Takeout with the Tos #21

I'm excited to get back to more consistent takeout blogs, but as I mentioned before, it's going to look a little different. Instead of cooking on Sundays and eating for the week, the cooking will be done....on random days throughout the week. This week's post will actually include cooking from last Friday as well as some in the beginning of this week. 

Collard Greens and Dace: $14.99

Egg Hugging Tofu: $15.99

Ground Pork with Basil: $13.99

Eggrolls (x29 @ $0.75 ea): $21.75

Fried Chicken (2.5 pounds): $20.99

Chinese Broccoli: $12.99

Asian Vegetable Soup (5 Qt @ $5/qt): $25.00

Total: $125.70

Tax: $10.37

Grand Total:  $136.07

 

 

 

 

Collard Greens and Dace

 

We needed some vegetables and I hadn't gone grocery shopping in a bit due to being out of town. So I pulled out a frozen bag of collard greens. I buy these from the store when they're marked down and the grocery store is speed-selling them. They go into my freezer and I use them at a later date for stir frys. This worked perfectly for us this one. Collard green is definitely not my favorite though. I still prefer turnip greens or even kale when it comes to the American vegetables. Collard greens have thicker leaves which aren't my preference, but with the right cooking technique and seasoning, it's not bad. 

 

Egg Hugging Tofu  

 

I've made this recipe a few times since I added it to our rotation a few months back. It's so easy and is a great change from the old teriyaki tofu I made for years and years. I love how the egg adds extra protein to the dish. This was again a quick meal pulled together so no green onions or anything green to make this dish look a little better aesthetically. 

 

Ground Pork with Basil 

 

I was actually excited when I saw Woks of Life post this recipe recently. I had seen their recipe with pork belly and thai basil  before which was a delicious recipe. My problem was that I could never get the texture of the pork belly right because of a combination of heat + cooking time issues. This happens a lot with nonstick because to preserve the integrity of the cookware, you can't use very high heat. As a result, things cook slower, and when this specifically applies to meat, this means you get texture issues. 

 

So when I saw a very similar recipe with ground pork, I was intrigued because I love the flavor of this dish, but I wanted an easier way to do it. Using ground pork means no texture issues with the meat and you still get the flavor of the dish. I compared the recipes side by side and the seasoning proportions are actually identical. There's slight modifications between the two recipes with the other ingredients, but the key seasonings are the same.  

 

Seeing this recipe made me sad I didn't grow basil this summer. I had so much of it in the past and could only use/freeze so much before I was overwhelmed. I planted some seeds last week in hopes of making this dish a few more times the rest of this year, but we'll see how much the weather can cooperate with me as basil grows in hot weather. 

 

 Egg Rolls

 

 

 

Now these aren't the tiny egg rolls. These are the egg rolls that are 5-6 inches long each. I didn't follow a recipe to make eggrolls. This was a very improvised recipe which turned out great. My frying skills and wrapping skills need some work though. I forgot to fill and fold on the diagonal. They turn out a lot neater and prettier that way. Oooooops. I'll have to remember that for next time. Mine have awakward straight seams to the side, some of which wildly popped open during frying and created some wacky waves. 

 

My filling includes half a carrot, 1 pound ground pork, 1 pound shrimp, half a small cabbage, 3-5 cloves garlic, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, corn starch, and sugar.  I can't tell you the proportions of everything else because I don't know. I was just dumping things into the mixing bowl. 

 

My first fry turned out super dark. Two are pictured above and I ate the other two. This is when I realized that frying egg rolls at 350+ degree oil is not good. The outside burns and the inside is questionable. That's the reason I tried the dark ones first because I was worried the inside was raw. It wasn't, but it was definitely too fried. 

 

Would I make this again? For sure. We put a good number of them in the freezer and they'll make great quick food for the future. 

 

 

 Fried Chicken

I had originally marinated this chicken to be browned in a pan like a grilled chicken, but since I already pulled out the oil and pot for frying, I decided to fry them. I marinated them in soy sauce, oyster sauce, honey, cooking wine, sesame oil, and corn starch. Again, I can't tell you exact proportions because I just dump everything in, put on some food gloves, and mix it before popping the bowl in the refrigerator for 24 hours. A beginner recipe would be equal parts (1tsp or 1TB depending on amount of food) of all. I was telling my husband I love these seasonings because you can mix them together in random amounts and it will still taste good. I'm sure if you tweak the proportions, you can get a fine-tuned flavor profile depending on what you like, but equal portions of everything is a good place to start. 

I did two different coatings because I ran out of panko halfway through frying. The rest of the chicken is battered in potato starch. 

