Takeout with the Tos #23

It finally happened. I forgot to take pictures of all of my food this week. Oh well. I guess this is what happens when I don't cook everything on the same day. There are no photos of ketchup shrimp or my snow pea tofu stir fry, but I made them on week 12 of this year and it's pretty much the exact same dish. 

Pork Belly Tacos (2lb pork belly): $25.99

Homemade "Ramen" Bowls (4 servings): $35.99

Ketchup Shrimp:  $16.99

Snow Pea Tofu Stir Fry: $14.99

Asian Marinade Chicken Tenders (1.5lb): $20.99 

Total: $114.95

Tax: $9.48

Grand Total:  $124.43

 

Pork Belly Tacos

 

One of the chefs I enjoy watching on television (and is still airing new episodes) is Pati Jinich. There's many recipes in my collection which are from her cooking shows. We were watching an episode of her show one evening and it was all making us hungry. When meal-planning for this week, we thought about using pork belly as a protein since I had some in the freezer. We also had leftover tortillas which needed to be eaten. I picked up some vegetables from the grocery store and we were able to use our Kewpie dressing.

 

We found this dressing on clearance at the store. I'd never used it before but I do enjoy other flavors of Kewpie dressings. We decided to buy one to try. I used a little in a recipe last week but decided it would make a great taco condiment. 

 

I winged the pork belly marinade. It's a combination of soy sauce, sugar, cooking wine, sesame oil, honey, and a little salt. I wish I had actual amounts to tell you....I don't. I literally just grabbed ingredients and poured some in. For two pounds of pork belly, each ingredient was probably between 1-4TB. I bet you could mix and match between the ingredients I listed above and it would still taste good albeit a different "stronger" flavor. That's one thing I love about Asian cooking. When you have the main staples, any combination of them is going to give you a nice flavor. You just have to know how to control the amounts based on the flavor you actually want.  

I had some pickled banana peppers in my fridge which made a great sour addition to the savory taco.

 

 

Homemade "Ramen" Bowls

We have lots of instant ramen at our house....despite all my cooking with fresh meats and vegetables, we still love a good late night instant noodle when the time calls for it. 

This meal came about on my lightest day of work. We were starting to run low on food - middle of the week - and I thought of something quick and easy with some ingredients I already had on hand. 

The protein for these noodles came from an egg and some spam. Yup, I cook spam. I had frozen broccoli in my freezer so I pulled some out for a quick blanch to reheat and added them in. I cooked the instant noodles and used the seasoning packets from our Mi Goreng. I didn't season any of the add-ins because there would be enough flavor from the instant noodle seasoning and spam. 

My kids ate this so quickly all by themselves with no need for coaxing. I realize it's not the most healthy meal I've ever made, but as a mom, a self-fed meal with no fuss about finishing is a huge win.  

Everyone got their own bowl of this.

 

The ketchup shrimp and snow pea tofu stir fry I made were delicious. Unfortunately I didn't get photos of them. I did use my stainless steel wok  which I had written about earlier this year. I spent a few months away from the stainless steel and back to my nonstick because I got scared after a few bad tries with the wok. The unfortunate part of learning is that you have to keep cooking in stainless steel, even if it means messing up dishes. 

I got brave this week and tried again. The last three dishes - ketchup shrimp, snow pea tofu stir fry, and my chicken tenders were all made using stainless steel. These attempts were much more successful. I think I need to remind myself not to use too high of heat. 

Asian Marinade Chicken Tenders (1.5lb)

This is all that was left when I remembered to take a photo.

Originally, I pulled this chicken out of the freezer to thaw in order to make curry. By the time the chicken thawed, I wasn't in a place to make curry and if I let it stay in the refrigerator for another 15-20 hours, it would begin to go bad. I realize not everyone enjoys freezer meat because they can taste the difference from fresh meat. I don't notice it. However, I do use my thawed meat immediately because the longer it sits in the refrigerator after thawing, the more likely it is to go bad. 

