Takeout with the Tos #15

Officially, this is the second takeout post for this summer. We've survived our jet lag and are back on a normal schedule. I'm excited to bring some new dishes this week from our takeout menu.  If you're new joining in, don't forget to check out the first post which explains where this series came from. We're not actually order takeout....

1. Pressed Tofu, Snow Pea, Fried Dace Stir-Fry: $21.99

2. Chinese Broccoli: $16.99

3. Pork with Garlic Sauce: $20.99

4. Pan Fried Pork: $9.99

5. Beef Noodle Soup (calculated from 6+ adult-sized portions): $59.99

Take Out Total: $129.95

Tax: $10.72

Grand Total: $140.67

1. Pressed Tofu, Snow Pea, Fried Dace Stir-Fry

I was inspired to cook with fried dace because Woks of Life posted a recipe earlier this year. I always thought I grew up eating sardines. This statement is true. However, we also grew up eating this canned fish and black beans. I incorrectly associated this fish as sardines as well. Now, I know what it was. It's deliciously salty straight from the can. I'd eat it with plain rice if I could, but being a reasonable and healthy person, I can't let myself do that. I haven't read the nutrition on the can. I probably won't to save myself some sanity because I want to keep eating it. 

I didn't use their recipe but I wanted to try stir-frying this canned fish and black beans. I decided to mix tofu and snow peas instead. I've done stir fry with these two ingredients before, but it was my first time adding this fried fish and black beans to the mix. I was cautious not to over-season the dish because I knew the fish was salty. At the end of cooking I tasted one tofu and one snow pea. They still needed a little more umami in my opinion so I did add some sugar and salt to bring out the flavor. I think it was a very successful dish. 

2. Chinese Broccoli (bottom left) 

It was nice to cook my own vegetables again. We didn't order a lot of side dishes which is where the majority of vegetables come from overseas. It would have been too much food so whatever vegetables came inside the dishes we ate were what we got for two weeks. This was nice. I boil them quickly in salted water and then pull them out. I include the stems but peel the outside off to make it more tender. 

3. Pork with Garlic Sauce 鱼香肉丝 (top right) 

I've always loved this dish at the restaurants. It's saucy with this mix of savory and sour. I've made it many times before, but it has never been the same or even close to what I've tasted in restaurants. In my recipe binder, I had two different recipes. There was one I ended up throwing out because every time I made it, I didn't like it. I printed it five years ago and I've never enjoyed the result. This time, I followed the recipe from Woks of Life.  I will say my ingredient proportions are probably double their recipe which is why I personally doubled the sauce portion of the recipe. Mine never looks like their photo on the recipe because somehow I always end up short on the sauce. One of these days...I'll try to get it right.

Honestly, I haven't tasted it yet because since I've made this dish, we've been eating other things or leftovers from the previous week. So, ironically, I can't tell you if this version of the recipe is any more authentic in my opinion. You'll have to ask me personally about this one. It looks nice from the photo? I liked the smell of it when I finished cooking....

4. Pan Fried Pork

This turned out amazing. I wish I had more actually. The irony is I can't even actually tell you how I made it. I thawed a frozen pack of 18 oz of pork. Half of it I used in the previous recipe above. The other half I cut into boneless chops and marinaded before throwing it on a nonstick and pan-frying. I added a mixture of corn starch, rice wine, soy sauce, and sugar. It sat in the bowl for about a half hour on the counter and then I threw it in the pan. 

It's really delicious. I will need to attempt to recreate this another time. I wish I had more descriptive instructions to share with you but I really don't. This was one of those cooking improvisations which resulted in very tasty food. 

5. Beef Noodle Soup

We came back from Taiwan and were missing the food there. On one of my grocery trips, I saw stew beef on sale and decided to buy a pack with the intention of making beef noodle soup. It's not the most ideal cut of beef but it was quick and easy. (In all honesty, it was too lean. You need a fattier cut of beef for this to be at its richest flavor.) I did an overnight broth in the Instant Pot. My recipe inspiration was from Woks of Life again. I don't actually have all the ingredients so I didn't follow it to a tee, but what I made wasn't half bad. 

The next day, I threw in the beef and the carrots and slow cooked everything in the broth on low for about 6 hours. We boiled some noodles on the stove and the dish came together pretty easily. The amount of soup I made ended up lasting 6+ adult-sized portions of soup.  

The original batch I made did not include the quintessential bok choy. We used boiled carrots instead. I'm a little surprised I've never tried to make this before in the past. It's such a warming meal, perfect for a cold winter night. 

I'm surprising myself right now with what I'm cooking. Hoping to include some new recipes soon. Will need to brainstorm with my family what everyone wants to eat/try this summer. 

