A Week of Good Food | Summer Grilling, BBQ Sides, Life Updates

Hello friends, welcome back. I hope your summer is going really well so far. I'm starting my day off by making a big batch of bircher muesli, which is essentially like the OG overnight oats. It's got fruit and nuts and shredded coconut in it and I find myself really craving it every summertime just because it's cold and refreshing and I do not want to have to cook if I don't have to. For the liquids, I'm going to use equal parts ripple milk and the Siggy's vanilla yogurt and both of these have pea protein so it's gonna make it more of a complete breakfast without having to add like protein powder making it all chalky and disgusting. For sweetness, we're gonna add in some dried fruit. You can use raisins. I'm using some chopped medjool dates and some grated apple. Also adding in some coconut flakes, whatever kinds of nuts or seeds you want to. I've got some almonds this time. This is my favorite part because it adds crunch. Just gonna add a few shakes of cinnamon, give that all a good mix. Now we're gonna fold in our oats. Oh, totally forgot, I also like to add in some chia seeds. Maybe just one or two tablespoons for some extra fiber and omegas. I am actually gonna add a little bit extra milk just because chia seeds are very absorptive. Maybe another half cup. That's looking good. I'm gonna pop these in the fridge. Overnight would have been best but I did not think ahead. A couple of hours is fine and it should be ready by the time I get back from the gym and I'm ready to have my first meal. She's like a creepy little shadow. You want some banana? Touch. Chin. Paw. Other paw. Yes. Yum. Just wanted to do one more thing before I headed out to the gym. I have to refill Lila's popsicles. If you are raising a puppy and you need something to occupy some of their time when you need to work or clean the house or whatever, you need to use popsicles. They sell a powder that you can mix with water. Good thing it was just green beans. They sell a powder that you can mix with water and freeze but I like to either make my own purees with vegetables or buy baby food. It keeps her occupied for a good, I don't know, 20 or so minutes. Kind of just like the same idea as a Kong but I prefer these because you can prep a whole bunch of them ahead of time and they take up a lot less space than putting a bunch of Kongs in your freezer. You know, freezer space is at a premium. Oh yeah, I'll give that a 10 out of 10. So I refill these like every couple weeks and every time I do, I have a song that I sing. You do? Hello? Well, it's more like a chant. Meal prep for my dog. Meal prep for my dog. Meal prep for my dog. I think you have green bean on your chin. I know, it exploded on my face earlier. I feel so much more motivated to prepare treats and food for my dog than myself. Like, you will not catch me meal prepping for myself. The reason is because Leela will eat the same thing every single day, happily. That's true. And you don't like anything the next day. It's not because I'm bored of the food though, it's because I'm like neurotic about leftovers. I will if it's frozen though. Leela loves meal prep because she loves anything. She will eat this. She will eat grasshoppers outside. Meal prep for my dog. Meal prep for my dog. Meal prep for my diggity diggity dog. Nice. That's so funny. We have been together for a long time. Some might say too long. It's Friday. We're gonna grill for dinner. So I'm getting everything started a little early. I'm pressing two blocks of tofu. Eric's gonna make like a balsamic marinated tofu. I just went to Sprouts and got ingredients for veggie skewers and then I'm gonna try to throw together a rice pilaf. I just prepped a ton of veggie skewers. These are plain right now but Eric's about to make the balsamic marinade for the tofu and I'm just gonna take whatever is leftover from that and just brush it over the vegetables because I feel like the flavor of the vegetables is just so good on its own. I don't want to do too much to them. First things first, I just want to acknowledge New York Knicks 2026 NBA champions. Starting with some balsamic vinegar, then olive oil, a little bit of maple syrup, Dijon mustard, this is homegrown garlic, some dried basil, a little bit of oregano, a nice little teaspoon of salt, and way more black pepper than Sarah would use. Fun fact, Sarah doesn't really cook with black pepper but I love it. If it weren't for me, I don't think there would ever be black pepper in any of her recipes. Nice. That's exactly what I was referencing. Smells so good. Is that