So instead of making curry, I took my chicken and marinaded it - and then put it back into the refrigerator for 36 hours. Once you add something with salt and sugar, the marinade serves as a mini "cure" for the meat which is why it will not spoil so quickly after that. Simply leaving raw unseasoned meat in the refrigerator will go bad after an extended amount of time. 

The seasoning for this chicken was very similar to the pork belly. I think I used the exact same ingredients for the marinade, probably in slightly different proportions because I just dumped everything into the bowl. I like making this because it's a quick, easy protein with lots of flavor that goes well with rice and a vegetable for a balanced meal. 

That's all for this week!

Takeout with the Tos #22

We had a conglomerate of food this week. It was a little bit of hodgepodge.  

Green Beans and Pork: $14.99

Steak (2 8oz ribeyes) : $39.99

Mashed Potatoes: $8.99

Green Onion Pancake with Shrimp: $24.99

Tortilla Kebabs: $12.99

Total: $101.95

Tax: $8.41

Grand Total:  $110.36

 

 Green Beans and Pork

I make this dish a lot. It's easy, we have ground pork in the freezer on hand, and it's tasty. These beans were from a friend's garden. I seasoned with salt, sugar, cooking wine, soy sauce, and oyster sauce. I blanch the beans first in salt water to get a softer texture without being fibrous. The salt helps to keep the vibrant green color and actually cooks the beans faster than in unsalted water. 

 

Steak 

These steaks have been in our freezer for almost a year. I got them on sale last year when I spotted them and vacuum sealed for the freezer. It wasn't our intention to save them for a year, but when I vacuum seal my meats, I'm more at ease about "forgetting" them for long periods of time. My husband cooked these and seasoned with salt, pepper, and garlic. I'm typically not a fan of steak, but when he does it, I'll eat it. This makes me wonder if all the steaks I've ever ordered at restaurants have not been cooked properly. 

Mashed Potatoes 

 

Mashed potatoes go with steak and we had a lot of potatoes leftover to use. Nothing fancy here - no box mashed potatoes though. An important thing to note is when boiling potatoes, use low heat. Boiling too high will overcook the outside faster, resulting in crumbling outsides. To keep the potato intact, add the potatoes into cold water and bring to a boil, then lower the heat to continue cooking the potato evenly to prevent it from falling apart. Once the potatoes are cooked, we drain the water, add milk, butter, and seasoning. 

Green Onion Pancakes with Shrimp

I bought a giant pack of green onions from Costco a few days prior to making this. I can use up a lot of green onions if I want to, but boy does Costco sell a lot at once in their bag. I ended up using about half the bag of green onions to make these pancakes alone. I've made these many times so I no longer reference a recipe, but the one I started out with was by Maangchi. I've done it many times so I just wing the batter now and look for consistency. I still mess it up every now and then, but that's the errors of being human. These are so good fresh off the pan when they're nice and crispy. 

Tortilla Kebabs 

This recipe popped up on my social media one day. It seemed interesting and was mesmerizing to watch him make. I filed it away in the back of my head. One weekday morning when I was home, we started running low on food options. I had leftover tortillas in the refrigerator from before and decided I was going to make this recipe. 

*Note: I followed the recipe very loosely. I don't have half these ingredients on a whim and I wasn't going out to buy them. So my kebabs are not Lao style. They're simply...Lao inspired.*

My meat filling consisted of: one pound of ground pork, Kewpie onion dressing, lemon pepper seasoning (to replace the lemongrass), salt, sugar, oyster sauce, garlic, cilantro, and green onion. Then I followed the recipe to layer the tortillas and the meat. 

I didn't end up with perfectly flat tortilla squares. Once I filled my meat layers, it did start to sag on the ends. Maybe this goes away with more experience, but I clearly don't have the experience. This came out really delicious for a first try. It definitely took some time to assemble and cook the skewers and they were consumed in a fraction of the time. These types of recipes make me sad, but good food is good food....

