Asian Lettuce Wraps

Asian Lettuce Wraps

Recipe from Our Best Bites

Yall know me, I love any sort of Chinese food.

I actually don’t know if lettuce wraps are Chinese food, but I love them anyway!

I was craving some lettuce wraps, and found a recipe I wanted to try from Our Best Bites!

These are SO good! My mom loved them so much that I actually made them two days in a row!

Enjoy!

Note: this recipe is a bit time consuming. These will probably take 45-60 minutes to make! My advice is to be organized and gather all your ingredients before you start cooking! :)

Ingredients

· 2 tsp canola oil

· 4 cloves garlic, minced

· 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

· 1 lb ground chicken* -I used ground turkey

· 3 ounces mushrooms, finely chopped (about 8 small mushrooms)

· 1/2 tsp kosher salt

· 4 C bagged coleslaw mix or thinly shredded cabbage

· 1 8oz can sliced water chestnuts, drained, rinsed, and finely minced

· 1/2 C thinly sliced green onions

· 4 Tbs soy sauce

· 1 tsp sesame oil

· 1 lemon, zested and juiced (about 3-4 Tbs juice)

· 1/2-1 tsp sriracha or other hot sauce

· 1/3 C roughly chopped cilantro

· 1-2 heads iceberg lettuce

Here’s what you do!

*To prepare your own ground chicken, cut boneless skinless chicken breasts into large chunks and pulse in a food processor until ground.

Dipping/Drizzling Sauce

· 4

· 4 Tbs soy sauce

· 4 Tbs rice vinegar

· 3 Tbs water

· 2 tsp honey

· 1-2 tsp finely minced fresh ginger

Heat a very large skillet to medium-high heat on the stove top. When hot, add vegetable oil and then garlic and ginger. Saute for about 30 seconds, until fragrant, and then add ground chicken, chopped mushrooms, and kosher salt. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring often, until chicken is cooked through. (*At this point, sometimes I have some extra liquid in the pan from the chicken. If it’s quite a bit, I tilt the pan and spoon it out so the chicken can cook and not boil.) Add cabbage/coleslaw, water chestnuts, and green onions. Cook for about 2 minutes, until cabbage starts to wilt. Add soy sauce, sesame oil, the zest from the lemon and the lemon juice, and hot sauce to taste. Remove from heat and stir in cilantro.

To prepare dipping sauce, combine all ingredients and whisk to combine.

To serve, carefully remove the individual leaves from the head of lettuce. (The closer you get to the center, the easier it becomes!) Place chicken mixture in the leaves and serve with sauce.

Yield: about 5 C chicken mixture. Makes 14-16 lettuce wraps.

Yall enjoy! These are delicious!

Restaurant Review: Mellow Mushroom

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to post on this blog every week. Well, I’ve already failed, but I can keep trying.

Since I’ve been pretty busy lately, and I’ve been living off of bowls of gluten free oatmeal, chex cereal, tacos, food my parents give me when I go home, and those baked taquitos I keep talking about.

But, a resolution is a resolution. And I’m going try to stick with it.

So, instead of a recipe, I’ll give you a review.

The other day, my boyfriend and I decided to go out to eat in the middle of the week (not exactly a common occurrence, considering we almost never eat out…) and we went to our favorite Thai restaurant right here in Denton, but it was closed. They were doing maintenance and had to close it down that night. They opened a Mellow Mushroom almost right next to it, and I had heard from a friend that they had gluten free pizza, so we decided to give it a try.

It was a really fun atmosphere! They seemed to have a huge beer/bar selection, but we didn’t try anything from the bar because, like I said earlier, it was in the middle of the week. Our server was nice, but his service was pretty slow. He did not seem very knowledgeable about the gluten free menu, so I was a little nervous to start eating. We ordered the vegetarian gluten free pizza.

It was really good! The crust tasted like normal pizza, and it didn’t fall apart. One thing I noticed about the pizza was that the vegetables were different on almost every slice. They need to evenly distribute the vegetables over the pizza. It didn’t bother me, but I thought it was pretty funny. :)

It was really tasty, so me and Daniel were feeling pretty good. We thought we found a new restaurant to eat at!
When we got the check, we were a little annoyed. It was around $23.00 for one medium vegetarian pizza.

And I understand, we would pay that much at another restaurant, but at least at other places we would get two entrees.
Even though it was good, I certainly do not think that pizza was worth over $20.

If you are not a poor college student, and you are allergic to gluten, I would definitely recommend the place. It was really good, but at this point in my life, I cannot order a pizza for that much money.

It was fun while it lasted Mellow Mushroom, unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be coming back any time soon.