good? It's like pizza. All right. Looks, smells great. It's going in the fridge to marinate for a few hours. Okay, I'm gonna hopefully find a spot in the refrigerator for this. There's gonna be so many leftovers. This smells like pizza. Hey guys, it's the 4th of July. Eric and I are prepping a couple dishes to bring to our friends later. We're just doing like a low-key hangout with two of our friends and all the dogs and we're making a potato salad. Eric's famous potato salad. Famous potato salad. Eric calls literally everything that he makes Eric's famous blank. I'm making my Hawaiian macaroni salad which I make like every summer on the channel. It's like my favorite pasta salad. I think Sarah's starting to develop a New York accent living with me for so long. What'd I say? You just said macaroni. You said macaroni salad. Play it back. I don't know. I loved it. And then I'm gonna try to like throw together some s'mores bars. Let me show you. I did a bunch of prep already. I prepped three pounds of potatoes, celery, some pickle relish for Eric's potato salad, some scallions, and some shredded carrot for my salad. I just went to the store because yesterday they were totally out of dill and parsley. We only had parsley today but we'll just use dried dill. It'll be fine. Sarah was soaking these potatoes for me. I'm gonna top this up with cold water. Potatoes are going. I'm just gonna wipe this bowl down and I'll just use the same bowl to mix it all together. We're gonna start with mayo. Mmm. Dijon mustard. Pickles that Sarah lovingly cut up for me. A little bit of garlic powder. A little bit of paprika. Some salt. Some black pepper. Celery for the crunch. Scallion. So whenever Sarah uses herbs she like scrapes the leaves off and I've never actually tried it and I don't think I'm gonna be able to do it. Okay. How much do you think I need? That's good. It's just so fun. This is the dried dill. Far inferior to fresh dill but we do what we can. And this is our potato salad dressing. Beautiful. Now that it's almost boiling I'm gonna do a little bit of salt. I was watching this Food Network thing and they had like all the Bobby Flay, all those people, and they asked them how do you salt your pasta water and they were all doing literal fistfuls of salt. And then I tried it the next time we made pasta. Game-changing. It was so good. And I'm gonna let this go till al dente. That's my spoon. Sorry. That's my starchy spoon. I'm gonna put together the base for the Hawaiian salad. Got some shredded carrot for a little bit of sweetness. If you ever gone to Hawaiian barbecue this is the kind of macaroni salad that they have. It's like really creamy. There's a little bit of sweetness in the dressing. I'm gonna add like a tablespoon of white sugar. Mayo, obviously. I can't think of anything more American than having an entirely mayo-based meal. Although actually you know what I've been doing lately is mixing half mayo and half unsweetened vegan yogurt. I feel like I've made this recipe enough times to eyeball. When you really think about it though mayo is kind of gross. Kind of. So I don't think about it. A little bit of garlic powder. Just a touch. A little bit of oat milk. So the dressing is very loose and when you first add the pasta in it's gonna seem like way too liquidy. But then you let it sit in the fridge and the pasta that's soaks in the extra moisture and it just becomes that perfect squishy wop texture. I'm sorry? Also gonna add some salt. I'm gonna go check on our pasta and our potatoes. Also I gotta say Eric rigidly sticks to cook times. Like he will always set a timer. He always forgets that we live at high altitude though and stuff takes longer to boil here. So he stays under I'm coming to defend myself. The thing specifically with pasta is that when I make pasta I try to make it very al dente. So then when I add it to the sauce I finish cooking it in the sauce and by the time it's served it's perfectly al dente. Because if you if you wait. But it doesn't always happen. I try to make it like that. I'm sorry. The problem is I'm so strong that when I put the fork through it's so easy that I sometimes undercook them because like for for most people the potato has to be really tender for them to get the fork through. But because I'm so strong it's much easier so I have to let it go a few extra minutes. All right Thor. This is actually a little overdone right now. I got distracted. Also I forgot to add the vinegar. This looks good. You can kind of see there's like extra dressing at the bottom but trust me after a couple of hours by the time we're ready to