banh mi with chicken meatballs

We’re getting ready to move on Thursday, which means not only the kitchen but the entire apartment is a mess of suitcases, boxes, and cleaning supplies. Yesterday I boxed up most of our kitchen supplies, and today I cleared out everything else in the cabinets so I could clean them out. In the midst of all this super exciting packing, I realized that we have a lot of food left in our fridge.

I always try to eat my way through as much of the random food in my fridge and freezer as possible before moving, mostly to avoid the impulse to throw things away at the last minute when I decide “I don’t want to deal with it.” Salads were an obvious choice, with all the produce we had laying around, but we also had a lot of random things to eat up…like teriyaki ginger meatballs. Meatballs…garlic mayonnaise…carrots…cucumber…and then I realized that we had almost everything we needed to make a rough variation of banh mi xiu mai, Vietnamese meatball sandwiches.