Day 14: Mac & Cheese, Chicken Lettuce Wrap

I felt that I haven't been eating enough fresh vegetables since quarantine started, so I had this Thai-inspired chicken lettuce wrap for dinner a few days ago. The lettuce was bought on a grocery run a few days prior to this, sometime in the last week of March. I say Thai-inspired because I was going for a Thai chicken lettuce wrap but I feel like I didn't really get there. I didn't have ginger, for one, which I think is pretty crucial. Regardless, it was good! And vegetables were consumed.

This recipe serves two.

Ingredients

Sauce

• 1/4 cup sweet chili sauce (ideally more, but this is all I had)
• 1 heaping tablespoon peanut butter (I used smooth, but crunchy is okay)
• 2–3 tablespoons soy sauce
• Some cilantro, chopped
• Fried chili (I used some by Laoganma) to taste

Chicken

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into small cubes
• 5–6 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, diced
• 2 medium carrots, grated
• 2–3 tablespoons sesame oil
• Lettuce (I did 8 pieces)

Steps

1. Make the sauce by mixing the ingredients together.
2. Sauté the chicken, garlic, onion, and carrots with sesame oil in a pan.
3. When the chicken is mostly cooked, add the sauce and cook to incorporate.
4. Wrap a spoonful of chicken in lettuce and enjoy!

After seeing this, you might ask the same question that Vamsi asked me, which is: "Are we having any sort of carbohydrate with this?"

The answer was no, because we had mac & cheese for lunch, which is basically just carbohydrates and cheese. We each had a package of Trader Joe's white cheddar mac & cheese, simply prepared according to the stovetop instructions with a bit of butter, milk, grated parmesan(another new addition to the fridge!), onion salt, and lemon pepper added.

This is one of my favorite things to get from Trader Joe's and I had quite a few boxes taking up a good amount of space in my quarantine pantry. I'm down to three now, only one of which is a new, intact package. I thought the other two were new too, but I think they might have been salvaged from my dorm when we all fled in a hurry. It seems like they were opened, half-eaten, and resealed with a glue gun, and I also think there's only dry macaroni in there and no cheese powder. No matter! I'll use them as boxes of macaroni if need be.