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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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.
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 (:
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