A weekend with my mom

March 6, 2025 6:43 PM

My mom visited me this past weekend, and we spent a lot of time cooking and eating. I didn't really have much prepared for her when she got here on Friday night, but I did have some leftover shumai and broccoli so we ate that with rice. My mom thought that my shumai was okay, but the texture was off and she said she had a better recipe. To be fair, the pieces that she had were from my first batch this year where I forgot to add cornstarch.

So we decided to make more shumai. My mom said that in order to get the right texture, you need to "cheep" the filling, and she made a folding motion with her hands. (I know she was saying something in Chinese, but as of right now, I have no idea what the Chinese character is for "cheep", but I think it basically means "to knead". If I ever figure it out later, I'll update this post) Mixing the filling with my hands is much easier than using chopsticks. She also mentioned that we needed to add the oil last, after we already mixed everything else.

I'll admit, the batch we made together was a lot better than the one I made on my own.

Because I wanted to have some vegetables to go with this, I also made some brussels sprouts and bacon, which I know doesn't really make sense with Asian food, but I already had all the ingredients for it.

We didn't have all the ingredients for the shumai, so we needed to go to the store for that. I wanted to check out one of the newest Asian stores. The last time I went there, it was really empty and it seemed like they were still stocking the shelves, but this time it was actually really nice!

My mom noticed that shelled peanuts were being sold for a good price, so we bought a bag of those, and my mom roasted them later. And then we saw some peanuts in the shell, and my mom said that that was also a good price, so we boiled those!

But the best deal that we saw at the store was some sad looking grapefruits that were being sold for 99 cents each! My mom told me that these grapefruit were perfectly fine, even better than the nice looking ones because it has more time to ripen and get sweeter. So we bought all of the discounted grapefruit.

And I agree, that sad looking grapefruit was delicious.

But you know what was the most delicious thing I had this weekend? It was my mom's ginger chicken stir fry. I had specifically asked her if she could make it and also teach me how to make it. So I'm gonna try this on my own at some point!

I've looked up ginger chicken stir fry recipes on google, but none of them are what I'm looking for. Most people cook with very small amounts of ginger, just to infuse its flavor in the dish, but not here. Ginger is a first class vegetable. And that means that we need just as much ginger as chicken in this recipe. Honestly, I wish we could have added more ginger.

But I'll go on more about ginger in a future post. Since my mom was helping me a lot with making food, I wanted to make sure I made her some fresh food of my own. My mom really likes carrot cake, so I made her some carrot cake muffins. She thought they were a little too sweet for her taste, but she still liked them!

And finally, I made her some scallion noodles. I wasn't sure if she was going to like this, but after she took a bite she said "Not bad! Can I add sriracha to this?"

So all in all, it was a successful weekend with lots of yummy food.

Eating more veggies

December 17, 2023 7:43 PM

I tried to eat a little bit healthier during my second week of meal prepping. That meant less meat and more veggies. First, I decided to make Mediterranean hummus bowls. I already had feta and olives from a meal last week. I also had a bunch of cilantro, and I thought that would go well in the hummus. Cilantro jalapeno hummus is one of my favorites (: And I also made pickled onions! I didn't realize how easy it was to make pickled onions. I should have been doing this years ago. I heard celery seed goes well in pickled things, so it was a good way to use up more of that.

We really like how healthy and fresh it is, and it's become one of my go-to meals to make.

I only used a small amount of ground beef in the hummus bowls, and I used the rest of it to make a couple of stir fry dishes. I bought a pound of green beans and I added just a little bit of the ground beef to make some stir fry.

I really like ordering green beans from Szechuan restaurants, but it costs like $15, and I can easily make this myself. Pretty sure it's healthier this way too.

With the last half-ish pound of ground beef, I did another stir fry. One of my co-workers said she likes to stir fry beef with coriander and some other spices, and I have a really old container of coriander, so I tried it out. It was alright. I'm really not good at just throwing things together without a recipe.

The next meal I made was loaded chipotle sweet potatoes. I had a little bit of sour cream leftover from last week, and also a little bit of chipotle powder that I wanted to use up. It didn't look very pretty, but it still tasted pretty good!

Finally, I'm ending on these udon noodles again. I made a little bit more sauce this time, and it was even better than the last time.

Meal prepping

December 11, 2023 10:12 PM

About a month ago, I thought to myself, "Man, I'm spending way too much money eating out. I need to cook more of my meals." And then I went on a little vacation, and I ate out for every single meal of the day because I'm not cooking on vacation.