go it's going to be the perfect texture. Sarah says the potatoes are done which means if they're not done it's not my fault anymore. Here's what we're going to do. Let's drain the potatoes back into the hot pot right. White wine vinegar a couple tablespoons. I'm just going to toss them in there. You want them to get broken up a little bit and like kind of get roughed up and doing this in the hot pot makes them steam and all that moisture cooks off so they dry out in here a little bit. I'm just gonna set them aside and let them cool off a little bit before I add them to the dressing. I had a hot dog earlier today. Yes I did. And what is a hot dog bowl? It's like a burrito bowl but it's chopped up hot dogs. Potatoes are going in. That is that sound. Yeah let's ASMR that. That is really yummy. Yay. But you're right it is going to be better when it's chilled. Plus it's going to be healthy because it's resistant starch. Oh my god. Hell yeah. What are you doing? You want some peanut butter that's surely not dosed with drugs for the fireworks? That's delicious. Oh yeah. Yeah you won't freak out during the fireworks. Okay so Travis has these spicy pickle vodka shots and we are going to drink them. This is jackass. That is more than a shot. This tastes like pickle juice. It's like it is spicy though. No it's spicy. I actually kind of like it. I like a pickle back. I actually like it more than a regular shot because it's masking the flavor of alcohol completely. Yeah. If it's out of five I'm saying like four. Yeah four and a half. Yeah that's actually really good. Hello friends. Eric and I are about to head to the gym but I'm going to try a new energy drink. I'm usually an Ilani girl but I saw these bloom drinks. I got peach mango. I only drink half of an energy drink at a time so usually I will dump half into a jar. Wow that is a it's probably from the B12. It's like neon green. Kind of tastes like celsius. A lot less sweet than Ilani. A lot more like natural flavoring. Do you want to try this? Sure. Eric hates Ilani. It's just it's too sweet for me. Yeah. Eric likes the worst energy drinks. He likes red bull and uh not even the white monster the black monster. It's no it's the blue monster. Blue. Low carb. But no I I think I'm becoming a red bull person because it gives you wings and it comes in smaller cans which means drinking a can doesn't need to send me into psychosis. We would be a couple who drinks the energy drinks for the flavor and not the energy wouldn't we? They need to make caffeine free energy drinks. Yes. That's what I want. Energy free energy drinks. Okay let's go to the gym. If you guys watched our last vlog we mentioned that we toured a house to potentially move into in September and we got approved for it so we're not buying it. We're still renting for a couple more years. We're saving up for that down payment. Disassembled our squat rack. We're clearing out the garage. It's too hot to work out in here during the summer anyway so we go to the gym. Uh so I figured we needed a staging area for when we pack stuff up in the house and we need somewhere to put it so it's not in the house. Now we have this area and really just like doing the first thing has made my brain like okay we're moving let's do this. Workout complete. I feel like I'm gonna so hot right now. Uh we're going to pick up puppy. She went on a learning adventure with her trainer and a couple of other puppies so she's gonna be exhausted tonight and so are we. Okay I'm back at home and for lunch I'm gonna make us some wraps using this buffalo tofu salad that I've been making on repeat for the past couple weeks. This is shredded super firm tofu. I brown it in a pan to get it nice and chewy and then I mix it with celery, carrot, buffalo sauce and I make a dressing with ranch seasoning and vegan mayo and unsweetened vegan yogurt and it is so addictive. Um instead of regular tortillas I'm gonna use these wraps because they're a little bit higher in protein and fiber than just regular tortillas and I got this avocado a while ago so I'm hoping it's still good because it's been in the fridge. Pray to the avocado gods. Oh very nice. I mean avocados have always been expensive but I feel like now especially they're really expensive. One of the best ideas you've ever had. So Lila's asleep right now as she does when she comes home from camp and when we picked her up her trainer told us that she interacted with some ducks today. The place they took them had a little flock of ducks and Lila was a really good girl apparently. Little background. We got Lila from a rescue but we did a DNA test