flailing in my kitchen v3.1
How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Back in March, I had attended a wedding, and one of the appetizers were these cute little veggie spring rolls. I thought they were delicious, and it made me want to make some spring rolls of my own.
I remember telling my aunt I made some chen nem生ណែម - fresh spring roll, and she said something like
leu jiah chen nem汝食生ណែម - you eat fresh spring roll?! in the winter?!
And I had to tell her, it's spring! It literally became spring that week!
Well, maybe it was technically spring, but it was actually still so cold for the next month and a half, so I guess Soy Go細姑 - small aunt was right to call me out on that.
When my family makes spring rolls, we typically add both pork and shrimp, but I was a bit tired right after that wedding trip, and I didn't want to make things too gang kou艱苦 - difficult for myself, so I opted to just include shrimp. (Yes, shrimp is the easier of the two!)
But after I finished all my shrimp, I still had more spring roll wrappers left, and I didn't want to make even more shrimp spring rolls, so I decided that it was time to cook some pork.
I often will go the easy route and just boil and slice some pork belly, but Soy Go has a special pork recipe that involves toasted rice. Remember when I had spring rolls every day for pre-dinner snack? Well, I did learn how to make the pork! When Soy Go first explained it to me, she made it sound like it was sooo easy.
It's not. Spring rolls themselves are already a lot of work, and this pork makes it a whole day affair for me. And I was actually feeling kind of sick recently and I did not want to make cooking more of a hassle. Buuut I guess my desire to eat this pork took over, and because of that, now YOU can learn how to make this pork too!
Anyway, I grabbed about a 3 lb chunk of pork butt from Aldi and I got started. In order to get more flavor into the pork, I cut it up into large chunks and then I salted the chunks for at least a few hours before I cooked them. But I'm still not sure if this extra step makes that much of a difference.
Next I needed to make the toasted rice. I would say that if you have sticky/sweet rice, definitely use it! But most of the time, I only have a big bag of Jasmine rice so that's what I used. For this amount of pork, I scooped out about 1/4 of a rice cooker cup, washed that, and then cha炒 - stir fry on a dry pan on medium heat.
Then I toasted it until it was chiah chiah sek赤赤色 - golden brown! Once that cooled a little, I threw it into my Nutribullet and blitzed it up into little pieces.
And then it was time to cook the pork. I boiled 2.5 quarts of water and added a healthy pinch of salt and sugar. I ended up using 1 tbsp of salt and 1.5 tbsp of sugar, but honestly I think it could have used more of both. I plopped in the pieces of pork and let it boil for 5 minutes before turning the heat down to medium low, and then I let it simmer for 30-45 minutes, occasionally skimming out the impurities that float to the top.
To see if the pork is done cooking, you can take a chopstick and poke at it and see if blood comes out. That's what Soy Go told me, but I just kind of cut into it to see if it looks cooked. If it's still a bit tough, you can also cook it for longer. Once it was at my desired tenderness, I sliced it up into bite sized pieces.
And finally, I seasoned it with the toasted rice, salt, sugar, and goi jeng雞精 - chicken bouillon to taste.
I like to put these in my spring rolls! The toasted rice bits make it so fun to eat. My aunt also told me to save the water that the pork cooked in, to bu beung煲飯 - cook rice in it or something. I decided to make some soup with it. I made this Napa cabbage and tofu soup recipe, but I used my pork broth instead of chicken broth. It was very good!
I've been a bit mentally tired lately, and so I've been sticking to the basics with my cooking. That means making a lot of the same dishes over and over, and I know that's not very exciting for the food blog. But I've had some photos from the past couple of months that have been sitting on my phone, and I wanted to share these at some point, so here we go!
Remember how I hang out with one of my friends every other week and we pick a dish to make? Well there was one time when another friend picked out a dish for us, and she went with Shanghai style braised pork belly. Except we only had access to Aldi, so we used pork butt instead. I think it was a better choice anyway. We also used granulated sugar instead of rock sugar because that's what we had available.
It was tasty and not too hard to make! The recipe called for waaay more water than we needed so it took a while to evaporate, but other than that it was pretty straightforward. I also stir fried some broccoli using the method from Made With Lau.
And I was even inspired to make it a second time on my own, and this time I was better about not using too much water for the braising process. I also tried using brown sugar instead of white sugar just to see if that would make a difference. I don't think it did.
I did get a little fancy and I bought sesame seeds just so I could have them as a topping. And I stir fried bok choy this time. Overall, I think this attempt was even better! I do want to make this a third time, but with some hard boiled eggs as well. I feel like I missed out on having braised hard boiled eggs this Easter (you know, with how expensive eggs are now), but the egg prices are going down a little!
Anyway, I was originally going to put a lot more dishes in this post, but I feel like I've typed enough, so until next time!
Still on my quest to clear out everything in my kitchen! I'm making progress!
