My Therapist Cooks

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Asian Fusion Recipes

Easy Shrimp Curry

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This delicious shrimp curry features coconut milk, fish sauce, and lots of lime juice for brightness. This is a curry shrimp recipe that's done in just 30 minutes, aka the perfect weeknight seafood dinner! Pair this with plain white rice or naan for dipping and sopping up all the creamy curry sauce.

 

large skillet of shrimp with creamy curry sauce, napkin, and cilantro

Ohhhh curry, how I love you. It's no secret that we are highly obsessed with all kinds of curry, and a yellow curry with coconut milk appears a few times per month on our dinner rotation.

I often see curry recipes with a bunch of chopping, starting with garlic, ginger, jalapeno, and green onion. I LOVE starting curries with that flavor combination, but wanted to do a quick version using dried and jarred flavors to save time and effort. 

This shrimp curry recipe is super easy thanks to coconut milk and yellow curry, and the result is a 15-20 minute curry that tastes like tons of effort without any actual effort. Shrimp cooks in 3 minutes or less, and with some storebought naan this can truly be dinner in under half an hour.

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Pan Fried Tofu with Thai Peanut Sauce

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Our 100% favorite plant-based weeknight dinner that we eat at least every other week! Perfect spicy peanut sauce (make it in advance!), crispy pan fried tofu, and slaw with whatever greens you have make for the most delicious vegan rice bowl dinner that is healthy and comforting.

tofu rice bowls

I don't think I've ever said this about anything before (I probably have), but this is hands down our favorite dinner.

We have other things that we love, other things that are in regular rotation, for sure, but this is our dinner. One that we've tweaked and crafted over the years and every time we have it we kind of sink into this "it's healthy but comforting" haze of joy.

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15 Minute Hibachi Steak

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Steak in just 10 minutes! This recipe for hibachi steak has just 6 ingredients and cooks in about the same amount of time it takes to steam some rice. I use sirloin steak cubes for a super affordable option, but this is also delicious with ribeye steak.

hibachi and hibachi sauce recipe

YEAH YEAH YEAH!! ..is my reaction to hibachi steak bowls early in the week in January.

Since the dawn of this blog (you're like, calm down), hibachi recipes and Asian-fusion recipes have been some of our favorites to make, and your favorites to read. The top recipes of all time (and, kind of by a lot) are hibachi shrimp and spicy crab salad (like in sushi!), and honestly they're some of my favorites too.

I think with the hibachi method in general, the hot pan + quick cooking nature of things make them really attractive to us: real people trying to feed our families good food in a reasonable amount of time.

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Gluten Free Orange Chicken

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This easy gf crispy orange chicken recipe features pantry ingredients, a glossy sauce, orange juice for sweetness, and ginger and broccoli for a super easy weeknight takeout-at-home dinner. You'll love this sticky, crispy, gluten free Chinese dinner!

Gluten Free Orange Chicken

Hell. O. Pan. Try. Meal.

Cue all of the "in these trying times..." phrases BUT GUESS WHAT I made this months ago for a magazine I write for and it only is just now making it to your eye balls.

I can see the future, basically? OR, more likely, the best recipes are the kind that work all the time, even in pandemics.

What we have here is: A crispy chicken dealio, made gluten free because cornstarch, PLUS the cornstarch makes the chicken EXTRA crispy without any overly annoying breading, you're welcome for that.

Then we have a glossy sauce with orange juice, ginger, soy sauce, and stock. Broccoli for balance. Rice for ... more balance.

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Easy Broiled Salmon with Kimchi Fried Rice

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One of our favorite weeknight dinners! Super delicious broiled salmon with a Korean-style sauce that can be made in advance, and quick fried rice with kimchi and whatever veggies you have in your fridge. 

Hello and hi.

Are you doing OK? Are you loving or hating or nothing-ing this stay-at-home moment in our lives?

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Korean Broiled Salmon

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ON WEDNESDAYS WE EAT PINK FISH.

Yep. Super easy broiled salmon, comin' atcha. This recipe is a companion to the kimchi fried rice from last week, but I wanted to keep them as separate posts (and eventually together!) because they are so good together OR separately.

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Easy Chicken Larb

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This Thai chicken larb recipe (sometimes seen as chicken laarb on menus!) is so quick and easy thanks to the use of ground chicken. We love making this for meal prep with extra dressing and using it on salads or in rice bowls all week. It's gluten free and wildly delicious thanks to a fish sauce lime vinaigrette.

close up image of thai ground chicken lettuce wraps with lime wedges on the edge.

