culinary adventures.

sunday, march 3rd, 2024.

I've been pretty busy the last couple of weeks, mostly with bicycle advocacy stuff. Pushed and pulled the organization website a bit to add a Google calendar of events— we're gonna start having Saturday morning group rides soon just to get folks together and hopefully start building up a membership.

I snagged a copy of Madhur Jaffrey's Quick & Easy Indian Cooking for $6 and it came in a few weeks ago, so I've been trying out a few Indian recipes. We're trying to eat healthier and push towards a vegetarian (or at least pescatarian) diet. The shrimp curry dish we had, bhagari jhinga, was so good. I had to go on a bit of a scavenger hunt to find the ingredients, though. Got fresh curry leaves from a nearby Asian market and garam masala (a spice blend) from, strangely enough, Publix.

Last night, I also tried making some overnight oats:

We made a base blend of oats by combining these ingredients into some mason jars:

• 1 part old-fashioned rolled oats.
• 1 part milk.
• ⅛ part chia seeds.
• a big spoonful of greek yogurt.
• half a cap full of vanilla extract.
• honey to taste.

The texture is interesting, but the base blend has a very bland flavor. Adding some fresh blueberries improved it quite a bit. We tried adding syrup as a sweetener and I wasn't a fan of how it turned out. I could see all sorts of fruits, cinnamon, and maybe some candied nuts going well in it, though!

Other than that, I've been gradually weaning myself off of caffeine. I had been drinking somewhere between 500 and 600 grams of coffee daily, but now I'm at 200g and tapering off 50g every week or two. I've been sleeping a lot better, but I've also had a mild background headache a lot more often, too. I've heard that tapering off is way better than quitting it cold turkey, though!

I suppose that's all for now! I've got to eat some lunch and convince myself to get the taxes done... *sigh* edit: nope, not doing them today!

Until next time, be well! :)