Recipe Round Up May 2025

This is going to be different

Hi all, HAPPY PRIDE— I don’t really have recipes this month.

Now, maybe this is sad or disheartening that your favorite blog is going off-book. Fear not, my friends, next month will (hopefully) be back up and running. We just had a few bumps in the road this month, and mostly ate out. Not super complaining about that, but I digress.

I do have two recipes, kind of, and a lot of miscellaneous things.

Butter Chicken Mediterranean Bowls

I think I’ve already talked about this recipe before but Amateur Pro Chef’s Butter Chicken recipe is a damn slay. Tomorrow (as of this day, May 28th), we’re planning on cooking another of his recipes. Very easy to follow, and he gives great substitutions for various ingredients that might be harder to find/less common.

We were going to make butter chicken, had every intention of it, but sometimes you get to the night and suddenly you don’t want the meal you’ve prepped for— so we decided to do a remix.

I had already prepped the cut chicken breasts and had been marinating them for the day (per the first instruction). But that’s all I followed with this recipe. So let’s go off-book.

Ingredients (for Chicken)

• 2 chicken breasts (or a cut of your choosing)

• 3 tbsp plain yogurt

• juice from half a lemon

• 1 tsp ground cumin

• 1 tsp ground coriander

• 1/2 tsp turmeric powder

• 1 tbsp garam masala

• 1 tsp paprika or Kashmiri red chili powder

• 1 tsp salt

• Black pepper to taste

Marinate the chicken— I already cut the breasts into cubes— for a least two hours. I marinated ours for closer to six hours (did it in the morning/early afternoon).

After it’s been marinated, cook in a skillet on the stovetop, don’t forget a tablespoon of oil or whatever so it doesn’t stick. We like our chicken to have a little crust on the outside, so we cook it on each side for at least five minutes each without messing with it. Since the chicken is cubed, it doesn’t take super long to cook. I wistfully added some lemon juice while cooking because I’m a free spirit that way.

Ingredients (other parts of the meal)

• feta or goat cheese

• cherry tomato

• red onion

• 2 c couscous

  • turmeric

  • paprika

  • salt

  • water

  • lemon pepper

Dice the onion and cut the tomatoes to your liking.

Cook the couscous like normal with the spices (turmeric, salt, lemon pepper, paprika)— fun fact, you can use a rice cooker to slay up some couscous. We have this one, which is the perfect size for us, and it’s pink!

Ingredients (the SAUCE)

• lemon juice

• lemon zest

• greek yogurt

• dill

• salt

• paprika

mix mix mix, this will be our topping.

We had this meal in a bowl, with the couscous on the bottom, chicken above that, and the tomatoes/onion/feta sprinkled on the top. With a great ole dollop of our yogurt mixture, you’re off to the races.

Street Corn Ramen

Another cross-cultural bastardization coming your way

Ingredients (for 2 servings)

• 1 corn on the cob

  • You can also do canned corn, but I live in the Midwest, so I’m gonna be snotty about the corn

• feta

• red onion

• 2 blocks of ramen (your choice, we use the shitty chicken one)

• hoisin sauce

• 2 tblsp butter

• sriracha

For sauce topping:

• 3 tablespoons sour cream

• paprika

• lemon juice

• sriracha

• salt to taste

Cook the corn, either boil the cob or grill it, or stick it in the oven. We boiled it, I wanted the juices— which sounds weird to say now. I truly left this boiling/simmering until I finished with everything else, then I removed it from the pot and cut off the kernels.

Make ramen, boil some water in a pot, dump the seasoning packet in (we had chicken), and cook the noodles until tender.

While this cooks, let’s make the topping: combine paprika, lemon juice, sour cream, and sriracha, with a hint of salt, together in a bowl. spice and season to your liking.

This next part you have to time, don’t start preparing until the noodles have almost finished cooking. The sauce will thicken and get gross if on the heat for too long. To make said sauce, take a saucepan and add the butter, cooking on medium-low heat until melted. Once melted, add hoisin and a hint of sriracha (this is dependent on your spice intake)— mix until combined. Add the cooked ramen noodles to the saucepan, coat completely. DO NOT ADD THE BROTH— put it in a jar for later, or dump it, or drink it like I did (I was a little sick, so it was amazing on my sore throat).

To put it all together, grab a bowl: add the ramen first, with the freshly cut corn, feta, and onions on top. Give it a generous dollop of sauce and you’re good to go.

Rat girl snack

There are always charcuterie boards for those who have eyes to see.

I love a charcuterie board, meat, fruit, cheese, jam, and crackers. What more could a girl want? But I am also lazy.

Whoever said charcuterie boards had to be fancy?

Ingredients

• berry granola minis (or any kind of sweet grainy treat like this)

• cheese (we have Wisconsin cheese curds that I am devouring right now)

• beef stick— yes, like a Slim Jim, or something like that

boom— a rat girl snack.

Also, here’s the macros if you even care: Cal— 265, fat— 16g, carbs— 16g, protein 13g. DISCLAIMER: If you use different products, these will be different .

Kitchen staples and new friends

This is gonna be a highlight reel of some spices I love.

Lemon Pepper

If you don’t have this in your pantry, I don’t know you. My love for this might be because I would cook seafood a lot for my mom growing up, and lemon pepper is the way to go. She is that girl.

No Salt Kirkland Seasoning

This was an Instagram/TikTok trend I became victim to, but it was worth it. I bought it on a whim and haven’t looked back since. It can be sprinkled on anything, truly. I use it mostly to season things like chicken, beef, and veggies— especially if I know another part of my meal is going to be more salt-forward.

Every seasoning pack always has so much salt, I am loving this trend of having less/no salt in these seasoning mixtures.

Creole Seasoning

Dear mom, thank you for going to school in the south and bringing this back with you. Growing up, my parents didn’t use a lot of spices, but for some reason, spice blends were their bread and butter. “Kickin’ Finger Lickin Chicken” spice blend is still something my parents buy on the regular, though they don’t really cook anymore. But that’s not what we’re talking about—

Creole Seasoning can be put on anything and everything. The salt content is a lot, so I don’t suggest adding extra salt to whatever you’re cooking. I smack this seasoning on chicken breasts mostly, or potatoes. Recently, I used it and some lemon juice as a sort of marinade for some brussels sprouts, and it was quite good— it helped the brussels be tender without being mushy.

Garlic Salt

Another one that IS that girl.

Everyone needs garlic salt, a big ole bottle of it— a jug, a bucket, whatever. I’m not on the seasoned salt train (yet, if you like it, let me know) because why would I use anything other than garlic salt?

Japanese BBQ Sauce

I think this one is also kind of trendy right now. I at first wasn’t sold on it, we bought it on a whim, hoping to be a more traditional BBQ sauce with some added elements, and it is not. It is very soy and mirin forward, who doesn’t love those flavors, but it was missing the smoky sweet heat I’m used to in southern BBQ sauces.

That all being said, we finally used it well. First time we tried it, we used it as a sauce for basically chicken nuggets. It was good, but not exactly what we were looking for at that moment. The second time, I had an epiphany. I used it as a marinade for salmon and chicken, with some extra added brown sugar. Cooking the sauce down with the brown sugar ignited the flavors.

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As always, I love cooking, and if you have any recipes you like— SEND THEM OUR WAY. It’s annoying trying to meal plan/prep, so the mental burden being off me would be great! Maybe I should ask for cookbooks for Christmas this year, I don’t know!

I hope next month we find full bellies of home-cooked food and friends to share them with.

Until next time!

-Bloom and Jude