Take Out At Home Chicken or Beef Lo Mein

Beef Lo Mein
Chicken Low Mein

Canadian Chinese food is one of my favourite take out to get. I always thought the process would be complicated and hard. Then I stumbled across several recipes that showed me it didn’t need to be complicated. I seem to have a habit of mashing recipes together to make it my own so I’ll type out the recipe we made here.

Sauce ingredients

3 tbsp soy sauce

3 tbsp hoisin sauce

1 tsp sesame oil

Mix and set aside.

Lo mein ingredients

8 ounces of lo Mein noodles or spaghettini

2 tsp oil

1 tsp sesame oil

1 tbsp minced garlic

2 cooked and chopped chicken breast or even rotisserie chicken or 2 cups thinly sliced leftover roast beef for the beef version

2 cups of frozen Asian vegetable mix (I use this kind)

Cook noodles of choice according to package. In a skillet add oil and sesame oil. Fry garlic 10-15 seconds. Add in frozen veggies and cook 1-2 minutes(they will still be frozen it’s ok) Add in cooked meat of choice. Add cooked noodles and drizzle sauce stirring everything till it’s coated in the sauce and the veggies are defrosted and warmed. Serve and enjoy 🙂 This dish also goes well with egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken balls.

I really hope you give this recipe a try.

Happy Cooking!

Rachelle

Take out at home McDonald’s Big Mac

Take out at home can be quite time consuming but the taste and flavours in my opinion are worth the extra work. I will leave instructions for some shortcuts along the way for when you’re just too busy. Now I haven’t done the breakdown in cost and I am hoping to be able to do that in future recipes. I do however know that for my family of 5 to go to this particular establishment would cost between 60-80$ Canadian and it was much less to gather the ingredients at home

Big Mac and fries (the fries are actually frozen French fries that I deep fried, which is one of my shortcuts with seasoned salt)

In this recipe the only shortcut I took was the frozen French fries which I got at my local Walmart for 2,27$ and we used about half the bag for the family. Another shortcut you could use if pressed for time would be buying hamburger patties and buns. Now let’s talk about the burger patties for a second.

My burger mixture is quite simple and I choose to make them so I could have the thickness of burger be thin. I mixed 2 lbs of ground beef with this seasoning and 1 egg. Formed them into patties and cooked them up on my indoor grill. I didn’t use the bbq because they’re so thin they would fall thru the grill.

The bun recipe I used from a YouTube video and I will link the recipe here. Trust me it’s worth making these if you have the time.

Now the reason we all order the Big Mac in the first place the sauce! I actually combined a few different recipes to get the exact flavour my family likes. So here is our version of the Big Mac sauce

Ingredients

1 cup mayonnaise

1/3 cup finely diced dill pickles

3 tbsp mustard

1 1/2 tsp white wine vinegar

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

Mix everything together and let sit while cooking the burgers.

To assemble out Big Macs I washed and shredded lettuce, finely diced some onions and cut some dill pickles. I also cut the hamburger buns in three buttered and lightly toasted them on the grill. On bottom bun spread sauce, sprinkle with onions, sprinkle with lettuce add burger with cheese slice. Put middle bun on spread sauce add pickles and lettuce top with second burger. Top burger with more lettuce and the top bun with more sauce put on top and serve.

           

What Have I Been Up To

Ok so it’s yet again been quite a while since I’ve blogged. Life is always so busy and I am trying to live in the moment and do all the things. The thing is I really do miss coming here and blogging. I’ve been on an eat at home journey and I have many times opened my laptop to start typing our latest meals only to get distracted. Most of the time by the kids homeschooling curriculum (which I am loving) and extra curricular activities. Heck I even joined a book club. For the next few weeks I will be updating you on all the fabulous meals we’ve been and will be eating.

Why did I choose to start an eat at home challenge you may be wondering? Well there’s several reasons.

  1. I wanted to clear out the panty and rotate stock
  2. I wanted to save some cash in our budget
  3. I wanted to get creative
  4. I wanted to show the kids that no take out didn’t mean boring meals that we could and did recreate some favourites that we prefer over the take out versions
  5. I wanted to share my passion of cooking with the kids and add it into our homeschool curriculum.

So all this to say Stay tuned for some delicious looking foods headed your way

Happy Cooking!