 

Chinese Broccoli  

This is a basic parboiled vegetable. I used salted water and dropped in the leaves for maybe 30 seconds. The stems I leave for about 1 minute. Nothing fancy, but parboiled gives it a good texture. The leaves stay bright green and the stems are soft with a little bite to them. 

Asian Vegetable Soup

Earlier this year, I started randomly throwing ingredients together to make soup. This still continues now! This soup includes: tofu puffs, tofu skin rolls, mushrooms, cabbage, carrot, daikon, celery, garlic, soy sauce, dried shrimp, and chicken bouillon for seasoning. It was a little bit of a "stone soup" because the carrot and celery was thrown in to clean out my fridge. I didn't mean for this to be anything fancy, but a warm soup is nice as the weather is cooling down. 

 

I was telling my husband that an Asian soup with fried egg rolls was reminiscent of the quintessential "cheap Chinese restaurant food." I'm not even sure you can get cheap soup and egg rolls anymore at any restaurant due to inflation and tariffs. I'll take my homemade version any day.  

Takeout With the Tos #20: Lazy Food

It's been over a month since I last wrote a Takeout post. Summer ended and the new school year started. We have new routines now. I knew this was going to change and that's partly why it was hard to continue this series. I used to have to cook completely on Sundays because I was out of the house between 9:30am-2:00pm most weekdays and that only left me 1-2 hours before I had to start teaching. My schedule now is actually quite the opposite. That same block of time is when I am actually free, and most days, at home. 

This shift has brought about some changes to our household - some good, some bad. Good: I no longer have to mass cook a week's worth of food on Sunday afternoon for 3 hours. Bad: I'm getting lazier about meal planning and sometimes, the day's food plan comes on a whim. 

This week's food was definitely on a whim. We got home on Monday after being out of town for the weekend. We thankfully had some leftovers courtesy of a friend which turned out to be a meal life saver. For ease of this blog that will not be counted since I didn't buy/make it. On Tuesday, I went grocery shopping for some last minute ingredients to finish a recipe I was making. Along the way, I found some bargain finds which turned into more meals for the week. 

This is probably the epitome of my "lazy food" from this entire year. Honestly, it kind of feels like a treat for us because we don't eat like this very often. So while I do enjoy nice homemade cooked meals, sometimes the lazy food is fun 😛.

Here's our food for the week:

Clam Chowder (7 servings @$7.00/ea): $49

Sandwiches (4 sandwiches @$5.00/ea): $20

Pizza: $8

Total: $77.00

Tax: $6.35

Grand Total:  $83.35

 

PIZZA 

Take and Bake Pizza

The pizza was a bargain find from the grocery store. I bought two and put one into the freezer. The other one was in the fridge for us to eat sometime this week. Sometime this week turned into 5 hours later. This pizza is a 12 inch pizza. The kids ate about half of it by themselves and then I ate a few small slices as a second dinner after working. We ended up with 2 slices leftover in the refrigerator which will probably end up being a meal for one child. I paid less than $8 for it but we're assuming this was a takeout price which is why it's priced accordingly. 

  

CLAM CHOWDER

Clam Chowder

This is the only truly homemade item on the menu for this week. I decided to make clam chowder because we had a surplus of potatoes I needed to use before it became expensive compost. The recipe I use is one I wrote down a long time ago when we first got married. I can't find the exact one on the internet anymore but this one comes pretty close in terms of ingredients and proportions. We don't have fancy bread bowls at our house but some toasted bread goes along way with this chowder. 

 

SANDWICH

My daughter's sandwich for lunch. 

I don't know about you but sandwiches are kind of a treat for us. We don't eat them often, and when we do, it's usually when we go out of town. I ate them all the time during the summer as a kid and got super tired of deli meat between bread, but now as an adult, it's a nice change from hot meals. 

I found deli meat at the grocery store marked down when I went this week. I guess I've never gone at the right time or wandered the section to find it, but this time, I found it and decided to get some. Sandwiches aren't a go-to food for us because it's not budget-friendly when done well. Yes, I could buy the cheap meat and cheese and put something together for a few dollars, but that's really not worth it in my opinion. If I'm going to buy deli meat for a sandwich, I'm going to be paying around $7+ per pound for my deli meat. Finding this as a markdown item meant I was able to get my meat for closer to $4 per pound. That's almost half! 

