chicken

I’ve Been Busy

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My last post was over a week ago. I’d been meaning to post in this time, but life has been rather busy.  Because of that, this is going to be a rather long post, but it’s going to be pretty all-encompassing. And I’ll break it down into the different categories and keep them short-ish. To start:

Beauty

I got my August GlamBag around the middle of the month. This one had three different bags that you could have received and I got the one I wanted. In the bag I received two CLIV Max Hyalruonic Masks, theBalm Cosmetics theBalm Voyage Vol. 2 Eyeshadow in Willkommen, MAKE UP FOR EVER EXCESSIVE LASH Aressting Volume Mascara, Hikari Cosmetics Shimmer Bronzer in Flush, and Hey Honey Come Clean: Propolis & Minerals Face Scrub.

So far I have used one of the masks and don’t have a lot to say about it. I like these masks, they are refreshing and for at least the next day after using them, my skin feels softer and looks brighter. Since I don’t use them regularly though, I can’t really say anything more than that. I know that these having hyaluronic acid in them is supposed to be a good thing too, but honestly, the word “acid” used in the same sentence as the word “face” makes me uncomfortable. I’ll probably stick to the green tea masks.

The left is the bronzer and the right is the eyeshadow. This is under a light in the apartment.

The eyeshadow and bronzer I haven’t actually used. I swatched them, because that’s what you do, but I don’t use a lot of eyeshadow and bronzer. They just aren’t my jam. I thought the swatches looked pretty nice though.

I like the mascara. I use it with a primer, obviously, but it works. I think most mascaras work pretty well with a primer, but I have found a few that didn’t work super well, and this was not one of them.

As for the face scrub- I’ll be tossing this out before I finish using it. The description on the ipsy website says that every people with sensitive skin love it but I don’t see how. I have pretty normal skin- gets oily when I don’t wash it for a bit but is generally okay. THIS STUFF BURNED. I love face scrubs. I looooooove the way my skin feels after exfoliating. Unfortunately, after exfoliating, it felt like there was salt poured all over my face. This was not a good feeling. I don’t think I’ve ever given anything from ipsy one star until now.

 

Food

The only full meal from BA we could make- but it was really good.

I am a Blue Apron customer. I originally signed up because I was curious and with a Rooster Teeth promo code, I could get $30 off, making my first box half price. Because I am stingy, I didn’t finish signing up at that point. I held out and they sent me an email for $40 off. Still wasn’t enough. Then I got the email for $50 off and I finished my membership and got my first box. Since then I have had a love/hate relationship with them. I believe that $60 is too much to be dishing out monthly for these meals so most of the time, I’ve been skipping weeks and only getting the boxes when they’ve got meals that look especially tasty in them. Since my first box however, all the of the boxes I have received after were boxes that I didn’t actually want and only received because I forgot to skip them. On 9/1, I received one of these boxes.

I was upset a) because $60 that I was not expecting to spend was now going to be spent and b) because I forgot about it, I didn’t even get to pick which meals I received and I got the default meals, one of which was barbecue baked chicken breast, sweet potato salad, and sauteed green beans. I spent $20 on barbecue baked chicken breast, sweet potato salad, and sauteed green beans. You can’t see my face, but it is unamused.

Since the box came in on Friday morning, I was at work so I asked Luke to bring it in and put all of the ingredients away. He did so and didn’t say anything was wrong with any of them. That Saturday, we decided to make one of the meals that turned out pretty well. On Sunday morning, I decided to go through all of the ingredients, just to see what we had. I pulled the sweet potatoes out of the pantry to find that one of them had turned completely to mush. What’s worse, somehow there was liquid in the bag that proceeded to leak all over the kitchen floor. I was livid. Luke then informed me that the sweet peppers in the fridge had also looked a little funky. I pulled them out and surely enough, they were moldy. I immediately took photos of it all and sent Blue Apron an angry email stating that for $60 I should not be getting bad produce (this wasn’t the first time) and would be cancelling my account. They responded the next day saying that they credited $10 to my account and how to cancel my account should I choose to proceed that way.  This confused me as I have never seen a company actively tell people how to stop being customers. I guess they have so many that they figured they didn’t need me anymore.

I have yet to cancel because I don’t want that $10 to go to waste, but I will after I use it up.

