Three Takeout Classics You Can Make Better at Home

Yeah, we haven't added Wow. Yes. That's all I got to say about that. Now, before you pull out your phone and you hit that takeout delivery app, I just want you to pause for a second because I have three recipes for you that are all takeout classics that are going to hit those flavors that you're craving, but they're slightly reinvented to be a little fresher, a lot more flavorful, so you're left feeling much more satisfied than spending your hard-earned money on takeout. So, I'm starting off with one of the most comforting takeout dishes of all time, Chinese wantton soup, which in many ways is overlooked considering in American Chinese cuisine, it's always served as a starter to the main dishes. But trust me when I say that this wantton soup is

definitely the main event. I've been super inspired by my recent collab with dumpling expert Maryanne Chang. And the filling all starts with some zucchini or summer squash, which is abundant right now. And I'll also need some serious aromatics to enhance this broth. Oh, this is so cool. This is the first time we've successfully grown ginger. This right here is young ginger. Of course, it would mature if we left it in. But the aromatics we're going to get from both the ginger root plus the ginger stock for this soup broth is going to be incredible. And to bulk up this soup a bit, I'm going to need some greens. So, I'm just picking off the outer leaves of this nappa cabbage. And I'll give these

little chive patches a fresh haircut. Now, Maryanne said this recipe was developed by her family when they were overwhelmed with squash in the garden, which is very relevant to anyone who has grown squash or zucchini before. I'm always looking for creative uses, and this certainly is one of my new favorites. I'll grate all the squash and lightly salt it to help pull out the moisture, and I'll set it aside. And for the filling, I'm using ground chicken, which is nice and light, but I would imagine ground pork or even beef would work great as well. I'll finally chop all of the chives, dump them in the bowl. Then I'll squeeze out as much moisture as possible from the squash so

my wanttons aren't soggy. I'll add that to the mixture and I'll simply season it with some sesame oil, a little salt and pepper, and I'll give everything a nice mix. All right, so this is finished. And Maryanne blew my mind with just how simple the filling is, but just how refined and delicious it can be. I'm going to roll the wontons once I get the stock done. So, I'm just going to let it sit at room temp. Now, a classic wonton soup broth is very simple at its core. We're not building some 48 hour ramen broth here, but we still want it to be super flavorful and super delicious, which we can accomplish pretty quickly.

I'm going to start with these babies right here, my secret weapon. These are some reduced roasted chicken stock cubes. I made a full video on this, and mine are fairly reduced, like a bullion cube. So, I'm just going to use two of them. Of course, we need some water. Again, I'm just looking for about four servings here. I would say that should do it. This is really the secret weapon right here. Young ginger is one of my favorite ingredients ever. And I'm just so excited that we finally, after a few years of trying different methods, throwing the ginger right into the ground was the way to go.

I'm going to save some for the curry after this. And everything is just so aromatic and can all be used. So, I'll dump in those leaves. I'll cut off the roots and just bash release that flavor. Pop it in. I'm actually going to save these stems for the curry paste. I'll throw an entire clove of garlic in there. Again, just building quick aromatic flavor. And finally, I've got these mushrooms right here. Dehydrated shiakees. Just released this video on growing shiakees at home on logs. These I will use all winter long for all of my Asian inspired soups. Now, I will season this up a little bit later, but I'm just going to pop the lid

on there. Let all those flavors infuse. And in the meantime, I'm going to fold my wonton. Just grab a little water bowl. I'll grab a tray. Pop some flour on there. The wonton wrappers when they sit, they get a little soggy and they'll start to stick to the surface. So, you want that flower protector. See, they should be defrosted. Yeah. Beautiful. I love how they can come back to life from frozen. So, well, always nice to just cover them with a damp towel. And we'll roll. Now, a great little trick is you take like a full stack of these. Marianne taught me this. And just give it a quick dip in the water.

Everything's wet now. Now, you don't have to individually wet each wrapper. And you can go as simple as possible. Just dollop some of this chicken in there. Fold over into a triangle. Don't over stuff or you'll run into some issues. Boom. That is a simple but effective wonton. We'll lay that down. Level two. Still very simple. Put some filling in there. fold over into your same triangle with the corners and then just fold over. That's like the crown shape. Obviously, that's an extra step, but totally up to you. So, I'm going to roll a bunch of these. And the beautiful thing I've been figuring out about wanttons or dumplings is that they store so well. You can freeze them. If you want to skip all of this, you can buy

frozen dumplings and throw those in your soup. They're going to be delicious. But it is nice to just spend a little time, make a bunch, and then have them meal prep for the next few weeks. So, the broth has been cooking for about an hour, which is plenty of time to infuse all that yummy flavor. I'm going to strain out about half of the broth into a smaller pot because I'm only making two portions right now. And the broth is very aromatic, but it needs some seasoning. So, I'm just going to add a few spoons of soy sauce, a few spoons of Chinese cooking wine, a little salt, and finally just a hit of some sugar, which is fairly common for wantton soup broth. Then, I'll pop in

about 8 to 10 chicken won. Good for two portions. And they really only take about 3 to 4 minutes to cook on a gentle boil. So, in the meantime, I'll slice up my nappa cabbage. And I will spoon a few of those rehydrated shiitake mushrooms in, which are totally edible and delicious. Then, just 1 minute before the wanttons are done, I'll throw in that cabbage to blanch. And I'm ready to serve. All right, did it. This is like my new favorite thing ever. M. Smells good. Yum. So hot. I've only ever had, you know, classic Chinese takeout want soup. This is a little bit upscale.