About a month ago I actually came across some marked down packaged deli meat which I threw in the freezer to save for later. It ended up coming in handy for our trip this past weekend. It was a partial experiment because I had never frozen deli meat before. I was curious how it would turn out. With proper thawing (must be all the way - not a single ice crystal), it still made a decent sandwich. The added mayo and mustard helped to maintain the moisture within the sandwich. If you eat the deli meat by itself (which I did eat a small bite,) it would have been slightly drier than fresh deli meat due to the change in moisture content due to freezing and thawing. I asked my husband if he would go for frozen deli meat again and he said he would. In the future, I'll keep an eye out for deli meat markdowns and then freeze them. There might be a post in the future specifically on freezing deli meat and how to keep it manageable. Someone may have to remind me. 

I love good homemade dishes, but sometimes, we could all use some lazy food. 😄

Two Decades of Grey: The Everyday

When I last blogged about my hair, I ended up writing this post. When I wrote it, it felt unfinished in a way. Yes, I had stopped coloring my hair. My natural hair color, pigmented or not, was growing out, and this was going to be how the rest of my life went with hair color. Sometimes I'd think about coloring it for fun. Sometimes I'd think about adding some highlights. But I never ended up doing anything.

In November of 2024, I cut my hair. I do normally cut it a few times a year, but this cut was special. This haircut was when I cut off the rest of my colored hair. I colored my hair for the last time in December 2022. It kept growing, and two years later, the remaining roots which were colored back in 2022 were cut off. For the first time in my life since I was 16 years old, I had completely virgin hair. 

Every day is a new challenge when it comes to living with my premature greys. Some days, I'll look in the mirror and think to myself, "Hey, it doesn't look so bad today" as if I could convince myself I had less grey hairs on my head than I did the day before. Other days, I'll look in the mirror and want to start pulling them all out one by one because they look like they've taken over my entire head. And still, there are other days when I look in the mirror, see all my greys, and tell myself, "They look okay today."

As I've gotten older, my need to please others has gone down. I don't hang my value and worth on what everyone else says. There's still areas where I struggle with this, but when it comes to my hair, I've learned to put the comments aside. Over the last year, multiple people have made comments about noticing my greys. Some of them are shocked because as far as they can tell, it looks like I went from zero to grey in a few years. Little do they know I was hiding them for so many years already and this is merely just letting the facade fall. 

My youngest is in kindergarten this year. The year I was in kindergarten was when a poignant comment about my mother's hair stayed with me forever. I had children almost 10 years earlier than my mother did. I am still younger than my mother was when I was born. By the time I'm as old as my mother was when I was in kindergarten, I will probably have the same amount of greys as she did. I think I'm luckier in some ways. Society now is much kinder regarding beauty, signs of "aging," and self-image. It's refreshing for me as a parent to see other parents and staff at my child's school embracing their natural hair color.  And yes - there are still the parents who are 1000% put together and could be ready for a photo shoot at any minute. 

I have one box of hair color sitting in the closet at home. Yes, it's nearly 3 years old. Someone out there is probably face-palming and secretly yelling at me to throw it away.  Some days, I want to use it. I want to color my hair back to a uniform sea of black. I want to complete the picture of youthfulness nature took away from me naturally. But then, I'm reminded of how difficult these 3 years were to get through, growing my hair, leaving it uncolored, and wanting myself to be comfortable with myself. So I push through another day and don't look back.

Shrimp Chips

I've loved shrimp chips since I was a child. They've always given me this sense of comfort when I eat them. I remember eating them at the Asian buffet we frequented growing up. It was my "post dinner" treat after I ate my actual dinner. I'd go and get a plate full of shrimp chips to eat. We made them once at home from the store-bought dried shrimp chips. They looked like oval, translucent plastic discs. I remember watching them fry and being mesmerized when they started to puff up. 

Years later as an adult, I was fortunate enough to marry into a family with homemade shrimp chips. During big holiday gatherings, my husband's aunt would sometimes make them. They're delicious. I really like the ones they make, and they're as big as my face! I have always wanted to try making my own.

I finally did.

It's a labor of love. If you don't absolutely love these and enjoy them, don't bother. From the day I started making them, it was another 5 days until the day I first fried them. This is the recipe I followed. I first saw their video on social media and then looked up the full recipe online. 

Kneading this was tiring.

 

For those of you who just want a quick overview and don't care about the recipe, this is a quick summary of how shrimp chips are made.

1. You need to blend up the shrimp mixture and then mix with tapioca starch. The blending was easy - I threw it in a food processor. The mixing was more laborious. Once everything came together, I had to knead it by hand. This is a dry dough as you don't want excessive moisture in it so it was hard to knead. 

2. You split it into logs to steam.  This cooks the shrimp and the starch.

 3. After steaming, you leave them uncovered in the refrigerator overnight to cool and dry. The next day, I sliced them into little discs with a mandolin. You could chop them by hand thinly with a knife. I'm debating if the knife would have been the better option because the dough was still slightly tacky and would stick to the mandolin which made pushing it to slice difficult/unsafe if you're not careful. 

