Feeding the Self

Having my own apartment is lots of fun.  The rent and utilities and all that are a little less fun, but I'm pretty sure they're outweighed by the freedom and intriguing responsibility and yeah... freedom. In an effort to keep myself alive and healthy I've been trying to cook meals that incorporate as many vegetables as possible so that I can consume them before they spoil. Yes, the better idea would be to not buy as many groceries at once, but my parents left me with enough food to feed my entire lab for a week, so here we are.

This one was (too) easy--365 Classic Tomato Sauce with chopped ham, green peppers, and onions to give it some extra flavor. My sister doesn't like multigrain pasta, but personally I am a fan.

Needing to get rid of some 青梗菜 (baby bok choy?), I started hunting around Cookpad. Japanese housewives never fail me! I sort of messed up the order of the steps in the recipe, but in the end everything turned out all right. The spaghetti got a little soft because of the excess water from the baby bok choy, which would have been avoided if I'd boiled the vegetable at the right time, but whatever. I couldn't really taste the ginger that several of the reviewers were raving about, though.

http://cookpad.com/recipe/1070970

This was an even more desperate move to try to beat the bacteria and molds to my vegetables. A while back I remembered seeing a 白菜 (bok choy?) and pork hot pot dish on one of 嵐's shows, and it looked super easy (after all, it was a bunch of guys cooking) so I decided to give it a try. The original recipe called for a 土鍋 (clay pot?) and alternating layers of pork and bok choy carefully arranged to look like flower petals, so obviously I used a stainless steel pot with vertically stacked layers of pork, bok choy, もやし (bean sprouts?), and えのき (umm... small white mushrooms?). In the end I came to the realization that this was basically a hot pot glorified by five idols, and entirely inappropriate for 70-80F weather. Oh well.

My biggest problem, obviously, is that I do not know how to cook in English, as was discovered on a day I would now very much like to forget.