2025: Books!

I read a lot of books in 2025. I keep one-upping myself from the previous year. Unintentionally. I won't be writing blurbs about all the books I read this year, as honestly, I don't remember too much about each one. As I reflect on this list of reading, I think it's a reflection of my year. There's a lot of light/fun reading this year. When I'm in the mood for light reading, it means I'm looking to read something other than what my reality is experiencing. 

I allow myself to do fun reading now. It's nice to enter into a fictional character's world, see life through their eyes, and then step out when the book finishes. I've had to ask myself: why read if I can't remember half the books I've read?  It feels a little counterproductive at times, spending so many hours with these books and not being able to recall anything of importance. But I think that misses the point.

We meet so many people in our lives throughout the years, and we probably truly keep in touch with less than half, maybe even less than a quarter. Were those people we met before "unnecessary"? I still think about my elementary school friends and how close we were at the time. I'd go to their houses to play or do group projects together. 

Even though our lives were not meant to keep in touch with every single person we've ever met or interacted with, it doesn't mean his/her presence wasn't important at the time, even if only for a short while. I think if we actually did keep in touch with every single person, our lives would explode with anxiety and stress at dealing with so many people all the time. 

So much like our interactions with people and the way only a few (relatively) truly stick around and last, reading books feels the same way at times. We read to explore various characters and stories. Many will be forgotten once the back cover closes and others will linger on in our minds, reminding us of the locations we sat and read or multi-tasked while listening to an audio book.   

 

Ornithologists Guide to Love

Veronica Speedwell #1: A Curious Beginning

Accidentally Amy

Happily Never After

Flirty Little Secret

Veronica Speedwell #2: A Perilous Undertaking

The Love Wager

The Secret Service of Tea and Treason

Veronica Speedwell #3: A Treacherous Curse

Veronica Speedwell #4: A Dangerous Collaboration

The Do Over

Veronica Speedwell #5: A Murderous Relation

P.S. I Hate You

Better Than the Movies

Nothing Like the Movies

The Silence Between Us

Fourth Wing

Iron Flame

Just For the Summer

A Pho Love Story

Love on Paper

You Bet Your Heart

Onyx Storm

Wreck the Halls

Veronica Speedwell #6: An Unexpected Peril 

Part Of Your World

Yours Truly

Powerless

Veronica Speedwell #7: An Impossible Imposter 

First Time Caller

A Sinister Revenge

The Wish Switch

Reckless

Love That Dog

Veronica Speedwell #8: A Grave Robbery

Maid For Each Other

The Friend Zone 

Life's Too Short

Fearless

Hamlet

Sounds Like Love

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion Volume One 

Love and Other Great Expectations

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion Volume Two

I Just Wish I Had a Bigger Kitchen

Love Unmasked

Fearful

(The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe came somewhere before Prince Caspian)

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion Volume Three

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion Volume Four

Prince Caspian 

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion Volume Five

Great Big Beautiful Life  

 

 

 

I made it to 53 this year.  

Takeout with the Tos #27 : Gluten-Free

This may be my last Takeout post of the year. I have still been cooking but a lot of the dishes have been repeats of ones I've already made. When I cooked this gluten-free dish for a friend, it inspired another dish, both which I will talk about in this post. 

One of my friends is gluten-free and I was at her house. I can't remember how it started exactly,  but our conversation went from food to fried chicken to gluten-free to gluten-free flour. I told her I could make her a gluten-free fried chicken if she had the gluten-free flour. Indeed she did! 

I took her flour home and made fried chicken with it! 

You would never believe this was gluten-free if I didn't tell you. 

My breading of preference with fried chicken is actually panko. When I use panko, the crumb is larger so it sticks better to the chicken. When I used the gluten-free flour this time to fry, a lot of the coating went into the frying oil. Not a problem at all, but it doesn't leave a clear oil when you're done frying. In the past, I've just dumped the oil and the flour in it in the trash. However, this time, there seemed to be a lot of extra flour in the oil. 

Then it hit me. I had just fried chicken and inadvertently made a roux! Roux is pronounced "roo" like kanga"roo" if you don't know. Typically, it's made by cooking flour in oil in a pan for a long time before making gumbo. People have created other shortcuts to roux by baking the flour in the oven first before cooking it in the oil to cut down on the stirring time - you must stir your roux or it will burn and burned roux is bitter.  I think I just found the greatest double-duty hack of all time: fry something with a flour batter, and then use the extra cooked flour and oil to make something that requires a roux!

I poured off the excess oil from the top and then I was left 
with this beautiful dark brown, flavorful roux.