I dried my shrimp chips in the sun for 3 days. You could probably fry them at this stage without drying outside and it would be fine, but I wanted mine to dry so I could store them longer in my pantry. 

4. Fry them up to eat! My first batch turned out very inconsistent because I wasn't doing a good job of keeping the oil temperature consistent. Yes, I have a cooking thermometer. Yes, I used it. Yes, I still messed up. Why? Because I got my oil to the correct temperature, started frying, left the heat on a bit too high which kept increasing the temperature of the oil as I was frying, and because what I was frying wasn't cold or large, it wasn't dropping the temperature as I was frying so the temperature of my oil just kept increasing, and before I knew it, my oil was close to 450 degrees. 

Guess the order which these were fried.

 

 

Yes, I wrote that run on sentence on purpose because I wanted you to feel the trajectory of my experience in frying these for the first time. And yes, this is exactly how you learn - by making mistakes. Thankfully this mistake is a low stake mistake because I just ended with some extra brown shrimp chips.

 

Our Disney bucket has turned into the shrimp chip bucket

These don't save well after frying because they go stale after just a few hours sitting out. My guess is if I put them in a container they'd go soggy the next day. This is why I like frying them in small batches and saving the rest (hence why I spent 3 days drying them outside.) 

The shrimp flavor of these homemade is incomparable to one served in a restaurant. Theirs have the perfect fry on them so the texture is 🤌 but the flavor is 😐. My texture isn't bad as I've learned to manage the frying oil better in small batches. I've also learned to push the chip down into the oil even after it puffs because sometimes it will continue to fry and puff but needs the extra help after it floats. My children enjoy these and watching them eat with such delight is special. 

Rice Krippy Treats

Months ago, I found Bluey cereal at the grocery store. It was on sale, and it looked almost identical to Kix cereal which my kids really enjoyed. I read the ingredients and saw that the color they added was a natural dye. I asked my kids if they would eat it, they said yes, and I bought a box.  

  

Well, friends, my children struggled through that first bag. I even ate multiple servings myself and it tasted identical to Kix. But my kids just didn't ask for it nor did they want it when I offered. So somehow, the first bag was eaten, and the second bag was left unopened in our pantry for months. I had actually forgotten we still had it because when I reorganize our pantry, I put whatever I can in whatever packaging I have to maximize storage space. For most people, this is a nightmare because they forget what they have. For me, it works and nothing expires for the most part - I think. This bag of Bluey cereal was hiding inside a Cinnamon Toast Crunch box.

Recently, the idea hit to me to turn this cereal into a marshmallow treat - basically a rice krispie with subbed Bluey cereal.  I went to the grocery store, got a bag of marshmallows, and made this with my kids. 

Three ingredients! 10 oz bag of marshmallows. 6 cups of cereal (I added more but you need to watch as you stir it in). 2 TB butter (I might add slightly more next time).

 

I remember making this treat as a child with my mother exactly once. To my memory, that was the one and only time I've ever made it by myself. For some reason I was under the impression I needed to use a nonstick pot to make this with to help the marshmallow stick less. When I shared this with a friend, she told me she makes hers in stainless steel pots. I will concur the nonstick did not make a difference and will use a stainless steel pot next time. It just gives me the flexibility to grab any cooking utensil instead of having to limit my utensils in order to improve longevity of the surface of the pot. 

I don't know if anyone doesn't know this trick, but saving butter wrappers to use as pan greasers in baking is genius. My friend taught me this trick in my early 20s because she baked immensely more than I had ever. Baking is still not something I enjoy to this day, but I have used this trick multiple times when I do bake. 

My kids gladly ate my homemade "rice krippy" treats. That's what we call them in our house because our kids couldn't pronounce the "-sp" cluster properly when younger. We've kept this silly pronunciation because it makes it more fun. Yes, my husband and I are two grown adults who will still say rice krippy treats to each other because it's cute and funny. Our kids can pronounce it correctly now, but it's still fun to keep this pronunciation alive in our house. 

Eleven

So last year was our big ten year anniversary and we celebrated with a trip to Maine. I thought I had blogged about it...but I didn't. There may have been a short post with a photo on another platform about our trip. It was a lot of fun.