Saving Seeds

My son loves to help. But, he's a little too helpful for his own good sometimes. One afternoon about a month ago, our doorbell rang. Immediately, he was at the front door opening it faster than I could open the doorbell camera to see who it was. I was asking myself in my head what kind of white lies am I going to have to tell to get rid of this door to door salesman. 

Fortunately for both of us, it was our neighbor from down the street. She was holding a big box which turned out to be bluebonnet seeds. She had asked if we wanted some and I elatedly accepted. We had seen this neighbor grow bluebonnets before and she had told me about one of the houses across from our side of the street which used to have bluebonnets blooming in the spring. She was inspired to buy bluebonnet seeds and plant them. Since the transferring of ownership multiple times, that house no longer has bluebonnets, but hers does! 

She scooped up a bunch of seed pods, gave them to me, and told me how to grow them from her experience. The first step needed was to dry them. I was thinking, "Great, we're going to be gone for two weeks. Let's let them sit outside under the patio to dry and when we get back, I will deal with them."

I set them outside to dry and our trip came and went. When we got back, I had seen some of the seed pods outside burst open by themselves to release seeds. For the rest of them, we manually opened them and removed the seeds. 

These are what bluebonnet seed pods look like. My children and I sat outside on the patio one morning and opened a lot of them. These were the pods we couldn't finish before we got tired of the chore. I'll finish them another day. My neighbor said to scatter them in the summer, let them grow and die away in the winter, and then they will come back naturally in the spring after the rains. 

This is actually the second time my children and I have removed seeds for a plant. The first time was when we plucked coriander seeds off my plant. I realize they naturally dry and fall off when they're ready. However, we were going on a trip and it was going to coincide with when most of them would naturally dry and fall. As a result, I manually removed the majority of them before our trip so I could save them instead of having them fall all over our patio or blow away and start growing in random locations around our yard. 

Coriander seed is on the left and bluebonnet seed is on the right.

I'm not sure how much of my outdoor hobbies my children will pick up on, but they've sure experienced a glimpse of what it's like to be a farmer/grower. If anyone local wants coriander or bluebonnet seeds, let me know and I'd be happy to share some with you! I can't guarantee the efficacy of growth, but nature hasn't disappointed me too badly with all my growing experiments. I don't recommend this coriander for eating because I've handled it with outside/dirt-ridden hands, but if you'd like to use it for cooking purposes, you're on your own 😅. 

Please note coriander is a cool weather plant so please don't plop it in the soil and expect it to grow well right now. I don't think I planted mine last season until September or October. 

Takeout with the Tos #14 : Post-Jet lag Edition

As I stated in my previous post, I wasn't sure how summer cooking was going to go or how it was going to align with the original parameters I set when I started this series. I still don't have all the answers thought out, but this post was inspired from post-trip food necessity as well as being awake at random hours of the night. 

After coming back, we did one grocery store run at an American grocery store. We picked up milk, eggs, bread, rotisserie chicken, broccoli, and green beans. Basic enough to get by but not enough to make complete meals with only these ingredients. This is where my freezer stash came in handy. I had ground pork at home and pre cut beef strips for stir fry in my freezer already as well as some containers of tofu in my refrigerator. This is how this week's food was inspired.

Teriyaki Tofu: $11.99

Stir Fry Green Beans: $14.99

Green Beans and Ground Pork: $14.99

Beef and Broccoli: $18.99

Chinese Beef and Eggs: $18.99

Chicken Karage (2.5 pounds): $29.99

Take-Out Total: $109.94

Tax: $9.07

Grand Total: $119.01

I want to take a minute to talk about my tofu first. Someone posted about a tofu press on my local Buy Nothing group. I thought about it for a while and wondered what I was going to do with a tofu press or if I even wanted it. My mind instantly went to homemade tofu, but that wasn't what I wanted to do. I did a quick search online and found that it could be used to press out water from other things as well such as shredded potatoes or homemade cheeses. Now this started to get my mind churning. I messaged the person giving it away and went to pick it up. It looked basically brand new and unused. 

I've not used it for anything other than pressing tofu yet, but I press a lot of tofu in this. I already buy firm tofu from the store, but when I use my tofu press, it removes even more water out of the tofu which makes pan-frying so much easier and faster. Who knew? 

I doubled up on my ingredients for the next four dishes. Each one was integrated in two different dishes. I cut my green beans two different ways and cooked them slightly differently. The first green bean dish I cut on a bias and made a stir fry with garlic. I could have slightly steamed them more during the process but my jet lag brain wasn't functioning at 100% so they came out more on the crunchy side. Oh well, variations in cooking happens. 

