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 (:
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.
Kimchi pasta
February 1, 2025 12:56 AM
It's kind of a gloomy day today. So, I don't have great food photos. That doesn't mean I don't have any good food, but it was already enough work to cook, and I think I used up most of my photo-taking energy on chicken and rice.
Anyway, as I was browsing youtube the other night, I saw a recipe for kimchi pasta and it looked really good. I mean, orange pasta always looks good. I also happened to already have kimchi in my fridge and half a box of rigatoni and some parmesan and some green onions, so I added this to my list of things to cook.
But that was last week. I ran out of all those ingredients, but I still wanted to make this pasta, so I bought more of everything today. Well, except for green onions. Aldi was completely out! I've watched enough Aaron and Claire youtube videos to know that Aaron's favorite ingredient is green onion, but well, we're gonna have to settle for cilantro.
I decided to double the recipe just so I would have plenty of leftovers (we'll see if I regret having too much leftover pasta). And this was actually a lot more work than I expected. There were a lot of things to cut up, kind of like stir fries. And it took me so long to grate the cheese, and my hand was so tired. Maybe I should invest in a box grater. Or maybe I should just buy a container of pre-grated parmesan.
Once I got to the actual cooking part of this, it was pretty easy. After I poured in the heavy cream, I thought it looked a little too creamy though. The youtube video made this look so orange! Mine was super pale compared to that. It kind of looked more like an alfredo or a mac n cheese. So, if I make this again, I might cut the heavy cream in half. It's probably healthier that way too.
I gotta say, even though I'm not too happy with the color, it doesn't taste bad! The kimchi, oyster sauce, mushroom, and bacon all add a lot of depth to the flavor and I was really digging that. I would totally make this again, but I'd definitely make some adjustments so it's easier.
Almost vegan chili
February 2, 2025 10:16 PM
It was a really bright and sunny day yesterday. But it was also cold. I mean, it wasn't single digit cold, but it was still pretty cold that I regretted not bundling up more when I went out for dinner last night.
So what's good on a cold day? Chili. I really like making chili because it's super easy, makes a big batch, and the leftovers are always great. But I also feel like I've consumed a lot of meat this week already so I wanted to make a vegetarian dish. One of my friends is vegan, and he'll often make chili, and it's always so good to eat at the end of dance game session.
Pick up Limes recently put out a recipe for spicy chili and I figured this was a good time to give it a try. In the past when I've made "vegan" recipes, I would completely un-veganize it by replacing some of it with meat or slapping some bacon on it. This recipe calls for "veggie ground", and I know I could replace it with some ground meat. But not today! I am actually going to try to make this vegan.
I don't really know where to get veggie ground though, so I decided to buy lentils instead. I had actually never cooked lentils before. But they're super cheap, and I just followed the package instructions. It looks like you just boil it until it's done.
And yeah, the recipe was very easy! I'd say the hardest part of all this was opening all the cans. I don't know if this is a common problem, but I have so much trouble opening cans. I can never make a single clean cut. The can opener always detaches from the can at some point while I'm spinning it. And every can that I tried to open yesterday took more attempts than the previous one.
Other than that, this was smooth sailing, and the chili wasn't too bad! But what makes it better are the toppings. I bought an avocado because it seems like every food blogger likes to top chili with avocado. It's pretty, but honestly, eh, it's not my favorite chili topping. The pickled onions were great though. Vegan chili is pretty good, but I still found myself missing something in this.
So I added cheese. Aaaand now it's not vegan anymore. But it's still vegetarian! I also tried toasting a corn tortilla and crumbling that up, and I really liked it but it kind of looked like a mess at that point, so I didn't take a photo of it.
Faux pho
February 3, 2025 7:50 PM
The other day, I was at my friend's house and I was looking through all of her Hello Fresh recipe cards. She mentioned that she really liked the "Pho-Style Beef Noodle Soup", and I looked at it skeptically because almost nothing about it resembles pho. It comes with ramen noodles. The only thing about it that made it seem like pho at all was that it contains "pho stock concentrate" (whatever that is). But honestly, it still sounded like a tasty noodle soup, and she had two copies of the recipe card, so I took one.
I wasn't sure when I was going to make this, but just earlier this week, I saw a post in the "Aldi Aisle of Shame" Facebook group raving about their limited time offering "Pho Broth"! This is perfect for my fake pho. I told my Vietnamese friend about this and he just shook his head disapprovingly. Hey, not all of us have Vietnamese relatives that can make pho.
I didn't want to buy a bunch of stock concentrates for this, so I just used chicken msg. And I also had a single chicken thigh in the freezer so I used that instead of beef. So who knows what I'm even making at this point. But in order to stay somewhat true to this inauthentic recipe, I did use bok choy, mushrooms, and wheat noodles :P
What resulted was something that I guess kind of had the essence of pho? But it needed more flavor so I dumped in some fish sauce and extra lime at the end. To be fair to Aldi, I did essentially mix it with chicken broth, so I probably diluted some of the pho flavor. But if I don't think of it as pretending to be pho, it was a good meal. I don't think you can ever go wrong with a noodle soup.
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