Yellow rice chicken skillet

January 29, 2025 6:46 PM

If you've been following the blog from the beginning, you'll know that yellow rice chicken skillet is one of my go-to dishes to make. It's one of the first meals I ever made that made me think "wow, I can actually cook something that tastes good." I've made it so many dang times (and those are just the times I blogged about it!)

But my last few attempts at yellow rice were not great. I've made so many adjustments to it over the years, and now I'm questioning all my adjustments. First, I undercooked it, then I made it too mushy. Or I somehow overcooked and undercooked it at the same time. Other people still tell me that it tastes good, but I don't know...I feel like I need to redeem myself.

And my fridge has been looking kind of bare lately. This makes a really large portion--it's like 5 meals for me! So I decided to restock my fridge and be a little extra with the food photography today. I've also never actually made a dedicated post for this dish, so here it is.

Because I'm taking life slowly now, I make sure to prep as much as I can before I actually turn on the stove. While I'm sure I could chop up my garlic while my chicken is cooking, this is just a lot more relaxing, and if anything, I can wash dishes if I'm waiting on something to finish cooking.

This would be better with bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, but I'm trying to make something that's easy to eat, so I went with the boneless, skinless stuff. I did pre-salt the chicken the day before to see if that would allow more flavor to soak in, and maybe it helped a little bit. I think it could have used more salt though.

I cooked the chicken for about 3 minutes on each side (I intentionally did not cook it all the way through in the first step) and I must have had larger pieces of chicken because I could not fit all four pieces in the pan at once. I really wanted to get some color on the chicken, so I cooked it on medium high (I normally just do medium). By the time I was done cooking the second batch of chicken, the kitchen got reeeaaal smokey. So I had to blast the fan and open the windows 😬 But it was alright. I did get a little bit of that golden color.

So I go back and forth on the amount of chicken broth to use in this dish. The recipe calls for 2.5 cups, but sometimes that makes the dish really mushy. But I also think that's because I usually pre-wash my rice. So this time I decided to just not wash the rice (blasphemy! 😱)

And I also cooked it for exactly as long as the recipe stated, which is 25 minutes on low, and 10 minutes just sitting there on no heat. I think the rice ended up being cooked alright, maybe a tad mushy on the bottom, so it probably doesn't need to be cooking for that long.

Because I'm trying to make easy meals for the future, I did go and cut up all of the chicken into bite-sized pieces. I don't like needing to use a knife when I'm eating chicken. And I also gave everything a mix so the peas and chicken were evenly distributed throughout the rice.

Ultimately, I'm pretty happy with this! The rice texture isn't perfect, but it's all cooked, and the chicken was cooked well too. I think it would have been better if I added more salt or if I just made the chicken stock more concentrated. But those are easy tweaks.

What I'm really excited for are the pan-fried leftovers tomorrow morning.

What I ate this week (1/20 - 1/26)

January 28, 2025 12:48 AM

It's been a while since I've done one of these! Since I'm not working right now, I wanted to make at least one post about my thought process for what I decide to cook for the week. I know I used to have goals of spending less than $30 a week on food, but nowadays my focus has shifted away from spending as little as possible to wasting as little as possible. And I think I'm actually pretty good at this! I try to use up everything I buy, and I rarely have to throw away food because it's gone bad. This actually means I don't buy in bulk. In fact, I usually only buy what I need for the next dish I'm making. Does this mean I spend more money now? Yeah, but I feel better about it.

I feel like I live a weird lifestyle because I go grocery shopping more than once a day. Sometimes I'm cooking for myself, sometimes I'm cooking for others, and sometimes I'm just eating food that other people have cooked. So I'll share the things that I cooked this week, which means the meals that I don't mention are either leftovers or stuff that others cooked.

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Monday (1/20)

On Monday I decided to make some Shoyu butter noodles, which has become one of my go-to's. I already had some frozen udon noodles because I bought a bunch to make noodle soup. We had also been planning on having poke at some point, and I thought it would be good to use half a bag of edamame for these noodles, and half a bag for poke. And I could buy exactly as many mushrooms as I needed for this dish since Giant Eagle sells them in bulk.

This is always really tasty, but in the future I'll try to 1.5x the recipe because we didn't have enough for leftovers!

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Tuesday (1/21)

I had scallion pancakes for breakfast and I made shumai! This was one of those times where I didn't actually base my meal off of what I had. I just really wanted to try making the shumai recipe from the cookbook. I do try to make things that are a little different so I'm not stuck rotating the same recipes all the time.

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Wednesday (1/22)

So every Wednesday, Giant Eagle has a special deal on a different item. It's either free or greatly reduced in price. And on this Wednesday, they were selling cups of shredded parmesan for $0.99! Along with this, zucchini was on sale at Aldi. I already had cream cheese in the fridge, and it had been long enough since I last made pasta so it felt like the perfect opportunity to make my favorite HelloFresh pasta.