The second was a dish I've always made with green beans and ground pork. However, this time I cut the green beans into half inch dices and did not parboil them. It actually worked out great and I still ended up with a very nice texture of green bean and made the whole entire dish easier to eat because of the uniformity of sizes. 

Beef was the next ingredient I doubled up on. The first dish I made was my beef and broccoli. I still parboiled my broccoli as these are larger pieces and I want to make sure my children will eat them so I need them on the softer side. The second dish was a first-time dish for me. While on my trip, I had seen Woks of Life post a Chinese beef and egg recipe. These ingredients seemed simple enough so I wanted to give it a try. My portion of beef I defrosted was twice as much as I needed for one recipe so it worked out I could make a second recipe with the remainder. It turned out really well. I hope to include this recipe in my meal rotation because the ingredients are basically and it's simple enough to pull together quickly. I still dislike cooking eggs in my wok unless it is a freshly washed, clean wok because a layer, no matter how thin, always ends up sticking. I'm still a one-pot-cooking kind of person and if I have to clean my wok in between every dish I make, it becomes impractical and lengthens my cooking time immensely. It may just be a pitfall of having a stainless steel wok instead of carbon steel. That dilemma is to be pondered another time. 

Karage was the last item on my cooking list to get us through some more days of food. After coming back, my homemade chicken nuggets made a meal. They were not, however, the most tasty chicken nuggets. I'm pretty sure I'm the only member of our family who will eat food because it's there and not because it's tasty. The other three members are much pickier. I didn't follow a recipe this time for my karage but I've read recipes before for inspiration. I love making karage because it's such a convenient freezer food to have and pull out during times when I need an extra protein boost in the weekly rotation. I've done minor experimenting with seasonings and coatings, but honestly, potato starch and a good marinade goes a long way. 

A Decade of "Home"

We're celebrating 10 years in our house today. The previous owner only lived here for 4 so we've been in this house 2.5x longer than they were. We bought this house as our forever home with the intention to stay here until we died. That's stayed true until recently when we saw a house that was almost "perfect" on paper. Larger square footage. Has a pool - this one gives me mixed feelings. Completely updated. 

We contacted our realtor who scheduled a showing for us. She showed it to us and we walked around. 

Kitchen - almost every single cabinet had slide out drawers. Storage galore.

Living area with built-in shelving. I love built-in shelving.

Guest room with murphy bed and Elfa wall shelving which was going to stay with the house.

Enclosed sunroom. 

I was so torn after seeing the house. It was definitely bigger than our house, but it didn't "feel" bigger than our house. My kids loved the pool. I've always wanted a pool since I was a little kid (and I've never gotten it), but it's a dream I'm willing to relinquish because after seeing the cost of pool maintenance, I would like never to own one. The fact that the pool came with this house...was a neutral aspect to me. 

The laundry room was so much larger than our current one, probably double. Much more storage space with room for a second refrigerator. Also, you won't believe it. This house had FIVE TOILETS. Yes, you read that correctly....five toilets. Every single member of my family plus a guest could use a toilet simultaneously. 

So what was stopping me from immediately buying this house? You'd be surprised, there were some things.

The largest setback was the master closet. The bathroom was updated, and it was nice, but the closet was about 1/3 of the size of our current master closet. For such a large house with so much square footage, I was severely disappointed in the size of the closet. The owners had added a wardrobe into the room which was going to remain with the house, but it still wouldn't compare to what we currently have at our house. 

The second largest setback was the garage. It was a nicely done garage, but still only a two-car garage. Our garage fits three now. My husband really loves our garage and it would take a lot for him to give it up. I don't blame him.

So did we buy the house? Are we leaving our "forever home" after a decade of renovations and memories? Did the kitchen with slide out drawers in 95% of the cabinets convince me it was worth the trouble to move? 

Nope. 

Revisiting these pictures still makes me think what a beautiful house it was. It was move-in ready. There were so many things I liked about that house. But there are still things I like about our house which that one lacks. I don't think we'll ever be leaving this house without a reason of necessity, but you can never say never with absolutely certainty either. 

Homemade Chicken Nuggets

I'm taking a short break from Takeout With the Tos for a while because our summer schedule is different so I'm not entirely sure how the cooking is going to fit in. I'm working on thinking through how that's going to work. Next school year I will also have more time during the week so I may not need to cook on Sunday afternoons anymore! That's still TBD though. The series will come back after a few months but it may look a little different.

