What I ate last week (1/27 - 2/2)

February 7, 2025 2:58 PM

Honestly, I don't really remember. At this point, this post is way late, and unless I'm writing down what I ate the day of, I tend to forget. So here, I just have some extra photos for you:

I made more shumai! I just wanted to see if I could improve on my first batch, and I'd say I did! The shumai wasn't really falling apart as much. I still think the recipe is way too much work, but it was a nice snack to eat throughout the week. And see that smoothie in the background?

I had a few remaining pineapple chunks from my can of pineapple, and whenever I buy canned pineapple I feel the need to use the juice in a smoothie. I love smoothies.

After I made all the shumai, I was still left with a small amount of dumpling wrappers, so I used them the next morning to make some scallion pancakes. These really aren't the ideal type of wrappers to use for shortcut scallion pancakes, but I'm trying to use what I have. They do look a little sad, but they still taste good!

And I know I already made a whole post about this yellow chicken and rice, but here's a bonus pic, as well as a picture of some leftovers the next morning:

Finally, here's some stir fry that I made!

This was another recipe from the Woks of Life cookbook. I was flipping through the pages just to see if I could find an easy recipe that used spicy bean paste. It's not really an ingredient I have much experience with, and I wanted to use it for more than just mapo tofu. I settled on their Farmhouse Pork Stir-Fry, which was pretty easy to make! I even sort of made it again this week, but with a cheaper cut of pork.

So, apart from all that, I blogged about eating things with bread, vegan chili, and kimchi pasta. I took a close look at my spending again and I spent just a little more than I did the previous week on groceries. And just a little less on eating out. But it was pretty consistent between the two weeks.

What I did notice was that I spent a lot of money on meat! (I also include eggs, seafood, and even tofu in that category. It makes sense in my head) Almost $40! I bought salmon, shrimp, ground pork, pork belly, chicken thighs, bacon, and eggs! So, I'm trying to cut back on the meat this week.

And finally finally, I'm trying to add more updates to this site! Have you noticed anything? 👀

What I ate this week (1/20 - 1/26)

January 28, 2025 12:48 AM

It's been a while since I've done one of these! Since I'm not working right now, I wanted to make at least one post about my thought process for what I decide to cook for the week. I know I used to have goals of spending less than $30 a week on food, but nowadays my focus has shifted away from spending as little as possible to wasting as little as possible. And I think I'm actually pretty good at this! I try to use up everything I buy, and I rarely have to throw away food because it's gone bad. This actually means I don't buy in bulk. In fact, I usually only buy what I need for the next dish I'm making. Does this mean I spend more money now? Yeah, but I feel better about it.

I feel like I live a weird lifestyle because I go grocery shopping more than once a day. Sometimes I'm cooking for myself, sometimes I'm cooking for others, and sometimes I'm just eating food that other people have cooked. So I'll share the things that I cooked this week, which means the meals that I don't mention are either leftovers or stuff that others cooked.

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Monday (1/20)

On Monday I decided to make some Shoyu butter noodles, which has become one of my go-to's. I already had some frozen udon noodles because I bought a bunch to make noodle soup. We had also been planning on having poke at some point, and I thought it would be good to use half a bag of edamame for these noodles, and half a bag for poke. And I could buy exactly as many mushrooms as I needed for this dish since Giant Eagle sells them in bulk.

This is always really tasty, but in the future I'll try to 1.5x the recipe because we didn't have enough for leftovers!

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Tuesday (1/21)

I had scallion pancakes for breakfast and I made shumai! This was one of those times where I didn't actually base my meal off of what I had. I just really wanted to try making the shumai recipe from the cookbook. I do try to make things that are a little different so I'm not stuck rotating the same recipes all the time.

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Wednesday (1/22)

So every Wednesday, Giant Eagle has a special deal on a different item. It's either free or greatly reduced in price. And on this Wednesday, they were selling cups of shredded parmesan for $0.99! Along with this, zucchini was on sale at Aldi. I already had cream cheese in the fridge, and it had been long enough since I last made pasta so it felt like the perfect opportunity to make my favorite HelloFresh pasta.

