Tilapia tacos

February 20, 2021 12:26 PM

First of all, I'm going to lessen the frequency of these blog posts. I'm trying to take it easy and also free up my time for other things. But I'll still be cooking, and I'll try to post at least once a week.

After impulsively buying tilapia a few weeks ago, I decided to finally make some tacos with it. Blue Apron has a catfish taco recipe that's been one of my go-to's, and I thought that if they have one good fish taco recipe, they must have others. So I went and searched for "fish tacos" and these are the top results:

• Tomatillo Pork Tacos
• Salmon & Cilantro Rice Bowls
• Smooth Salmon & Homemade BBQ Sauce
• Garlic & Olive Tilapia
• Sheet Pan Pesto Salmon

Wait wait wait, these aren't fish taco recipes, these are fish OR taco recipes. Blue Apron, you gotta work on your search code. What is it with recipe sites and terrible search algorithms?

So after scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling I finally stumbled upon Baja-Style Tilapia Tacos.

These tacos were easy to make, and they tasted pretty good too. But they're fish tacos. Of course they taste good. I don't know if I love the combination of avocado and orange, but it seemed to work well enough. The only problem with this recipe is that it doesn't work well for leftovers. The avocadoes end up browning.

I followed the recipe pretty closely, but I used green cabbage instead of red because it was cheaper. I also used corn instead of flour tortillas because that's just what I had already. As much as I think grocery store brand corn tortillas are awful, Aldi corn tortillas are actually pretty great once you toast them in the pan. And finally I added cilantro because of course I added cilantro.

Oh, so, I also went grocery shopping today, and as much as I told myself I wasn't going to buy any more meat/seafood, I ended up impulsively buying another bag of tilapia. It was $5! That's even cheaper than when impulsively bought it last month!

Meal Plan: 1/23 - 1/29

January 29, 2021 9:10 PM

Normally I would start with a picture of my whiteboard, but there's a ridiculous amount of photoshopping MS Paint-ing involved to get the image to look the way I want. So, I actually went and re-organized the whiteboard to make it a little easier on me. But you'll have to wait for next week's meal plan post to see it.

I will show you my groceries, though! This week I made shrimp scampi florentine and BBQ chicken pizza, which you already know. I bought ingredients for those meals, and I also bought a few extra things for snacks, like getting chickpeas to make hummus. I spent a little over $30 on groceries.

Well, I impulse bought tilapia. (Frequent readers of this blog should not be surprised.) It was on sale for $6! It's normally $12 for the 2 lb bag! And that was from Giant Eagle, not Aldi. I know, it's always $6 at Aldi. But maybe this brand is better.

Also, Aldi was out of chickpeas! I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Aldi runs out of chickpeas a lot. I really didn't want to make another grocery store trip, so hummus will have to wait until next week. I really should just keep a constant supply of chickpeas like I do with eggs.

If you're wondering why I bought kimchi, it's so I could eat it with some meat that my grandparents prepared while I was visiting them.

My grandpa has the best recipe for both beef jerky and 腊肉. Deep frying things kind of scares me (but not as much as dough does) and I think I overcooked the 腊肉 a little, but it still tasted great.

I also asked several members of my family what 腊肉 (lat bhat) actually translates to. I know 肉 (bhat) means meat but what is 腊 (lat)?! No one was able to tell me! As I was looking things up in a Teochew app, I realized that 腊 is the same 腊 as in 腊肠 (lat chiang) Chinese Sausage. And then I looked this up in the Wiktionary and I learned 腊 basically means dry or dried meat. Now I know.

Okay, Chinese lesson aside, I only cooked two meals this week because I was still going through the leftovers in my freezer. It was my full intention to actually keep track of what I ate this week, but I realized I haven't written down anything since Monday. It was just bagels every morning, while rotating between the scampi, pizza, and leftovers during lunch and dinner.

And I did add pineapples on my leftover slices of pizza. I love leftover pizza. It's the best leftover.

Meal Plan: 11/28 - 12/4

December 2, 2020 10:17 PM

I'm going to try something new, and show you more of my thought process in how I meal plan. This is inspired by the Weekly Recap posts that Beth used to make on Budget Bytes.

First of all, I cannot be spontaneous with food. If I'm cooking, I need to plan every meal, and I am constantly thinking about my next meal. So, as long as work hasn't totally exhausted me, I'll take some time every Friday night or Saturday morning to come up with the next few dishes to cook. And I start that by staring at my whiteboard.

