Our English Breakfast

Despite my efforts to eat healthier, I do miss slap-up English breakfasts I used to have when a student in Australia and at bed-and-breakfasts overseas. Nothing starts the day better than a hearty service of eggs and sossies and it keeps me going on and on and on and on like the Duracell bunny! Hehe...

It's been quite a while since I've had one so it was great fun to replicate a slap-up breakfast again at home! We had nice back bacon, BBQ sossies that split beautifully as they fried, eggs and mushrooms. And for the requisite carbo intake, we found some nice Oat and Honey bread, delicious topped with cheese! It was really good but somehow couldn't take me as far as it used to! I wonder what's changed!

Dad Cooks Dinner

One of the best things about having your parents around is coming home, tired and starving, to a hot and delicious home-cooked dinner. I battled heavy traffic and wet roads yesterday and opened the door to be welcomed by the heavenly smell of sambal. Hurrah! Dad cooked dinner again!

And cook he did! We went marketing during the weekend and bought some prawns and squid. Guess who was bent over the sink cleaning them?! Needless to say my hands stank! How can something that smells so bad raw taste so good when cooked?! Dad cooked sambal prawns and squid! It was full of onions and tasted really delicious with hot, steaming rice. I'll have to learn this!

We had the sambal with one of my favourite vegetables - bitter gourd. Research has recently shown that bitter gourd has lots of medicinal properties. Dad just sauted it till it's soft with some garlic. My late grandma used to cook a mean bitter gourd dish by throwing in an egg just before it cooked to make a nice eggy gravy.

We topped it all off with a fried fish each. This was kerisi or Japanese threadfin bream which is really yummy deep-fried. Just lightly season with some salt and you're good to go! One of my favourites!

A healthy home-cooked dinners like this always makes my night!

It's a Simple Life

Some days after a long crappy and PMS-y day at work, after being yelled at, after battling the rains and horrible traffic jams, all you want to come home to is a simple hot dinner and a nice hot shower.

And so, it was nice to come home to this - Koka instant noodles (no MSG!) with vege, fishballs, fishcake and hard-boiled egg. Don't you think sometimes in this crazy world we live in, the simplest things in life are the best?

Mushroom Bruschetta

We gave mom a break this weekend and cooked up dinner for a change. Bro prepared his mushroom bruschetta as appetiser - Best in USJ, Best in KL and some say Best in London! :)

As usual, we never have ingredients when we start cooking so off it was to Village Grocer in Bangsar V. If you've never been there before, do go in and take a stroll. It's got amazingly fresh veges and herbs from all over the world and gorgeous salad mixes, right down to edible flowers!

A quick nip down to the herb garden didn't turn up any basil so the chef picked up some rosemary instead which he chopped up finely to add into his mushrooms. Saute the sliced mushrooms with garlic and a dash of good ol' salt and pepper, spoon it up on crusty slices of baguette and you have a delicious appetiser that'll leave you wanting for more!

Note: You can lightly toast the baguette slices before spooning on the mixture to give it an extra crunch. We didn't want to fire up the oven for a few slices but if you use fresh bread like how we did, it's really good untoasted too!

My Healthy Breakfast

It was one of my New Year's resolutions to eat healthier this year. However, it didn't quite help when I discovered a stall at the food court selling the most delicious fried beehoon for breakfast. The Malays called it Singapore Beehoon and it's beehoon that's fried with fishcake, lots of veges and a very healthy dose of black pepper, giving it a spicy tang that's quite out of this world in the mornings!

After falling off the healthy wagon, I've decided to pick myself up again and give it another go at a healthy breakfast! So, 3 days a week when dear dad's here, we wake up to a bowl of hot, tummy-filling and cholestrol-lowering Quaker Oats. He mixes it with powdered milk before adding hot water so we get our calcium intake in one shot.

This was my bowl this morning. I usually add half a banana (the other half goes to my unwilling bro who apparently hates bananas in his oats!) and for an extra treat today, I topped it off with a handful of raisins to give it some sweetness as we don't add sugar to the oats.

Well, oats definitely last longer in my tum compared to anything else I eat for breakfast so it does help me curb mid-morning snacking and after a while, it doesn't taste that as cardboardy as I thought it would. I'll try a drizzle of honey and maybe some fresh fruit next for some variety. If nothing else, at least I feel psychologically a little healthier!

Oodles of Noodles

I've been having a hankering for instant noodles but the hidden health freak in me has been trying very hard to avoid the MSG-laden and high fat noodles swamping the market. So, on a trip to Singapore last December, I was very excited to find Koka Low-Fat and MSG-Free instant noodles there!

So, last night's dinner was the instant Chicken Pho which I had with my favourite poached egg white and DoDo ngoh hiang fish rolls.


The packet came with dried hor fun type noodles, a packet of seasoning, oil and a small pack of garnishing which provided the green sprinkles above. The brown stuff were the fish rolls which I drained in hot water first so the oil on it wouldn't contaminate the noodles.

