Daily Dose of English 208
My Favorite Meals
Daily Dose of English 208
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about my favorite meals. Because this is one of the tricks that I've come up with or I've started to do. I didn't really come up with it originally, I'm sure. But I have started to basically cook the same few things every week that I really like, that are easy. And today, I want to just talk about them because I like them. Um, and I don't exactly eat the same thing every single day, every single week, but having a short list of at least like four or five, well, no, it's more. So like I have probably, I don't know, 10 meals that I really like that I can go to at any point. And so I pick maybe four or five of them to have every week and then I can have two special days or whatever it is. And for me that's more than enough variety. I don't need to have something totally new every single day of the month because that's just too much extra mental effort and these things are very good anyways. So let's just talk about them. So let's start with the salad because a lot of these things that I have aren't a full meal on their own so I like to have a salad on the side. And I've talked about these salads before basically, but it's essentially just lettuce. I do some homemade pickles on there that are very, very easy. A little bit of fruit, typically an apple, some pecans, dried cranberries, a little bit of goat cheese, and then some olive oil as a dressing. And I also put a bit of the juice from the pickles on there. And that creates a very good salad that it's so easy and fast to make. And then that combines with a bunch of other meals depending on what I'm eating, if it doesn't have any veggies or something like that. So an example of what I might pair that with is a tuna melt or tuna melts because I usually do two of them. A tuna melt is essentially an open-faced sandwich. An open-faced sandwich, by the way, is like a sandwich with one slice of bread. So a closed sandwich or a regular sandwich has two slices of bread and stuff in the middle, but an open face sandwich is just one bread, right? So it's sort of a it's all the stuff on top of a piece of bread, right? A tuna melt is a bit of tuna salad, which is what it's called. There's no salad in it, but like a tuna salad, and then cheese on top, on top of a slice of bread that is then toasted and melted, right? That's the melt part. Melt implies that there is melted cheese on the sandwich. Melts are relatively common. You can find many different ones, but I think the tuna melt is the most well-known in the US. But I make, so I take a can of tuna and I put in some mayonnaise, some mustard, some of my pickles, some sauerkraut, some hot sauce, a couple, you can put a bunch of things in there. There's a lot of stuff you can do to make the tuna spread really good. But it's always got, it always needs tuna, mayonnaise, and something that's a little bit acidic. So like a pickle or a sauerkraut or something like that. Then you can put whatever else you want. I really like it with hot sauce, so it's a little spicy. And then that goes on top of a slice of bread. I like to toast the bread first so that it doesn't get totally soggy. So I do a little bit of toasting, then I put it on top, and then you put cheese on top of that, and then you melt that. For me, one can of tuna is enough for me, and I do two slices of bread, so I get two melts out of it, and then also a salad. I eat that probably every week because it's so fast and easy and delicious. It's so good. I also like to put, um, some more, some hot sauce, some chili sauce on top. It's really good. And then another favorite is beef and broccoli. Beef and broccoli is a relatively well-known American-Chinese takeout meal, which is beef and then broccoli, both cooked, and then you have a sauce that goes on the beef, that marinates the beef, and then you have a sauce that goes on the entire thing. And it's pretty typical, like, Chinese-American sauce style. It's a little bit sweet, it's a little bit tangy, it's salty from the soy sauce, and then you have it with the rice and that's also relatively easy and I really like it because I love broccoli. I don't usually have that with a salad because it already has broccoli, but yeah. Then, oh, my brain. What else? Oh, another thing that I've been doing recently is this delicious pasta dish. It's, I don't think it has a name, but it's like, it's a broccoli pasta, broccoli sausage pasta. And it's really just an onion, broccoli, some sausage. I've been using chorizo or longaniza, or you can also do it with really whatever sausage you have, as long as it can be broken up into pieces. Then you blanch the broccoli a little bit, you cook it down with the onion and some garlic and the sausage. You make the pasta and then you put it all together in one big pot and then you put a bunch of Parmesan cheese on top, a little bit of pasta water to make it a bit saucier. Mix it all up really well. And then I really like to put