But vacation is over. Time to cook. I'm know I'm really slow at making things, so I decided that I was going to try meal prepping. I'm not making three different dishes in one day--that's too much--but I wanted to see if I could do more prep in advance: cutting up vegetables, mixing together sauces and spice mixtures. So I came up with a bunch of different meals for the week, and I wrote down all the groceries I would need for those meals, and I spent over two hours on prep work last last last Saturday.

I was exhausted. But, it really did make the cooking for the rest of the week a lot easier.

So the first thing I decided to make after all that prep work was leftovers. I was way too tired to cook a whole meal. But after I ate that meal, I guess I felt like I had enough energy to make some real dessert. That's right, I didn't just microwave something in a mug, I made a whole batch of snickerdoodles.

I have this little container of cream of tartar sitting in my pantry, and apparently that's what you use to make snickerdoodles. For most of my life, I thought snickerdoodles were just sugar cookies with extra cinnamon on them. Turns out they're sugar cookies with cinnamon and cream of tartar.

When I made my first batch a month ago, it was way more work than I expected. Mostly because I don't own a stand mixer. And it also took me forever. This time it was juuust a little bit easier and went juuust a little bit more quickly. I still somehow seem to mess up at least one batch in the oven, but I'm getting the hang of this.

On Sunday morning, I made some Greek Turkey Rice. (Actually I used chicken, because for some reason turkey is sold in 19.2 oz packages rather than 1 lb, and I already think 1 lb is way more meat that I need for this.)

I've had a bunch of pasta dishes lately, so I wanted to switch it up with some rice. I had some leftover spinach from last week, and I didn't mind buying feta, olives, and sun-dried tomatoes since I can just snack on those.

Very good, very easy meal. Also very easy to pack and heat up leftovers, which is what I needed after getting nothing but take out at work for the past few months.

Later on Sunday, I made some Cajun shrimp toast. I've already made up my mind that I want to make these as a Christmas appetizer when I visit family, but I wanted to try it a couple of times before then.

This stuff is so good. I went over to a friend's house on Sunday night to watch a movie, and I brought the shrimp toast. It was a big hit.

So the week before this, I ordered a HelloFresh box, and one of the meals was Cajun chicken sandwich. It was pretty tasty. I wasn't originally planning on making more chicken sandwiches, but then I thought about my container of celery seed that expired in 2017 that I'm trying to use up. I can make coleslaw with that. Coleslaw goes well enough with chicken sandwiches, right?

Right. I thought the coleslaw was great. I had only intended on making four sandwiches, but I had a little bit of chicken left over, so I fried up some nuggets and ate them with a pack of McDonald's BBQ sauce. That was also great.

I also really wanted to make some mac n cheese because I had some breadcrumbs, and because my boyfriend has mentioned that he likes baked mac n cheese, with the crispy breadcrumbs on top. The last time I made mac n cheese, it was just okay and it was way way way too much food.

Okay, so this time I tried a different recipe. And I only cooked half a pound of pasta, which is a much more reasonable amoumnt of pasta for one or two pasta. This was pretty easy to make since I could use pre-shredded cheese. I ended up using the rest of all the random bags of cheese that I had: pepperjack, mozzarella, and Mexican blend (four different cheeses!). And then I topped it with some parmesan! It's six cheese macaroni!

Honestly, after I put it in the oven, I was a little worried about all the different cheeses that I added. Maybe it was too much. But it ended up tasting pretty good! I think I made it a tad too salty, but we had no trouble eating all of it within a few days.

Finally, the last meal I cooked was some almost vegetarian shoyu butter udon noodles. Why is it almost vegetarian? Because I used butter. And oyster sauce. But I wasn't going to buy vegan products when I had perfectly good non-vegan substitutes.

Anyway, this was really easy and the mushrooms were delicious. I'm gonna make it again this week (I still have more noodles and edamame!)

And finally finally, I decided to make some carrot cake to use up the rest of a block of cream cheese I had sitting in the fridge. I followed this carrot cake for two recipe, but I doubled it, and then I also used my square muffin tins which are very large, so it ended up making three very large muffins. And it was kind of a struggle to get these cakes out of the muffin tin.

I also only ended up icing a single muffin so I have lots of cream cheese frosting left over. More muffins this week! I'll be sure to make them smaller and use cupcake liners so it's easier.