Now you might be looking at this in the bottom of my wok and think this is way too much roux to use for any dish. That's exactly what I thought. It was a lot of roux. I pulled out my silicone ice cube molds (which I've never used for ice) and spooned a portion of the roux in. These molds went into my freezer and now I have pre-made roux cubes for next time!

I only spooned out four cubes worth. In retrospect, I probably 
could have spooned out...at least another two. Wisdom for the future.

It was unfortunate I could not share this gumbo with my friend as well as I had fried non-gluten-free food in the same oil after I fried her gluten-free chicken first. I don't know all the contamination rules with gluten and frying, but I wasn't going to risk it. 

My gumbo was not traditional as the Cajun trinity involves onion, bell pepper, and celery. I used neither bell pepper or celery in my "trinity." My gumbo started simply with onion and carrot. Then I added leftover ham, lentils, and shrimp. Not traditional at all, but absolutely delicious. I would definitely make it again and use the same ingredients or even try mixing up other ingredients. I actually enjoy okra in my gumbo but I didn't have any in my freezer so it wasn't included. If this isn't a real gumbo to you, then I guess you can call it a very rich stew. 

Yum.

I flipped the order this time, but this is my cost breakdown:

4 large servings of gumbo at $12.99 per serving: $51.96

15 gluten-free fried chicken tenderloins at $2.50 each: $$37.50

Total: $89.46

Tax: $7.38

Grand Total:  $96.84

It's been a fun year blogging and sharing about my food and stories. I hope you've enjoyed reading about what I cook, how I cook, and occasional tips and tricks with freezing and saving food. I have a couple ideas for themes next year that still revolve around food. When I finalize which one I want to do, you will be reading about it on the blog. If you cooked anything I shared or received inspiration from a recipe, I'd love to hear about it! 

Twenty-One (and some) Years Later

I see my dad on a weekly basis now. Unless he's sick or one of us is sick, we will have a visit every week. I've come to enjoy these visits a lot more. There was a time when I really dreaded going to visit him and felt burdened by having to do so. At the time, each of these visits would leave me drained and sometimes angry. I never wanted to go because I'd leave in a foul mood after. 

It's taken years to reach this point, but my relationship with my dad is the best it's ever been. Now "best" is relative.  We're on a low scale here...by best, I mean we see each other once a week, we don't yell at each other, and we can have some surface-level conversation. Maybe sometimes more than surface-level. But honestly, if we're talking at all, and it's not yelling or reprimanding, that's a positive. 

I never got to have an adult relationship with my mother. When she died, I wrote a letter. In the letter, I listed a series of events and experiences she would miss from my life : my high school graduation, my college graduation, my marriage, the birth of my children. All of these have happened. But one thing I didn't have foresight into: both of us would miss having an adult relationship with each other. She would never stop being my mother, but the relationship of a mother and child is not the same as the relationship of a mother and an adult child. 

I have a vivid memory of being in middle school. I trace the timeline back to about 7th grade because I don't remember my brother being with me. My mother had driven to pick me up from school. I don't remember when she stopped driving, but 7th grade was less than a year before she died. She never waited in the carpool line because traffic was horrendous. Instead, she pulled up a street around from the school, and I'd walk down and look for her car. 

Upon opening the door, I got in the seat and loaded my violin and backpack around me. Immediately, I got yelled at because my violin was in the way of my mother's ability to drive. I got angry she snapped at me. We drove home in a sour mood and didn't speak to each other. I vaguely remember her later explaining to me she couldn't reach the gas pedal properly due to my violin being in the way, and that was dangerous. 

She was right. All these years later, I know she was right. I was just being a bratty teenager who didn't want to be corrected, and in that moment, I was annoyed at how bulky my backpack and instrument were. As an adult and mother myself now, if my child did the same thing, I'd be snapping at him/her in an instant, too.

I never had the chance to drive my mother around. She died a year and a half before I received my driver's license. I've driven my dad around a number of times on adventures with my children. I often wonder if it's strange for him to see me now doing things for him he used to do for me.  For a while, I resented the fact that it wasn't her. Why didn't my mother get to be the one to play with my kids and hear their laughter? Why wasn't my mother the one sitting in the passenger seat beside me as I drove? 

I learned to stop asking why. No answers will ever suffice for these questions. For now, I'm just glad my dad and I have time.  

Takeout with the Tos # 26: Long-term Storage

It's been a little bit hectic with the holidays coming and the end of semester drawing nearer. My cooking still happens but I've been doing a lot of repeats and there's not a lot to expound upon when I've made the same dish 3-5x already this year.  

