Making Meals with Meka! is live!

Hey guys, welcome to my live. I'm starting a little early just to give you guys some behind the scenes. I'm going to chop some things on camera. This is going to save me time during the live because I would like everything to be as efficient as possible when I'm teaching you guys how to make this delicious dish. Chicken lettuce wraps are on the menu so I'm just doing some prep work before we are officially ready to go on. So if you are here right now, I'm a little bit early. The live is supposed to start at 7. It's almost 7. So I'm just doing some some things that y'all don't really need to see on camera which is dicing an onion. This way I can prepare myself for the tears if I have any tears. I am dicing a regular yellow onion right now for these chicken lettuce wraps. The chicken lettuce wraps are going to be absolutely delicious. So welcome to my live. This is making meals with Mika. Happy Wednesday. Happy hump day. Today on the menu is chicken lettuce wraps. Chicken lettuce wraps are absolutely delicious. Most of us have had them. If we go to you know major restaurants, any type of you know some sushi restaurants has chicken lettuce wraps on there and basically what chicken lettuce wraps are is a chicken mixture right. It's a chicken mixture and the mixture will have chicken or maybe some mushrooms, some onions. We're going to put some water chestnuts in here and it's going to be in a delicious sauce and you're going to cook the chicken. I mean you're going to eat the chicken mixture in a lettuce wrap. So this is a naturally low carb high protein recipe. I am going to be going in and out like you know reading the comments. Hi everyone. Thank you. Welcome to my live. Yes I absolutely love cooking. All right cooking is what I absolutely love to do. I've been cooking since I was eight years old in my grandmother's kitchen making like homemade cakes and caramels and just delicious food for the soul and I am just very blessed and honored that I could just do this full time. So today we are making chicken lettuce wraps. Let's get into it. For this recipe this is what you're going to need. You're going to need some chicken. All right these are boneless skinless chicken thighs. I'm always going to give you alternatives. Okay this is my recipe but you can take this recipe and make it your own. You love baking. I'm not a good baker but I am trying. These are boneless skinless chicken thighs. These are to me best for this recipe. They're going to be juicy. They are going to be meaty and they're going to cook up nicely. So a pound of boneless skinless chicken thighs. I have cut up an onion nice and diced and I also have some green onions. We're going to throw these in a little bit later and I have some fresh garlic. Okay so this is a very vegetable forward recipe. I have my garlic. We're going to put in some sliced water chestnuts. I don't know if you guys have ever had water chestnuts but these are those little crispy bits that you get like when you're ordering like Chinese stir fry or things like that. It adds a really nice texture. Oh thank you. Thank you for saying you like my earrings. I appreciate it. The water chestnuts adds a really nice texture to this to this dish and we also need some bean sprouts. Now bean sprouts are not readily available everywhere. I got these bean sprouts at an Asian store. These are beautiful beautiful sprouts. We are going to need these in this recipe. If you're tuning in we are making Asian chicken lettuce wraps. This is going to be a beautiful delicious one pot low carb recipe and I have my wok here. Okay so let's chop up this chicken. Now I always have two cutting boards for my food. I have one for my meat and one for my fruits and vegetables. I really really really really urge you guys if you're cooking at home have two separate cutting boards. One for your meat one for your chicken. So here are the chicken thighs. We are going to get these nice and chopped. Now typically I really wouldn't wear gloves when I'm cooking because I like to feel the meat and everything. However because I want to stay on camera the whole entire time I am going to wear gloves so I don't have to go off camera to wash my hands. So I'm going to wear gloves and we're going to chop this chicken. Now this chicken has gotten room temperature. It is really good to make sure your meats any protein that you're cooking make sure they are room temperature prior to cooking them. That is going to I'm sorry guys that is going to ensure that your chicken is going to be nice and juicy and as you can see we're going we're going to cut we're going to dice these but you see the little lines in the chicken we're going to cut with the lines and then we're going to go opposite of the lines and that's just going to make sure that our chicken is nice and tender. Be careful when you're chopping room temperature chicken because it can be very slippery. So make sure you really do have a really nice sharp knife and I'm just going to cut some strips. I'm just going to go in the opposite way. I'm going to show you how big you want this chicken. You want it to be really nice bite-sized pieces. You really don't want large chunks of chicken in these chicken lettuce