A couple weeks ago, I made chicken nuggets by scratch. Have you ever wanted to make them from scratch? Chances are, your answer is "no." For the longest time, it wasn't on my radar either. But then, I was scrolling social media and came across a post on how to make homemade chicken nuggets.

I made them. 

I saved it just out of curiosity thinking I may or may not make it. A few weeks after I saved this recipe, my kids were hungry when I was teaching so I made their requested food really quickly. My son requested chicken nuggets and my daughter requested something similar to a burrito. Long story short, I put everything on one plate, handed it to my daughter, and my son never got his chicken nuggets. 😭 I was very upset for him because those were the last chicken nuggets in our freezer. As a result, I decided to make homemade chicken nuggets and try this recipe.

If you want the TLDR version: I'm never making homemade chicken nuggets again. 😂 And I'm someone who goes through the trouble of cooking because I enjoy it. But chicken nuggets....never gonna happen. And here's why:

I followed the recipe shown above loosely. There was another recipe I looked up and kind of combined the two together into my own version of chicken nuggets. Here's the part that ruined the recipe for me: the ground chicken. I didn't have pre-ground chicken but I had plenty of chicken in my freezer. I used my food processor to blend it down. Don't get me wrong, I love chicken nuggets because of that ground up texture vs the fibrous meat strands of meat pieces. But physically making it yourself and dealing with it/cleaning it up? That is a whole other monster.

Mixture consistency. Love the food processor for stuff like this. Hate the cleaning. 

Then there was the frying process. Again, I'm not against frying food. I love frying food, and especially having our wok to fry in. But boy does it make a huge mess. 

My big mess.

I tried a few after I made them, and I definitely skimped on the salt/seasoning. Oops. It wasn't intentional. But with some barbecue sauce or ranch, these would be some yummy chicken nuggets. 

I'm never making these again because Costco sells freezer chicken nuggets from $3/lb all the way up to the fancier $6+/lb all natural chicken pieces. I'm for all of them. I'm going to compare my nuggets to the $6/lb ones because I used chicken tenderloins and there are no preservatives in my nuggets. These definitely already cost me $3+/lb to make at home due to the cost of the ingredients, the time it took to put everything together, and the hassle of cleaning up after myself. I'm glad I did it once....but never again.

For all its glory, here they are again. My homemade nuggets. 

Takeout with the Tos #13

I'm including this week's takeout menu and costs but the real story is going to be about one dish in particular.

Shrimp with Lobster Sauce: $17.99

Bok Choy: $14.99

Mushroom, Bamboo, Carrot Stir Fry: $14.99

Braised Pork and Tofu Puffs (not pictured): $20.99

Baked Drumsticks (8 ct): $12.99

Take-Out Total: $81.95

Tax: $6.76

Grand Total:  $88.71

 

My husband baked these drumsticks. My kids really liked it. They turned out well!

These were my two main vegetable dishes this week. I cut the bok choy into strips to create a different texture. I liked it, but I'm not sure the extra time was worth the result. But I'm glad I tried it once.

Shrimp with Lobster Sauce

 

 

My picture doesn't do the dish justice. My kids also don't eat peas so there's nothing green. I completely forgot about this dish until I was flipping through the Woks of Life cookbook and saw this recipe. I've always loved that slurry-sauce texture for this dish and anything similar. I don't actually follow the recipe anymore because I just make it the way I want to, but this recipe is still special to me.

My mother died 21 years ago. My dad hired a nanny to watch us after school and cook for our family, but that arrangement lasted a mere month. Maybe only weeks. The memory is hazy now unless I go back and flip through the journals. After the nanny had to quit, my dad had to figure out a way to feed us. He ended up cooking on Sunday afternoons for the entire week.    `

Yup, that's right. I follow the same routine now that my dad did for many years. He would cook multiple dishes and we would eat it as long as it would last through the week. Sounds familiar, right? I remember packing lunch my junior and senior year of high school. I went out and bought myself a glass Pyrex dish with a red lid. 

This is what my "lunch container" looked like in high school. Microwave friendly so I could heat it up at school. 

I knew it had the possibility of leaking, and I didn't have a lunch box so it had to go in a plastic bag into my backpack. I was ingenious enough to pack and store it correctly in my backpack. Half was rice, the other half were the meats and vegetables. I'd make sure to put it in my backpack with the rice side down. That way, if the juices started to run, the rice would absorb it and nothing would leak. 

I had two favorite dishes he made. The first was a shrimp and green peas stir fry. Simply done, maybe added some soy sauce. It was yummy. The second was a dish made with frozen mixed vegetables and ground beef. He made a sauce to go with it which was the slurry-sauce I loved. Whenever he made this dish, I got really excited to pack it for lunch. 

