Lettuce wraps on a lazy Sunday

June 26, 2023 7:49 PM

Lazy Sunday cooking is one of my favorite things. Lazy Sunday cooking doesn't mean it's a quick meal, just an easy one. I don't have anywhere to be, so I want to take my time and go slow. I don't have work during the day, so I can take as long as I need to make my lunch, and then when I take photos I have plenty of natural light!

So this week's Sunday meal was lettuce wraps. This is one of the first things I wrote about in this blog way back in 2019. I decided on lettuce wraps when I concluded that the green leaf lettuce was just not going to work in a salad. This also allowed me to use up more of my hoisin sauce, which, hmm, is that expired?

FEB 19, 2023

Okay, so it's only a little expired. Honestly, it's probably still good for another year. I also got to use up more of my rice cooking wine which has probably been sitting in my pantry for much longer...

Best Before: 04012019

😬 Uhhh, I think it's still fine.

The recipe only calls for half a pound of meat, but I doubled it (except for the dipping sauce--there's more than plenty of that). I really like the ground meat mixture, and I know in my old post I said that I can use whatever mushrooms I have available, but I did use shiitake in this, and I thought shiitake was great in it.

The whole process of actually putting the meat in some lettuce, and then attempting to wrap that up? Yeah, that's still completely impractical. It just breaks and food falls out and your hands are a mess. I don't care what kind of lettuce you use. Lettuce is not a good wrap.

Next time, I'm chopping up the lettuce into bite size pieces and just making it a bowl meal.

In spite of the mess, this was delicious, and perfect for a lazy Sunday. I'd definitely make it again.

Scallion oil noodles

April 1, 2023 3:54 PM

This past week has been a busy week, but today is a lazy Saturday, so I was able to cook and take my time. Plus it was a very nice and sunny morning (as opposed to the wind and rain that's happening right now) and I had to take advantage of that natural lighting. I saw some youtube videos on scallion oil noodles, and they looked really good so I wanted to make some for myself.

I used both Binging with Babish and J. Kenji Lopez Alt for inspiration. I only had 5 scallions, so I cut most of them into these little strips, and also diced some little circles for garnish at the end. Cutting them like this takes way more time, but it's a lazy Saturday, so I don't care.

I wish I had more scallions though. I think this could have used three times as much.

See that last photo? That was perfect. I should have taken the pan off the heat before it got to that point, so the residual heat would actually cook it to that point, which is exactly what the youtube videos told me to do, but I didn't listen. So I may have overcooked my scallions a little, but that's okay. They were still tasty.

I tossed my noodles in the scallion oil as well as some sugar, light and dark soy sauce, and some Chinese black vinegar (which has been sitting in my pantry for waaay too long--that's gonna take a while to use up). The flavor was good!

The noodles themselves were a bit sticky, and that might have been because I bought the noodles from an American grocery store instead of an Asian one. I also used a little too much of the oil. But I've got more scallion oil and more noodles and waaay more sauce, so I'll be making this a few more times this week, and I'll keep tweaking it to my tastes.

Fried rice

February 27, 2021 9:51 AM

Last Sunday I made some fried rice.

I needed an easy, filling meal for a lazy Sunday and I figured this Chinese Sausage Fried Rice 香肠炒饭 recipe would be good for this. In Teochew, I think I would tell my family I ate 炒饭合腊肠  (cha beung gat lat chiang).

There was a decent amount of prep work involved, so it took a while, but it was easy.

I think I may have had more rice than I needed. The recipe called for 5 cups of cooked rice, which is the most unhelpful measurement since I needed to cook the rice first and I have no idea what the ratio of "uncooked rice cooker cups" is to "cooked rice measuring cup cups". I used 3 cups of uncooked rice cooker cups, and I think I should have at least doubled the sauce.

But overall, this was a good meal that I would definitely make again. The best part of this was definitely the crunchy bits of rice at the bottom of the pan. If I have extra time, I'll reheat this again on the stove, which makes it even better.

Just like my mother, I had to add some sriracha to top this off. Well, not exactly like my mother. She would have had this swimming in hot sauce.

Beef and Pineapple Enchiladas

February 1, 2021 9:23 PM

A week before going home for the holidays, I bought some corn tortillas to make tacos. When I was home, we made tacos, and my aunt bought some corn tortillas because she knows I like them. The problem is no one else in my family really likes corn tortillas, so I took those home and now I have a surplus of corn tortillas.

I make tacos a lot, so this time I thought I'd make some enchiladas. The first few times I tried to make enchiladas in my life they were pretty terrible. But I think I've gotten better at it, somehow.

I was browsing enchilada recipes on Budget Bytes and came across Beef and Pineapple Enchiladas, and I thought, "Perfect! I can use my opened can of pineapple chunks!" and then I looked at the recipe more closely and I thought about the combination of ground beef and pineapples and thought "Ew, that sounds kinda gross."

Well, if it was really that bad, then Beth would have removed it from her site. The reviews were very positive so I figured I'd give it a shot. I wrote down the recipe in my notebook, and man were there a lot more steps in this than I realized. But it seemed easy, so it was a good thing to make on my lazy Sunday.

The filling actually didn't look too bad. But I should have added more pineapple. Use the whole can. This also made way way more enchilada sauce than I needed. I might have to freeze it and make more enchiladas in a month.

Not a bad recipe. I'd give it 4/5 stars.

Shrimp Scampi Florentine

January 23, 2021 2:01 PM

Remember when I made spring rolls and basil chicken and bought so much mint that I didn't know what to do with it? Well, I looked up things to do with excess mint, and I came across mint pesto. The recipe actually calls for mint and parsley, but parsley is kinda gross, so I went all in on mint.

So, this mint pesto has been sitting in my freezer since Thanksgiving, and I finally have a use for it! My initial thought was to make some sort of pesto pasta, but since I had some leftover spinach and frozen shrimp available, I decided to make one of my go-to's, Shrimp Scampi Florentine.

If I have the time, you might have noticed that I like to write the recipe down in advance. If you're wondering, it's not a recipe book. It's just a journal. But since it's a lazy Saturday, I had even more time, so I went and reorganized my journal to make it easier to find the pages that have recipes. And by that I mean I numbered every page and made a table of contents at the end of the book.

And then I realized I already wrote this recipe down! And then I had another thought. Maybe I should just write down the recipes for all my go-to's. But on index cards because I have a lot of those and they work well for recipes. So I went and marked those recipes with a blue asterisk. There are more, but I'll get to those when I get to those.

I recently gave a lightning talk at work about my meal planning process, and now my coworkers are going to see this and think I'm even more insane than they already thought.

Anyway, I don't really love the mint pesto, but I still love this dish. Shrimp, tomatoes, spinach, pesto, and pasta. What a well balanced meal.