wraps. Everything should be relatively the same size. So I have a nice dice on the onion that you saw earlier. So I'm going to dice this chicken in the same manner and at the same time I'm going to preheat my wok. If you don't have a wok that's okay you can use a skillet. However this this is enough for four people and the quantity is pretty big so you do want you know a pot or a skillet that's going to be able to hold you know all of the food. So I suggest a wok. If you don't have a wok get something similar to that because we are we want it to be able to hold the capacity of all the food. So this is how big we want our chicken. We want bite-sized pieces. Okay this is going to look just just bite-sized for it to fit inside of our lettuce wraps. Okay so I'm just going through and you guys are seeing me chop these boneless skinless chicken breast. I mean chicken thighs. Now you can use honestly for this recipe you can use any type of meat that you want. If you're not a thigh person and you want breast go ahead use the breast. I'm not going to tell you not to use the breast. If you want to use more of a ground chicken or ground turkey you can do that as well. I like the chicken thighs because they're really tender and it's hard to overcook. It's really hard to overcook chicken thighs right. I feel like you can you can overcook chicken breast because they don't have any fat so they dry out they dry out really easily. But chicken thighs you know you can cook these and the more you cook them the tend the more tender they get. That's why boneless skinless chicken thighs is a really good option when you're making something like this. If you want to make this vegetarian or vegan you absolutely can. So instead of using the chicken breast you're going to use mushroom right. You're going to use mushroom it's going to give you that nice meaty texture that you're looking for but it's vegetarian. You can also use tofu in this dish. Now depending on the type of tofu that you use that's going to change how you cook it okay. I am not an expert at cooking tofu however I do know that it's a great substitute for this. So if you're someone that you use tofu and you're like hey you know I want to use tofu in our recipe go ahead use tofu and then it makes it it makes it vegan and vegetarian. This is a really really great recipe for someone who doesn't have a lot of time to cook. You want your food done quickly and you want something that's very flavorful and you just want something different throughout the night. You know there's there's so many ways that you can cook chicken and after a while you're like oh my gosh I'm so tired like what can I do with this chicken. Having chicken lettuce wraps is a really good way to utilize the chicken and like I said we can make a vegetarian version of this. If you want to use pork I think that this would be delicious with maybe a ground pork. I love pork. I use I eat pork all the time. If you want to take this recipe and use ground meat feel free to use ground meat as well. But this recipe is served so versatile you can pretty much you know put anything in here and it tastes good as long as you are using the basic seasonings that I'm going to teach you. You can pretty much make these lettuce wraps whatever you want to so they can be mushroom lettuce wraps they could be tofu lettuce wraps they could be ground pork lettuce wraps whatever you want. I'm giving you the basics and then you take this recipe and you make it your own and that is a really good thing about cooking right is you just need the basics and once you get the basics down you can flip it turn it reverse it however you want to just to suit your needs. All right so I have a good amount of chicken already cut and believe it or not I'm not going to season the chicken just yet okay I'm not going to season the chicken just yet. This hand is still clean I want you guys to know that. I'm going to move this out of the way I'm going to preheat my wok. Here's the great thing about woks when you are cooking in a wok everything should kind of be stir frying right you don't want it to be boiling or anything like that you want to cook it on a high heat so everything is constantly stir frying. This is why I like the wok for this compared to like a pan or a pot because I can make sure that the temperature is very high and for woks I feel like it it heats up evenly so everything's going to cook it has the high sides everything's going to cook at an even temperature and it's constantly going to be basically stir frying. For this you're going to preheat your wok or preheat any vessel that you're using and you want it to be hot enough that when you put the oil in there it makes that sizzle you guys know what I'm talking about you you want it to be nice and hot when you put the oil in there because we want this chicken to kind of not crisp up but we want it to get you know like a nice firm coating even though we're not going to coat it we still want it to you know get a nice coating once we put it into the skillet so I'm almost done cutting up this chicken you see how long it took me it took me what maybe like well four minutes to cut the chicken and I'm talking to you guys but we have this nice chicken nice pieces