We ran out of food halfway through this week so I had to figure out some dishes to cook. It's also been cold and rainy and I didn't feel like going to the store to buy anything so I had to use what we already had. I also wanted dishes with some vegetables in them.

How do I get vegetable dishes cooked Asian style without buying anything fresh? Let me tell you how!

My three dishes which meet the above quota are:

- Peas and Shrimp: $13.99

- Turnip Greens with Dace : $13.99

- Stir Fry Bamboo, Water Chestnuts, and Bell Peppers: $11.99

Total: $39.97

Tax: $3.30

Grand Total:  $43.27

 

Peas and Shrimp

Both of these are in my freezer. I have a bag of frozen peas in my freezer almost at all times. There was a phase when my kids wouldn't eat peas because they influenced each other to not like peas. Now I'm trying to reverse the habit. I finally got the younger one to eat some and I'm trying to get him to influence the older now. 

Shrimp is always in my freezer. This dish comes together super quickly. My dad used to make this dish as part of our food rotation when I was in high school. I enjoyed the way he made it. It wasn't super saucy and I actually don't know what he put in it - probably soy sauce or some combination of an Asian sauce - but it was good. 

I start by heating up some oil in my wok and then adding the shrimp (1/2lb?). When the shrimp is about 85% cooked, I add in thawed peas (1.5 cups?).  I mix it around for a bit, added oyster sauce (approx 1TB?) and a light sprinkle of sugar and salt. Make sure the shrimp is cooked all the way through and no longer translucent. That's about it.

If you're not into Asian food or it's not easily accessible, I bet adding some garlic and butter would make a great sauce for the shrimp and peas! Think shrimp scampi with peas. 

 

Turnip Greens with Dace 

I never thought about freezing bags of vegetables until my friend told me she did it all the time. This one is great because bags of pre-washed and cut turnip greens can be found at many grocery stores and aren't specifically "Asian." If you're super chill and want convenience, throw the whole bag into the freezer and save it for when you need it. This is what I do. If you want to go for a little more work before the convenience kicks in, you can open the bag, sort out some of the larger stem pieces, rewash if you'd like, spin dry, and then save in a Ziploc bag in the freezer. This is what I wish I would do sometimes but am realistically too lazy to ever do it. Laziness is a form of efficiency, remember? 😜

Canned dace has become a new staple in our house. I ate it in dishes as a kid and then forgot about it for a while until Woks of Life jumpstarted my memory with this recipe. This was the initial inspiration for my dish. I hardly ever make this with fresh greens because if I'm making this dish, it usually means I don't have any fresh vegetables for one reason or another. I also like to make my dace super small instead of the larger chunks because it is pretty salty and I want it evenly distributed with my greens.

For this dish, I first empty the contents of the fried dace can onto a plate. Then I pick out the bones and cut the fish smaller. Next, I heat up a pan and then throw in my dace, beans, and the oil. Once the fish and oil get hot, I throw in my turnip greens. If you're using a frozen bag of turnip greens, do not thaw first. Throw them in frozen. Let them cook down and give it a good stir. Once the greens are cooked, the dish is done. I don't add any extra seasoning into this dish because the canned dace has a lot of salt in it already.  

 

Stir Fry Bamboo, Water Chestnuts, and Bell Pepper

I made this dish up on the spot because it was vegetables I had on hand which I could combine together for a cohesive dish. The recipe inspiration came from this recipe. I just sub whatever vegetables I have on hand. I keep canned bamboo and canned water chestnuts in my pantry at all times. There are other dishes I use these canned vegetables for, but they came in handy for this stir fry as well. The bell peppers were some of the last ones to come out of my garden. They were smaller and thinner but still usable. I realize not everyone is going to have a garden of bell peppers. That's not a problem because bell peppers can be frozen! 

Now you can't freeze them whole. The best way to freeze a bell pepper is to wash, remove the seeds and middle, and cut the bell peppers into the size you want to use them. Then, lay them out on flat on a tray and freeze. Once frozen, transfer them to a freezer bag to use when you want them. This is probably true of most vegetables, but you don't want to thaw them before you use them. They'll turn into a soggy mess. These are best for stir frys because you throw them in frozen and the high heat fast cooking method will help to preserve the texture of the vegetable. 

The actual recipe uses much more seasoning than I did for this batch. I just used chicken bouillon in water this time and made a starch slurry to thicken the sauce. 

I hope these dishes inspire you to be able to cook with more vegetables even when you're in a bind or can't make it to the grocery store!