Baked butternut squash pasta

Filled with butternut squash and spinach. That means it has 0 calories, right?

It’s getting to be that time of year. The sun sets earlier, the wind has more chill to it, and the layers start coming on. Scarves, sweaters, hats, and unfortunately, body fat. Like clock work, once it starts getting cold, all I want to do is eat, hibernate, and develop a fat coat to keep me warm throughout the winter months.

Variation of Chicken Plov

Delicious carbs.

I had just come back from a head race, where I competed in two 5k events back to back. I was ravenous, slightly delirious, freezing, and all I wanted were hot carbs. Piping hot bowls of carbs. The rule of thumb is that you carbo-load before and especially after races, right? Whatever, after a hard day of racing, I eat what I want.

Plov is basically meat, rice, some vegetables, and a bunch of spices. It’s a national dish claimed by many countries in Central and South Asia. I’ve only come into contact with plov in Russia and at the Uzbek restaurant, Rus-Uz, here in DC, so I have yet to actually try plov in its true form. Despite never having had real Central Asian plov, the plov I have tried has been absolutely delicious, and I wanted to take a stab at cooking it myself.

Xiu Mai. Vietnamese Meatballs

Meaty balls, mighty delicious.

As that today was Halloween, I spent the majority of the working day consuming sugary treats — mini candy bars, chocolate covered oreos, banana bread, you name it, I ate it. Because of my disgustingly excessive sugar intake today, I was craving something savory. That savory something, dear reader, manifested itself into Vietnamese meatballs. Don’t ask how, it just did.