I'm gonna put that in the sink I'm going to remove my gloves so no icky fingers how are you guys doing today happy hump day I hope everyone's doing well today just going to rinse my hands real quick in my soapy water there all right so to this we are going to add I want to make sure you guys we're going to add this right here is avocado oil I'm just going to add a little bit okay you see that you remember I said I want it to sizzle that's exactly what I want I want that sizzle this is avocado oil avocado oil is really really good when you're cooking with a wok or anything in high heat is actually one of the best things to use so I know my wok is nice and hot my stove goes from like zero to high zero to ten and it's numbered right so this is I have this at around an eight okay so this is at eight and when we put the chicken in there it's going to give us that beautiful sizzle that's what we're looking for if your chicken does not do that when you put it into your pan it's not hot enough okay we want this to be nice and hot everything's in there put that in the sink put this you want this chicken to be nice and hot okay so it can cook evenly it's going to give us that nice coating that we're looking for okay now it's time to multitask who knows how to multitask oh quick tip if you guys are using this type of cutting board and it slides all over I have a granite countertop and mine slides just take a wet towel put the towel down put the cutting board on top of the towel and it stops it from moving look I just put y'all on the game oh don't worry about it you're gonna get a lot of game during this session and I always keep some some hot water because I have to clean as I go if I don't clean as I go I'll go crazy all right so I still have this on high and we just want our chicken to cook I'm not seasoning it right now I am going to season it in a little bit we just want our chicken to cook okay you guys see that this is chopped up chicken now if you were doing pork grill um I would suggest doing some type of ground pork ground pork in Asian dishes it's absolutely delicious okay um the next vegetables we're going to add in a second we're going to add a chopped onion this is one whole chopped onion this is what I was chopping when you guys joined me we have our green onion I'm not going to chop those just yet but it's time for the garlic we're always going to use some fresh garlic okay so I have my garlic you can go by the amount of garlic that I use or you can use your own so for something like this that's one about one pound of chicken I am going to I'm going to use like five garlic cloves guys I love garlic garlic is my absolute favorite seasoning so I'm going to use a lot but it all balances out right it's not going to be you know too garlicky you just you know just just nothing better than fresh garlic so I have a garbage bowl over there I grew up watching Rachel Ray on the Food Network and I understood why she had a garbage bowl because she was in front of the camera and she didn't want to just keep putting her fingers in like the trash can it it makes perfectly good sense so I have a garlic bowl so I have six cloves of garlic and I am going to I'm going to chop these up and I hope you guys know how to chop garlic you just take it and you smash it and then you just remove the peel and you're just going to chop it while while the cooking while the chicken is cooking I'm going to smash the garlic if you are just tuning in first of all thank you thank you for hanging out with me on Wednesday on this live we are making one of my favorite easy dishes this is chicken lettuce wraps really easy one pan dish it really doesn't have a lot of ingredients we're going to get the flavor perfectly right I have the chicken cooking in the wok and now I am going to I'm going to rough chop the garlic you know I want I want the pieces small enough where they're a nice bite but I don't want them like itty bitty because we just know garlic and Asian cooking is just it's a must so I'm chopping up six cloves of garlic right here okay I have to wash my hands off all right let's season this chicken I know you guys are dying to season the chicken let's season the chicken so we have the chicken and right now we got to get it to smelling good in here too because like unseasoned chicken is not it's not the best flavor so I am using a little kosher salt use whatever salt you like I'm using some kosher salt okay you know whatever your dietary preference is you use the salt how your dietary purposes is I like my food seasoned we're also going to use some black pepper so right now we're just seasoning the chicken that's going in our chicken lettuce wrap I have garlic salt I mean I have salt and black pepper okay just very basic and I am going to use onion I mean garlic powder I love garlic you don't have to put garlic powder in yours because we're using fresh garlic but I am going to put garlic powder in mine because it's absolutely delicious and it's one of my favorite seasonings and already the chicken is smelling better right it just smells better when everything is seasoned so the chicken is almost cooked through it's not 100 cooked through but it's turning white and yes dark meat chicken does turn white