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! 

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. 😄

Takeout With the Tos #19: Long John Silver's

When I was growing up, takeout wasn't atrociously priced. You could get a family meal to feed four people for around $20 and probably have some leftovers. Sadly, this isn't the case anymore. As a result, my children don't eat out in the same ways I did. This is probably for the better because I believe they eat much healthier than I did as a child. However, this means they're missing out on some of the fond memories I have of eating out of a fried chicken bucket or eating fries at our kitchen table. My cooking initially increased after my first baby was born. We were home a lot during the evenings and cooking became an outlet for me to be creative and "do something." I wrote about the various recipes I tried the year after she was born. 

One thing I've never done was fry fish. I grew up eating Long John Silver's and it was our "justified healthy food" because we were eating fish. I still live next to the same location we went to growing up. For fun, I looked up the prices and they are much higher than they used to be. 

Instead of ordering a 12 pc family meal for $43.79, we fried our own fish, French fries, and hushpuppies from scratch.

Here are the recipes I followed for each of the items.

Fried Fish Batter - The batter is the main part I needed to help with. I fried each batch of fish for about 4 minutes at 350 degree oil. We used tilapia instead of cod or pollock because that's the only white fish we had at home. We also cut our fish in half so they wouldn't fry with a little slit in the middle. 

French Fries - I hand cut my fries and followed the double fry method.

Hushpuppies - Believe it or not, I followed this recipe almost entirely.

Guys...I got too excited after making an entire meal in the style of Long John Silver's....so excited I never got a picture of everything after frying. Instead, I got the remains of the fish and fries after plating up my children's servings.

The fish and fries.

 

I never got a picture of all the hush puppies, but here are the ones on my kids' plates. 

As a child, food was sustenance. I ate because I was hungry. Sometimes I liked what I ate, sometimes I didn't. As a young adult, I ate what I could afford. Sometimes this was plain food. Sometimes this was delicious food. Now as a more established adult, I've finally begun to appreciate the power of food and the true meaning of comfort food. 

The prices below are taken from the Long John Silver's a la carte menu. Simply calculating from their family meal accurately accounts for the fish but not the proportion of hushpuppies or fries. Because of this, the price is inflated compared to the meal price, but I did not make three sides, only one. 

12 pieces of fish @ $2.89 each: $34.68

3 orders of hushpuppies (6 pc/order) at $2.79 each: $8.37

6 orders of fries at $2.79 each: $16.74

Total: $59.79

Tax:$4.93

Grand Total: $64.72 

I was able to save about half of everything I cooked in the freezer to be consumed at a later date. The leftovers from the other half will last us about 3 portions. I had fun doing a fish fry. The benefit of this fry batch was these were not coated or wet batters. This allowed the frying oil to stay much cleaner throughout the process and remain usable for longer. I will most likely continue to use bits of the oil in my cooking throughout the week before I dispose of the last remaining portion with the bits on the bottom. 

Total Prep and Fry Time: 2 hours. 

Takeout with the Tos #18: Fry Edition

We don't have any streaming services right now. We do have a nice big screen TV and an antenna to get public channels. Occasionally I miss the variety from when we had access to a streaming service. It would have been very easy for us to sign up for a subscription and pick up right where we left off. It would cost us about $20/month and we'd continue the shows we watched from before. However, with us being out of town for two weeks at the time, we decided to wait. I was never opposed to signing up for a subscription, but I knew once we started, there was no going back.

 

When we came back from our trip, there was a period of time when we didn't watch a lot of television. There was just too much to do around the house and we were still tired/jetlagged from our trip.  It wasn't until about a month after returning when we started resorting to the television again. 

 

We haven't started a subscription for anything yet, and honestly, most of the time, there's nothing overly exciting to watch on public channels, but once in a while, there will be a nice gem of a show that's on when we're watching. 

 

This happened at the end of last week. We were browsing channels at night and came across a cooking show talking about Louisiana and seafood. They introduced various restaurants in Louisiana and the food they served. These weren't fancy high-brow restaurants. Most were just basic restaurants serving simple food of the south. I loved watching them talk about oysters. It also made me hungry for some oysters myself. 