It's a little bit lighter. So fresh tasting. The wontons to me are like the most special little treat. I almost have been enjoying this more than ramen noodles because you get the noodle texture, but then you get this package inside. That's to me. This is way more filling, too. Yeah. It's like super light and filling at the same time. Those types of meals I love. You can really literally customize it however you want. That's what I've been doing. You kind of meal prep the dumplings and then I've just been making different types of soups. You can make ramen broth.

Like a coconut curry broth would be good with these in it. Interesting. I mean, they'd be good fried, too. Yeah, having the dumplings around is just a game changer. Now, before we get into the next recipe, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Our Place, which makes some of my favorite kitchen wear I've ever used. And their new Titanium Pro cookware line is an absolute game changer. Now, what makes these pots and pans so special is the technology. They're made of a fully clad triply construction, but rather than applying a chemical non-stick coating, they press on a textured titanium pattern to the interior cooking surface. So, not only do you get that same amazing heat

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first purchase. All right, we're back in the garden to harvest some goodies for a chicken jirro. And I don't know about you, but when it comes to picking takeout, Greek food is a cuisine that I deeply crave. But I do find that the Greek restaurants around me are just all right. So, I end up not ordering them often, which is why I wanted to develop a recipe that was simple enough to recreate on a weekly basis while getting those delicious flavors in. And part of this recipe includes a really simple salad, so I grabbed some cucumbers, a bunch of ripe tomatoes, and finally some fresh basil. Now, this Jurro sandwich starts off with marinating some chicken thighs. These are bone in, skin on, but

to make the slicing a bit easier and the cooking a little quicker, I'm just going to debone them. And I'll just throw those bones into a stock. And for the marinade, I'll zest about half a lemon, then squeeze in the juice of the entire lemon, and then I'll add in equal parts olive oil. And I've got some dried oregano, which I'll sprinkle in, and then season with some salt and pepper. And this is not just a marinade. That's the trick here. I'll first dump about half of the mixture into a container, which I'll be using for a dressing as well. And if you chop your chicken up into little pieces and skewer them, you'd have a nice chicken slovaki. But I'm going to let my thighs marinate

whole for at least an hour. But if you do plan accordingly, let them go overnight so that lemon juice has time to tenderize the chicken. And to accompany this chicken, I'm making a quick salad. So, I chopped up my cucumber into some nice chunky pieces, sliced up all my tomatoes, ripped up some basil, and I would have preferred some nice salty feta, but all I had in the fridge was some parmesan. So, I grated some strips of that in, then hit it with that dressing/marinade. And I'll let that sit while I prepare the flatbreads. And of course, you could totally buy some store-bought pita or flatbreads, but you know, that's not my style. This my overnight pizza dough recipe, which is in the description below. And I formed a bunch of little

dough balls, which I've been proofing, and I'll be taking those out to the grill along with my chicken. Now, as those pieces of chicken are grilling away, I'm going to roll out some flatbreads. And I'm using a rolling pin to get them pretty thin since I want to wrap this entire sandwich up. And I'll lay the dough on the other side of the grill and just let them cook for about 2 minutes aside until they bubble up nicely and are perfectly cooked through. And just so you know, if you take the exact same dough recipe with the same exact dough ball and just roll them out slightly thicker than the flatbreads, if you throw one of those in a pizza oven or a really hot preheated oven, you can get some really nice

fluffy pita pockets to stuff this sandwich versus wrapping the sandwich. It's really up to you. But I do love how these thin flatbreads give you a little stretch so you can wrap everything up in a beautiful little package. I load in my chicken, add on my chopped salad, and I made this spicy relish by simply adding some bread and butter pickles that I jarred up, some pickled peppers, plus a little bit of habanero hot sauce to a food processor. processor and I blend it all up, which is exactly what this sandwich needed. That's a nice wrap. Look at that. M. That seasoning is Yeah. The chicken is so flavorful. It's so simple, but when you char grill it, it gets so much flavor.