okay that's just the the color of it so since the chicken is almost done I'm not going to reduce the heat I'm going to add our next ingredient and the next ingredient is the onion this is one whole yellow onion you can add sweet onion you can add white onion I would not suggest adding red onion to this if you want you know some color maybe but red onion would not be the best in here you want to add an onion that's nice and mild in flavor red onion is it's pretty powerful to me so remember I said you can make this your own make this your own but don't add red onion to this okay we're going to add that nice yellow or white onion because it's going to have a milder flavor and believe it or not guys this is already smelling delicious this is such an easy dish and when you go out to the restaurants and you know it tastes so complicated but really it's really easy we added our onion and now it's time to add the garlic and we're like almost like the half of the way done seriously so the first time I tasted this I was at um I was at you know the major food chain the the the Asian food chain and I had these and I was like oh my gosh these are absolutely delicious this was I mean my kids were young so this was I'm going to say like 15 years ago maybe and I think it was probably the first thing that I had in a lettuce wrap seriously and I was like this is delicious and I just fell in love with it ever since and every time I saw it on the menu I would just try it out but I am one of those people that like when I go to a restaurant and I try something I'm trying to like articulate or trying to like see like not articulate but like pick apart to see what's in there and I'm one of those people that if I taste something once at a restaurant my goal is to go home and try to replicate that and I'm pretty good at it I am pretty good at tasting something once and then going home and replicating that flavor so I've been doing that ever since um ever since then I've been making these ever since then from one taste okay now we have in here we have our chicken we have onion we have garlic another key component in this is ginger I do have fresh ginger but I want to keep this as easy for you guys as possible I don't want you guys to peel the ginger and have to grate the ginger so I have this is jarred ginger it's perfect you can get this from any Asian store any specialty store this is just ginger in a jar I'm putting about a teaspoon in there and you can tell the difference when you don't add it and you add it ginger is a really big staple in Asian cooking I need you to add ginger to these chicken lettuce wraps it's just going to add a little twang a little to make it taste delicious okay we're going to add that and we're just going to let all these flavors become good and acquainted all right while the flavors are becoming acquainted it's time to chop our chestnuts now I already have sliced chestnuts this is strictly for texture because everything in here is going to be kind of soft we have the chicken the onions are cooking the garlic so we need a crunch this is going to add the crunch now I don't put them in here whole like that no way I just dump them all and then I just do like a rough can you guys see that through through the steam I do a rough chop okay so remember I said in the beginning that everything is going to be pretty much the same shape the same size so we don't want these really really big but we do want them big enough it's going to add a really nice texture to these lettuce wraps let's see what else that they have in the can they have like bamboo you know you'll see like canned bamboo can bamboo get the bamboo if you like it they have the little baby corn you have to chop those up really really nicely it's going to change the flavor profile a little bit but you're just going to add something for crunch okay if you don't like the water chestnuts that's fine if you want to add something else in there for crunch like let's just say some celery you can do that I don't see why you couldn't and we're gonna put all this together you guys see how this is coming together like these are almost done I'm not joking and we have been cooking for 25 minutes okay these are almost done we only have we only have a few more ingredients before they are done so cheers to everyone I hope everyone is having a wonderful Wednesday I am having a great Wednesday let me know where you guys are from where are you watching from I see there are people on here let me know where you guys watching from right now I am in the Chicago area so Chi-town that's what that's what representing right now let me guys know where you're from in the comments I would love to to shout you out okay so we see this like we don't this is what we want we don't want any liquid in here okay we want this to be nice and just kind of dry okay here comes the delicious part it's time to make the sauce a couple components all right so we're going to start with sesame oil this is only for flavor you're not cooking anything in here we're not frying anything sesame oil is very very strong oh it's strong this is only only for flavor we're going to add a little bit of sesame oil like that's kind of like a half a teaspoon right for flavor we're also