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Meal Prep Diary: tempeh, kale, and sweet potato

January 26, 2019 Comments : 4

One thing that I’ve been doing consistently every week for the past few months is meal prepping! I know that some of my friends have expressed interest in meal prepping to save money and eat healthier, so I thought I’d turn my meal preps into blog posts to help people out with recipe inspirations. (Also, one of the reasons I started blogging again was so that I could have a place to post all of my meal prep photos instead of spamming it all over Instagram and Facebook 😅)

For today’s meal prep, I decided to make smoky tempeh, a sweet potato hash (I used red onion instead of yellow), and steamed kale.

Here are the ingredients that I bought for today’s meal prep, all of it was purchased at Trader Joe’s:
Tempeh: $1.99
Sweet potato: $0.69
Red bell pepper: $0.99
Red onion: $0.99
Kale: $2.79
Total: $7.45*
$1.86 per serving

*This doesn’t include any of the ingredients I used to make the sauce for the smoky tempeh, so if you don’t have any of those ingredients at home already, your total will come out to be a bit higher.

Zero-waste tip: Reuse your produce bags for composting! We put all our compost in the bag and store it in the freezer until we have time to drop it off at a compost site.

Here, I’m using a steamer insert that I got from IKEA. It’s handy since it can easily fit into different pot sizes due to the way it folds up. If you don’t have a steamer, you can also just splash some water in a pan with your kale and cover it with a lid for a similar effect.

I only steamed the kale for one minute to make sure it didn’t overcook.

I’m using my Field Company cast iron skillet to cook the sweet potato hash. I love my cast iron skillet and it’s by far one of my most used pans.

Reused the pan again to cook my tempeh to minimize dishwashing later.

And here is the finished product, four colorful and very healthy lunches for the week! We don’t have many matching containers, but these do the trick. The top two are from IKEA from a few years ago and they stopped selling those. The bottom left is from Pyrex and the bottom right is also from IKEA.

Would I make this again? Yes! The smoky tempeh recipe is one of my favorite recipes and I’ve made it several times before. I love the clean taste of steamed kale and I liked using the sweet potato hash as the carbs for this dish (but it could also be substituted with brown rice or quinoa). This was a pretty light meal and it didn’t give me food coma. I did need to eat snacks a few hours later since I was feeling hungry, but I can probably resolve this issue by making more tempeh next time.

4 Comments Categories: Meal Prep

Three things I learned in 2018

January 23, 2019 Comments : 5

This is a bit late, but if you know me in real life, I’m a huge procrastinator and I have had a long habit of being consistently late. To be fair, I’ve gotten a lot better, but when it used to be considered normal for you to be two hours late, you can only get better, right?

Money isn’t everything, but it will give you freedom and piece of mind.

I’ve had a really bad relationship with money my entire life, and there are still some parts of it that I struggle with. However, one of the biggest learnings of 2018 is to the importance of an emergency fund. I’m not sure when I started saving up, but I wanted to have at least three months worth of expenses saved up incase anything should happen. After a bit of penny pinching and learning to not let lifestyle inflation happen to me, I was fortunate enough to be able to achieve that by May of last year. I’m not going to get into specifics, but thanks to my emergency fund, I was able to walk away from a toxic situation without feeling chained to it because I needed a paycheck. I know not everyone is fortunate enough to walk away from work because they need the money, so I am very grateful for what I have.

It takes sacrifices, planning, and effort to be healthy.

I have ran two marathons, a few half marathons, and many more races of shorter distances. However, I was not in shape. I would stay up late, drink on nights before working out, and even eat McDonald’s a couple times a week. Last year, I noticed that even though I was working out regularly, I was gaining weight and my running wasn’t improving. If anything, my running was getting worse and I was constantly getting injured throughout the year.

I saw everyone around me improve while I was getting weaker and slower than my first year of running. It was then that I decided if I wanted to become a better runner, I would have to take everything more seriously.

I started meal prepping and it’s something that I now look forward to every Sunday! I started looking up recipes, adding it to my calendar, making time to grocery shop, and so forth. I also learned that it’s really important to read nutrition labels and ingredient lists (this is applicable to non-food items too, see this article about aloe vera being sold that didn’t actually have any aloe vera in it).

In addition to eating healthier, I have been setting strict bedtimes and alarm times for myself to get eight hours of sleep a night. Sleep is way more important than most people realize and my friend, Kelvin, send me a podcast just explaining why it’s so important.

Already I see my running paces improving and I’m not injured yet (knock on wood)!

