Takeout with the Tos #24

I cooked a mixture of individual meals as well as some Asian dishes. I've blogged a lot about the Asian dishes I make so this week I'm going to focus on the other meals we had this week. It doesn't encompass all the food we ate this week, but it provides some variety in showing you what we cook and eat in our household.

Mediterranean Stew with Naan (6+ servings) : $50.99 

Burgers and Fries (10 burgers + fries) : $89.99

Flatbread Pizza (4 flatbreads) : $39.96

Total: $180.94

Tax: $14.93

Grand Total:  $195.87

 

Burgers and Fries

I discovered this recipe for homemade burgers before 2020. It's the only recipe I ever follow when I make burgers because it's so good. When I was pregnant, I would still make this recipe because we could fully cook the burgers and it was still delicious. Last weekend I was having a random burger craving. We had McDonald's for a meal and it wasn't quite satisfying. We ended up making our own burgers for this week and it was really delicious. I made an improvised coleslaw for the burger and we fried some french fries at home with really old potatoes. 🙈 Nobody got sick. They were delicious. 

 

Flatbread Pizza 

I went grocery shopping one day and found flatbreads on clearance at the grocery store for 50% off. Flatbread is not usually on my grocery shopping list, but this price was pretty good. I also thought quickly on my feet and told myself I'd save it in the freezer for us to make homemade pizza with one day. Well, the day to make homemade pizza came this week! I pulled together this pizza in about a half hour. The flatbread was thawed from my freezer. The cheese was thawed from my freezer. The sausage I tore apart as a topping was from my freezer. The tomato sauce was two cans of tomato paste mixed with some water to thin and Italian seasonings. 

This was a really delicious pizza. It was gone in two meals. I love how I could pull out almost every ingredient from my freezer and those I didn't were shelf stable! I also really enjoyed eating sausage on my pizza instead of the usual pepperoni we would do. Pepperoni is just too greasy after it bakes, and honestly, the sausage adds a nice flavor as well. I'll have to do this again sometime if I can find more flatbread on sale. 

 

Mediterranean Stew with Naan 

I started putting together this post only to realize I didn't have a photo of the actual stew! Oops. I did get a nice photo of all my spices lined up in a row on the stove ready to be added in.

...and then I got a photo of what the spices looked like dumped on top of the stew. I didn't measure for amounts but it's about 1 tsp - 1 TB of each. 

I've never followed a recipe to make this stew. This recipe was born one day of trying to use chickpeas in a high fiber stew. I include chickpeas, beans, carrots, potato, canned corn, and this time, cabbage. There's a variety of vegetable combinations that could be used for this.

This specific batch has some bacon in it, both for the fat and the flavor since everything else is a vegetarian component.  

Yes, my children eat this. My daughter took it to school for lunch for two days. Yes, they need the naan to bribe them. But I'm thankful to expand their palette and have them eating their fiber at a young age! I will probably never go vegetarian in my lifetime, but I love being able to cook vegetarian options that are tasty to add variety to what we eat.  

The takeout total this week is on the high side, but realistically, this is what we would pay if we ordered all this food as takeout. These burgers are not In-N-Out sized...they are closer to what the Big Mac used to be back in the 90s. McDonald's is selling a Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal for over $9.50. 😱

I decided to go back and add up the takeout costs from the first 3 quarters of this year. Guess what it came out to? Will reveal in the next Takeout post!