During my last year of college, I lived in an apartment with three other girls. I did my own cooking that year and made simple meals for myself. The first dish I wanted to cook was this dish my dad made with the ground beef and mixed vegetables. I did exactly that - stuck ground beef and mixed vegetables into a pot and cooked them. However, I couldn't get the sauce. My dad didn't follow any recipes so there wasn't anything to share with me. At the time, I had no idea about the powers of corn starch and water and how it changes when heat is added. So I made....ground beef and mixed vegetables with no sauce. That was the moment I realized cooking was a lot harder than I thought it to be.

Fast forward 14 years later, and I understand much more about cooking than I did when I first started in college.  This dish, shrimp with lobster sauce, will always remind me of the years my dad cooked, and the dish which instigated my love/hate relationship with cooking.  My dad doesn't cook much anymore if at all. I've shared some of my cooking with him. He doesn't share his thoughts or even express opinions, but I hope he's impressed. What he started 21 years ago, I continue today with my family.

The "Free" Garden

I knew I wasn't going to be able to garden much this year because we had planned a trip during (what I believe to be) a crucial growing window. Because of that, I didn't buy a single plant or vegetable start this year from the store. My sage recovered from the winter. As did my green onions, citronella, and rosemary. My cilantro is flowering and going to seed. My kale is still going, purposely planted in the back of my raised bed to get some shade from the summer heat.  I'm excited to harvest more seeds to grow more cilantro in the fall. 

Cilantro flowers

As for any edibles, I wasn't planning on growing anything significant this year. I had pole bean seeds from a while back which I wanted to plant and experiment so I planted a row of six. That was it. So why does my garden look like this?

April 17, 2025

It's...a funny story. So I planted my row of six pole beans, but while I was waiting for those seeds to germinate, I decided to dig a trench around the front edge of my garden bed and dump in some incomplete compost into there to continue composting in the ground. My actual composter is a bin so it is not in the ground. Well, after a few weeks, I started seeing sprouts pop out. A lot of sprouts. I ended up with six tomato plants and two cucumber/squash/melon plants which have been yet to be correctly identified. This doesn't include the numerous tomato plants I had to pull due to natural selection to allow the six I wanted a better chance at thriving. 

Fast forward 10 days, and here's what my garden looks like currently:

April 27, 2025

Nature is pretty amazing. When I look at these two pictures next to each other, I'm still in awe at how much growth can happen in 10 days given a balance of moderate heat, good rain and sunshine. 

When I said I didn't buy anything for the garden yet this year, I really meant it. My net spend this year is $0 and that includes the water! I'm even impressed myself, but it's the truth and here's how I did it:

I didn't spend money on any plants this year. The bean seeds I planted were from a free seed box found at our local environmental center. Every single tomato plant was a compost sprout. Every single cucumber/squash/melon plant was a compost sprout. The kale was free from an event hosted by Central Market last fall. The broccoli from that same event has since bolted for the summer and been removed. 

My kale is still growing.

I didn't spend money on any soil this year. The leftover soil in the raised bed was kept and I added to it from last year's pots of tomatoes and pepper plants which didn't survive the winter. I've tried various overwintering methods and been unsuccessful now for two consecutive years. I probably shouldn't try anymore, especially when my compost sprouts tomatoes and I have a never ending supply of pepper seeds. 

I didn't spend money on fertilizer this year because I still have garden fertilizer leftover from last year. The efficacy of the fertilizer probably goes down over time, but I'm not at the point to care or to want to buy a new bag. Also, for my purposes, it works great. I mixed it in when I topped off the soil into the bed for this year and everything has been growing wonderfully.

I haven't spent money on water to water my raised bed this year because all the water I've been using is recycled! (Just for clarification, yes, we water our lawn with the sprinklers and that is not recycled water. But all of my potted plants and raised garden bed have been watered with recycled water) Ever since we moved into this house, we've been collecting the cold water as we wait for the hot water before we shower. Each evening, we collect about 3 gallons. I have 4 giant laundry detergent jugs (approx 2 gallons each) to catch the water and I empty them each day so I have space to collect more water that evening. 

During the winter, we don't use as much so I empty it slower. During the summers, we empty faster than we collect so there's no surplus. In addition to recycling water inside, we have a rain barrel outside which collects rainwater. I've been making sure to empty it before every storm so it can fill up again with new water. As the hot summer months approach, I know we're going to have to supplement with more water to keep the garden thriving.

Honestly, I'm busier than I intended with the garden, but the joy I get from growing my garden is really a fun adventure each year. Not sure what kind of harvest I'll get this year, but it might be the only year my garden is "free". 😊