going to add some rice wine vinegar rice wine vinegar we're going to add about a tablespoon of that is very important okay we are going to add some hoisin sauce hoisin sauce is a really thick you see that it's a thick sauce but it's going to add a little sweetness not too it's not as sweet as like a teriyaki sauce but we are going to add the hoisin sauce and that's about I'm going to say about two to three tablespoons okay and it's also going to give it that nice beautiful dark color and then we're going to add of course y'all know we got to add soy sauce I love soy sauce so I'm going to add about two tablespoons of that now I am eyeballing this but you can go ahead and measure it out yourself like I said I've made this a zillion times so I'm eyeballing it oh yeah it's hard this is already it's already smelling done now now that we're on the sauce part right everything is fully cooked we can actually reduce the heat a little bit because now we want this to simmer before we were stir frying now we want it to simmer okay and we're just going to continue to just kind of stir stir this together now you always have to taste you always have to taste your food guys let's just see where we are it's delicious I get so excited every single time I taste this like I haven't made this a zillion times but I mean this is such a great flavor it's not sweet it's not spicy it's just like perfectly mild and beautiful okay so we're just going to let this simmer before we add our last two ingredients I just want to make sure that all those flavors are combining I'm going to sit there and let that simmer in the meantime in between time let's get started on our lettuce oh can y'all still see me I hate being off the camera y'all gonna I'm gonna have to grab the camera for like one second guys I'm sorry so while that's simmering let's do the lettuce okay lettuce so now when you go to the grocery store you'll see like bibb leaf lettuce and things like that that lettuce to me is not strong enough for these right the bibb lettuce even though it's lettuce cups it's very thin and it doesn't hold up to the weight of the filling so I'm using iceberg lettuce and what I did was I took a knife and I just went down the center and I removed the core okay I removed the core and this is what you're left with so to get really nice lettuce pieces you're just gonna go you have to be gentle and you're going to go around and just peel the lettuce off look at that ain't that beautiful you have to be gentle right so you're gonna go around the core peel the lettuce off look at that look at look at this is actually how I do it when I do lettuce wraps for my sandwiches right look at that that would be perfect for a sandwich but today is gonna be for chicken lettuce right and then let's go back in and you're just gonna go around now once it gets towards the middle it starts to get a little tight y'all just stretch it out a little bit but this is where you just have to be very careful you know be very look at that very smooth and we are just removing the lettuce cups and I'll probably chop the ends off you know well look at that look at that perfect lettuce cups and I don't know about you guys but I wash my lettuce right see that I couldn't use that anyway but I'm gonna go around and I'm going to do this until I can't pull any more lettuce from and you have to just come you know stretch it a little bit and that's okay you need to loosen it up because down in the center towards the core it gets tighter which is fine so far I've gotten about like what six or seven off okay and if you have a family of four you might need you know two heads of lettuce it's just me and my boo so we don't need two heads of lettuce and I have all that and don't put it in the sink just yet I have to you got this is just me I have to spray bleach in my sink when I use chicken okay while I'm doing that let's check on the let's check on the wraps I mean let's check on the meat look at that this is almost done and it smells amazing in here so I'm just going to rinse my lettuce in cold water it's rinsing in cold water shaking it and I'm just going to put it over here so it can drain okay let's finish let's finish these these chicken lettuce wraps I am so happy that you guys decided to hang out with me today thank you I appreciate it so we're almost done now the good thing about the lettuce wraps what I like about them is you get a lot of texture okay so we are going to add our sprouts this is a showstopper I love sprouts I love them I love them in ramen I love them on sandwiches they're just delicious okay these are uh mung bean sprouts but you can do like um regular bean sprouts like soy bean sprouts they're going to be a little bit yellow and this is to add crunch and it's also going to add nutrients and things like that if you don't want sprouts and you just want the chicken you don't have to add the sprouts remember I said everything is customizable so it's up to you and I'm just going to gently fold the sprouts in here right and they're just going to get some love give them a little love and we're going to we're adding these towards the very end because we don't want them to get too soft right because they're supposed to add that texture that nice