Scoop Your Lip Balms

As the weather gets colder, I will definitely be relying on my lip balm. I have vivid memories of being in middle school and visiting my cousins during the winter. They lived in the northeast and it was cold. I didn't have anything to put on my lips and they were dry and cracked. It was a pretty brutal week. Overnight, they'd begin to heal, and then during the day with talking and eating, they'd crack again. 

Since then, I started to put something on my lips every night before bed, winter or not. This habit still continues today and I have a surplus of lip balms which I slowly work my way through.

Not sponsored by any of these companies.

Recently, I reached a point where I had three tubes of lip balm which were all "used" but I hadn't completely cleaned out yet. You see, once the lip balm is flat and can no longer be swiped across your lips, there is still a lot of balm left inside which you have to dig out or throw away. Having used up three sticks this way, I finally decided to grab a cotton swab and scoop out the remainder of the balms.  

If you've never seen how these lip balms are made, there is a plastic "cup" at the bottom that holds the stick of balm. They're all designed with some sort of built-in "stabilizer" inside to hold the stick together as you use it and twist it higher and higher. As a result, there is a lot of balm left inside of each tube once it is "flat". 

These are what my tubes look like once I've emptied them completely. 
Two have center rods and one has indents on the perimeter of the circle. 

It just worked out where I had an empty moisturizer container to deposit all my extra lip balm into. I use my finger to apply it now, but there has been plenty to last. I emptied my lip balm tubes on September 1st so we are just over two weeks since then. My guess is I will have enough to last me through the end of the month and maybe some more. 

It was satisfying to throw away these three tubes of lip balm. I couldn't bring myself to do it before scooping the remainder out because I knew how much product was still leftover. Once this surplus in my container is used up, I will be more than happy to bring out a new stick to start using and once again be able to swipe on my lips. 

Four years ago, I started cutting my lotion tubes in order to use up all the product there. Now, I scoop my lip balms.

Anyone else have their own creative ways of using every last bit of product before trashing? 

Takeout with the Tos #21

I'm excited to get back to more consistent takeout blogs, but as I mentioned before, it's going to look a little different. Instead of cooking on Sundays and eating for the week, the cooking will be done....on random days throughout the week. This week's post will actually include cooking from last Friday as well as some in the beginning of this week. 

Collard Greens and Dace: $14.99

Egg Hugging Tofu: $15.99

Ground Pork with Basil: $13.99

Eggrolls (x29 @ $0.75 ea): $21.75

Fried Chicken (2.5 pounds): $20.99

Chinese Broccoli: $12.99

Asian Vegetable Soup (5 Qt @ $5/qt): $25.00

Total: $125.70

Tax: $10.37

Grand Total:  $136.07

 

 

 

 

Collard Greens and Dace

 

We needed some vegetables and I hadn't gone grocery shopping in a bit due to being out of town. So I pulled out a frozen bag of collard greens. I buy these from the store when they're marked down and the grocery store is speed-selling them. They go into my freezer and I use them at a later date for stir frys. This worked perfectly for us this one. Collard green is definitely not my favorite though. I still prefer turnip greens or even kale when it comes to the American vegetables. Collard greens have thicker leaves which aren't my preference, but with the right cooking technique and seasoning, it's not bad. 

 

Egg Hugging Tofu  

 

I've made this recipe a few times since I added it to our rotation a few months back. It's so easy and is a great change from the old teriyaki tofu I made for years and years. I love how the egg adds extra protein to the dish. This was again a quick meal pulled together so no green onions or anything green to make this dish look a little better aesthetically. 

 

Ground Pork with Basil 

 

I was actually excited when I saw Woks of Life post this recipe recently. I had seen their recipe with pork belly and thai basil  before which was a delicious recipe. My problem was that I could never get the texture of the pork belly right because of a combination of heat + cooking time issues. This happens a lot with nonstick because to preserve the integrity of the cookware, you can't use very high heat. As a result, things cook slower, and when this specifically applies to meat, this means you get texture issues. 