Rachelle

East Coast Brown Bread

I absolutely love baking bread. There’s something therapeutic about kneading the dough and watching the loaf rise. I’ve had my sandwich bread down for quite a while but wanted to try something new. I went on the hunt for a new bread to try and came upon what appears to be an east cost favourite, brown bread! These bread has amazing flavours. With the incredible flavours of brown sugar and molasses I knew this was going to be a hit! The dark crust, the fluffy centre, seriously you just need to give this bread recipe a try. I wish I would have come up with this recipe but I discovered it discovered it on this website. Here’s the recipe for his amazing bread but you should definitely try more of his recipes. I’ve made the hot cross buns from this website and a few more, he definitely knows what he’s doing when developing these amazing recipes.

Chicken Pot Pie

With the weather getting colder what’s better then a chicken pot pie! Once again I searched thru my cookbooks and found a recipe. Then I got to work making a delicious chicken pot pie for dinner. I started off by cooking a whole chicken in the instant pot and then making some bone broth after I had taken all the meat off the bones. Then I was able to dive into actually making the chicken pot pie. If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while you probably know that I am currently obsessed with The Pioneer Woman otherwise known as Ree Drummond. So if you have a chance try this recipe as well. My family loved it and it was even better the next day.

Chicken with Mustard Cream Sauce

So the other day I wrote about the delicious buttered parsley noodles. And while they were amazing the show stopper was definitely the chicken. The amount of flavour in this chicken dish was amazing. Just by tasting it you would think it would be a complex process to achieve the flavours, but I am here to tell you that’s not the case. You can have a gourmet meal on the dinner table and you won’t be slaving in the kitchen for hours to get it. In the cookbook See mentions that you’ll want to slurp up the sauce and she was right. Next time we might even serve the sauce with mashed potatoes so we don’t loose any of it. I’ve written about quite a few of the recipes I’ve made from The Pioneer Woman’s cookbooks and what I really like is with a quick google search you can find similar or even the exact recipe from the book. So here’s a link if you want to give this chicken a try. And here’s how we plated ours up 🙂

Buttered Parsley Noodles

Have you ever overlooked a recipe then for whatever reason you decide to give it a try and you think why on earth did I wait so long to make this recipe. Well that’s what happened with me. I was browsing thru my pioneer woman cookbook and stumbled upon the noodle recipe I knew my kids would eat as a side dish to our main course. I managed to find a very similar recipe online so I’ll post it here. Trust me it’s a simple yet delicious side dish. Everyone enjoyed it and the kids have requested I make them again soon! Stay tuned for my next post to see the amazing chicken dish I made to accompany these noodles.

Sourdough Skillet

I love having a sourdough starter. However sometimes it gets away on me. I think I’ll be using it so I feed it and then all of a sudden I have a bunch of extra starter I need to bake with. So I remembered seeing a YouTuber make a sourdough skillet among other recipes and set out to find her blog. If you need a recipe for sourdough you have got to check out farmhouseonboone.com . She also has great YouTube videos on how to make and maintain your sourdough, life on a homestead etc. Here’s the recipe I tried tonight.

Although the top looks a little darker then I would like it definitely wasn’t burnt. I added whatever veggies I had on hand. Some carrots, onions, celery, broccoli and peppers. I don’t think there’s a combination of veggies that would be bad in here.

So if you have a lot of sourdough your looking to use. I highly recommend this recipe.

Sourdough Banana Muffins

I’m here again with yet another Pioneer Woman recipe. This time it’s sourdough chocolate chip muffins. Now hopefully Ree wouldn’t be mad but I changed this up a bit. In stead of using only chocolate chips I used both chocolate and vanilla chips just make these muffins that much more extra lol. The kids gobbled these up quick and the one I got to taste was divine. Here’s the link to the recipe. And with homeschooling or even traditional school starting back up these would be great to make in a giant batch and freeze. That is if you can keep the kids away and you don’t indulge in them before getting them in the freezer.

Sourdough Sandwich Bread

If your familiar with sourdough you know that a lot of the recipes for bread call for a long fermentation period. And while I can appreciate the benefits and the flavour of a long fermentation, sometimes a mom just doesn’t have time to wait 12 hours for bread. I set out for not only quick recipe but also one I could throw in my bread machine and walk away from. I ultimately decided to give this recipe a go. I did however change a few things. I let my machine run the full dough cycle. Once it was done I put it on a lightly floured surface flattened into a rectangle, rolled it up and set it in my pullman pan for 30 minutes. Then I baked it at 350 for 40 minutes. It was perfect and delicious. If you prefer a darker crust feel free to bake an additional 5-10 minutes. When pinched for time will definitely be making this one again.