Yes, this is an actual snippet of what was on my whiteboard a week ago. There's actually A LOT more on the whiteboard, but I just cropped this. Each date lists what I bought that day. I know, you're seeing that I've had half and half for almost two months. The internet tells me I should only keep half and half a week after opening. But it still smells and tastes fine. /shrug

But you know what, it's a whole quart of half and half so I should really find another use for it besides going in my morning coffees. I searched for recipes that use half and half on Budget Bytes, and I see that she has a mushroom pasta recipe, which works well, since I also have mushrooms that I don't know what to do with. It's perfect! All I have to buy for this is pasta!

So I also have this huge head of cabbage that I bought for my dumplings. My dumplings only took like a quarter of this head, so I need something that uses a lot of cabbage. My go-to cabbage meals are stir fry or some sort of sausage skillet, but I figured I'd try something different and make okonomiyaki. And it also works because I can use up the rest of my green onions as well!

Finally, you see that Mac n Cheese in the Already Cooked section? Yeah, I needed to do something with that. I decided to try and make fried mac n cheese balls, except it's going to end up being fried mac n cheese rectangular prisms since that's easier to cut. I wanted to make some dipping sauce for this, and of course I looked on Budget Bytes for one.

And that's already plenty of food, especially when you consider all those Thanksgiving leftovers I had. So I barely had to buy anything from the store!

...of course I ended up buying twice as many things as I had on my list. But I ended up spending a whopping $10.52, so I think it's okay. Random grocery store thoughts:

• There was no fettuccine! And I was not about to walk the extra five minutes to Giant Eagle to check there. This was a ONE STORE shopping trip. My pasta options at Aldi were rotini and farfalle. I chose rotini because those bowties don't cook very evenly.
• I impulsively bought beef jerky and it was almost half the grocery bill. My aunt is going to see this and tell me "Child, I sent you beef jerky in the mail! Why would you buy beef jerky?!"
• I also impulsively bought crescent rolls, but they were only $0.25! The sell by date was the day after I went to the store. Whatever, it's still good.

As I was checking out, I thought, "Huh. I don't have any veggies." I probably should have bought something green. I don't know why I didn't restock on cilantro. I mean, I had it on the whiteboard, but I was low on cilantro, and why would I ever be worried about having too much cilantro? Plus it's only like $0.75! That was a mistake. Definitely getting cilantro next time.

Anyway, here's every breakfast, lunch, and dinner that I ate. I also had a lot of snacks, but I'm not going to type those out, because that's just way too much to type.

Stay tuned, and I'll actually show you how all the cooking went. In the meantime, here's some tacos using the last bit of cilantro I had.

Social Distancing: Days 46 - 48

May 10, 2020 8:11 AM

Day 46 (Sunday): It's a grocery shopping day. We end up buying way too much food it seems (like always), but this might be the first time in a while that I wasn't as stressed out.

We ended up going to the Mexican grocery store, and I impulse bought some mini tortillas. My sister loves them! She just eats them as a snack! But we also used them for some chicken fajitas. Delicious.

Day 47 (Monday): I don't realize it yet, but it's the start of a very busy workweek. So busy I that I'm too pooped to cook. It's a good thing my sister is willing to cook.

Our fridge was getting crowded with all the groceries we got the day before, so we figured we should cook something that takes up too much space. Along with those tortillas, we also ended up impulse buying some collard greens. We actually had some collard greens on Friday when we got takeout, but it wasn't very good. My sister makes much better collard greens. We ate this with some leftover shepherd's pie.

Day 48 (Tuesday): I was probably at peak stress level on Tuesday. I ran into a problem at work that I couldn't solve, and I had no idea what to do next. Well, I didn't know what to do for work, but obviously I needed a break. Somehow we ended up with so many leftovers in the fridge, so we did another pairing of something freshly cooked with something leftover.

I had half a box of orzo sitting in my pantry, as well as a zucchini in the fridge that I needed to use up, so this was a good recipe to try. I'm usually not a huge fan of pasta salad, but this went well nicely with our leftover chicken piccata.

Better Than Takeout

March 16, 2019 12:30 PM

Lately my meals have been inspired by random foods that are on sale at the grocery store. I decided to get some extra chicken breast (in case I needed a little more for that pizza), and it was on sale for $1.48/lb which I figured was a decent price. I also saw these 1lb bags of green beans for $1 each, and I impulse bought two of them.

I used two Woks of Life recipes. With the green beans, I decided to make Sichuan Dry Fried String Beans. I ordered this at a local Chinese restaurant once and they were delicious. They were also like $10, so when I saw that Woks of Life had a recipe for it, I had to try it.

Originally, I had intended to use both bag of green beans, but we ended up saving the second one for a different recipe. But that's why there's so much pork. I think I'll use a lot less pork next time, or even omit it completely.

We also made Thai Chicken Stir-fry with Basil and Mint. Except we didn't use mint. This had a very strong fish sauce smell, which is great, since I love fish sauce. I probably should have doubled the basil since I didn't use mint.

So delicious and way cheaper than takeout