Okay, done writing for now. I know it's been a while, but thanks for reading my rambly food thoughts!

Scallion noodles again

June 17, 2023 5:00 PM

...and again and again and again. I think I made these noodles at least 7 times.

So the first time I made this, I referenced recipes from Binging with Babish and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, but as I was scrolling through food things (like I always do), I stumbled across another scallion oil noodle recipe, this time from i am a food blog. And it made me realize something. I can just make one serving of this at a time. And then if I wanted to tweak the recipe, I could just make it again the next day! (and the next day, and the next day, and the next day...)

This is what I've settled as my preferred way of preparing these noodles:

• Start boiling a pot of water, and when that's ready, cook about 3 oz of dry noodles. (I was able to find packs in the store with individual sized portions!)
• Meanwhile, cut four scallions into strips, about 2 inches long. Slice the white parts a few more times length-wise.
• Pour enough veggie oil into a pan in order to cover it, and cook the scallions in the oil, until they start to brown and crisp up a little. I just use enough oil to cook them, not to have the scallions swimming in the oil.
• Take the crispy scallions out of the pan and set aside.
• Transfer the cooked noodles directly from the pot into the pan with oil. (No need to drain! I just use chopsticks or tongs for this)
• Pour some sugar, a dash of light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, and Chinese black vinegar into the noodles, and stir it all around. Taste and add more of whatever I feel like adding.
• Serve the noodles with the crispy scallions on top.

Am I even making scallion oil noodles at this point? Or am I just making some noodles with crispy scallions on top? I don't know, but whatever it is, it's delicious. I thoroughly enjoyed every one of these meals I made. But I think now it's time to take a break from this, so I can make other foods.

Asian sauces

April 2, 2023 4:19 PM

Guys, I'm making such good progress on my quest to get rid of everything in my pantry, and I think I'll actually be able to get through everything by July! I've gotten through various ingredients with long shelf lives, and now I pretty much only have sauces and vinegars left.

And I have a lot of Asian sauces, so it's time to make some Asian food.

Last entry I mentioned that I have a bottle of Chinese black vinegar that's been expired for a while. I've been looking up recipes to use up that vinegar, and I came across these glass noodles with cabbage. I love glass noodles. I've made a different cabbage and glass noodle recipe from Woks of Life before, and that was delicious, so I figured this one would be too.

And it was! But it was also a little too spicy, and I really should have known better than to put four dried chiles in this because this is exactly what happened last time I made glass noodles.

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I also figured that this Chinese black vinegar would go well with some dumplings, so I bought some frozen dumplings (I know I usually make them myself, but I was lazy). I mixed it into a dipping sauce along with golden mountain seasoning sauce, sugar, sesame oil, and some water, which tasted great with dumplings.

I had saved this hot and sour dumpling soup recipe from Woks of Life because it looked really good, and this was the perfect opportunity to make it.

My first attempt wasn't that great, and the soup looked really dark. I guess I didn't have the chili oil that I needed to give the soup a red color like in the recipe. But it was also too oily, too salty, and too sesame seed-y. The fact that I only have black sesame seeds didn't help the color balance either.

But I tried it again a few days later, and I adjusted the amounts of each sauce. I also fried the garlic for a little to bring out the flavor more. It was definitely better, but I think it could still use more tweaking. I'm all out of dumplings for now, though I might buy more because those dumplings were really good.

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And just yesterday, I made some fried rice! I had leftover Chinese sausage from another meal, and this was a good way to use that up. Because I basically just use Woks of Life for finding Asian recipes, I also used their Chinese sausage fried rice recipe.

I realized this isn't shown in the picture, but I have a bottle of rice cooking wine that's been sitting in my pantry for who knows how long, so I used that instead of Shaoxing wine. I only used a dash of it, so I have no idea if it really made a difference in flavor. I also added waaay more soy sauce than the recipe called for. (The recipe calls for 1 teaspoon! That's nothing!) (Wait, I said this last time I made it)

This was really good! I still have two links of the sausage so I think I'll make some more this week. I need to get better at just pouring soy sauce and salt and sugar by feel instead of always measuring.

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Finally, I made some beef and cabbage stir fry! I don't quite remember why I decided to make this, but I think it's because I knew my boyfriend was coming over, and he really likes this dish.

Look at those carrot slices! My sister bought a mandoline, and kept it at my place, and it's been sitting in a drawer for years, and I finally used it to slice up my carrot. Thanks sister!