Makeshift Chinese
January 31, 2019 4:46 PM
This meal was somewhat inspired by the Sesame Slaw recipe I saw on Budget Bytes. Yup, it's something like -2° Fahrenheit outside, and we're making salad.
This was just one of those meals where I tried to utilize whatever was in my fridge/freezer as much as possible. We still had a small amount of frozen dumplings left over from the dumpling party. We also had one piece of sweet and spicy chicken left.
Oh, and lots of salad dressing packets. I keep buying various salad mixes that come with dressing packets, and then only end up using the veggies since I put them on my tacos.
It was a pretty delicious makeshift Chinese meal.
Of course, now we have a bunch of leftover salad. But you know what's great about cabbage? You can always stir fry it...
Greek Turkey Rice
February 3, 2019 5:21 PM
More rice dishes!
I still had those olives sitting in my fridge from the Greek Chicken we cooked a few weeks ago, and I wanted to use them up. And I guess olives means another Greek dish.
I really like the skillet rice dishes from Budget Bytes, and I hadn't made the Greek Turkey and Rice Skillet yet so I figured I'd give that a try. This was really easy to make, and all of the flavors worked really well together.
The only modifications we made were using fresh spinach instead of frozen (because frozen spinach doesn't taste as good), and using cilantro instead of parsley (duh).
We may end up making all of the rice dishes in Budget Bytes before my sister leaves.
Fish Tacos
February 4, 2019 5:50 PM
Happy Chinese New Year! Today we celebrated by making tacos.
I've always thought Blue Apron was a huge waste of money. I have to pay $8+ for a meal that I need to prep and cook myself. I actually like going to the grocery store, and I don't like cutting vegetables, so why would I ever pay extra money to cut veggies?!
However, all of the Blue Apron recipes are available online for free! And they have a pretty great cookbook with useful pictures. My favorite of their recipes is Spiced Catfish Tacos with Roasted Sweet Potato and Coleslaw.
Except I use tilapia because even though I don't know how much catfish costs, I know it costs way more than tilapia.
Tacos are always delicious. I'll have another new year's post coming soon!
Happy New Year!
February 5, 2019 4:52 PM
I know we had fish tacos yesterday, but our official new year's celebration happened on Sunday, making and cooking dumplings.
Our dumpling filling consisted of ground pork, onions, and chives. We actually had to look in three different grocery stores just to find ground pork. Giant Eagle only had a pound left and Whole Foods sells pork for $5.99/lb! It's a good thing I have a lot of grocery store options.
My friend also made a filling with ground turkey and carrot. It kind of reminded me of shumai.
We pan fried the pork dumplings and boiled the turkey dumplings. Everything was delicious. Next time I think I'll up the ratio of chive to pork. I love chives.
All in all, it was a successful dumpling party. I definitely want to have more of these in the future.
Meatloaf and Brussels Sprouts
February 7, 2019 4:30 PM
I bought a loaf pan last month, so I've been meaning to make meatloaf for a while. I found this Thai Turkey Meatloaf recipe from Budget Bytes. And I know we just had ground turkey last week, but for some crazy reason all the recipe sites I look at exclusively make meatloaf with turkey.
She put rice inside of the meatloaf! Maybe that's what makes it Asian. We cut the recipe in half because 2 whole pounds of turkey seemed like a bit much.
For the most part we followed the recipe, but I probably used five times as much ginger as the recipe called for, and I used red onions instead of green. Can you believe Aldi was out of green onions?! This is the fourth time this has happened this year!
To go with the Asian meatloaf, we also made these Sweet and Spicy Brussels Sprouts from How Sweet Eats. I liked the flavor, but I think the sauce needs some adjustments. Next time I'll only use 1 tablespoon of chili garlic, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, and I'll cut every other sauce ingredient in half.
Overall, it was very Asian American. I found the meatloaf to be very sweet and the brussels sprouts to be very soy sauce-y, but the flavors worked well together.