IknowIknowIknow.

Maybe not the most inspired thing to do for our first 2020 recipe, but inspired is not what we're attempting here. Delicious is. Chicken larb is delicious.

Jay usually does some kind of January ... eating thing ... which, is fine. I could go on and on about how I don't do things like that for a variety of reasons that I feel strongly about, but I'm also happy to support people in my life that try to make healthier choices. 

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Spicy Sambal Pork Noodles

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spicy noodle bowls made with ramen noodles (or any pasta you like!) are the perfect mid-week alternative to spaghetti with meat sauce. this asian noodle bowl is the best!

What do you watch while you eat dinner?

Do not tell me that you talk to other people. I won't hear it.

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Summertime Green Curry {vegan}

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Today in Quick Dinners With Four-ish Ingredients:

And also What To Do With Baked Tofu!

This is a dinner that I made specifically to pair with the baked tofu from Monday, and one that we make all the time. We love Thai food, and Thai green curry is something that I order almost every time I go to a Thai restaurant.

Curry, though, can take some time to simmer and build flavors. I love doing that BUT definitely only on weekends. Weekdays aren't the time to add little pinches of this and that or be dealing with whole lemongrass and jalapenos, nope. So THIS Thai Curry is the polar opposite in terms of effort: Vegetables, coconut milk, green curry paste. Full stop, done and done.

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Easy Baked Tofu

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Hello and welcome to your Monday! I made us the easiest marinated baked tofu bites ever.

File this one in your "things to make all the time" list of fave recipes. 

This, my friends, is baked tofu. We make some version of tofu two or more times per week, and even more since both kids started eating solid foods. Jay and I both eat meat, but the meat in our food system is, let's say, dicey at best. We try to buy lots of local meat, and with that comes a higher food cost. SO, we offset that by eating vegetarian several days per week, so that when we do eat meat we feel good about it while not completely going broke on fancy groceries.

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Cauliflower Adobo {vegan}

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Adobo Cauliflower Rice Bowl: A perfect dinner, comin' atcha! One of our favorite vegan cauliflower recipes is here for all of our weeknight dinner needs. This is a vegan Filipino adobo sauce with seared cauliflower that makes the most delicious 30 minute vegan dinner!

silver skillet of cauliflower adobo topped with green onions.

We are always on the hunt for light and/or vegetarian dinners, and this one kept popping up on my Instagram several weeks ago. I'm a huge fan of Chicken Adobo, a soy/vinegar Filipino dish. This vegetarian adobo version features cauliflower as the main ingredient and is different + much lighter.

The sauce here is suuuuuper umami and bright from the vinegar, which I love. There's some sugar here as well, and I love how pungent the sauce gets after it simmers a little bit.

The method here is so simple: sear some cauliflower for tons of flavor, then simmer it in the adobo sauce for a few minutes until it's cooked. The whole dish is done in 30 minutes, maybe less, and YES PLEASE extra sauce all over some rice you'll serve this.

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Chinese Ground Beef and Zucchini

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Perfect for summer garden zucchini or year round, these Chinese ground beef and zucchini bowls are SO good. Quick and easy, make-your-own-takeout style, and who doesn't love a rice bowl? No one is the answer.

This recipe was first published in June 2019 and was last updated February 2021.

Oh hey, easy dinners that light up my life.

Beef and Zucchini Rice Bowls

Are bowls over, or are we still good with everything we make going in shallow bowls with lots of toppings? Please say bowls aren't over.

These particular bowls are exceptionally delicious. We're working with a yummy brown sauce that comes together so quickly thanks to a Microplane grater that eliminates chopping of teeny things AND can get little kids involved.

Beef and Zucchini Rice Bowls

Then, we have ground beef, zucchini from your summer garden (or, like, the store), and crunchy water chestnuts mainly because I adore them. This is one of those "regular" meals that is also highly flavorful and a perfect weeknight dinner.

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Weeknight Korean Chicken Rice Bowls

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Crispy Korean chicken with a super delicious sweet soy sauce! These easy rice bowls are the perfect kid-friendly weeknight meal.

Weeknight Korean Rice Bowls are simple to make and have tons of flavor in just half an hour.

Today! Another (not planned this way) bowl inspired by one of my favorite bloggers - this time Jessica @ How Sweet Eats. I got her new cookbook around Christmastime last year, and have loved so many recipes that I've tried so far. The one that I've made over and over and over and OVER again is the Korean Beef Bowls. They are SO good, but since we tend to not eat a ton of beef I wanted to try a chicken version instead.