I actually checked the zucchini again the next day, and they were the same exact price even though they weren't labeled as being on sale anymore! 😒 It's fine, it's still pretty cheap. I just felt bamboozled by Aldi.

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Thursday (1/23)

The only thing I actually cooked on Thursday was breakfast, which was scrambled eggs, served with rice, and drizzled with some sesame oil. This meal is something I come back to every so often, and it was originally inspired by this youtube video. It's super easy and a nice comforting breakfast.

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Friday (1/24)

I ran out of frozen dumplings, so I bought more at one of the Asian stores. I decided to try a different brand this time. It wasn't bad, but I think I still prefer a smaller sized dumpling for soup.

After I ate breakfast, I went over to a friend's house to "co-work" and make dinner together. I decided to make mapo tofu using a recipe from the Woks of Life cookbook. I chose this because she loves spicy food and I know that the mapo tofu I kept making was way too spicy for me.

But this is actually different from the mapo tofu recipe that I used a few weeks ago (even though they're both Woks of Life). This time, I thought it was just the right amount of spicy! And I thought the flavor was pretty good. Of course this means that my friend thought it was too salty and didn't think it was spicy enough. Maybe I should have used the other recipe with her 😅

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Saturday (1/25)

I had a small amount of queso fresco left over from...the fajitas? And I still had some tortillas in my fridge. I know I could make tacos, but I really didn't want to end up with a partial lime.

So I went with black bean and avocado enchiladas! I already had everything I needed to make the enchilada sauce, including cocoa powder! I love using up baking ingredients for savory foods. The recipe also includes corn (which I don't like), and normally I substitute that with pulled pork, but this time I used canned pineapple chunks (another thing to also put in the poke!)

So I actually made this vegetarian for once! But not quite vegan because I needed to use up all the cheese.

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Sunday (1/26)

On Sunday, I spent a good chunk of my day making those carrot cake muffins, eating some, and writing a blog post about it.

For dinner we finally had that poke! I think the best way to make poke is to just buy the fish and use whatever mixins you already have. This time it was edamame, pineapple, kimchi, sweet onion, green onion, furikake, and some sriracha mayo that I mixed up.

Okay, I did buy the peanuts so we could have something crunchy, but we also like to snack on peanuts so I know that will be gone soon.

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In total, I spent about $91 on groceries this week, and $56 of that actually went towards the dishes I mentioned in this post. I also spent $30 eating out with a friend. Is this a lot of money to be spending on food in a week? I'm not sure. I'm not the only one eating all this food.

But I will say that every single dish I made this week was really tasty, and I'm so glad I have extra time to make good food (:

Carrot cake muffins

January 26, 2025 9:29 PM

Every once in a while I get an urge to make some carrot cake muffins. It's usually when I have some cream cheese in my fridge, and I'm craving something sweet. And it's one of the only things that I make that uses ground ginger, and I'm still trying to go through my container of ginger that expired in 2017.

My go-to recipe is Budget Bytes' Carrot Cake (for two), except I usually double it (because I'm not going to use a partial egg). This time however, I quadrupled the recipe (two eggs!).

I honestly was only planning on making four muffins, but I realized that I had a really big carrot in my fridge, and I also didn't want to be left with a partial carrot.

What I didn't quadruple was the frosting though. I made that exactly as the original recipe stated. And I still had enough frosting for ten muffins! (I intentionally left two unfrosted because my boyfriend prefers it that way) People must really like to dump lots of frosting on their cakes. I actually really do like cream cheese frosting, but I only need a tiny fraction of what the recipes calls for.

I suppose that when you actually follow the recipe as written and only make enough for two servings, it's a pretty easy recipe. But I found this to be a lot of work on my hands. So much grating and mixing and holding the bowl up to pour the batter into each of the muffin tins. There's probably a better technique than what I did. Maybe I should try using a spoon.

But I think it was all worth it. These muffins are delicious. And now I have a nice snack for every single day of the week.

Well...we'll see if they last all week!

Rigatoni with sausage and zucchini

January 22, 2025 2:09 PM

Last year was a really busy year, and I often got stressed out over what to cook. One of my friends was regularly ordering from HelloFresh, and I also got a box every once in a while. It was nice to not have to think about what I was going to cook, but man was it expensive. And that's even after I had 50% off and I wasn't paying for shipping. It also came with way too much packaging.

But I did really enjoy one of the recipes so much that it's become one of my go tos: Pork Sausage Rigatoni Rosa. I think that name makes it sound way fancier than it is. It's basically another one of those tomato-y cream cheese pastas, and if you've been following this blog you know that I love putting cream cheese in pasta.

