I like getting recipes out of magazines. I absolutely love how you can find a million variations of any recipe on the internet (customized to diet restrictions and ingredients on hand), but there’s something about being discovering recipes on paper and cutting them out that I can’t leave behind.
Recently I did one of my (yearly?) magazine clean outs. I have a process – when I get a magazine, I read through it and fold the page corner of the recipes I’m interested in. Then at some point when I’ve accumulated a bunch of magazines, I go through and tear/x-acto out most of the pages with corners folded. I say “most” because at this point I start weeding out/skipping recipes that I’m obviously never going to make, whether it’s because they have ingredients I’ll have a hard time buying or because I already have something similar I like.
After I’ve accumulated multiple rounds of these cut outs (this process is never-ending haha), I go through the pile and weed them out again, being more picky and also considering what mike may or may not like to eat/make. I also cut and tape the instructions to the images of the food if they’re not already on the same sheet – I keep my recipes in a binder with clear pockets and prefer it on one side of one page.
Finally, I go through those taped and thoroughly combed through recipes and put them into the clear pockets for 3-ring-binders. I try to group similar recipes together (pastas together, salads, desserts, etc). Then these go into a temporary binder, with the first half being savory, and the second half sweet. I like to keep my un-tested recipes in this temporary binder so it’s easy to find something new to try out. Once we try the recipe *and* decide we like it, it gets moved into one of our permanent recipe binders for future reference (more on this system another day haha).
When I first started this post, I had no idea it was going to turn into this long-winded description of my recipe system. 😂
So now, here’s the recipe I used out of Clean Eating Magazine. It felt pretty authentic to how we cook Chinese dishes in my family (especially with the corn starch). The main thing I’ve never added to a dish like this is the chicken broth. The serving size is pretty accurate in that this made enough for 2 dinners for me and Mike.


