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, were 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.  

 

Takeout With the Tos #19: Long John Silver's

When I was growing up, takeout wasn't atrociously priced. You could get a family meal to feed four people for around $20 and probably have some leftovers. Sadly, this isn't the case anymore. As a result, my children don't eat out in the same ways I did. This is probably for the better because I believe they eat much healthier than I did as a child. However, this means they're missing out on some of the fond memories I have of eating out of a fried chicken bucket or eating fries at our kitchen table. My cooking initially increased after my first baby was born. We were home a lot during the evenings and cooking became an outlet for me to be creative and "do something." I wrote about the various recipes I tried the year after she was born. 

One thing I've never done was fry fish. I grew up eating Long John Silver's and it was our "justified healthy food" because we were eating fish. I still live next to the same location we went to growing up. For fun, I looked up the prices and they are much higher than they used to be. 

Instead of ordering a 12 pc family meal for $43.79, we fried our own fish, French fries, and hushpuppies from scratch.

Here are the recipes I followed for each of the items.

Fried Fish Batter - The batter is the main part I needed to help with. I fried each batch of fish for about 4 minutes at 350 degree oil. We used tilapia instead of cod or pollock because that's the only white fish we had at home. We also cut our fish in half so they wouldn't fry with a little slit in the middle. 

French Fries - I hand cut my fries and followed the double fry method.

Hushpuppies - Believe it or not, I followed this recipe almost entirely.

Guys...I got too excited after making an entire meal in the style of Long John Silver's....so excited I never got a picture of everything after frying. Instead, I got the remains of the fish and fries after plating up my children's servings.

The fish and fries.

 

I never got a picture of all the hush puppies, but here are the ones on my kids' plates. 

As a child, food was sustenance. I ate because I was hungry. Sometimes I liked what I ate, sometimes I didn't. As a young adult, I ate what I could afford. Sometimes this was plain food. Sometimes this was delicious food. Now as a more established adult, I've finally begun to appreciate the power of food and the true meaning of comfort food. 

The prices below are taken from the Long John Silver's a la carte menu. Simply calculating from their family meal accurately accounts for the fish but not the proportion of hushpuppies or fries. Because of this, the price is inflated compared to the meal price, but I did not make three sides, only one. 

12 pieces of fish @ $2.89 each: $34.68

3 orders of hushpuppies (6 pc/order) at $2.79 each: $8.37

6 orders of fries at $2.79 each: $16.74

Total: $59.79

Tax:$4.93

Grand Total: $64.72 

I was able to save about half of everything I cooked in the freezer to be consumed at a later date. The leftovers from the other half will last us about 3 portions. I had fun doing a fish fry. The benefit of this fry batch was these were not coated or wet batters. This allowed the frying oil to stay much cleaner throughout the process and remain usable for longer. I will most likely continue to use bits of the oil in my cooking throughout the week before I dispose of the last remaining portion with the bits on the bottom. 

Total Prep and Fry Time: 2 hours. 

Takeout with the Tos #18: Fry Edition

We don't have any streaming services right now. We do have a nice big screen TV and an antenna to get public channels. Occasionally I miss the variety from when we had access to a streaming service. It would have been very easy for us to sign up for a subscription and pick up right where we left off. It would cost us about $20/month and we'd continue the shows we watched from before. However, with us being out of town for two weeks at the time, we decided to wait. I was never opposed to signing up for a subscription, but I knew once we started, there was no going back.

 

When we came back from our trip, there was a period of time when we didn't watch a lot of television. There was just too much to do around the house and we were still tired/jetlagged from our trip.  It wasn't until about a month after returning when we started resorting to the television again. 

 

We haven't started a subscription for anything yet, and honestly, most of the time, there's nothing overly exciting to watch on public channels, but once in a while, there will be a nice gem of a show that's on when we're watching. 

 

This happened at the end of last week. We were browsing channels at night and came across a cooking show talking about Louisiana and seafood. They introduced various restaurants in Louisiana and the food they served. These weren't fancy high-brow restaurants. Most were just basic restaurants serving simple food of the south. I loved watching them talk about oysters. It also made me hungry for some oysters myself. 

 

I had oysters in my freezer. With some thawing technique, I was going to give it a try. The recipe I followed loosely (and boy do I mean loosely) is this one.  

 

If you've followed along with my blog you'll know that I'm a very rustic cook. I don't like following recipes because they slow me down. I either have to memorize enough of it to be simple to execute or it's completely made up. 

 

What I followed from the recipe: a 1:1 ratio of flour and cornmeal

 

What I didn't follow from the recipe: everything else 😂 

I didn't have buttermilk for the recipe, but I also didn't have enough milk to amend into buttermilk (milk + vinegar) so I ended up just leaving that part out. I also did not add seasoning to the oyster or the batter. When using frozen oysters, I learned from a Korean cook to salt them and wash them before using. I thought this would have been enough salt to flavor, but it wasn't. 

The overall fry was great though. 

Tasty.

Proof it's an oyster and not chicken in disguise.

 

 

If I did this again in the future, there would be two things I'd make sure of:

1. Add some seasoning. Or wash them in more salt next time, haha. 

2. Fry a little longer. These weren't bad by any means but they got less crispy as they cooled. A longer fry may have helped this. **We've gone to seafood restaurants before and had dried fried seafood so I'm aware of the opposite extreme.**

 

Now if you know me, I don't waste my frying oil or my extra fry batter. I had both in this case. That same evening, I speed-prepped some shrimp balls for frying. Because there is cornmeal in the batter, it wasn't a true Asian shrimp ball. Think more of a shrimp hush puppy.  But it was improvised on the spot, quick to pull together, and tasted pretty good. 

I don't think these would ever be my main item on my frying list, but they make a good secondary fry to use up extra batter and take advantage of the oil. 

 

 

 

The following day, I continued my frying efficiency by making a batch of chicken karaage. This is the recipe I first used when making karaage, but since then, I just wing it by memory and improvisation now.  

I've breaded it in both potato starch and tapioca starch. Both get good results. 

I love fried food. We never had homemade fried food growing up, but we did fast food. My kids get the opposite. We don't do a lot of fast food, but we have fried food in my freezer on hand. A pipe dream of mine is to never buy freezer chicken nuggets again and to always have enough karaage in my freezer. My kids consume a lot of chicken nuggets, so this is a lofty goal, but maybe in the future when they can significantly help in the kitchen, this will be possible. 

As for our health, everything in moderation, right? Not all of this (except the oysters) were consumed in one sitting.

Fried Oysters x18: $20.99

Shrimp Balls x11: $15.99

Chicken Karaage (1.5 lb): $14.99  

Total: $51.97

Tax: $4.29

Grand Total:  $56.26