Basil Canteen & Whole 30 Part 2

I can't believe we're doing it again, but starting tomorrow, it's back on the meat and veggie express and so long to my good friends "bread", "cheese", and happiness. I'll see if I can manage to blog about it this time, but no promises. In the meantime, here's some yummy food that I ate today.

Basil Canteen - kao pode tod - $7.5

Basil Canteen was pretty good, would definitely head back if I was in the neighborhood, although it's on the pricey side.

First February Meal Plan

Greetings, strangers. Here's a quick meal plan:

Sunday:
Roasted vegetables, pan-fried chicken breasts, rice

Monday:
Mashed potatoes, roasted zucchini, roasted pork tenderloin

Tuesday:
chicken vindaloo, rice, leftover vegetables

Wednesday:
Caldo verde, crusty bread

Thursday:
Leftovers tossed with pasta

Friday:
Cauliflower soup, chicken in parchment

On NaBloPoMo Failure and Caldo Verde

dear lord this is an ugly picture

I have unsurprisingly failed in my NaBloPoMo quest. This has happened a lot more now than it did before. I think some of it was the encouragement I had when I actually knew other bloggers in Austin. A lot of it is because the seasons in my life have changed and my energy is directed elsewhere. I've been going to data science and machine learning meet ups whenever I can. I've been trying to attend community-building events to learn more about creating a diverse and inclusive culture both at my company and in tech in general. These do not leave much time for blogging, or cooking for that matter. Colby bears the brunt of the domestic responsibilities and I am very glad that he can cook.

I've been thinking about priorities a lot lately. I spend 2-4 nights per week doing after-work extracurricular activities. It's meant that I've been spending a lot of my mental capital on that and not on other things that I used to do (hello, paper crafting). It's also meant that I don't sleep and haven't been to my insanely expensive exercise place in 2 weeks (hello, Crossfit). This results in very quiet weekends. This isn't a bad thing, except that my weekends used to be the most interesting part of my week. Instead, I've been spending a lot of time snuggling with Ramona, watching Bob Ross, and catching up on my sleep.

The best part about quiet weekends has been that it's gotten much colder. This means that snuggling under piles of blankets is not uncomfortable and that soup for dinner is totally legit. This weekend, PBS Create had a soup-centric theme and that was awesome. America's Test Kitchen highlighted a recipe for caldo verde and it was amazing with nothing more than a side of crusty San Francisco sourdough.

Data Science Meet Up Recap

nice picture of the back of someone's head. :) 

My favorite way to interact at conferences is twitter. It's easy to follow hashtags and use @messaging to connect with people. As a result, I often "meet" people on twitter and never really meet them in real life. Today I went to a data science meet up and got to actually meet someone I've been interacting with on twitter since SciPy.

The meet up was basically an intro to data science. We talked about why data science is having a moment, what the data science work flow looks like, and what skills are crucial in being an effective data scientist. We then went through a tutorial using a Jupyter notebook, scikit-learn, and the iris data set. I've actually given a tutorial in a research seminar using that data set, so I didn't really gain much technical insight out of this; however, I did come to this realization:

The amount of machine learning one needs to understand to use SKLearn is very low. This is both wonderful and dangerous. #datascience

— julie k h (@jkru) November 3, 2015

I also got to hang out with Sonya, Michelle and Michael, and some Hackbright grads, while meeting other people who are interested both in data science and building a culture of inclusion in the tech industry. Quality way to spend an evening.

NaBloPoMo 2k15 Meal Plan #1

Can I actually just eat bacon all week instead?

It's November, which means that i get that itch to do something writing-related. i'm not saying that I'll success with NaBloPoMo, but whatever. Made this earlier today because we need to start eating better/cheaper:

Monday - rotisserie chicken, arugula
Tuesday - slow cooker pork, butternut squash in a brown butter and pine nut sauce, swiss chard
Wednesday - mac and cheese, leftover pork
Thursday - pan-fried chicken breast, roasted okra, swiss chard + lentil soup
Friday - chicken + vegetable pasta toss

I'll actually be out of the apartment for Monday and Wednesday to attend various events, so those are actually just for Colby to do while I'm gone.

Coconut Raspberry Muffins, Part 1

Remember when I took actual pictures with a real camera in natural light?

Remember when this was a food blog?

Remember when I used to post recipes?

Remember when I planned and executed stupidly complicated dinner parties?

My new job keeps me busy, but I really love it. I was able to meet up with one of my Hackbright mentors today and had a chance to reflect on the last (gasp!) 7 months. It's been good, though there is always room for improvement.

These days, I rarely cook. Colby has proven to be a good cook and, given that he preps food daily, perhaps even better than me. While I miss being in my old kitchen (with the counter space, walk in pantry, center island, in a city where I have friends), I don't miss stress baking because I hate grad school. After watching enough America's Test Kitchen, I finally decided to bake something.

Are these any good? Ish. There should probably be more sugar (maybe even up to 1/3 c) and that would balance out the harsh flavor of whole wheat. It's also unsatisfying that these are made from a mix. However, I'll probably make these again with some modifications. It's a low-pressure way to ease my way back into the kitchen.

Coconut Raspberry Muffins

2 c Trader Joe's Multigrain Pancake Mix (or any Bisquik-like mix)
1 T granulated sugar
2/3 c culinary coconut milk
1 egg
1 T melted coconut oil
1/2 t vanilla extract
1 pint fresh raspberries

Preheat oven to 400 F.
Whisk together pancake mix + sugar.
In a separate container, combine coconut milk, beaten egg, coconut oil, and vanilla extract.
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir until combined, some flour lumps are okay.
Add in raspberries and stir to distribute.
Bake for ~14 minutes, rotating halfway through.

Alameda Farmers' Market