I’m slightly obsessed with Pinterest. As with, most social media I was a late adopter, but boy oh boy it did not take me long to fall in love. It jump started my journey into clean eating, cleaning up my beauty products, and starting this blog. I love that it provides a place to easily store all those recipes you might try, places you might go, and DIYs you might make. I’m a bit pin crazy. I’m going to let you in on a little secret…I have about 3,000 pins on my personal board. That is the main reason I started a separate account for the blog because: a. I have too many pins and don’t plan on stopping 😉 b. I don’t want to overwhelm my blog followers with random pins and it is a bit embarrassing. I pin while we watch TV, it is hard for me to just sit there and only watch tv…it gives me a little something to do that does not require too much brain activity.

At least half of my personal pins are food related. Most of the meals we cook are new recipes. Every Sunday I share on the blog the meals we have cooked that week. Since I started this blog, I’ve shared 82 pins on my Food Board, at least 70 of these are new meals for us, probably more. I use Pinterest exclusively to plan our meals. I have a secret board labeled “meals this week” and pin the meals we are planning for that week, then at the end of the week I delete those pins and start over. This makes it easy to find the meals we are cooking without having to scroll back through all the pins on various boards.

I’m planning on increasing the boards for Food, Booze, & Baggage by adding boards about blogging and photography. Currently, I have these on my personal account as secret, but I want to start sharing tutorials and articles I’ve found helpful with building this blog and learning photography. It is a bit silly not to share with you guys. You have been warned, I’m stepping up my pinning game!

Ok, so why am I babbling on about Pinterest? Well, to introduce the 6th prompt of the Nectar Collective (of course), “When Pinterest Comes to Life”-where Melyssa challenges us to make something we have pinned.

I chose to do something that is on my 101 in 1001 list: # 83~Make Peanut Butter. Ok, guys this is stupid simple….all you do is dump the peanuts in the food processor, hit on, and watch the magic happen. I have a particular purpose for my peanut butter so I did add sweetener but next time I’m trying some honey. Clean-up was easy enough and this gave me a reason to use my new green mason jar. I only used 2 cups of peanuts which gave me about half a pint sized jar, so 4 cups should give you close to a full pint. I like to read several recipes when attempting something new, and then decide which one sounds best. Below are the ones I read before making my peanut butter.

Confessions of a Bright-eyed Baker: DIY Peanut Butter

Serious Eats: DIY Simple Peanut Butter

Aggies Do It Better: Make Your Own Peanut Butter

Make sure to visit the Nectar Collective Wednesday to add more lovely pins to your DIY boards! Better step-up your pinning game, you don’t want me to be out pinning you. Competitive pinning it’s a thing right? Competing for Queen Pinner, Gold Medal in Pinning or what about this….

I wish I could claim credit for this, but no….found it on Pinterest 🙂

One of my goals with this blog is to include what we are eating at home. As I mentioned on my about page, I’m fascinated with what people eat and how they plan their meals. When I lived alone, if I ate at home, I would eat things like cheese and crackers or maybe a frozen something for dinner. Well, I’ve come a long way from those days. Our move into focusing on cleaner eating has been great and was actually easier than expected. The big challenge for us is not wasting food; to avoid this planning is required.

Our general routine is to plan and shop on Sunday morning three to four meals for the work week (not to include weekends). This gives us the flexibility to go out to dinner one night or to pick something up one night because we don’t feel like cooking. The weekends we leave open and just figure them out as we go. P and I do all of our planning, shopping, and cooking together (well I may do a bit more planning and P may do a bit more cooking).

Pinterest has been a great resource for planning and finding new recipes. We will repeat some recipes but try to do at least one new recipe a week. I have a secret board labeled “Meals this Week” that we use for planning purposes. This makes finding recipes when it is time to cook so much easier. I try to write a comment on the original pin of any changes made or notes for next time. If a recipe is particularly good then I will copy it into the Menu Planner app (so if a blog disappears we still have the recipe).

Here is one of the meals we enjoyed this week:

Veggie Soba Bowl

Adapted from Epicurious "Spicy Soba Noodles with Shiitakes and Cabbage"~Maggie Ruggiero

For sauce

1/3 cup water
1/3 cup soy sauce
1 to 2 teaspoons roasted red chili paste
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 tablespoon packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon sriracha or to taste

For noodles

1/4 cup vegetable oil (I use sunflower seed oil)
3 tablespoons finely chopped peeled ginger
1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic
10 oz fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and thinly sliced
2 cups broccoli florets (about 2 broccoli heads)
8 cups (@1 1/4 pound) Napa cabbage, thinly sliced
3 scallions, thinly sliced
8 to 9 ounces soba (buckwheat noodles)
Toasted sesame seeds (optional as topping)

Preparation

Whisk together all sauce ingredients until brown sugar and paste is dissolved, then set aside.

Prepare pot of salted water for soba noodles (2 tablespoons salt for 6 quarts water). Heat oil in wok or large skillet over medium-high heat until it shimmers, then sauté ginger and garlic, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add shiitakes and sauté, stirring frequently, until tender and starting to brown, about 6 minutes. Reduce heat to medium, add broccoli and sauté for about 3 minutes. Start noodles-see below. Then add cabbage and most of scallions (reserve about a tablespoon for garnish) and cook, stirring occasionally, until cabbage is crisp-tender, about 6 minutes. Add sauce and simmer 2 minutes (a bit longer is ok if you are still waiting on the noodles).

While cabbage is cooking, cook soba in a pasta pot of boiling salted water (2 tablespoons salt for 6 quarts water) until noodles are just tender, about 6 minutes. Drain in a colander and rinse under cool water to stop cooking and remove excess starch, then drain well again. Transfer to the pan with the vegetable mixture or combine both in a large bowl. Serve sprinkled with reserved scallions and if using sesame seeds.

Serves Four: this was enough to have 5 bowls and two potions left over for lunch the next day.

Notes

This would also work really well over rice.
The mushrooms may stick a bit while cooking
This does end with quite a bit of liquid sauce at the end, it does not really thicken up.

I created a Pinterest page for Food, Booze, & Baggage. My goal for each week is to share our “Meals this Week” pins there…so head on over and see what other dishes we enjoyed this past week.