Lettuce Wraps

January 24, 2019 10:04 PM

Man, there are not enough hours in the day. I come home from work, run an errand, cook dinner, eat dinner, wash the dishes, shower, and then it's already 9pm! And I told myself I was going to prioritize sleep this year. When am I ever going to have time to actually write blog posts?!

I gotta catch up on posting about the things I've cooked. So here's some pork lettuce wraps I made a few weeks ago.

I actually bought lettuce to put in a hamburger, but I used maybe two leaves of it for that so naturally I decided to make lettuce wraps. I really like the Asian Chicken Lettuce Wrap recipe from skinnytaste, but I do make a few modifications.

• Replace ground chicken with ground pork.
• Replace shiitake mushrooms with whatever mushroom is cheapest.
• Use 2 whole scallions instead of 2 tablespoons of scallion. I don't even know how you're supposed to measure scallions in tablespoons.
• Don't use iceberg lettuce. It is really hard to eat a lettuce wrap with iceberg lettuce.

We used green leaf lettuce...which was also hard to wrap with. Why do people like wrapping things in lettuce anyway? Next time I'll just make a taco.

Seafood Blend: Part 2

January 20, 2019 2:38 PM

...is unfortunately not as successful as part 1.

Last Christmas my aunt made these shrimp avocado cucumber bites, and it was probably the most Californian thing I've ever seen. And I was convinced I needed to make these myself. I googled "shrimp guacamole cucumber" and grabbed the first recipe I saw: Avocado Cucumber Shrimp Appetizers from Natasha's Kitchen. Now it probably would have made sense to actually buy some shrimp for this, but I had half a bag of seafood blend that I needed to use up.

I also had guacamole that we had made earlier in the week using Skinnytaste's Best Guacamole Recipe. So really all I took from that other recipe is the Cajun shrimp part. It wasn't so bad, but next time we'll just use shrimp, and actually use freshly made guacamole. Or be lazy and buy it from the store.

We actually had leftover pieces of seafood, and my sister remarked that we could throw some pasta in it. I checked my cabinets and I found a box of that Banza chickpea pasta...that expired last year. Hey, it's a box of pasta! It should be fine!

Second note to self: Do not eat expired chickpea pasta. In fact do not even buy chickpea pasta at all. It is way more expensive than regular pasta and doesn't taste as good.

Seafood Blend: Part 1

January 20, 2019 9:37 AM

I just happened to be at Trader Joe's the other day, and I remembered a Budget Bytes recipe that I really wanted to try: Seafood Rice Skillet. Now this recipe calls for some sort of seafood mix, but Beth used the one in Trader Joes so I figured, why not.

Note to self: never buy Trader Joe's Seafood Blend again. It is tasteless.

I followed the recipe exactly, and the end result was a really beautiful dish. I think it needs some adjustments though:

• Double the seafood. There is a lot of rice in this, and not enough seafood.
• Cook the seafood first, and mix that in with the rice at the end. I always find cooking seafood with other things to be kind of tricky, but if I cook it by itself then I can get it to just the right amount of done-ness.
• Fewer peas. There were also too many peas for my liking, but let's be honest, the next time I use frozen peas in a dish, I'm not going to bother actually measuring them.

Oh, and I also replaced parsley with cilantro. Because parsley smells weird and cilantro makes everything better.

Pierogies and Brussels Sprouts

January 19, 2019 1:11 PM

I'm exhausted. My company had their semi-annual company meetings this past week, and even though I'm pretty sure I had about 8 hours of sleep each night, I feel incredibly sleep deprived. I ate nothing but hotel and restaurant food all week, which makes my body feel really weird. I don't know how I went most of college only eating out.

Anyway, I needed to do some real cooking on Friday night. I had bacon that had been sitting in the fridge for a week, so naturally I decided to cook brussels sprouts. I actually had brussels sprouts the day before at Altius, but they were so crispy and salty I was practically eating potato chips. I decided to cook Jessica Gavin's Sauteed Brussels Sprouts with Bacon.

I skipped the breadcrumb step out of laziness. I also doubled the amount of bacon because that's just how much I had on hand. And I replaced shallots with red onions. Can you believe one red onion at Giant Eagle costs more than a whole bag of red onions at Aldi? I don't even want to think about how much a shallot costs. Also onions are delicious and you can never have too many onions in your dish.

Brussels sprouts aren't exactly a meal in itself, but I didn't want to do that much cooking, so I decided to be half lazy and buy pierogies from Whole Foods. My absolute favorite pierogies are Gosia's Pierogies, and I used to frequently buy their frozen packs at a local farmer's market. Every single year they've increased their prices, so much so that now they're the same price as the pierogies in Whole Foods.

The pierogies were just OK. My sister isn't a fan of starch inside starch, so next time we'll go with a less traditional filling. I cut up and sauteed a whole onion to go with them, but it wasn't enough. Two onions next time.

Tuna Salad

January 13, 2019 1:16 PM

I had two cans of tuna sitting in one of the kitchen cabinets, so I figured it would make sense to make some tuna salad. Now I know I could just throw tuna, mayonnaise, and chopped celery in a bowl and call that a tuna salad, but that's boring. I went to Allrecipes.com to try and find something better. I typed in "tuna salad" in the search bar, and this is the first result:

Tuna and lettuce salad with garbanzo beans, chopped egg, and cucumber. Great with French dressing.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/21406/tuna-salad/

Uhh, that's not what I call a tuna salad. That's a "Salad with Tuna". And you know what the second result is?

Quick and easy vegetarian main dish made from pantry items in just a few minutes. Perfect for summer picnics or fast weeknight meals. Serve on bread, buns, crackers, pita bread, or plain.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/234227/no-tuna-salad/

WHAT. That's not a tuna salad at all! Why would you show me a vegetarian recipe as one of the top results? If I had typed "vegetarian tuna salad" then I totally get it. I even understand if it's say, the fifth result, after other results that are traditional tuna salads. But Allrecipes needs to redo their search algorithm.

So Recipe #3 it is: Barbie's Tuna Salad. What I liked about this was that it didn't call for celery, and it did call for lots of spices. I do like celery in my tuna salad, but I don't want to buy a huge piece of celery just to use a single stalk. Unfortunately there was no crunch at all in this recipe, so I replaced the dried minced onions with fresh diced onions. And I put waaay more than 1/8 tsp. It was at least a 1/4 cup.

As I mixed up all the ingredients, something hit me. I was missing a crucial tuna salad ingredient: hard boiled eggs! NOOOO. Why doesn't the recipe call for hard boiled eggs?! Well, it was too late to add it since I was hungry. Next time.

I burned the roll even though I literally stared at it the whole time it was in the toaster oven.