A very involved Taiwanese beef noodle soup

February 10, 2025 3:41 PM

Every other Friday, I go to my friend's house and we have a co-working session. Technically, I'm not really working, but I do use that time to make updates to this blog! After work, we'll grab some groceries and then we'll cook something for dinner. We seem to have a tendency to pick dishes that take quite a bit of time to prepare, which was especially true this time.

My friend wanted to try the Taiwanese beef noodle soup recipe from the Woks of Life cookbook. I saw that it used spicy bean paste, which is great because I already have it, but it also called for a bunch of things that neither of us had. I went to three different Asian stores to look for cumin seeds, coriander seeds, whole white peppercorn, and pickled mustard greens. And I didn't even find the coriander seeds! My friend ended up getting that from a fourth store. And we still went to Aldi the day of to grab everything that we could get from a non-Asian store.

Unfortunately, after I arrived at my friend's house on Friday, I realized I forgot the spicy bean paste 🙃 It's okay, she had other spicy pastes that we used instead. I was just annoyed that we couldn't use mine.

The recipe states that you need to braise the beef for 20 minutes and also simmer the soup for 90 minutes after that. So we tried to start prepping early, which was a little before 5pm for us. Even with that, it already past 7pm before we got to the "simmer" step. So we ended up eating dinner at around 9pm. (It's a good thing we ate lunch at 4 😅)

But the late dinner time didn't bother me! I thought it was a successful meal. We actually cut back a little bit on the amount of dark soy sauce, but I think it could have used the full amount. Or maybe just more regular soy sauce. It was a pretty dark broth already.

The recipe says that the dish tastes even better the next day, so I took some leftovers home and had some for breakfast a couple days later. It honestly tasted about the same to me, but I thought it tasted pretty good the first night, so I was still very satisfied.

A quest for canned olives

June 2, 2022 10:23 PM

Speaking of eating food that's way too warm for the summer, I've been making lots and lots of 糜 lately. My aunt recently sent me a bunch of 鱼干 (I'm only about 60% sure I chose the correct Chinese characters there) from Cambodia, and porridge is really the only thing I ever eat with dried fish.

I do eat other things with porridge though. My aunt also sent me some 咸菜. Really salty foods go great with porridge. Salty eggs, salty fish, salty and sweet Chinese sausage, salty and sweet pork floss, and salty olives. It's childhood for me. Growing up, I was a super picky eater and all I wanted to eat was porridge with salty things. I've expanded my tastes a lot since I was 5, but I still love coming back to this.

While I do love salted hard boiled eggs the best, those take about a month to prepare, and I don't have that kind of patience. But I remember those salted olives just came in a can that we bought from the Asian store!

So I drove to my local Asian grocery store last week, and I looked for these canned salted olives, but the closest thing they had to that were dried olives, and I wanted the ones in a can, with the pits still in them. I then drove to an Asian store further out, which was pretty big for Pittsburgh standards, but they didn't have these olives either.

I ended up going to eight different Asian grocery stores in the area and not a single one had the olives I was looking for. One place had Mediterranean olives. Another place claimed that they sold olives, but when the lady went to her computer to check the inventory, she exclaimed, in an almost comical way, "We're sold out!" I'm not totally convinced they actually stock the canned olives at all since I didn't actually show her a picture of them >.>

And, well, that's it. I never got my olives. I also realized that none of my Asian friends have even heard of Chinese olives, so maybe it is just that rare. (But they're out there somewhere! I know it!) I think I've also hit my quota of porridge for a while, but I'll come back to it. Next time I'm visiting family I'm definitely buying some olives to bring back.

And maybe, just maybe, I can make those salted hard boiled eggs too.

I needed some Thai basil

November 24, 2020 9:31 PM

The other day, I had a sudden craving for some spring rolls.

Okay, those pictures are from July. But that's the last time I made spring rolls for myself! I was totally due for another spring roll meal. I know, it's getting colder out, and spring rolls are totally a summer thing. (Or a...spring...thing I guess)

Anyway, here's the spring roll spread I had a week ago.

