Kirsty, Unhinged

Tag: recipes

  • Family and my stand mixer…

    I’m not a baker. However, as we know I do like to cook. I recently decided to make bread and I was reminded of why I don’t bake. It’s the incessant kneading. It sticks, you keep adding flour, you scream ‘WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WRONG?!!’ You cry a little and then then finally you have one tiny baguette that is delicious but gone in 30 seconds and you are left alone and empty inside.

    So I bought a Kitchen aid stand mixer. Who knew this was going to be life changing?! You just throw in your ingredients, turn that sucker on and then 5-7 minutes later you have workable dough.

    Today I was working from home and I took a lunch break. I threw some soup in the crop pot.

    Sidebar: it’s the potato veg soup I made and froze when I did my 5 meals with one tube of beef challenge. I actually took it out to make for dinner yesterday.

    But further sidebar…

    Jaime was snowboarding earlier in the week (she’s 11). She fell. She hurt her wrist. She thought she should go to the doctor. I did not think she needed to go to the doctor. I have three kids and this is not my first injury. In fact…

    Another sidebar: one time when Jaime was around 18 months we were in Disneyland and due to a series of events including a toddler running into the crowd (Jaime) and a mom (me) pulling her to safety, her little wrist got dislocated. I didn’t panic, we’ve dealt with dislocated joints before (I also have two boys). I consulted google. I turned her wrist gently one way, gently the other and bam! Popped back into place and we continued our vacation.

    Anyway, I had taken the soup out yesterday. Then Jaime came home and said her teacher had inspected her wrist and felt like it was important her mom take her to the doctor. Do you know how hard it is to see a doctor for a non-emergency but urgent situation? Especially one that Dr. Mom already knows is not an emergency, not even urgent? Not swollen. Not in distressing pain. Range of motion is limited but fine. She rode her scooter to school ffs. This is a mild sprain, at worst.

    But alas. The school thinks we should get it checked. Jaime thinks we should get it checked. So we go to urgent care and sit in the waiting room next to a nice young man with an obvious fever as his girlfriend put cold compresses on his face. He did compliment me on my boots, which are indeed very nice boots, but I am for sure getting sick now. Two + hours later we see a nurse and, as predicted, it is a mild sprain.

    This was a grand adventure for Jaime though. The nurse wrapped her wrist and recommended she get a wrist brace and wear it for two weeks. Jaime says oh, well it’s a good thing we went!! As she sports her new wrist bandage. Yes. Good thing.

    Anyway, we ate Subway at 7pm and the soup stayed in the fridge.

    Which brings me back to lunchtime today and my stand mixer. I dump my thawed yesterday soup into the crock pot and look at my mixer and think ‘boy fresh buns would be great with this soup’ so as I heated my lunch I I threw the bread ingredients into the mixer, and 10 minutes later had dough rising.

    I finished my workday and went to the kitchen, as I do. The kids congregated. Jim and our friend arrived from golf. I put the buns in the oven. OMG the actual buns, there will be no more buns in this oven I’ll tell you that with certainty lol

    We gathered, we ate homemade soup, we enjoyed the fresh buns, we talked and laughed and although things are crazy sometimes and I don’t know if I can handle any more conversations about Tyler’s conspiracy theories and Brad’s commentary and the chaos – this was hands down, one of those moments that fills my soul. #delight

  • Five Meals. One Tube of Beef.

    I keep seeing these videos come up in my feeds.  How I fed my family 5 dinners under $50.  I saw a lady doing a shop and and was like oh look at this lb of ground turkey on sale for $1.99! 

    $1.99 (*eyeroll*) .

    The cheapest lb of ground turkey I can find is $8.  And I’m normally a grass fed, free range kinda cook so like that’s unreal. 

    Anyway, the other day I was about to make butter chicken and realized I was out of butter.  Which is fine actually because strangely butter chicken has little to no butter in it. 

    Who knew? 

    Fun fact: Butter chicken’s proper name is Murgh Makhani — and makhani literally means “buttery.” But “buttery” here doesn’t mean floating in butter. It means rich, silky, and smooth, mostly accomplished with cream.

    My South Asian friends can correct me if I’m wrong lol

    Anyway, Butter chicken or not, I did need butter and also I could use some more naan and I needed some milk too so I headed to the grocery store.  I checked out the sales and saw tubes of 3lb ground beef were on sale.  I was out of ground beef, and I’m like seriously grocery prices though, so I put the tube in my basket.

    I also got my milk and butter, some cilantro, 2 cans of dog food, a bag of dog treats and some carrots I think. 

    $56. 

    I stood there thinking about those “$50 feeds my family for a week” videos and whispered to myself, what the actual hell.

    So I had a good chat with my friend ChatGPT about grocery prices, as one does.  She was like well you can probably make 5 meals out of this. 

    I was like ummm NO Brenda, we are a 1.5-2 lbs of ground beef per meal kind of family. 

    This is like the time she thought I could serve one rotisserie chicken to my family of 5 and still have leftovers for a second meal.   Silly AI lol

    But then I started to think about it and I was like, ok, maybe I could make 5 meals out of this.  At least 4 with the beef + a vegetarian. 

    So I went home, divided that beef into 4 and pulled out all the stuff in my fridge that needed to be used and scoured the pantry including my sick stash of homemade bone broth.

    In under 3 hours I made:

    • Beef and Barley Soup
    • Meat Sauce
    • Beef and Potato Vegetable Soup
    • Lasagna Soup
    • Chickpea Turmeric Rice

    My $21 beef tube + maybe $30-$40 dollars (and that’s being generous) of other ingredients from my kitchen made 5 whole food super healthy meals.  So frickin satisfying. And pretty darn close to $50.