Takeout With the Tos #5

Here's the takeout for this week:

- Bok Choy: $12.99

- Egg Fried Rice: $12.99

- Egg and Tomato: $15.99

- Char Siu: $12.99/lb x 2.75lb = $35.72

- Seafood Vegetable Soup: $6/qt x 6.5 qt = $39.00

- Stir Fry Turnip Greens: $12.99

Take Out Total: $129.68

Tax: $10.70

Grand Total:  $140.38

Bok Choy (top right)

Bok Choy is on the menu again, but it's actually not the same vegetable as last week. Yes, they share the same name but it's a different variant of vegetable. The leaf shape is very slightly different and I think the taste is very slightly different as well. Think about it like different types of tomatoes: Roma, Beefsteak, Heirloom, etc. There's also different types of bok choy! You'll find that this one gets repeated every two weeks or so because it's a basic staple leafy green we like to eat with our Asian food. 

Egg Fried Rice (bottom right)

Egg friend rice made it on the menu again. My kids definitely eat this once or twice a week so making it multiple weeks in a row doesn't feel like a repeat. I had some leftover fat from the pork belly I made last week so that was used to make this fried rice. 

Egg and Tomato (bottom center)

This is such a simple, basic dish most Asian people have eaten or cooked once. It was self-taught for me in the beginning. I'd scramble some eggs and then throw in tomatoes. Add some salt. Done. As the years went by, I started to doctor it up. I add ketchup to my tomato and eggs. Some people frown on this. I've always liked it so that's how I continue to make it. My sugar is in my salt/sugar shaker already so I don't add it separately. For some people, sugar is their secret ingredient. After I got the Woks of Life cookbook, I looked up the actual recipe for egg and tomato. They add shaoxing wine to the scrambled eggs before cooking. I tried this once and it enhanced the flavor very slightly. I think it's one of those ingredients where if you don't add it, you won't miss it. But, if you do add it, you can taste the difference. So sometimes I'll pour in a bit of shaoxing wine to my eggs when I remember. And other times I still make it without out of habit. 

Char Siu

We make our own char siu when I buy large cuts of meat. Two weekends ago when I was working, I told my husband to pick the food menu for the week. He and the kids flipped through our cookbook and my daughter wanted char siu. My husband put it on the menu, but upon returning home, I told him we didn't have the right cut of meat in our freezer to make this...so it wasn't made. A few days later, I was at Costco and saw their pork shoulder on sale. Yes, it's an enormous pork shoulder. Yes, I buy it about once a year. So this was my once a year pork shoulder purchase. We spent 40 minutes processing and vacuum sealing 15 pounds of pork shoulder. One turned into the char siu we ate this week. Two turned into a freezer batch of char siu. One turned into a freezer portion for this recipe.  

The recipe we follow is by Made With Lau.  I made a double batch this time so we started with 4 pounds of meat. You lose about 25% of the weight cooking so the final weight shown in the cost breakdown is pretty accurate. (Yes, we weighed it.) Making homemade char siu is actually pretty simple. We marinate the meat overnight and then bake it on raised racks to allow the fat to drip off as it cooks. Alternating basting and baking in the last half of the cooking time is the most hands-on part of this recipe. Baking this char siu took about an hour. I think we overdid it slightly this time and probably could have taken 10-15 minutes off the overall time. Depending on your cuts of meat, it varies. I may have cut my pieces a bit too thinly this time and the cooking time wasn't adjusted accordingly. This is part of the cooking/learning/experimenting process. We just eat every batch, good or bad. 

Seafood Vegetable Soup

I was feeling another batch of soup and the weather cooled down as well this week to match. This pot of soup has: tofu puffs, sweet potato, carrots, cabbage, daikon, tomatoes, and mussels. I saw recently Woks of Life came out with a winter vegetable soup recipe. I didn't follow the recipe, but it inspired me to add cabbage to my soup. I don't typically think of cabbage as a soupy vegetable, but after glancing at their recipe, I decided to add it in. Honestly, you don't notice it. It cooks down and blends in with everything else. The seasonings I add to my soup include garlic, ginger, dashi seasoning, and dried shrimp. The vegetables add everything else and I may finish with some salt for a final taste. 

Stir Fry Turnip Greens (top photo bottom left)

This was a first for us. I've never done this before. But my freezer was filling up and I had to start using some of the things in it. I have bags of greens in my freezer because the local grocery store puts them on clearance when they don't sell after a while. The greens are still find, but the best by date is nearing. I buy them, take them home, and put them into my freezer where they continue to sit until I have a recipe to use them. There are some recipes which work better for these than others. I wouldn't recommend stir frying as my top choice, but it's the method of cooking I used this time. They're not bad, but because they are pre-washed and pre-cut in the bag, I cannot control what goes in or the size of the pieces. When I cut my vegetables for stir fry, I cut the leaves larger than the stems to accommodate cooking times. This way the leaves don't overcook and allow the stems to cook through without being overly raw. This pre-cut bag did not allow for that distinction, but it turned out okay. I actually enjoyed eating this throughout the week. I'll need to add it to my mental list of freezer vegetables which can pair Asian food. 

I'm proud to say I cooked enough food this week and at the posting of this blog, none of the dishes has been completely eaten yet. 😂 This does mean we have eaten a rotation of the same foods for 4 days now. However, don't forget that we do supplement with "filler meals" here and there. I've decided next week I will post about freezer filler meals so stay tuned.

Total time elapsed: ~3 hours