Weekly Round Up 2 of 2: Food n'Stuff

 

A weekly round up:  eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Picking it up from part 1, lemme tell you the usual stuff that I talk about in these roundups.

Food

One idle click on Instagram and all of a sudden I came across two killer good recipes.  I've browsed Ambitious Kitchen before but I believe this is the first time I've ever made one of her recipes.

First up: Gochujang chicken bowls.  I don't like to tell people what to do but if you are at all into to Gochujang, I'd recommend making this ASAP.

My changes were: ignoring ingredient #1 on the list of "filtered water" and taking mine straight from the tap.  Change #2 was of course swapping the chicken for 8 oz of soy curls.  I air fried them using my go-to method via The Cheap Lazy Vegan in this recipe.  10/10 will make again.  I don't have the words to tell you how easy and how good this was.

Next up: green chile chicken burritos.  I always like to keep a batch of burritos in the freezer, and I'm always searching for the next Great Burrito recipe.  I can't explain what it was about a chicken and potato burrito that appealed to me, but I decided to go for it.

Changes: skipped cilantro and jalpeno because the grocery store stock wasn't looking good.  Skipped the green chiles because my assumption that I had a can in the pantry was incorrect.  Traded in the chicken for a block of crumbled tofu.  Cooked the potatoes in the air fryer to speed up the cooking process.  I had a few bites plain as shown but then upgraded with a sprinkling of melted cheese, a ton of salsa, and sour cream.  The upgrade was what hit the spot and this is now my go-to freezer burrito until the next one comes along.

Workouts

Same old same old.  I did the longest hike in my hiking challenge of 7.6 miles.  I wouldn't normally go for a three hour walk, but now that it's done I've got the bragging rights.  There is only one more hike that is over 6 miles and the rest are in the 3-5 mile range.

Watching

When you get that perfect NYC rent controlled apartment but your neighbors are a little intrusive...I finally watched Rosemary's Baby.

It was pretty good, and not scary BUT boy did I feel awkward watching it on the plane coming back from vacation.  As I was settling in I told a look around the cabin and took note of what everyone else was watching on their screens.  Then it dawned on me that I was in the aisle seat and everyone could see my screen.  There's nothing overly gory in the movie but there are some sex scenes and boobs and...well that's not what I want to see on other people's screens.  I found myself minimizing the media window anytime something spicy came up.

Meanwhile back home I've started season two of my current favorite quirky Australian show: Upright.  Look, this show didn't need a second season and it's no where near as good as the first season but all the same I don't mind getting to hang out with the characters for a bit longer.

Reading

I've been reading a lot in general and then when you add a beach trip on top of that, the result is a mountain of books.

First up: My Brilliant Friend started strong but the further I got into it the less I was able to follow the story.  After a certain point my brain just couldn't string the words together.  Once I got to the "my brain isn't braining" point, I skimmed the rest to get the story.  I think I'm going to class this as a DNF - I mean technically I read it in the sense that I put eyes on each page but for whatever reason I couldn't absorb the material.  I'm still following along with the Cool Blogger's Book Club for a cool discussion.

Next: nothing says beach vacation like the Alphabet series!  I gobbled down D is for Deadbeat and E is for Evidence and enjoyed them thoroughly.  I will say that I'm not really grabbed by the mystery and the whodunit part of these books, it's 100% the experience of hanging out with Kinsey.  I wanna be a 1980's private eye living in a garage apartment.

In between the Alphabet books I hit up another Nevil Shute, which I don't believe that I ever read before, but it wasn't nearly as good as his other books.  Beyond the Black Stump is about a straight laced American engineer who goes out to Australia and befriends a farmer's family.  He starts a relationship with the oldest daughter but troubles begin when she goes home to meet his folks and it turns out that the norms in rural Australia don't line up with the norms of small town 'Murica.  Look I don't know what small town Oregon was like in the 1950's and I suspect that Shute didn't either because that part of the story had a very cardboard cutout kinda feel.  I enjoyed the book up to the point where everyone went back to 'Murica and then it was just like "what's the point?"  It's alright, goodness knows that Shute wrote a mountain of incredible books so I can forgive him for a dud.

And finally, now that I'm home I'm reading a "not a mystery and not a Nevil Shute" book.  Wellness by Nathan Hill has a lot of buzz on it.  All I can tell you so far is that it's about a marriage that isn't doing so well.

Alrighty, that's my story for the past two weeks and I'm sticking to it.  See all y'all next week!