crunch that we like in a chicken lettuce wrap okay so we're going to blend all that let that get mixed together and then we have our green I just love green onions we have our green onions I feel like when it comes to like presentation like green onions are just so cute like who does not like green onions and I'll always just chop the the ends off it's just my preference and then we're going to chop these and I'm going to chop these in a diagonal because I'm fancy okay you don't have to chop them in a diagonal but if you're fancy then chop them in a diagonal and this is how you prove that you're fancy by the way you chopped your green onions okay and because I'm fancy we're chopping them in a diagonal and I chop it all the way down to the bowl and if I was grilling outside I would totally grill these and eat these okay I'm going to turn this up just a little bit now because this is so saucy like this has so much sauce I don't have to make a sauce to go on top but I know you know you you'll see some with like a peanut sauce or a ginger soy sauce or something like that you can add a sauce to this if you want to to me these already have so much juice and you will see when I'm plating I don't need a sauce if anything you might want to add soy sauce at the end if it doesn't have you know enough flavor but you really don't need a sauce for this and then we're going to take our beautiful green onion and just sprinkle it in there these are the ones that didn't get chopped all the way while I was being fancy okay the green onions in there look at that look at that those are done turning this down so it's on simmer and it's just time it's time to plate these up okay it is time to plate these beautiful lettuce wraps up I'm going to tell you how delicious they taste so I have a plate okay now typically when when I serve these like if you're serving these for a family a really nice way to present these is don't uh don't pre-plate them what you would do is you'll get a platter and you'll put all the lettuce wraps on there right you put the lettuce wraps on there and you'll get a nice bowl and you'll put the toppings in the bowl and then you just go around and allow people to you know fix their plate but I'm going to plate this up to show you how beautiful they look I have to taste it I mean that's delicious I don't have to add anything to this but this is where you would add you know um more soy sauce so you could add more hoisin sauce and then cook it a little bit longer at this point I wouldn't add more ginger because the ginger does need time to cook right but you can definitely add more like vinegar or you know if it's not pungent enough because for Asian flavors any Asian food you want certain flavors and it's a combination of sweet spicy salty what is it sour sweet spicy sour salty and then there's um like a tangy so you want to make sure that these have all that but let me show you how to plate these up so I'm going to take here's my lettuce guys and this is a big piece of lettuce so we can actually break this up when I tell you let me show you I cut like the little end off right and then look I'm just going to break this up so we pretty much have three from one and these are so fun to eat I'm just going to plate two though so we take our lettuce and I have the slotted spoon so some of the juice could could and put that in there like such oh smells so amazing we're going to do the little one over here and you don't really want to load these up with too much because it is you know hot toppings on a lettuce wrap now if you wanted to right to make this your own if you want to you know just for the very end if you wanted to add a little um you know a little hot sauce or some tabasco or um what is this sauce called you guys always forget the name sriracha you want to add a little bit a bit of that on top you can do that but here you go this meal took us around 40 minutes to make this is a low carb delicious chicken lettuce wrap I'm gonna do the small one and then all you do is you pick it up and you enjoy that's delicious and look at that sauce you don't need an extra sauce because you made the sauce with the chicken this is very fulfilling you know you eat you two or three of these and then you're done these are really easy to pack for lunch it heats up really really well you can even even coat you can even eat it cold delicious that's delicious I appreciate you guys joining me to make this dish I will be back next Wednesday 7 p.m. I am always going to do something that's delicious I'm going to do something that's healthy I'm going to do something that you could make it your own but the bottom line is the food is going to be wonderful so join me next Wednesday I'll announce it on Monday what we're cooking if you want the ingredients to cook along with me or maybe to make it afterwards inbox me let me know I will send you a full list of ingredients but thank you for hanging out and making meals with Mika and I'll see you guys later all right if you are not subscribed subscribe to the channel share this live with anyone that you think needs to know how to cook or learn how to cook or experience something delicious like these chicken lettuce wraps all right I'll talk to y'all later bye