 

I had oysters in my freezer. With some thawing technique, I was going to give it a try. The recipe I followed loosely (and boy do I mean loosely) is this one.  

 

If you've followed along with my blog you'll know that I'm a very rustic cook. I don't like following recipes because they slow me down. I either have to memorize enough of it to be simple to execute or it's completely made up. 

 

What I followed from the recipe: a 1:1 ratio of flour and cornmeal

 

What I didn't follow from the recipe: everything else 😂 

I didn't have buttermilk for the recipe, but I also didn't have enough milk to amend into buttermilk (milk + vinegar) so I ended up just leaving that part out. I also did not add seasoning to the oyster or the batter. When using frozen oysters, I learned from a Korean cook to salt them and wash them before using. I thought this would have been enough salt to flavor, but it wasn't. 

The overall fry was great though. 

Tasty.

Proof it's an oyster and not chicken in disguise.

 

 

If I did this again in the future, there would be two things I'd make sure of:

1. Add some seasoning. Or wash them in more salt next time, haha. 

2. Fry a little longer. These weren't bad by any means but they got less crispy as they cooled. A longer fry may have helped this. **We've gone to seafood restaurants before and had dried fried seafood so I'm aware of the opposite extreme.**

 

Now if you know me, I don't waste my frying oil or my extra fry batter. I had both in this case. That same evening, I speed-prepped some shrimp balls for frying. Because there is cornmeal in the batter, it wasn't a true Asian shrimp ball. Think more of a shrimp hush puppy.  But it was improvised on the spot, quick to pull together, and tasted pretty good. 

I don't think these would ever be my main item on my frying list, but they make a good secondary fry to use up extra batter and take advantage of the oil. 

 

 

 

The following day, I continued my frying efficiency by making a batch of chicken karaage. This is the recipe I first used when making karaage, but since then, I just wing it by memory and improvisation now.  

I've breaded it in both potato starch and tapioca starch. Both get good results. 

I love fried food. We never had homemade fried food growing up, but we did fast food. My kids get the opposite. We don't do a lot of fast food, but we have fried food in my freezer on hand. A pipe dream of mine is to never buy freezer chicken nuggets again and to always have enough karaage in my freezer. My kids consume a lot of chicken nuggets, so this is a lofty goal, but maybe in the future when they can significantly help in the kitchen, this will be possible. 

As for our health, everything in moderation, right? Not all of this (except the oysters) were consumed in one sitting.

Fried Oysters x18: $20.99

Shrimp Balls x11: $15.99

Chicken Karaage (1.5 lb): $14.99  

Total: $51.97

Tax: $4.29

Grand Total:  $56.26

Homemade Chicken Nuggets

I'm taking a short break from Takeout With the Tos for a while because our summer schedule is different so I'm not entirely sure how the cooking is going to fit in. I'm working on thinking through how that's going to work. Next school year I will also have more time during the week so I may not need to cook on Sunday afternoons anymore! That's still TBD though. The series will come back after a few months but it may look a little different.

A couple weeks ago, I made chicken nuggets by scratch. Have you ever wanted to make them from scratch? Chances are, your answer is "no." For the longest time, it wasn't on my radar either. But then, I was scrolling social media and came across a post on how to make homemade chicken nuggets.

I made them. 

I saved it just out of curiosity thinking I may or may not make it. A few weeks after I saved this recipe, my kids were hungry when I was teaching so I made their requested food really quickly. My son requested chicken nuggets and my daughter requested something similar to a burrito. Long story short, I put everything on one plate, handed it to my daughter, and my son never got his chicken nuggets. 😭 I was very upset for him because those were the last chicken nuggets in our freezer. As a result, I decided to make homemade chicken nuggets and try this recipe.

If you want the TLDR version: I'm never making homemade chicken nuggets again. 😂 And I'm someone who goes through the trouble of cooking because I enjoy it. But chicken nuggets....never gonna happen. And here's why:

I followed the recipe shown above loosely. There was another recipe I looked up and kind of combined the two together into my own version of chicken nuggets. Here's the part that ruined the recipe for me: the ground chicken. I didn't have pre-ground chicken but I had plenty of chicken in my freezer. I used my food processor to blend it down. Don't get me wrong, I love chicken nuggets because of that ground up texture vs the fibrous meat strands of meat pieces. But physically making it yourself and dealing with it/cleaning it up? That is a whole other monster.

