New Recipe Review- Asian Lettuce Wraps

For my new recipe this week, I decided to make Asian lettuce wraps. I love them at P. F. Chang's and I figured they couldn't be TOO hard to make. I found this step-by-step on the Tasty Kitchen blog and figured I could handle it! I wouldn't call it a recipe, per se, as there were no measurements, and the recipe it linked to had totally different ingredients! But it was enough of an outline for me to  create my own version.

Here's what I did:

Mix
3 Tbsp oyster sauce,
3 Tbsp hoisin sauce,
1/4 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce,
1 Tbsp Thai chili paste,
1 Tbsp minced garlic,
1 Tbsp brown sugar, and
1 tsp dried ginger

in a small bowl. Set aside.

Dice
1 red pepper,
1 onion,
1 bunch of scallions,
large handful of mushrooms, and
1 can waterchestnuts.

Sauté veggies in wok with canola oil, stirring occasionally until mostly cooked through, about 5-8 minutes. Remove them from wok and set aside.

Add more canola to cooking surface if needed, and brown ground turkey until no longer pink. Remove wok from heat. Add the veggies back in and stir to mix. Pour the sauce on top, and stir to coat.

Serve warm, wrapped up in large Bibb or iceberg lettuce leaves. Yum! This one was really good, and way easier than I expected!

I've Been a Bad, Bad, Blogger... And a New Recipe Review

I've been a very neglectful blogger lately. I've been in a bit of a funk, I suppose.

It's a combination of a few different things. We've been really busy lately, for one. Busy with mostly good things, mind you- great times and celebrations, with wonderful friends and family. But combine that with stress and extra hours at work, life has felt very GO-GO-GO recently, and we've had little downtime. And downtime, for me, is quite the necessity.

Another thing that has been bringing me a down a bit lately is that sometimes it feels like we work and work and work on our house, both inside and out, and still don't see any real progress. It may be a case of not seeing the forest through the trees, but nevertheless, it eventually takes a toll on my motivation.

And finally, all those "great times and celebrations with wonderful friends and family" mentioned above usually include an abundance of good food and drink. And so, my "healthy eating objectives" has been, ah ... suffering, shall we say. And since I tend to be a bit hard on myself, that's contributed to my funk more than it's motivated me to work harder.

But now that all that is out in the open, let's move on. 

And let's start with something easy to get back into the swing of things- a new recipe. One of the new recipes I tried last week was Farmer's Market Potato Salad from Cooking Light magazine. This one caught my eye because I'm so used to the standard potato salad- mayo-based with potatoes, celery, and hard-boiled egg- you know, the classic. This one was something different, and a lot healthier. AND it called for fresh corn on the cob, which had just become available for the summer in our area and I was craving some like you wouldn't believe. 

It turned out really well! I didn't really make any changes, except instead of roasting the corn in the oven, we grilled it with some butter and Cajun seasoning. Also, I added asparagus to the salad, since there was some in the fridge that needed to be used up. I served it with Honey Mustard Grilled chicken, from allrecipes.com, which was also really good and went perfectly. Man, how I love grilling weather!!