I have finally used up all of the two curry packets that my aunt gave me several months ago. I think I used 1/3 of a single packet each time I cooked some curry, and one dish would last me four meals. Kenji's kare raisu recipe has been my go-to way of preparing curry, even when my curry powder is Malaysian and not Japanese.
When I made spring rolls a couple of months ago, I had some leftover vermicelli (because I always have leftover noodles), so I made some Singapore noodles with them. I sort of referenced this recipe on Budget Bytes, but I didn't measure anything, so I'm sure I used more curry powder and soy sauce than what it called for. Noodles were a little soggier than I'd like, but that was to be expected, and it was still delicious.
Something else that I had leftover from the spring rolls was toasted rice. I was looking up other ways to use toasted rice, and I saw that it's used in larb! I've never made larb before, but my aunt makes it (and hers is delicious), so I wanted to give it a try. The Woks of Life recipe said that you can serve it with some sticky rice, and I just happened to have a bag of in my pantry. This was tasty, but not nearly as good as my aunt's.
Finally, I had a little bit of cornmeal still sitting in my pantry, so I decided to use it all up and make some cornbread. I just followed the recipe that was listed on the container, and I had exactly the amount of cornmeal that it called for! I also figured this was a good reason to use my square muffin pan. The cornbread was easy to make, but it did have some weird volcano-like action going on while it was baking, and each piece had a little point at the top which was not what I expected.
Oh, I impulsively bought some "Mediterranean spiced salmon" from Aldi because it was half off, even though I'm pretty sure I've had more than one person tell me that the pre-marinated pieces of fish at grocery stores are terrible. Well, I had never tried one myself, but uh, I have to agree. It was really bad. It would have tasted better if I had just baked a piece of plain salmon.
I also had spinach leftover from that sad chicken alfredo pasta, so I decided to go full-on Boston Market and make some creamed spinach. This was pretty bad. I should have just made a salad and eaten the spinach raw.
But look at the bright side. I'm getting closer to having empty kitchen cabinets 🤩
Day 57 (Thursday): At this point we're just trying to clear some random foods out of our fridge. One thing that always works for this is pizza. We've already done "normal" pizza and BBQ chicken pizza, so we decided to have some Hawaiian pizza this time.
Oh, my sister also made some cheesy bread sticks to go along with it. I don't think she was terribly happy with this dish, but it still tasted good. And it made a great breakfast a couple of days later. I love leftover pizza.
Day 58 (Friday): For the first time in three weeks, I finally started to relax at work. I had been working so much that I actually ended the day at 2pm! This meant that I was able to cook dinner again!
We bought a few eggplants when we last went to the Asian store without knowing what we'd do with them. But eggplant is always good in stir-fry, and I haven't had stir-fried eggplant in a while. My sister really likes it with egg, so we used that instead of ground pork. We ate all of it that night! And since we had a lot of that honey garlic pork left, we ate that as well. Delicious.
Day 59 (Saturday): I was so excited to make some pork tacos, but when I took out the piece of pork, it smelled kind of funky and after pondering about it for a while, my sister and I decided it was best to just throw it out.
But obviously I still wanted tacos, so I walked to Aldi and bought a whole other pork butt.
Hey, I really wanted tacos. Pineapple and pork go really well together. I was also going to make some sriracha mayo, but I decided to make it interesting and put sriracha in sour cream instead. I'm never doing that again. It was weird.
The tacos were delicious though.
Day 52 (Saturday): It's the weekend! Which means no work! Which means I actually had time to cook!
Yeah, that's right. I did the cooking. I really wanted to make some shrimp bowls. Of course, it ended up taking me forever, and it really felt like I made four different things: shrimp, rice, pineapple salsa, and black beans.
But whatever. It was worth it. Absolutely delicious.
Day 53 (Sunday): My sister was feeling lazy (and I've been feeling lazy for the past three weeks), so we just ate leftovers. We had too many leftovers sitting in the fridge anyway.
Day 54 (Monday): We bought this big thing of pork butt in our last grocery shopping trip and I think it may have been sitting in the fridge for just a little too long. So we decided to cook it.
I really wanted to try another pork loin recipe (but using a pork butt), and this honey garlic pork loin sounded really good. Using pork butt for this was definitely a good idea. We also needed a veg and some starch, so we roasted some brussels sprouts and potatoes as well. Overall, it was a good meal.
Day 55 (Tuesday): My sister made 韭菜粿 and I think it's worthy of its own post. So you'll see it in the next one.
Day 56 (Wednesday): When we went grocery shopping earlier this week, we stopped in the Italian grocery store, and decided to look all the different fancy pastas they had. Both my sister and I really like wide noodles, and I normally find fettuccine not wide enough.
But the Italian grocery store had some really nice fettuccine. The one we bought was completely in Italian! It was also a whole $2! I think paying that extra dollar was worth it though. The recipe we used was a bit weird, but it still tasted good.