 

So when I saw a very similar recipe with ground pork, I was intrigued because I love the flavor of this dish, but I wanted an easier way to do it. Using ground pork means no texture issues with the meat and you still get the flavor of the dish. I compared the recipes side by side and the seasoning proportions are actually identical. There's slight modifications between the two recipes with the other ingredients, but the key seasonings are the same.  

 

Seeing this recipe made me sad I didn't grow basil this summer. I had so much of it in the past and could only use/freeze so much before I was overwhelmed. I planted some seeds last week in hopes of making this dish a few more times the rest of this year, but we'll see how much the weather can cooperate with me as basil grows in hot weather. 

 

 Egg Rolls

 

 

 

Now these aren't the tiny egg rolls. These are the egg rolls that are 5-6 inches long each. I didn't follow a recipe to make eggrolls. This was a very improvised recipe which turned out great. My frying skills and wrapping skills need some work though. I forgot to fill and fold on the diagonal. They turn out a lot neater and prettier that way. Oooooops. I'll have to remember that for next time. Mine have awakward straight seams to the side, some of which wildly popped open during frying and created some wacky waves. 

 

My filling includes half a carrot, 1 pound ground pork, 1 pound shrimp, half a small cabbage, 3-5 cloves garlic, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, corn starch, and sugar.  I can't tell you the proportions of everything else because I don't know. I was just dumping things into the mixing bowl. 

 

My first fry turned out super dark. Two are pictured above and I ate the other two. This is when I realized that frying egg rolls at 350+ degree oil is not good. The outside burns and the inside is questionable. That's the reason I tried the dark ones first because I was worried the inside was raw. It wasn't, but it was definitely too fried. 

 

Would I make this again? For sure. We put a good number of them in the freezer and they'll make great quick food for the future. 

 

 

 Fried Chicken

I had originally marinated this chicken to be browned in a pan like a grilled chicken, but since I already pulled out the oil and pot for frying, I decided to fry them. I marinated them in soy sauce, oyster sauce, honey, cooking wine, sesame oil, and corn starch. Again, I can't tell you exact proportions because I just dump everything in, put on some food gloves, and mix it before popping the bowl in the refrigerator for 24 hours. A beginner recipe would be equal parts (1tsp or 1TB depending on amount of food) of all. I was telling my husband I love these seasonings because you can mix them together in random amounts and it will still taste good. I'm sure if you tweak the proportions, you can get a fine-tuned flavor profile depending on what you like, but equal portions of everything is a good place to start. 

I did two different coatings because I ran out of panko halfway through frying. The rest of the chicken is battered in potato starch. 

 

Chinese Broccoli  

This is a basic parboiled vegetable. I used salted water and dropped in the leaves for maybe 30 seconds. The stems I leave for about 1 minute. Nothing fancy, but parboiled gives it a good texture. The leaves stay bright green and the stems are soft with a little bite to them. 

Asian Vegetable Soup

Earlier this year, I started randomly throwing ingredients together to make soup. This still continues now! This soup includes: tofu puffs, tofu skin rolls, mushrooms, cabbage, carrot, daikon, celery, garlic, soy sauce, dried shrimp, and chicken bouillon for seasoning. It was a little bit of a "stone soup" because the carrot and celery was thrown in to clean out my fridge. I didn't mean for this to be anything fancy, but a warm soup is nice as the weather is cooling down. 

 

I was telling my husband that an Asian soup with fried egg rolls was reminiscent of the quintessential "cheap Chinese restaurant food." I'm not even sure you can get cheap soup and egg rolls anymore at any restaurant due to inflation and tariffs. I'll take my homemade version any day.  

