Poke with friends

April 17, 2021 2:09 PM

The last time I made guacamole, I had to run to the store to buy some chips. I had only intended to buy chips, but while I was there I noticed that these little packs of sashimi grade salmon were on sale for $5! That's a steal for half a pound! And I found some other frozen salmon that was also really cheap!

I ended up leaving the store with 2.5 lbs of salmon, some ice cream, and the chips. The next day I decided that I didn't buy enough of the sashimi grade salmon, so I bought another pound.

What did I do with all that sashimi grade salmon? Make poke of course. But I can't just eat poke by myself, so I had a couple of poke nights with some very good friends.

This is the first time I made poke without my sister, so it was a little flail-y. I don't think I ever figured out how to make the sauce, but it doesn't matter. You don't need sauce. This is delicious as is.

My friend took that picture above (obviously, because I'm in the picture). Below is from a poke night earlier this week. Such aesthetic arrangements of food.

Poke is great because you have such a large variety of fresh, healthy foods mixed with sushi rice and raw fish. Mmmmm. And making it at home is way better than going to an overpriced poke restaurant. Everyone assembles their own bowls, and everyone feels very stuffed at the end. But it's a good kind of stuffed.

Pulled pork

March 17, 2021 11:03 PM

A few weeks ago, I was getting lunch with my friend from one of my favorite restaurants: Taco Town. This place is right next to the office that I work in, but because I've been working at home for the past year, I haven't been able to eat here. So we were very fortunate that we happened to order food here on the last day they were open before taking a two month break.

On the other hand, they were out of carnitas that day. How can they run out of carnitas?! It's the best thing on their menu! Taco Town used to be a solid 5/5 stars for me, but recently I've had to dock them a star.

But whatever. If I can't buy carnitas I'll just make them. Except carnitas are a little more work than I like sometimes, so instead I ended up making some chili rubbed pulled pork.

Obviously these are pictures of the prep work, and I actually don't have pictures of the finished product. I invited a friend over for tacos that night, and sometimes you're just having too much fun to take pictures. I can assure you it was delicious though.

This was close to 4lbs of pork. I had lots left over, which meant I had lots of other meals with my pulled pork. Like this meal with garlic parmesan green beans and cilantro lime rice.

The green beans weren't bad, but I don't think I'd make that recipe again.

I also made some guac to eat with this pulled pork. Guacamole is one of the few things I can make without a recipe.

Typically when I make guac, it starts to brown after sitting in the fridge for a day. But this time was different. I had that guac in the fridge for 5 days, and it was still completely green! It was insane! Like I did some sort of magic on it!

I wanted to make the guac to put it in tacos or burrito bowls, but I knew I wouldn't need a whole avocado's worth of guac just for that. I went to the grocery store to buy some chips, and I came across guacamole-flavored tortilla chips, which made me feel kind of nostalgic. I used to hate guacamole, but when I was in high school, I loved guac-flavored chips. I guess that makes sense because guac-flavored chips taste absolutely nothing like guac. Eventually, well after graduating college, I started liking guac, but I still hated avocados. And just two years ago, my sister showed me just how delicious avocados are, and here I am now, loving all forms of avocado.

So many great uses for pulled pork. All were delicious.

(No, I haven't forgotten about carnitas. I'm absolutely going to make that at some point.)

Poke Party

September 2, 2019 10:30 AM

This is from over a month ago, but I wanted to make a post out of it, because it's poke, and poke is always great.

So the main reason that I broke my $30 a week challenge was because I saw that sashimi grade salmon was on sale at my local grocery store for $6.99/lb. Which is crazy! They normally don't sell regular salmon for that cheap. (I also bought crab legs. And two pounds of shrimp. You can guess how much that cost.) Of course the catch is that it only comes in these huge 2+ lb slabs, but whatever.

My cousins and sister were visiting for the weekend, so I figured this would be a perfect opportunity to make poke again. (We also rolled up some sushi! But I didn't take any pictures of that)

Yeah, we may have gone a little overboard with the number of ingredients. But it was delicious. Some tips that we'll keep in mind to make the poke better next time:

• Mix the fish and the sauce together, but don't bother mixing the sauce with any of the other ingredients. It becomes a little too overpowering.
• Err on the side of having too much rice. We cooked three cups for five people, which was not enough.
• Two pounds of fish is enough to make poke for six people.