If you click on the recipe link, you'll notice that there are certain ingredients that don't exactly have a real measurement. The recipe calls for "1 unit" of zucchini, tomato paste, and chicken stock concentrate. Okay, the zucchini is simple enough, it's literally one zucchini, but what is 1 unit of tomato paste?!

Well, I've made this enough times and I've written down all the real measurements on my paper version of this. I've also modified this recipe to my own tastes. I find that HelloFresh usually includes more meat than I care for, and not enough of anything else.

• I use 8 oz (rather than 6 oz) of pasta
• I also use two zucchinis because I can't buy a single zucchini from Aldi. But also because it's good to eat a lot of veggies!
• I lower the amount of sausage to half a pound
• 1.5 oz (or ~3 tablespoons) of tomato paste and 1 tsp of Better than Bouillon chicken stock concentrate

I also found that I get a little flail-y when I've made this in the past. There's one step when it tells you to add cream cheese, stock concentrate, pasta water, butter, sugar, and chili flakes all at once and I am never ready for that. I always ended up running around my kitchen grabbing each item--meanwhile, my tomato paste is starting to burn in the pan. So this time I measured and put every ingredient out before I started cooking.

I was much less flail-y today! I think I made the pasta a little too al dente, but that's alright, that means the leftovers will still taste good.

Scallion pancakes and shumai

January 21, 2025 5:36 PM

One of my friends got me The Woks of Life cookbook for Christmas, and I've been wanting to try something from it. I decided to start with something really simple: a dipping sauce. Not just any dipping sauce, an ultimate dipping sauce.

I don't know what makes it so ultimate, but it is a pretty tasty dipping sauce.

I actually bought some frozen scallion pancakes the other day, and I thought it would be a good breakfast. When I've cooked scallion pancakes in the past, I would just cut it up into little triangles (kind of like a pizza or a quesadilla), but I've heard that people like eating it with eggs so I made some scrambled eggs to go on top.

I wasn't really sure of the best way to eat this. Do I wrap it up like it's a tortilla? That seemed too cumbersome, so I grabbed a fork and a knife and cut a piece and dipped it in the sauce. It was delicious, but after the first bite I switched to ripping pieces with my hands. Very good breakfast.

For lunch, I went with something that was a bit more challenging, pork and shrimp siu mai. This is the first recipe in the cookbook, and while the author claims that it's really easy, I'd say it's still on the more difficult end of things that I make. I did make shumai a few years ago, but I used a completely different (much simpler) recipe. I did say I wanted to try the Woks of Life recipe, so here I am doing that.

I had everything I needed for this except for white pepper. It happens to be the coldest day of the year, and it's something like 10 degrees outside, but I decided that I would walk the half mile to the Japanese store (and back) just for white pepper. I bundled up and the walk itself wasn't too bad, but they didn't even have white pepper! So I just ended up using black pepper instead.

This recipe has you mixing the filling for a very very long time (that or use a stand mixer, but I don't have one of those). And you have to mix in stages. I tried, I really did, but my hands were getting tired. It also didn't help that I forgot about the pork in my freezer and didn't thaw it overnight. So it was still a little frozen when I was mixing.

I honestly feel like I did a better job at wrapping these when I made them years ago. I also realized halfway through wrapping that I completely forgot to add cornstarch to this! At that point it was too late. Oh well.

Steaming the shumai was probably the easiest part of this whole process. I added some water to a large pan, brought it to a boil, and then added the bamboo steamer and cooked the shumai for about 10 minutes. Taking the steamer basket out of the pan was a bit harder (do people use tongs for this?), but I just picked it up using oven mitts.

And then when I tried to pick up an individual piece, I noticed that it had extra liquid and the wrapper was not sticking to the filling at all. Apparently this is a pretty common problem and it sounds like...I just needed to mix this more and squeeze it more while wrapping it. (Or maybe it was the lack of cornstarch) But I don't think I had this problem when I made shumai years ago. Maybe I'm just out of practice when it comes to dumplings.

Okay, so I need to leave myself notes for the next time I make this:

• Mix mix mix, mix a lot, and make sure all the meat is actually thawed before starting
• Maybe try to spread out the filling all over the wrapper before forming it into the shumai shape (like you're spreading peanut butter on a piece of toast. a commenter on the Woks of Life post mentioned this and it sounds like something I should try!)
• Really squeeze the filling to the wrapper so there aren't any gaps
• Don't overstuff them. A rounded tablespoon of filling per dumpling is probably enough
• I still think some dark soy sauce would be good in this

Yes, this was a lot of work. But it did taste good, especially when I dipped it in chili oil! I gotta try making it again and see if I can make it better next time.