Seeing a therapist is one of the best things I have decided to do for myself.

I would say the majority of people have issues, me included. I’ve dealt with a lot of anxiety and anger issues for a while now and I’ve always tried to deal with it on my own. I tried reasoning with myself, isolating myself, meditating — all of those things could only get me so far and I felt my anxiety getting worse as time passed on.

Near the end of last year, I decided to see a therapist. Everyone has a different experience and sometimes you need to try out a few therapists before you find one that fits. There are also a lot of different forms of therapy that you can look into. In case this helps someone, I found my therapist on Psychology Today and she also accepts my insurance, so it’s definitely worth looking into if you have health insurance.

I’m planning on writing a more in-depth post about therapy in the future. I will say that while progress here is slow, I am feeling better.

5 Comments Categories: Musings

My Digital Perm Experience

January 18, 2019 Comments : 3

Ever since high school, I’ve always wanted to get a digital perm after learning about them from the Soompi forums. (I spent a lot of time on Soompi back in high school.) But as a non-working high schooler, it was way out of my budget and when college rolled around, I completely forgot about it.

Then a few months ago, I was watching Alice Gao’s Instagram stories and I saw that she had been getting a digital perm with short hair. In the past, I had always assumed that a digital perm would only look good with long hair, and at this point in my life, I’ve come to terms that I do not like dealing with long hair.

I really loved how Alice’s hair looked, especially since the curls add so much volume. I really love having my hair on the shorter end, but one thing I’ve always had an issue with is how flat and thin it is. I’ve had super thin, straight hair my entire life and sometimes hair stylists ask me if I’m balding because my hair is so thin and lacks volume 🙁

After doing some research on salons in New York City, I made an appointment with Haruka at Hayato Salon in Flatiron. Since Haruka is at the director level, the price of the digital perm at the time of writing this blog post is $240 + tax and gratuity. I also got a haircut, which was included in the price.

The heat process of the digital perm!

Getting a digital perm is a very involved process and long process! I arrived at 11am and we didn’t finish until 1:30pm. The first step was getting my hair washed and cut. Then a chemical was applied to my hair and I had to wait a little bit before getting my hair washed again. Then a heat protectant was added and my hair stylist and her assistant wrapped my hair in the rollers.

Haruka did warn me that it would be a little heavy because of all the things they were putting on my head and it was definitely a noticeable amount of weight. They let the machine turn on and heat for 20 minutes and it was really hot. There was steam coming from my head, but Haruka and her assistant did a good job with adding cushion so that it wasn’t too uncomfortable. Fortunately the 20 minutes passed by quickly and after they unrolled my hair, they then sprayed down my curls with another liquid. After one more washing and blow drying, the perm was done!

A view from the front
A view from the side.
Yes I know, I have a lot of white hair.

I am in love with my hair and how the digital perm turned out! I love that my hair is short and now also has volume and texture. I can’t wash my hair for two days, so I’m currently not sure how time consuming or how much effort the maintenance and care will be, but I’ll put together another blog post for that.

Hayato New York
125 East 23rd Street, 2F
New York, NY 10010

3 Comments Categories: Beauty

886

January 17, 2019 Leave a Comment

Last weekend, Will and I went to 886, a Taiwanese restaurant that opened last summer in East Village. We’ve walked past the place before on a weekend night and the place can get packed, especially since it’s quite small like most restaurants on St. Mark’s, so we made a reservation beforehand.

The Sausage Party was a Chinese-type of sausage, and instead of a bun, they used sticky rice, the type of stuff you’d find inside of those Pandan leaves. I think that one was my favorite dish. The Lo Ba Beng was marinated pork belly, with a marinated egg, and bamboo shoots over rice. It really reminded me of the Vietnamese dish, thịt kho, except with a lighter flavor.

Lastly, we got the Drunken Clam & Thai Basil. For an extra $3, we also got instant noodles with it, and I’d definitely recommended adding that on. The noodles did a good job of soaking up the flavor from the soup that the clams were in. The dish is also pretty generous with fresh clams.

The flavors are a lot lighter than what I’m used to, but everything was fresh and the service was great. I definitely recommended checking it out if you have a chance.

Leave a Comment Categories: Restaurants

Hello, World!

December 16, 2018 Comments : 2

I’ve been wanting to start up a blog again for a really long time now, but I kept making excuses and kept putting it off. I really miss the days back in college when I would pour hours into customizing my blog layout, writing content, and editing photos.

It’s been far too long, but I’m back! Keep an eye on this space 👀

2 Comments Categories: Musings

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