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I have now spent hours upon hours putting all my data together for my doctoral thesis. I think that I have forty hours left of work. Yay! Then it dawned on me that I will have to actually start analysing all of it. Just thinking of how much work that will take felt quite daunting. *Breathe in, breathe out* Why did I decide to enrol in a PhD program again?

Instead of allowing myself to feel too overwhelmed, I took a step back and got on with finishing my data collection and promised myself a little reward as soon as I accomplished that. I decided to celebrate my mini milestone by treating myself and my little family to some home-cooked comfort food. My go-to comfort food is normally pizza and pasta, but I felt like making something different and a bit more special. Having said that, for those of you who follow my posts on this blog would know that I have a seven-month old baby girl, so I didn’t want to make something that would end up being another chore instead of something that was a treat to myself which I could share.

So, I decided on a variation of my pizza-pasta combo. Instead of a full-on pizza that would require me to make the dough, I made some pizza bread. Super easy and most of you would know, so I won’t list the ingredients on here. Feel free to use whichever kind of bread you like. I used bruschetta, and ready-made pizza sauce, but really splurged on the toppings. I found it wasn’t time-consuming at all which allowed me to make lots of different ones, with many different toppings, to share with my family.

Now, instead of the stock standard lasagne or spaghetti Bolognese, I looked up an easy recipe for maple miso pork. Instead of Italian pasta, you can use soba or udon noodles. Instead of beef mince, it was pork. Mix two tablespoons each of miso paste, honey and soy sauce, then combine this with 500 grams of pork mince and let it marinate for about 10 minutes. Then it’s just pan frying that in a wok with a bit of oil. There are quite a few variations, but I steamed some broccoli and added that to the dish. If you have a bit more time, look up a gyoza recipe and add that to the bowl.

Both dishes were warm, hearty, and easy comfort food to make and sharing with family gave me just the amount of motivation I needed to begin this next phase of my study — data analysis!