Poke is so good.

Stuff I cooked a while ago

June 16, 2019 12:27 PM

I meant to write this blog post over two weeks ago. Then I got really busy, and I went on vacation, and now I don't really remember what I wanted to write about. But I have all these pictures so I should at least show them to you, and maybe looking through them will help jog my memory.

Remember how I subscribed to Misfits Market to get veggies delivered regularly? Well, I canceled it a while ago, but they did send me an email asking me to use their service again AND they gave me a complimentary box. I kind of feel bad because half of this box went to waste. It wasn't my fault though. The produce was sitting in transit for way too long and by the time it was delivered, the ice packs were completely melted, and the spring mix looked really sad. So, yeah, this free box didn't convince me to sign up again.

But, I did get an eggplant that I could use. I really like stir fried eggplant so I made Chinese Eggplant with Garlic Sauce. I know I didn't have any spicy bean paste or ground pork at the time, but it still tasted good without those ingredients.

And to go along with the Asian theme, I made some Sesame Chicken. This is a pretty old Budget Bytes recipe, and it was recently updated to double the sauce. I don't think it needs nearly that much sauce, so I would actually cut it in half now. So easy to make though, and very delicious.

It's really hard to tell from the picture of produce, but I did get some zucchini in a bag (why some things get put in bags, and others don't, I have no idea). Zucchini is not my favorite vegetable, as it reminds me too much of college cafeteria food, but turning it into Zucchini Fritters makes them a little better.

While I'm not a huge fan of zucchini, I really don't like butternut squash. It just tastes like a cross between a sweet potato and a pumpkin, but somehow much worse than either of those. I also don't know what I'm supposed to do with it except roast it or turn it into soup. They also take forever to cut up, which makes them not worth it to cook at all. But hey, this was free and I didn't want to waste it.

I do love salmon, though! This recipe came from a book, so I can't exactly provide a link. I still haven't quite mastered the art of baking salmon. I think I may have put it in the oven at 350 or 400 degrees for 10 minutes, and then broiled it for 5. This was waaay overcooked, but at least the rub was really tasty.

Also mango salsa to go on top of the fish! Because I had mangoes in the box!

For some reason I thought the mango salsa would go with the sesame chicken. I don't think I'd pair the two again.

Oh yeah, I also made collard greens (because it was in the box!), but I neglected to take a picture of the collard greens by itself.

Not box related at all, but I also cooked Shrimp Scampi Florentine, with some pasta added. This dish is always delicious.

I had a dinner with friends where we all made pizza. Anytime I get to choose my own pizza toppings, I will always choose BBQ chicken. For some reason every time my family orders pizza, they ask me what pizza topping I want, I tell them barbecue chicken, and they give me a look and proceed to not get any barbecue chicken. It's okay. I can just make my own.

And finally, here's one last picture of that chicken rice skillet. Because I must have had leftovers from the week before and this picture looks nice.

And that concludes this long, not-very-cohesive post. Honestly, it'll probably be a while until my next post because my schedule is crazy and I'm not going to have too much time to cook. Maybe once the summer is over!

Bánh Xèo

March 3, 2019 10:20 AM

My friend came over and we tried to make Bánh Xèo. We used this recipe from Hungry Huy. Here is a progression of how things went as we tried to make yellow pancakes.

Attempt #1

We poured too much batter in this.

Attempt #2

I don't know, we probably still used too much batter again. And the heat may have been too high.

Attempt #3 & #4

Heeey, look the third one didn't totally fall apart. And I think we finally figured out that the meat and onions needed to be on only one side of the pan, so it was easier to fold the pancake in half.

Many attempts later...

Yeah! We finally made it look nice! I'll have to make this again in the future, but I'll probably see if I can find a different recipe. Or at least cook the meat separately from the pancake.

Oh yeah, we had extra batter so we cooked the rest of the pancakes the next day.