Last week I bought a bag of brussels sprouts in order to force myself to cook them before they went bad. I love brussels sprouts, probably my favorite vegetable along with collard greens, which is funny because they are derived from the same plant, wild mustard, and have been bread for thousands of years to select for different qualities. This was a sort of motivation treat for me to get back in the swing of cooking more. I also needed to make room in the freezer, and the package of chicken thighs, which has been there since October, was fairly large. I diced up an onion, chopped a few cloves of garlic, pan fried them along with the chicken thighs, and threw in a handful of spices along the way. While that cooked on the stove, I roasted the halved brussels sprouts in the oven. I used a little over half the bag, and exactly half the chicken thighs and I ate it for 2.5 meals. When I got home today, I still had a lot of energy and I was mildly hungry, so I figured why not cook up the rest. I tweaked a few things, longer and hotter on the brussels sprouts and had to get the pan hotter to get a better sear on the chicken. I took some photos along the way:
I feel a little silly taking photos, this is a pretty simple dish, but it just feels good when something I envisioned turns out exactly how I imagined it.
Cooking a meal again kinda made me think about how I've been eating lately. There was a while where I was eating out every night or buying pre-made meals at the grocery store. When it's on a digital screen or at the grocery store I have a easy time over-ordering and then eating it all. The cannabis aides this. With cooking I can just make a lot, take out a healthy portion, but not the whole thing, and package back up what I don't eat for left overs. Also it just brought to my attention my sugar addiction. I try to stay away from soda and pure sugary sweets, but I don't put in that much effort. A lot of the foods I've been eating have added sugar and after I ate the meal I cooked to the point of not wanting more, I still felt hungry and craved something sweet. Last year when I was cooking almost every meal I had the opposite thing happen where I really stopped craving sugar or sweet things (except for ice cream of course).
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