveat that my version of this has neither chicken nor coconut...no chicken because I can't stand chicken and no coconut because it's a component of the chicken breading.  I used air fried soy curls instead.

 Also recommended in wrap form:

Biggest Source of New Recipes and Food Inspo This Year

Let's do a special shout out to The Cheap Lazy Vegan!!!  Prior to this year I'd made of a few of her recipes and occasionally watched her Youtube videos, but out of nowhere she started producing a string of hits and I started playing along at home.  No I'm not a vegan and I don't plan to ever become one, but good food is good food.

Soy Curl Buffalo Wrap.  Even if you don't like buffalo flavoring, it's worth checking out the recipe for the technique of cooking the soy curls in the air fryer.

Korean Fried Soy Curls.  Lol, they're not fried but they totally taste like they are.

Caesar Salad Dressing.  I adore Casear dressing but rarely have it because it's a bit heavy.  This recipe has a lighter feel and a taste that transcends the traditional dressing.  In general I'm not really that into salads but I keep making this on repeat.

Gochujang Pasta and Meatballs.

Biggest Food Shocker of the Year (Gasp!)

You might think it's that I stopped cooking family dinner, but we've already talked about that.  No, it's that after a billion years I changed to a different breakfast burrito recipe. 

It started as a vacation fling when I went to Chicago and got a Trader Joe's chicken sausage burrito and thought "whoa, I like this and I bet that I can make the same or better at home!"

I don't follow an exact recipe, but here's the general idea:

• Finely diced potatoes either cooked in the oven or the air fryer (recipe inspo here)
• Eggs scrambled in a bit of butter and onion
• Costco chicken sausage links
• Cheese
• Cook up all of the above and assemble in proportions that look right to you, roll up into tortllas, crisp up all sides of the burritos in a skillet, wrap up leftovers and freeze.
  

Best New Cooking Tips and Equipment Discovered this Year

Grated Tofu!!!

Yes there's a new way to prepare tofu of all things and another shoutout to Cheap Lazy Vegan for putting this on my radar.  I learned about this technique from her Vegan California Roll recipe.  The recipe is an honorable mention for the best of the year list but I really wanted to shout out the grated tofu which has so many applications beyond sushi.

The Online Taco Calculator

Winner of the "What Won't the Internet Think of Next" and "How Did I Ever Live Without It?" Awards...yes friends there is such a thing as an Online Taco Calculator to work out how much taco ingredients you need for a taco bar party.  I used this for one of my stepsons' birthday parties and for family girls' weekend.

The Best Thing that I Spent My Hard Earned Cash on This Year

Give it up for T Fal's 5.5 Quart Non Stick Pan which I walked out of Costco with for the price of $23.  After years and years of trying to jam everything into too-small pans I finally have something roomy enough to cook anything that my heart desires.

Now That We've Had Dinner Let's Move On To Dessert
The best new desserts that we made this year are:

Averie Cooks M&M bars.  I'm part of a family that adores a plain ol' chocolate chip cookie so this was something that I made for the family Christmas cookie tray and wasn't expecting to be wowed by. How wrong I was.  My only other advice is to double the recipe, but that's my standard advice for all of Averie's dessert recipes.

 

Oh Sweet Basil's Double Chocolate Zucchini Muffins.  This was something that I made only because I had a leftover zucchini that I needed to use up and I thought that the kids would like them.  I was correct on both counts, and also surprised by how much I liked them.

Homemade In The Kitchen's Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting.  This was something that I made on a whim to use up the remainder of a can of pumpkin puree from another recipe.  I was wowed and so were my stepsons.

That's it for food!  Let's move on to movies, TV, and books

Best Movies of the Year

The Bridge on the River Kwai.  Last year I settled in to watch all 100 of the AFI's top 100 movies of all time, and this was originally on my "I haven't seen this but it doesn't leap out as something that I want to see list".  It ended up being the final movie on the list that I watched and it was a great way to end this project.

The Room.  Yes, "The Citizen Kane of bad movies" made it on to my best of the year list!  In the sense that it was one of the most enjoyable movie watching experiences that I had this year.  Disclaimer that we saw the Riftrax version (the guys from MST3K making wisecracks in real time).

The Shining.  I was expecting a cliche and I got a great movie instead.

Best TV Shows of the Year

It's not even close...the best TV show that I saw this year was an Israeli spys n'guys show called Fauda.  It hit all of the right notes of being suspenseful without being too violent or frightening  (yes it's both violent and frightening but not TOO for either category if that makes sense).  There's a 4th season coming out SOMETIME but Netflix won't say when (hey Netflix if it matters the release date of season 4 will be the day that I restart my subscription so there's $10 in it for you). 

For most enjoyable TV show, that award belongs to 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.  There are full episodes and clips galore on YouTube.

Best Books of the Year

Heartburn by Nora Ephron.  This was a book that I'd heard about for a billion years but never got around to reading until now.  My loss and please don't make the same mistake.  I also enjoyed the movie but the book is tops.

A Million Things By Emily Spurr.  When you're a 10 year old girl and your mom doesn't come home, how long can you pretend that everything is normal before someone notices?  I've listed these books in the order that I read them but this is the winner of Best Book that I read this year.

56 Days By Catherine Ryan Howard.  My favorite Pandemic Lit!

You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz.  The best "for the life of me I couldn't get into the TV show but the book was a wow" read of the year.

Goodnight Beautiful by Aimee Malloy.  It's a "not that deep" beachy thriller.  It was enjoyable at the time and I'm still thinking about it now.

Dear Child by Romy Hausmann.  Along with Goodnight Beautiful it's notable for being on this list which gave me a lot of good reads and also notable for the "I was wrong" prediction.  I said here "I don't think that any of these books will make my best of the year" but when I look back sure enough they make the "best of the best" cut.

 Stay Awake by Megan Goldin.  Another great beachy-ish thriller that kept me awake until the very end.

That's a Wrap on This Year's Best of the Best Wrap Up Post!  What's on your list for "best of" this year?