I actually checked the zucchini again the next day, and they were the same exact price even though they weren't labeled as being on sale anymore! 😒 It's fine, it's still pretty cheap. I just felt bamboozled by Aldi.

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Thursday (1/23)

The only thing I actually cooked on Thursday was breakfast, which was scrambled eggs, served with rice, and drizzled with some sesame oil. This meal is something I come back to every so often, and it was originally inspired by this youtube video. It's super easy and a nice comforting breakfast.

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Friday (1/24)

I ran out of frozen dumplings, so I bought more at one of the Asian stores. I decided to try a different brand this time. It wasn't bad, but I think I still prefer a smaller sized dumpling for soup.

After I ate breakfast, I went over to a friend's house to "co-work" and make dinner together. I decided to make mapo tofu using a recipe from the Woks of Life cookbook. I chose this because she loves spicy food and I know that the mapo tofu I kept making was way too spicy for me.

But this is actually different from the mapo tofu recipe that I used a few weeks ago (even though they're both Woks of Life). This time, I thought it was just the right amount of spicy! And I thought the flavor was pretty good. Of course this means that my friend thought it was too salty and didn't think it was spicy enough. Maybe I should have used the other recipe with her 😅

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Saturday (1/25)

I had a small amount of queso fresco left over from...the fajitas? And I still had some tortillas in my fridge. I know I could make tacos, but I really didn't want to end up with a partial lime.

So I went with black bean and avocado enchiladas! I already had everything I needed to make the enchilada sauce, including cocoa powder! I love using up baking ingredients for savory foods. The recipe also includes corn (which I don't like), and normally I substitute that with pulled pork, but this time I used canned pineapple chunks (another thing to also put in the poke!)

So I actually made this vegetarian for once! But not quite vegan because I needed to use up all the cheese.

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Sunday (1/26)

On Sunday, I spent a good chunk of my day making those carrot cake muffins, eating some, and writing a blog post about it.

For dinner we finally had that poke! I think the best way to make poke is to just buy the fish and use whatever mixins you already have. This time it was edamame, pineapple, kimchi, sweet onion, green onion, furikake, and some sriracha mayo that I mixed up.

Okay, I did buy the peanuts so we could have something crunchy, but we also like to snack on peanuts so I know that will be gone soon.

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In total, I spent about $91 on groceries this week, and $56 of that actually went towards the dishes I mentioned in this post. I also spent $30 eating out with a friend. Is this a lot of money to be spending on food in a week? I'm not sure. I'm not the only one eating all this food.

But I will say that every single dish I made this week was really tasty, and I'm so glad I have extra time to make good food (:

Food thoughts: 2/6 - 2/12

February 13, 2021 10:45 AM

in which I buy real ice cream

At work, I'm a team lead, so I have to write two management updates every single week. Some of the other team leads at the company write their updates in the same exact format every week. I've tried to do that in the past, but I find that I just get bored or things change and the format makes no sense anymore. Some weeks I use paragraphs, others I use bullet points. Sometimes I have headers, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I write project updates, and other times I focus on people. It's just...whatever feels the best each week. And I feel the same way about these blog posts.

So, no whiteboard picture this week. Maybe no whiteboard pictures for a while. I'm still feeling the grocery store pics though.

Recognize that "Good and Gather" brand? That's Target. That's right, I did my grocery shopping at Target because I needed to buy some non-food items and in these COVID times I figured I should limit my shopping trips.

Grocery shopping at Target is terrible. I don't know why anyone would willingly do their grocery shopping here. Also, note to self, never buy ground meat from a tube again.

You might be wondering why I bought a 5 lb bag of potatoes. Well, I wanted to make some beef stew (post to come later!), and yeah, I could have just bought two individual potatoes, but then I thought of other potato possibilities and the lower price per pound and the fact that I bought a single lemon three grocery trips in a row. So here I am now with way too many potatoes.

