Quarantine Eating & Cooking: Leftovers & Chinese (my approximation of the cuisine)

I am almost out of wine, and I don't count the bottle of Prosecco I bought to mix with the gourmet fruit juice mixers I have in my liquor cabinet.  I want to save the Chardonnay I have for a seafood pasta dish, and so I've been drinking all the other liquors like this martini......and now I'm super low on vodka:(

And I'm on my usual quest to not waste food, and so dinner one night was a baked potato, leftover green bean casserole, and creamed kale.

It's also spring break, and the day before yesterday, the hubs and I ventured out to grocery shop--he to Draegers for ice cream and hamburger buns and me to Dean's Produce for vegetables.  I was so happy to have shopped my favorite grocery store--Anaheim instead of my usual Poblano peppers, Berlin bread from a Russian bakery because the Russian Rye was too dark for my liking though this bread is pretty dense too, scallions, dill, cilantro, Italian parsley, alfalfa sprouts, labneh, cilegini, sandwich pickles, chives.

I had half a head of Napa cabbage and didn't want that to go bad along with the leftover rice noodles and mapo ground pork and tofu I made a week ago.

This time for dinner, I sauteed the cabbage in my largest cast iron and then threw in half of the leftover Chinese make home (as opposed to takeout) Mapo in with it.

I remember not being able to find ground pork at Safeway and got this meat at Mollie Stone, a gourmet grocery store and wasn't gonna waste any of it.  A neighbor brought me more tofu and Chinese dried noodles and Asian coffee packets in exchange for a Borlotti beans and Italian sausage and fennel stew I made. 

I think I probably had these flat rice noodles in my starch drawer for almost a year, and so I was glad to use them.

Rice noodles after they're cooked dry out quickly and get hard, and so I knew it would be okay to throw them in with all the wet ingredients in the pan.  

The trick to cooking this dish was not letting the rice noodles get soggy and mushy by cooking off as much liquid as possible before adding them to the dish.  Also lots of chopped scallions and cilantro do a lot to enhance a dish with color and flavor, so thank goodness for my favorite produce store.

A satisfying dinner because I finished my Chardonnay.  It's okay. I'll substitute white wine vinegar or lemon juice in my seafood pasta dish.