Takeout With the Tos #20: Lazy Food

It's been over a month since I last wrote a Takeout post. Summer ended and the new school year started. We have new routines now. I knew this was going to change and that's partly why it was hard to continue this series. I used to have to cook completely on Sundays because I was out of the house between 9:30am-2:00pm most weekdays and that only left me 1-2 hours before I had to start teaching. My schedule now is actually quite the opposite. That same block of time is when I am actually free, and most days, at home. 

This shift has brought about some changes to our household - some good, some bad. Good: I no longer have to mass cook a week's worth of food on Sunday afternoon for 3 hours. Bad: I'm getting lazier about meal planning and sometimes, the day's food plan comes on a whim. 

This week's food was definitely on a whim. We got home on Monday after being out of town for the weekend. We thankfully had some leftovers courtesy of a friend which turned out to be a meal life saver. For ease of this blog that will not be counted since I didn't buy/make it. On Tuesday, I went grocery shopping for some last minute ingredients to finish a recipe I was making. Along the way, I found some bargain finds which turned into more meals for the week. 

This is probably the epitome of my "lazy food" from this entire year. Honestly, it kind of feels like a treat for us because we don't eat like this very often. So while I do enjoy nice homemade cooked meals, sometimes the lazy food is fun 😛.

Here's our food for the week:

Clam Chowder (7 servings @$7.00/ea): $49

Sandwiches (4 sandwiches @$5.00/ea): $20

Pizza: $8

Total: $77.00

Tax: $6.35

Grand Total:  $83.35

 

PIZZA 

Take and Bake Pizza

The pizza was a bargain find from the grocery store. I bought two and put one into the freezer. The other one was in the fridge for us to eat sometime this week. Sometime this week turned into 5 hours later. This pizza is a 12 inch pizza. The kids ate about half of it by themselves and then I ate a few small slices as a second dinner after working. We ended up with 2 slices leftover in the refrigerator which will probably end up being a meal for one child. I paid less than $8 for it but we're assuming this was a takeout price which is why it's priced accordingly. 

  

CLAM CHOWDER

Clam Chowder

This is the only truly homemade item on the menu for this week. I decided to make clam chowder because we had a surplus of potatoes I needed to use before it became expensive compost. The recipe I use is one I wrote down a long time ago when we first got married. I can't find the exact one on the internet anymore but this one comes pretty close in terms of ingredients and proportions. We don't have fancy bread bowls at our house but some toasted bread goes along way with this chowder. 

 

SANDWICH

My daughter's sandwich for lunch. 

I don't know about you but sandwiches are kind of a treat for us. We don't eat them often, and when we do, it's usually when we go out of town. I ate them all the time during the summer as a kid and got super tired of deli meat between bread, but now as an adult, it's a nice change from hot meals. 

I found deli meat at the grocery store marked down when I went this week. I guess I've never gone at the right time or wandered the section to find it, but this time, I found it and decided to get some. Sandwiches aren't a go-to food for us because it's not budget-friendly when done well. Yes, I could buy the cheap meat and cheese and put something together for a few dollars, but that's really not worth it in my opinion. If I'm going to buy deli meat for a sandwich, I'm going to be paying around $7+ per pound for my deli meat. Finding this as a markdown item meant I was able to get my meat for closer to $4 per pound. That's almost half! 

About a month ago I actually came across some marked down packaged deli meat which I threw in the freezer to save for later. It ended up coming in handy for our trip this past weekend. It was a partial experiment because I had never frozen deli meat before. I was curious how it would turn out. With proper thawing (must be all the way - not a single ice crystal), it still made a decent sandwich. The added mayo and mustard helped to maintain the moisture within the sandwich. If you eat the deli meat by itself (which I did eat a small bite,) it would have been slightly drier than fresh deli meat due to the change in moisture content due to freezing and thawing. I asked my husband if he would go for frozen deli meat again and he said he would. In the future, I'll keep an eye out for deli meat markdowns and then freeze them. There might be a post in the future specifically on freezing deli meat and how to keep it manageable. Someone may have to remind me. 

I love good homemade dishes, but sometimes, we could all use some lazy food. 😄