Mixture consistency. Love the food processor for stuff like this. Hate the cleaning. 

Then there was the frying process. Again, I'm not against frying food. I love frying food, and especially having our wok to fry in. But boy does it make a huge mess. 

My big mess.

I tried a few after I made them, and I definitely skimped on the salt/seasoning. Oops. It wasn't intentional. But with some barbecue sauce or ranch, these would be some yummy chicken nuggets. 

I'm never making these again because Costco sells freezer chicken nuggets from $3/lb all the way up to the fancier $6+/lb all natural chicken pieces. I'm for all of them. I'm going to compare my nuggets to the $6/lb ones because I used chicken tenderloins and there are no preservatives in my nuggets. These definitely already cost me $3+/lb to make at home due to the cost of the ingredients, the time it took to put everything together, and the hassle of cleaning up after myself. I'm glad I did it once....but never again.

For all its glory, here they are again. My homemade nuggets. 

Takeout With the Tos: Store-Bought Freezer Filler Meals

With the recent exception of last week's menu, we typically don't have enough food from what I cook on Sunday to make it through the week. So both as addendum food and variety, we eat fillers throughout the week. Fillers are foods we eat which I don't batch cook on Sunday afternoon. This can be a combination of store-bought freezer meals as well as batches of frozen food from homemade meals. Keep in mind any cooking which happens during the week is much more simple. 

In this post, I'm going to go over store-bought freezer filler foods we eat periodically. I know I make a lot of homemade food for my family, but I'm not above freezer chicken nuggets or dumplings.

Random assortment of what's currently in our freezer. Not sponsored. 

1. Chicken Nuggets - We love chicken nuggets. If there was a way I could get chicken nuggets to not be soggy in a hot food thermos, I'd bring them for my kid's lunch. I haven't found a way to do this yet. I've seen some youtubers stick paper towels in the thermos to absorb moisture and keep them crunchy, but I doubt the true effectiveness. So we save chicken nuggets for home when they can be eaten right after cooking.

2. Corn Dogs - My kids enjoy corn dogs here and there. My husband and I enjoy corn dogs here and there. We've done both the corn dog on a stick and mini corn dogs.

3. Frozen Dumplings - this category is anything that includes any brand of dumpling (we eat multiple), soup dumplings, or tiny wontons. Depending on how specific you get, you could almost lump them all under the category of "dumpling."

4. Frozen Noodles - I keep a small stash of premade noodle servings with vegetables. If it's convenient and I have some on hand, I will try to add a protein in since most are made vegetarian. Otherwise, it's a quick microwave and eat type meal.

5.  Tacos/Mexican - We do occasionally buy mini tacos at Costco when they're on sale and keep them on hand in our freezer. Currently, I have a pack of tamales I found on markdown. So those are on deck for a time when we need some food in a crunch. 

6. Fish Sticks - My husband and I love fish sticks. There's a guilty pleasure about eating breaded, crunchy fish late at night as a snack with homemade tartar sauce. My kids will eat it occasionally, but we seldom give it to them because somehow they end up smelling like a fish stick, even hours after eating! 

7. Lasagna - occasionally we find the frozen lasagna on sale at Costco or Sam's. This one isn't really a quick meal though since it does take a couple of hours in the oven.

#1, 2, and 6 are items we (the adults) tend to crave when we see our kids eating them. I'm not sure what it is. Perhaps it's because they're not our everyday food so they are actually more like a special treat. There are other items which make their rounds through our freezer so this list isn't all-inclusive. I actually enjoy a freezer food "treat" here and there because we don't eat it often. A number of these also turn into my dinner #2, especially when I eat dinner before 5 pm most days. These have also come in handy if we all get sick or after coming back from going out of town. If I'm feeling fancy, I'll usually pair these with some side dishes: mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, or broccoli with the American items or kimchi/seaweed salad with the Asian items. It ends up being quite a tasty meal!

Anyone else have guilty pleasure frozen food? 😄