Even though I said I would limit my shopping trips this week, it just happened to snow way more than I expected it to on Tuesday, and for that reason I decided it was the perfect time to walk a mile to Trader Joe's to buy ice cream.

And I was right! There was no line when I got there. That's practically unheard of during these COVID times.

I'm of the opinion that Trader Joe's isn't a real grocery store (they didn't even have veggie oil!) but their ice cream is 👌 and for that reason I'm forever a sucker loyal customer. And those mini cones are so good! They're like tiny little drumsticks, but even better!

As far as what I ate this week, I'm also going to ditch the table of my breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and just mention some highlights.

It was Chinese New Year and I missed being around family. I didn't even plan to make any Chinese food! But I figured I could eat something Asian and cook some more 腊肉 (lat bhat).

Hey, I really am getting better at this deep frying thing! I didn't overcook the meat this time!

I also had some leftover Dim Sum from last week, and I made some cucumber salad to go along with it. Normally I don't take pictures of food that I didn't make, but the salad looked so sad by itself.

I gotta get back to making more Asian food next week!

Food thoughts: 1/30 - 2/5

February 6, 2021 11:48 AM

in which I buy some "ice cream"

I'm getting bored with calling these posts "Meal Plan". It's really a weekly review, but I didn't want to call it that either. At one point I thought of making the tag line of this blog "thoughts on food", so I'm trying something like that. I was also going to append to that to give it a ridiculously long title, but I guess that's what subheaders are for.

So to start off, my whiteboard pic is back, and completely unedited!

Hummus had already been on my to-make list for a while, but when I thought about the tomatoes that I didn't have a use for, I figured I could turn my hummus snack idea into a meal and make Mediterranean Hummus Bowls. That also used up onions.

Like I said earlier, I made Beef and Pineapple Enchiladas so I could use up some corn tortillas, scallions, and the rest of my pineapple chunks. Plus that worked really well with the hummus bowls since I could use half the ground beef for each dish.

See that extra can in the back that's covered? Those are more chickpeas. You can never be too well-stocked on chickpeas. (Especially because I needed both of those cans this week) But you know what Aldi was missing? Tomato paste! I've never seen tomato paste run out at Aldi!

So I was just going to cut my losses and deal with having less tomato paste than my enchiladas called for (which honestly, would have been fine) but as I saw it snowing on Sunday I thought "This is perfect grocery shopping weather!" (because it's way less crowded.)

And you know what's even more perfect? Buying ice cream when it's snowing. Because I can walk at whatever pace I want and know it won't melt. (Also because it's always a good time to buy ice cream.)

So I'm standing in the gigantic ice cream aisle and I come to the same conclusion that I do every time I go to Giant Eagle: Giant Eagle has the WORST ice cream selection. It makes me angry. Every. Single. Time.

WHY are there SO many varieties of vanilla ice cream?! Turkey Hill has "Original Vanilla", "French Vanilla", "Vanilla Bean", and even "Homemade Vanilla"! (not pictured because there's not enough space in the picture to even capture the insanity) Turkey Hill, I know that you did not make that vanilla ice cream in a home. Don't give me that false advertising.

If one of my close friends read this, he would say "Meyling, you're just mad they don't have coffee ice cream." And he would be right. I am mad at Giant Eagle's lack of coffee ice cream. Coffee is a staple. You can't tell me you need four varieties of vanilla, but you don't need coffee.

You're probably wondering, did you even buy any ice cream? Well, I sorta did.

Breyer's was on sale so I settled for their "Frozen Dairy Dessert" that we all know is not real ice cream. I also tried a so-ridiculously-expensive-that-I-don't-want-to-say-how-much-it-was Leona's ice cream sandwich that was labeled "Chai Tea/Coffee". I still don't know if it was the ice cream that was supposedly coffee-flavored or the cookie.

Okay. Ice cream rant over. Here's what I ate this past week.

I don't think I'll ever order from that dim sum place again. I miss real dim sum. When we get back to a normal, COVID-19-free world, that's the first thing I'm eating.

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.