Weeknight Korean Rice Bowls are simple to make and have tons of flavor in just half an hour.

If anything, the chicken version is better than the original. That's because of the cooking method. The chicken gets sliced before cooking, then tossed in flour and verrrrry gently fried quickly in some not-too-hot oil. The chicken gets golden brown, we toss it with a super simple Korean-inspired sauce. Done!

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Spicy Peanut Chopped Salad

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MEAL PREP THIS FOR SURE. 

Spicy Peanut Sauce with red cabbage chopped salad. Perfect for meal prepping!

Alternative Title: The Time Beck Discovered Chow Mein Noodles and Now That's All She Wants To Eat. 

And honestly, who can blame her? This spicy peanut chopped salad is one of my favorite things to do with the Spicy Peanut Sauce I posted on Monday. We use it in hot and cold dishes which allows it to taste super different aka behave like two sauces aka two for one aka measure twice cut once? I don't know.

I posted on Monday. We use it in hot and cold dishes which allows it to taste super different aka behave like two sauces aka two for one aka measure twice cut once? I don't know.

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Perfect Spicy Peanut Sauce

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Ok so here is a five minute doohickey that you can make today and eat all week. PROMISE.

We're starting our week with a sauce! An epic sauce. A wonderful sauce. A spicy peanut sauce that we make in the blender in five minutes and slather all over our lives, not sorry at all about that.

I think most people have categories of food that they eat almost weekly, and sometimes find it a struggle to eat foods that they know/like/can cook but with different flavors. We might always do a veg/chicken/rice meal, a pasta meal, a main dish salad, etc. But those meals can be totally different each week, which I like because I have a list of about ten thousand favorite foods, and I want to eat them all all the time.

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Easy Chicken Curry with Spinach and Tomatoes

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I'm SUPER into curry.

When I was in high school in Tokyo there was a chain of Indian restaurants called Samrat. They had a lunch special that high schoolers could afford, and it was SUCH a treat to be able to go there and try some curries with rice and naan. It was the first time I had much experience with curry outside of curry chicken salad or similar southern foods, and one of my favorite memories of high school - of all things to fixate on in Japan.

Now, one million years later, I spend some weekends making curries with tons of spices, simmered for hours that stink up the house in the best possible way. Or I make this: a chicken curry with just seven ingredients that comes together in under an hour - way less if you happen to have leftover shredded chicken on hand.

Curry in under an hour is mainly my jam with two kids and a bunch of jobs and dogs that eat through walls. Slow-simmering things aren't as common in my kitchen as I'd like them to be, unfortunately.

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Crispy Tofu Rice Bowls with Brussels Sprouts

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I have sprouts on the brain, apparently.

If you follow along on Instagram you'll know that one of my most recent posts was these Parmesan Brussels that rock my world and make for a really yummy weeknight side dish. You also might remember that last year we made Momofuku's Brussels with Fish Sauce Vinaigrette at the recommendation of my friend Emily, which was one of my favorite recipes of the entire year.

So "one of my favorite," in fact, that I decided to turn them into a full meal because the vinaigrette is just so delicious. It has a fish sauce base (I use this one because I see it everywhere but people also like the Red Boat brand), which is admittedly funky, but really delicious once the sauce comes together, and not fishy at all. The punchy tangy/sweet/umami flavor of the vinaigrette soaks into the crispy tofu and Brussels, and all is right with the world.

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Marinated Thai Steak Bites

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Happy first day of school! For public school kids in our area. Not anyone in my house or most people reading this, but happy Monday anyway! Let's eat some beef. 

Since school is starting now-ish, I've been working on some new dinners that are quick, easy, and delicious. This comes from my obsession with kid sleep - they need to sleep more than they do, they can't sleep until they eat, dinner can't take five hours to make, that kind of thing. Tons of sleep for kids yields better moods and better focus in school plus more time in the evenings for grownups, so once the dirty work of getting small people to sleep is done I really only see benefits to the situation. 

But we've got to eat early enough to make it happen! Enter, easy Thai steak bites. They cook way quicker than a whole steak and don't require resting time, and while they marinate you make the rest of dinner - in this case, rice and raw veggies that get a quick slaw treatment with lime juice and salt. Then, the steak bites cook for maybe five minutes total, and dinner is ready! 

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