Yeah. It smelled so good when you were cooking it. Mhm. We've been recipe testing this a lot. So, I've been eating this chicken for a while and trying different methods. I've tried it in a pan many times. Can't beat getting grilled. There's nothing like the charred grill on it. It brings out so much like dynamic flavor. Yeah. And I think that the acid in the marinade helps with the tenderness of it. I feel like sometimes a grilled thigh can be a little tough. This right here, just got a new vacuum sealer, which we're very excited about over here at HQ. This I'm going to push a little bit longer. Like it's just such an easy marinade. And you let it sit in the fridge for a few days. I'm testing

to see. I'll comment in right here how long uh we can push it. And it's so good. Mhm. Absolutely lovely. I'd pay $16 for this. Cooper's about to get one for free. Oh, hell yeah. Now, the final dish I'm making is one of the most popular takeout dishes probably of all time, a Thai coconut curry. In this case, I'm making a green curry with the delicious bounty of aromatics I have available in the garden. And because the first two dishes were meat-based, I'm making this one veggie heavy, which definitely isn't a problem right now in September. I'm picking a bunch of peppers, some eggplant, and a few more

summer squash. For this homemade curry paste, I'm pretty much using all garden goodies, plus some coriander and cumin seeds. And of course, this would traditionally get pounded out in a mortar and pestle, which would take way too much effort and way too much time that I just don't have. So, I'm going to be using my food processor to grind this up as fine as my machine will let me go. So, I'm definitely not going to get the same smoothness that I would from a traditional curry paste, but those flavors will certainly be there. And the last bit of prep I have to do is just slicing up my veggies. And I'm going to go super rustic with the chopping of these veggies so I have these nice chunks throughout the curry.

All right, so we have everything prepped. I'm going to get my pan on mediumigh heat. Now, what I have on the back burner here is just a pot of water coming up to a boil. And there's a few really key steps to making an above average coconut curry. Getting those flavors that you would get from takeout, you need to nail down a few techniques. So, everything's prepped. I've got my veggies. I've got my curry paste. First thing I'm going to do is get a good bit of that curry paste. I wouldn't even call it a paste, curry grind. I'm going to get that frying off. And already the aromomas are out of control. The first key step is frying up this curry paste.

This is going to take the rawness out of the curry paste. It will round everything out and of course just add a lot of dynamic flavor when you fry all of these aromatics. Oh, smells so good. You can see some browning at the bottom of the pan. We're going to delaze everything with coconut milk, so don't worry about that. And when things are smelling really, really good, you know you've developed level one of flavor. All right, I have some full fat coconut milk, and I'm going to dump in about half of the can. Now, this is the next key step. We're delazing the bottom of the pan, but coconut milk is like, I don't know, 70% fat. So, we're going to

evaporate a lot of the water right now, leaving just the fat to fry the paste even more. You can see right here it's starting to reduce, but we're not there yet. And then boom. You can see we made it. There's no white milky color anymore. That is pure coconut fat that we're frying in. So, it's an extra step. It takes a little time, but we're building layers of flavor. All right. So, now what we're going to do is hit it with the rest of the coconut milk, and that will give it its creaminess. This is optional, but I am going to go in with one of these chicken stock cubes. You can just go in with regular chicken stock, or you could just use a little bit of water. There's plenty of flavor

in there. It doesn't necessarily need it, but I like it. So, while this is melting and coming together, I've got my veggies here. Just going to dump them in a pot of hot water. They'll blanch in there for just a few minutes to cook through. And then when they're done, they go directly into this goodness. All right, so this is looking great. We haven't added any seasoning, so obviously it needs salt. Going with some pepper, little bit of fish sauce, which is optional. If I had some lime, I would add it. I've got new citrus trees growing, so I'll have endless citrus soon. Mhm. Wow, that's perfect. Now, these veggies have been blanching for like 4 minutes. And what I like about

this is there's plenty of fat in here, so I like adding these nice, clean, perfectly tender, blanched veggies instead of cooking them in more fat. Doesn't really need it. And it also just simplifies the process. Boom. Beautiful garden veggies. Finally. It's not over. I actually had some Thai basil from the garden. Trying to get real authentic. You can use regular basil. You can skip it. And then more cilantro. Again, not needed, but can't hurt. And then we'll just give this a mix. Wow. That's it. You don't want to overcook those herbs. Done. And we'll serve it up

with some rice I got going in the rice cooker. Now, nothing I make is necessarily authentic. I just try to use what I have in my garden and apply good technique to get delicious food. M blanch veggies are very underrated. Like that eggplant was perfect. It's not too spicy. Could have used a few more Thai chilis actually. That's awesome. What I love the most is the balance between the super flavorful, fatty coconut curry and the very clean, perfectly tender fresh veggies. They work together perfectly. And of course, any veggies will work. Actually, now that I think about it, I have so many

cherry tomatoes coming in right now to the garden, and I was going to put them in there, but I forgot. All right, I'm going to finish my lunch. Hopefully, you enjoyed. If you want more recipes, click right here.