This is Offbeat Home's archive of Food posts.

This is our category dedicated to eating, cooking, baking, and feeding.

Most Recent Posts About Food

Yesterday, we talked about my thought strategies and meal planning. Today, it's all about the listing.

Like I said, I list out all the foods that we have that I want to use up.

Then, I list out all the recipes I've seen that I want to make.

Then, I list the ingredients I need to get at the store.

The Listing of the Recipes

It's hard to come up with recipes.

New recipes are scary and daunting and not to mention all of the questions in my head:

Will my picky three-year-old eat it?
Will my meat-obsessed husband eat it?
Will it be good in leftovers?
Can I make twice as much ahead of time and freeze?

The only way I overcome my fear of new recipes is by challenging myself.

I plan my meals every week.
It saves me time and money.
It helps me visualize when I'll need extra help, or when to scale back or when to pull out the fancy forks (Just kidding, I don't have any fancy forks. Do you?)
It keeps me from wasting food.
It takes less than 15 minutes a week.
So, what are you having for supper tomorrow?

Quinoa is fast becoming my signature dish at home. I started incorporating this versatile grain more and more into our meals at home last fall and it has just blown me away with its potential. Our hands-down favorite quinoa dish right now is Quinoa Pilaf; I even set it out for our family dinner at Christmas! It's vegetarian, delicious, and a great way to clean out the vegetable drawer stragglers (lone celery stalk, anyone?). Plus, there's more protein in one ounce of quinoa than in one ounce of meat! HA!

Near our house is a botanical garden which includes a small, pathetic tropical fruit orchard. We visit every now and then, usually bringing home a few lemons, but not much else. Most of the things growing there are not super productive, because they aren't cultivated or cared for, and there is usually only one tree from each species. The trees are also labelled with nothing but a name (and sometimes not even that), so it's hard to know when things are ready for picking.

A few months ago we grabbed a jackfruit, but when we cut it open it oozed so much latex that we got scared and threw it away. Then we saw Australian celebrity chef Luke Nguyen make a salad with green, unripe jackfruit. He talked briefly about how to cook it. That was enough to inspire us to have another go.

First let's talk about the magic that is hot chocolate on a mutha-fuckin' STICK, people. Not since snakes on a plane has a thing on another thing had such a profound impact on me.
Can you imagine hosting some friends over for dinner, and handing everyone a cup of steaming hot milk and a STICK OF HOT CHOCOLATE "for a creamy, interactive hot chocolate experience"!? That's how Kristi over at 30 Pounds Of Apples describes these things, which she then goes into detail how to make.

Inspired by creamy, interactive hot chocolate experience, I'm rounding up a few of my other fantasy hot beverages for y'all to serve up on a cold winter night. Some of these are boozy, some of them are not, but all of them are HOT.

When I saw this uber-adorable, super retro-styled 3-in-1 Breakfast Station my heart simultaneously leapt with joy and sank with bitter grumbles. SO ADORABLE! A STATION! FOR YOUR BREAKFAST! — but really, who needs another single-use kitchen appliance, even when it's a retrotastic 3-in-1 station?