Asian Fusion Recipes

Pan Fried Tofu with Thai Peanut Sauce

April 8, 2021 by Lindsay 2 Comments

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.

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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Hibachi Sweet Carrots

January 28, 2021 by Lindsay 5 Comments

Just like the kind you find on hibachi plates, Japanese sweet carrots to level up your homemade Japanese fusion food! Make these sweet glazed carrots a meal with my favorite hibachi steak, hibachi shrimp, and hibachi vegetables!

More hibachi! This time my favorite little nibbly side dish, the sweet carrots that come on the side of hibachi meals, mainly of the takeout variety.

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15 Minute Hibachi Steak

January 26, 2021 by Lindsay 2 Comments

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.

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

May 13, 2020 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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!

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

April 21, 2020 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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

February 26, 2020 by Lindsay 1 Comment

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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7-Ingredient Kimchi Fried Rice

February 19, 2020 by Lindsay 2 Comments

Let's make the unbearable (not to me) story of why we're making this suuuuuuper short and get to the buttery, spicy goodness that is kimchi fried rice.

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Chicken Larb Lettuce Wraps + Minty Cucumber Salad

January 7, 2020 by Lindsay 2 Comments

This Thai chicken larb recipe 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.

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

August 15, 2019 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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}

August 1, 2019 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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

July 29, 2019 by Lindsay 4 Comments

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}

July 10, 2019 by Lindsay 5 Comments

This recipe was last updated February 2021.

Cauliflower Adobo: A perfect dinner, comin' atcha! One of our favorite vegan cauliflower recipes is here for all of our weeknight dinner needs.

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

June 10, 2019 by Lindsay 1 Comment

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.

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.

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

April 23, 2019 by Lindsay 4 Comments

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.

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

April 17, 2019 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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

April 15, 2019 by Lindsay 7 Comments

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

March 13, 2019 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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

February 25, 2019 by Lindsay 2 Comments

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

August 20, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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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Spicy Crab Salad Poke

June 11, 2018 by Lindsay 13 Comments

Imitation crab salad poke bowl with our own spicy crab salad sushi and homemade poke bowl sauce! This dish has mostly storebought ingredients with a few quick things to prepare for extra fun and special weeknight sushi bowls at home.

...what can I say except, you're welcome?

We've been watching a lot of Moana around here lately. Which is PERFECT for this island fusion bowl to start your week, theme movie + dinner totally unplanned.

Obviously it goes without saying that the Moana-obsessed toddler in this house would turn her nose up in disgust at the lack of only crackers in this bowl, but it's developmentally appropriate to be a total ass about diverse foods at this age, so I forgive her.

People over 2, however, you will adore this. It's an addition to one of the most popular recipes on the site, this spicy crab salad. I know there are many that turn their nose up at anything with fake crab and mayo calling itself sushi, and that's fine. But-however-also, this stuff is popular for good reason: it's delicious, and so simple to make on your own.

I love spicy crab ANYTHING when we order sushi, right next to my all-raw authentic fare, but the ingredients are so simple and cheap that it seems silly to save spicy crab for special sushi nights.

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Asian Fusion Recipes

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