We didn't plan a big trip for our anniversary this year as it's not a "milestone" anniversary, but we had a wonderful trip overseas as a family of four. I finally got to have another "dream come true." Growing up, I'd see my friends' family photos in their homes - the glamour shots taken overseas with the fancy clothes and makeup. I'd always wanted to get glamour shots done. Of course, my family had their issues, and in my eyes, was more dysfunctional than others. Since growing up and seeing the world through wiser eyes, I've come to see a lot of families with their own dysfunctional aspects. So in that, I was probably not alone, but it definitely felt like it for a long time. Regardless, we never took them.

Since getting married, we've never made a trip to Asia and I didn't have them done as a single person when I lived overseas...because, well, I wanted glamour shots with my family. Due to a number of reasons, 2025 was the year an overseas trip finally happened for us. And yes, we took glamour shots!

 

For our actual anniversary, we celebrated a day early, got a babysitter for the day and had lunch together. We didn't intend for it to be so reminiscent of our younger relationship days, but that's what it turned into. It was fun.

We went shopping together before lunch and were able to go to stores we wouldn't normally get to with children. It was so nice not to have to watch a child and make sure nobody was grabbing things or on the verge of breaking fragile items. We were able to wander at our pace and not worry about keeping track of where the children were. 

We went to an all you can eat sushi restaurant for lunch and we were pretty impressed. For the price we paid and the food we ate, I enjoyed the food. 12 years ago when we were still dating, we went to an all you can eat beef ribs restaurant for lunch. I ate 12 beef ribs for lunch that day and he had 13. We joke about that lunch being the moment he knew I was the one for him.  

 

We had a decent amount of sushi for lunch. Between the two of us, we ate:

- seaweed salad

- 4 pcs tuna nigiri

- 4 pcs red snapper nigiri

- 4 pcs smoked salmon nigiri

-14 pcs salmon nigiri

- 4 spicy tuna nigiri

- Rainbow roll

- Firecracker roll

- Mango delight

- Street Fire Roll

- 2 pcs shrimp tempura

- green tea ice cream

My approach to all you can eat places has changed drastically over the years. Yes, I'd like to get value in my meal, but I also don't want to leave the restaurant feeling horrible. I want to enjoy my meal and leave satisfied and happy, not uncomfortable and sick.

The last thing we did on our date together was go walk around the mall where I spent all of my teenage years at and where we spent the first year of our marriage strolling. I can't say enough how relaxing it is to get to hold hands with my husband instead of my children, use the restroom by myself, and spend as much time looking at items I want to look at without keeping track of where my children are and what they're about to do. 

I wore this dress 12 years ago when he picked me up at the airport when we first started dating. This was my first time wearing it again since getting pregnant and having two babies. Not everything fits the same, but this dress is pretty forgiving. 

We were very young when we got married. The older I get and longer we're married, the more the realization sinks in of how young we actually were. Our love looks different now. We look different now. But I can't imagine spending the last 11 years with anyone else. Fun fact: 2025 is the first year our anniversary has landed on a Saturday since the day we were married. 🥰

The Sweetest Fig

I remember reading this book as a child. It freaked me out so I never read it more than once. 

 

 

I read it again as an adult. It made a lot more sense, specifically since I was able to link the author as the same person who wrote Jumanji. I was reminded of this book because my neighbor had figs which she shared with me last week. I've tried fresh figs before but they were never a craving or favorite of mine. 

 

I forgot to get a photo of all the figs she shared with me so these were the leftover I didn't bake with.

 

This time, as I ate one fresh, I was able to better appreciate the flavor. They're very sweet when ripe. Crunching on the seeds is a sensation not everyone would appreciate, but it reminded me of eating dragon fruit. My neighbor shared over a dozen figs with me, and although eating them fresh would have been nice, we were leaving town in a few days and needed to clear out our refrigerator. 

 

I was ready to blend them all into a smoothie, but my friend shared a recipe with me for an almond fig cake. I told her I wasn't sure I would make it because we were going out of town for the weekend and needed to finish them ASAP. My friend told me her cake was gone within 24 hours after baking. Now that's a smart marketing pitch. I decided to bake the cake and actually had all the ingredients on hand. It really was gone in 24 hours! (Had we not left town it might have made it to 36, but it was a yummy cake).

 

The almond flavor of the cake is more pronounced than the figs so if you don't like almonds, you won't like this cake.  Mine turned out a little darker than I expected because (I think) I set the oven too high for the first 20 minutes without realizing. I ended up having to improvise the cooking time and temperature in order for the cake to bake as intended. If you look at the photo in the recipe, it's a pretty dark cake, so I don't actually know what happened. But it ended up tasting very good. 

 

If you have access to fresh figs, I highly recommend making this cake (assuming no allergies to almonds and no excessive pickiness to flavor) at least once. Figs are definitely great to be eaten fresh, but I enjoyed this cake, too.