some fried bread. So like you, I just put a little bit of bread in the air fryer and it creates like these crunchy, crispy, almost like croutons on the pasta. And it's really good and also really easy and fast to do and quite cheap since sausage is not very expensive if you can find like a local variety. And that's the only pasta dish I've been doing, but I do really enjoy it. It's really good. Another favorite is just grilled salmon or baked salmon with broccoli and rice. It's very basic, but I'm a huge fan. I really like it. It's also very fast. That's something I have tonight, actually. I'm excited. I just got some salmon. I just put that, I salt both sides. I put it in the air fryer on the bake section, the bake setting for not even that long, like 12, 14 minutes, something like that. I just check it with a thermometer to see when it's done. Then I also throw on some rice and some broccoli and easy. Um, I like to saute my broccoli, so I put it in a pan to cook a little bit. Then I throw in some water and cover it so that it gets a little bit of more, it's still crispy and like snappy. Um, but it's cooked. That's something else I also don't eat with salad. What, let's see. Ooh, another big favorite is a sandwich. I have a couple favorite sandwiches that I do. One is like just a sort of typical ham melt sandwich where I put ham with some cheese on it, put that in the air fryer to let it melt. Then I put on like lettuce, tomato, pickles, whatever I have. That's just a typical sort of Sandwich, that's a great one. I usually put a bunch of meat on there because I like to have it feel a bit bigger. And that one often goes with the salad. But my favorite sandwich is a BLT or a BLAT. A BLT is a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. And they're very easy and they're very, very good, especially if you can find some good, relatively cheap bacon. Bacon here is quite good and relatively cheap, so it's a great sandwich and I can get them to cut it really thick, so I get a big thick slice of bacon. And then you toast the bread, you cook the bacon, and then on the bread, you put a little bit of mayonnaise, then you put the bacon, then you put the lettuce, and then you put the tomato, cut pretty thin. And then also a little bit of salt on the tomato, very important. If you don't like tomatoes, try salting them. And then if you want, you can put avocado on top. I really like it with avocado. And then again, a little bit of salt is great on the avocado. and then finish it with another slice of bread with a little bit of mayonnaise. And you get this beautiful, delicious sandwich that is so good. That I also like to eat with a salad because just the sandwich feels a little, not really like a meal. Another one that I have been making recently that it's a little fancier with the fish, with salmon, but it is what I call salmon not poke. Because poke is a specific thing that you can get in lots of poke places in the US. It's very, very popular. I think it's really popular here in Mexico too. I'm sure other countries it's gotten really popular because it's so easy to make in a restaurant setting. So like it's, it's really easy to sell and it's pretty expensive and yada, yada, yada. Um, but making it at home actually is like kind of annoying. Um, but this version that I got from an internet Shaquille video, is really, really good. You put on some rice and you can add some flavor to it with like a little bit of white sugar or in rice wine vinegar. And then you let the rice cook halfway. And then you put the cut up salmon in the pot with the lid on till it steams. And so you get like, Mostly cooked salmon, but it's still got like that really soft texture. It's still like got the texture of more sort of like sushi salmon, which is really, really nice. And then you prepare a bunch of toppings, whatever you want. So I usually do like some salmon skin, some mango, some edamame, some avocado, some pickled ginger, right? Things that I just have in my fridge or whatever. And then it's also really good to put some furikake, which is a rice seasoning stuff. I got that in an Asian market and you just throw it over the rice and all of the other stuff. And I don't even make a sauce anymore, but you can absolutely make a pretty easy sauce. There's like a sweet onion sauce that is really good. I just like chop up a quarter of an onion and put in some different soy sauce or other sauces and mix it up and you have a delicious sauce for the salmon. But honestly, it doesn't even need it, so. Yeah, that's my short list of favorite meals. I'm sure there's a couple I forgot that I also like to do because, yeah, I don't know. I don't have them in mind though. And we're at 11 minutes, so perfect timing. Well, that is this episode. If you enjoyed it, please let me know. I hope you did. And I would love to see if you have any favorite easy meals that you do like once a week or more often. But that's everything for today. See you tomorrow. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.