with her and she's like a blend of a bunch of different herding breeds so obviously she has German Shepherd in her, Cattle Dog, Australian Shepherd, Border Collie, oddly she has Boston Terrier in her I think. Which might be why she's so small for a dog that's half German Shepherd. So she definitely has herding instincts. She gets really hyper fixated on bunnies, even little dogs like chihuahuas. She will fixate on them when we're on a walk. So we weren't sure how she would do with little ducks in the same area as her but apparently she was able to focus. And not bark at them. Wow I was starving. This is what we look like now on our walks. Sun shirt, hat. So in a couple of hours we are going to go to the hospital because Eric has to get a CT scan. We've mentioned this kind in passing before but Eric has a pacemaker. He's had it since he was like 10. In 2020 I believe that we vlogged that he was getting the battery replaced. Oh yeah. But we haven't really mentioned it since then. So I'm gonna hand it off to Eric. So yeah I mean the gist is when I was 10 years old I was having anxiety and I felt my heart palpitating and pounding. So my dad took me to a um and they basically said he has second degree heart block. He needs a pacemaker Monday morning. So my whole family's terrified. They bring me to the hospital and 10 year old Eric gets a pacemaker put him. In my 20s when I was getting my annual checkups with a cardiologist they kept checking my pacemaker and realizing there was no activity. It wasn't doing anything. So I thought maybe it was a fluke and every year they kind of said the same thing to me. Until finally a new cardiologist I was seeing said have you ever thought about getting this taken out because you don't use it and that kind of blew my mind and I asked how would I not need it if they put it in for a reason. The short answer is that the science changed over the 20 years I've had the pacemaker and now when they see kids with heart issues that I had they know that it's actually safe and they'll grow out of it which I guess I did. So after a lot of deliberation and doctor's appointments I'm getting my pacemaker taken out in September. Looking very good. Okay sorry we got uh distracted by a big lawnmower but he did it very well even though it's very scary and loud. So basically because he had the pacemaker placed before he was done growing and he was so young and the scan is just to get a better idea of like where the scar tissue is and because that's really the biggest risk with the surgery is that you know something could happen with the scar tissue growing over the lead so they do technically have to be prepped for open heart surgery just in case even though the doctor said it's a very very low risk of that actually happening. I'm just trying to come to grips with like the emotionality of having had this thing that I thought I needed to keep me alive for most of my life and realizing that I don't need it and they can just take it out. It's just kind of a weird thing to to think about but other than that I mean yeah surgery should be easy and yeah let's go get a cat scan. Here's the secret sauce, just a little. Hello friends, I have just finished prepping everything to make spring rolls for dinner because I'm really craving something fresh. This is some tempeh that I thinly sliced, pan-fried and glazed with some of this Baochuan's Japanese barbecue sauce. This stuff is really good. Shredded carrot, julienne cucumber, got some jalapenos for Eric, we have some basil and then I made a peanut sauce, super simple, just some soy sauce, rice vinegar, fresh lime juice, sambal chili paste to make it spicy, a little bit of maple syrup and then I also added some fresh ginger into this and you just thin it out with water till it's a dippable consistency. Got our rice paper wrappers, let's wrap. Just finished wrapping the spring rolls and we have plenty of leftover noodles and veggies for tomorrow for lunch. We're just going to make rice vermicelli bowls. These are really only good the same day they're made because the rice paper dries out in the fridge. Just look at that, I'm so excited to eat these. One last little finishing touch that you guys have to try the next time you make spring rolls, roasted peanuts and then some crispy fried garlic. I got this from Trader Joe's but I'm pretty sure you can get fried garlic and fried shallots at any Asian market really. I'm sorry the lighting is terrible, the sun is going down but I put a couple tablespoons of each of these. Gonna take my peanut sauce, a little sprinkle of this goodness on top. Here we go!