Life

My job hunt is still active. I am still working part-time at Ulta, though not many hours. I am still working temp in the same office I have been since August and today, I had an interview for the permanent position. In about a weekI also have an interview for a different position at a different company. I don’t want to jinx any of it so that’s all the information I am currently putting out there, but I’m nervous and pretty scared. A lot of what’s currently scaring me is the potential to have to choose which job I want because I don’t know right now. I’ve been talking to many people about this and I haven’t come up with a clearer decision. I suppose that is a bridge to cross when I get there however, because I could only get offered one or neither and then all of this anxiety was for nothing. We’re hoping for a much better outcome than that though.

Besides that, I’ve been dealing with needing to get a TX driver’s license and that has been a whole process that I can’t wait to be over.

Luke and I also bought season passes to Six Flags Fiesta Texas which is in San Antonio. The passes we bought will get us into any Six Flags though, so whenever we’re home, if anyone wants to go to Great America, we are there. The passes were supposed to be a birthday gift to Luke, but I just didn’t have the money to cover it so the surprise was ruined. So I still have to find a gift for him. If nothing else, I’ll bake him a cake. I can do that.

Homemade Sweet & Sour Chicken

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Everyone loves Chinese take-out. I am no exception to this, but I don’t have the money for Chinese take-out right now. Thankfully, most recipes are rather easy, especially fried rice. All you have to do is throw some leftover rice in a pan with some oil, add whatever frozen veggies you like, soy sauce, and an egg and you’re done! If you wanna get even fancier, you can also add meat. In the past, we’ve added meats like char-siu pork and different Chinese sausages. Tonight we were going to add chicken since Luke had started defrosting chicken thighs, but I wanted to mix it up a little so I looked up a recipe for sweet and sour chicken. We also had a pineapple, so that aided in the idea.

This was the first recipe that came up on Google when I searched “sweet and sour chicken”: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sweet-and-sour-chicken-recipe-1957986.

I can post it this time because this time, I basically followed it. The things we changed were that we had no bell peppers, we used chicken thighs instead of breasts, we used fresh pineapple, and because it was fresh pineapple, we had no pineapple juice so we subbed in limeade that we had in the fridge. We also floured the chicken before frying it because it added a bit more depth to the dish.

It came out spectacularly. The only thing that we probably could have improved upon was that I think I didn’t cook the cornstarch long enough because I left the heat up too high so it reduced too quickly. However, the pineapple was super warm and tender, the sauce was sweet and sour, and the chicken was crispy and delicious. It all went really well with the rice too, which had corn and green beans in it.

The best part of it all, we have leftovers. I love leftovers. Who has Chinese take-out and doesn’t have leftovers?

Budget-and-Lazy-but-Still-Delicious Chicken Parmesan with Angel Hair.

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Last night both Luke and I didn’t know what to eat for dinner. We’d been making meals in the Crock-Pot the past few nights but wanted something different. I looked around the kitchen and found the large container of fresh basil that his mom bought us and immediately thought to do pasta. Not having any pine nuts, we couldn’t do a pesto (which is my favorite), but I then saw a can of tomato paste in the pantry and decided to do a red sauce with basil in it instead. This would have been all well and good to do a vegetarian meal for the day but the only other vegetable we had to go into the sauce was onions, not even mushrooms, so I had to start thinking again. This is when I pulled the last two chicken thighs out of the freezer and threw them into the sink to defrost.

Here I present to you: Budget-and-Lazy-but-Still-Delicious Chicken Parmesan with Angel Hair. 

Red sauces are one of the easiest things to make from scratch (especially if you’re not picky about flavor) and pasta is always an easy go-to as well. The part of it that we didn’t think of until the last minute was to flour and sear the chicken before putting it in the sauce.

We don’t have a bag of flour in the apartment right now. This is not just because we forgot to get one from the store, it is because if we have flour, we will bake bread and other yummy baked good that we are trying to cut out of our diet. I did, however, have a small bag of whole wheat flour that was left over from a Blue Apron box that didn’t make it to me on time (the meat went bad but all of the dry ingredients and veggies were still good). It was just enough flour to coat both thighs. Those were then seared in a hot pan and removed once they had a nice golden color and then we threw the onions and garlic straight in after them and cooked everything else on top of that. One-pot/pan recipes are always great because you a) don’t have to clean a million dishes and b) all of the flavors stay together- perfect for the lazy foodie.

In the interest of being a lazy foodie that I am, I’m not going to post a whole recipe/step-by-step because a) lazy and b) I really don’t have a recipe. So many dishes that I cook are not fully thought out until they have to be. I fly by the seat of my pants and just go with what I’ve got. It’s much more fun that way.