Pandemic meal prep: The salsa verde edition 🌶

Also a recipe for faux-jian bing, just coz.

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we meal prep. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.

First off, welcome, new subscribers from The Every Girl!  FTIA now has more than 700 readers! 🙀 Wow! 🙀 That’s both cool and giving me a lil’ social anxiety, ngl. 

A little about me: My name is Sophie and I like cats. That’s all you need to know.

And here are some of my fave posts if you wanna do a little catching up: A recipe for my Mama’s Scallion Pancakes, the Brighton Beach Chronicles, and a Slightly Illustrated Guide to Pineapple Buns.

Now, a recipe for water:

Spa water at home

Keep it in your fridge at all times

Making a big pitcher of Fancy Water in the summer is a game changer. I’m not talking about Fancy Water as in bubbly fruit essence, I’m talking about Hotel Lobby/Spa Fancy Water, which is much more budget-friendly. At night, take a big ol’ glass pitcher and add a scrubbed, sliced lemon, a big handful of washed fresh mint on the stem, and fill with water. In the morning it’ll be ice cold and refreshing and make you feel like you’re at the spa even though you’re at a sub-basement apartment in the Lower East Side surrounded by bags of fragrant garbage and sketchy scaffolding.

Tomatillo salsa verde at home

Recipe adapted from Simply Recipes

If you find yourself with a free Sunday, may I suggest making a big double batch of salsa verde? It requires all of six ingredients (minus salt), and you can use it in so many ways -- crack some eggs in a pot of warm salsa and cover the lid for nearly instant brunch, or see the chicken recipe below. I ~ very loosely ~ followed this recipe from Simply Recipes, using a red onion instead of white and adding a charred poblano pepper. Instead of turning on the oven, which in this apartment is relatably smol, angery, and often sets the fire alarm off, I charred all the tomatillos and peppers in the Instant Pot on the sautee setting, then used an immersion blender to incorporate the raw onions, garlic, cilantro, and lime juice. Oh, by the way, tomatillos are naturally high in pectin so don’t panic if the salsa gels. 

Chicken in salsa verde at home

Recipe adapted from Cookies and Cups

This recipe for Instant Pot salsa verde is probably not very “authentic,” but it is very, very easy, and that’s what I’m all about. I absolutely abhor skinless boneless chicken breasts and think that one should never buy them under any situation. So I bought skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts and picked the bones out after cooking. But I will begrudgingly admit that in this case skinless boneless would probably work just fine and you will not lose out on much additional flavor. If you make the double batch of salsa verde in the Instant Pot like above, you can just scoop out a bit more than half of it, dump the chicken in, not have to clean it out, which is also the goal :) 

Cilantro rice at home

Recipe from All Recipes

I have already written about my extreme prejudice against any rice that isn’t guo bao, and how I simultaneously learned that I love snarfing down cilantro-lime rice made with the cheapest possible grains. That’s because people contain multitudes! The recipe I followed was from user-submitted site All Recipes, but it’s never been as good as the first time, which I counter *is not* true of a lot of things in life, but I digress. So yeah. Find another recipe? Or just add a lot of cilantro and lime to long grain white rice.

Jian bing style scallion pancake egg sandwich at home

You can get frozen scallion pancakes at H-Mart and other Asian grocery stores.

I’ve been craving jian bing lately -- and by craving jian bing, I really mean craving the experience of getting Chinese street food from a cart or a store amid the hustle and bustle of people as much as the flavors themselves. Thankfully, the latter can be roughly replicated at home, even if there’s no replacing the former. Making a true jian bing takes a bit of work (but definitely try and let me know how it turns out!), but cracking an egg on top of a fried scallion pancake and topping it with cilantro and chili bean sauce gets us 90% of the way home. I like I MEI brand of frozen scallion pancakes best (you can get them easily and cheaply at H-Mart), but just between you and me using frozen onion parathas works well in a pinch. Heat a splash of vegetable oil over a hot skillet, add the frozen scallion pancake and cook, flipping once, until nice and browned. Crack a large egg on top and puncture the yolk with a chopstick; sprinkle with salt, black pepper, a smattering of chopped cilantro. Cover the pan and turn off the heat, so that the white sets. Put it on a plate and top with a drizzle each of sriracha and chili bean sauce (important!). Serve with soy sauce.

 XOXO,

Soph

P.S. Five Things I Ate might take a few weeks off for summer vacation, but I’m not ghosting you, I promise.