Honestly, the ones I made back in July were a lot better. A few things about these spring rolls that I recently made:

• I used already-cooked shrimp in this because it was on sale, and I bought a whole 3 lb bag of it. The shrimp was pretty meh. Gotta cook it myself next time.
• This would be so much better if I had pork belly.
• I added carrots just because I had half a carrot that I didn't know what to do with. I feel like restaurants love putting carrots in their spring roll. I'm not really a fan.
• I also added mint! I like mint, but I realized that the bag of mint I got from the Asian store was huge and I used a bunch of it in a stir fry (I'll get to that soon) and I still have way too much left over.
• It was such a pain in the butt to get Thai basil. When I was at the Asian store, there was none sitting out, and I asked the lady who works at the store if they had any and she said "Oh! Yes!" and walked away, and I waited for over ten minutes, and she never came back ): Then I wanted to try to go to the other Asian store a few streets over, but it was Saturday, which means street parking costs money, so I park in the other grocery store lot (for the place right next to the Asian store), and when I get out of my car, the parking lot guard says to me "You're only shopping at Wholey's, right?" so I felt bad and I never stepped foot in that other Asian store. I checked Wholey's though. They don't even sell Italian basil.

I was feeling so exhausted just from being in two grocery stores that I decided to head home, BUT I STILL NEEDED MY BASIL. I drove to the Asian store again the next day just to get it. And with my large amounts of basil and mint, I made some stir fry.

So good. So worth the many trips to the grocery store.

Social Distancing: Days 4 - 6

March 29, 2020 8:00 AM

Day 4 (Sunday): We are running low on groceries. Especially vegetables. We are completely out of garnish at this point, and I am looking at our list of foods wondering what I can scrape together. I did impulse-buy some fish. And I have some oranges. Hey, maybe I can make that same Winter Citrus salmon my sister and I made last year.

Hmm, but I only have Cara Cara oranges. And I don't have limes. But I do have a lemon! So this is just going to be really...orange. But what can I do for veggies? I still had two bell peppers, and I always have onions on stock. I remembered that I have some fajita seasoning that mixed up a while back. Fajita veggies. BAM. I just need some starch. Since I already did chicken broth rice with the tacos, I figured I'd do something different and make yellow rice this time. Which is making this dish REAL yellow, but whatever. It is delicious.

Day 5 (Monday): I actually have one more planned meal! I saw this sausage and broccoli recipe on Budget Bytes that I wanted to try.

And now I remember why I had extra bell peppers. I was totally saving one for this recipe. Well, we're just omitting that part and using extra onions. And I'm pretty sure that used up our whole onion supply as well.

And so that's it. That's all the meals I could possibly make from what we initially bought on Thursday. Could we have made it two extra days? Honestly, we totally could have. We have leftovers from all the dishes we cooked. Plus we could grab takeout! But we are dangerously low on butter and flour. And my sister is a baker and I will not stop her from baking!

Day 6 (Tuesday): Yeah, turns out the grocery stores have even less butter and flour than I do. I know, I said I'd be flexible and creative, but how the heck are we supposed to bake things without flour?! You can't replace flour! I mean you can use flour substitutes, but those are all gone too! I went to way too many grocery stores. I was out so much longer than I should have been. BUT I WAS DETERMINED TO FIND FLOUR. I actually found some at Target. Thank goodness, because I did not want to have to hit up Rite Aid and the dollar store.

Also, we bought way too many things, and I am never trying to buy two weeks worth of food at once ever again.

Oh you know what else we had trouble finding? Frozen mangoes. We found frozen strawberries, frozen pineapples, frozen peaches, but no frozen mangoes. Well, sorta. We did grab a bag of frozen mixed fruit that just happened to have some mangoes in it. My sister really wanted to make mango lassi, so we went and picked out all of the mangoes in this bag of fruit.

Anyway, we needed something easy for dinner after that whole experience, so we made spring rolls!

Poke

February 24, 2019 11:30 AM

I love poke. It's one of my favorite things to have for a meal, but it's something that I always thought I had to go to a restaurant (or Hawaii) for. But as I was scrolling through food blogs, I stumbled across Ahi Poke Bowls with Pineapple and Avocado from How Sweet Eats. And I thought, if she can prepare poke at home, I can do it too!

I went to a bunch of different grocery stores, and I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that most of them didn't have sushi-grade fish. Even Whole Foods didn't have any! I also learned that sushi-grade isn't even a standard thing. It's just the grocery store's way of saying "I think this is good enough for sushi." Luckily I was able to find some "sushi-grade" tuna for $10.99/lb. I bought just under a pound, which is way more fish than you need for two people.

It's a good thing we like raw fish so much. I just chopped up whatever veggies and fruit I had that made sense. We did a make-your-own poke bowl with these ingredients (listed in the same order as in the photo):

• Furikake
• Imitation crab
• Carrots
• Cilantro
• Sushi rice
• Ahi tuna
• Cucumbers
• Cara cara oranges
• Jalepeño peppers
• Green onions
• Ginger soy sauce

I definitely want to have a poke party with friends at some point.