And the verdict? It actually tasted pretty good! It had a subtle chicken taste, unlike some brands of noodles which come strongly flavoured. The noodles were silky smooth and the dried spring onions and chilli garnishing gave it a bit of a spicy kick. The best part, was of course, not having the terribly thirsty feeling one gets after eating instant noodles.

Curious about this brand, I googled it and was surprised to see that it's popular in places as far as Ireland and UK! I've recently seen the labels in our local supermarkets but sad to say, I've never seen the low-fat ones available here. Perhaps it's time we start being a little more health-conscious too especially with the recent health drive and move to ban fast-food advertisements.

I can't wait for my next trip to Singapore to stock up on more of these! :)

Steamed food

There are times when I'm so glad my Chinese race perfected the art of steaming food. I love steamed food. Perhaps it's the steamy fragrance that tantalises the tastebuds when you lift the cover, the piping hot "comfort-food" texture, the way the steam locks in the juices of the meat making it incredibly tender, or just the magic of putting some meat and ginger on a plate and watching it turn into a beautifully fragrant, tender dish surrounded by a light, tasty stock.

We had some belly pork the other day and Dad steamed it with little pieces of salt fish, ginger slices and some chilli paid for added zing. It was lovely! There was a little too much salt fish, though. We tend to overestimate such things! The broth was really nice, lightly flavoured by the meat with a tad of saltiness and zing.

We had something steamed again the other day, but with chicken instead. Sis bought some chicken thighs and had marinated them in the usual oyster sauce marinade, intending to fry them with mushrooms and ginger. But I managed to persuade her to steam them instead. You can't really see much under all that ginger and mushroom but the chicken was wonderfully tender. It was a dish created by accident and one recipe I'm certainly going to keep!

How I miss my home-cooked dinners!

Roast Duck - Before and After

Dad came recently and brought with him a lovely treat all the way from Petaling Street...the famous "Sei Ngan Chai" roast duck! Foodcrazee had blogged not too long ago about the roast duck at Crystal Jade and that suddenly had me craving for roast duck. It must be his pictures and description 'cos I'm not much of a duck fan!

"Sei Ngan Chai" (loosely translated as 4 eyes man due to his specs) is a small stall on Petaling Street owned by a small, bad-tempered old man. He's hugely popular and lots of other imitation stalls have come up around him. I remember queueing for hours on Chinese New Year eve just to get a duck to bring home for CNY! His roast duck is described as Salted Roast Duck which is probably what that makes it different from others. He's a no-nonsense man so don't expect daintily chopped duck pieces! Instead be prepared for huge, hulking pieces! :)

Look at those huge pieces! And the size of that drumstick! Must have been a HUGE duck!

Another picture. If you peer closely you'll probably see the specks of seasoning on the top piece. It's the secret ingredient that makes his duck so delicious!

Needless to say, we couldn't finish so much duck in one meal. So sis turned the leftovers into something equally good. Duck before *points above* and duck after *points below*

She stir-fried the remaining duck with lots of leek and soy sauce. Yummy! It's one of our favourite recipies for any leftover duck or steamed chicken. Do give it a try and whenever you're in Petaling Street, do look out for that little wizened old man with the push cart. The fragrance from the roast duck when you open the packet is really something quite heavenly! :)

Grilled Chicken Drumsticks

I finally found some time to cook last week and it took an interim of a few more busy days before I managed to find the time to upload my photos and blog about it! Work's been crazy!

I bought some chicken drumsticks the other day and decided to try A's recipe for the chicken wings we had in Sydney. Note: Carrefour's chicken drumsticks are so much bigger and fresher than Giant's! I remember attempting to buy chicken in Giant once and the whole chicken chiller smelt bad! *shudder* I meant to grill them on Wednesday night but got home late so these babies marinated for 2 whole nights before I grilled them on Friday! And all the lovely marinade had seeped into the meat, giving it a really nice taste.

While they were grilling, I blanched up some chopped zucchini, tore up some lettuce, caramelised some onions, hardboiled some eggs and threw the whole lot together with some cherry tomatoes for our fibre fix. Easy peasy!

Fresh garden salad, dotted with crispy cherry tomatoes and hearty chunks of hard-boiled egg; lightly flavoured with smokey caramelised onions.


Chicken drumsticks, tenderly grilled with a delicious ginger and garlic infused soy sauce marinade

A simple but nice meal to come home to after a long week!

Homemade Soy Bean Milk

I was bored a few weeks ago so decided to do something drastic - make home made soy bean! I have fond memories of watching my late Grandmother make soy bean milk. The whirring of the blender, the white muslin cloth, the fragrance of cooking soybean and the joy of drinking thick and pure soybean milk is a strong childhood memory which I wanted to relive while learning a traditional art.

First I put approximately 500g of beans to soak overnight. I rinsed it several times and rubbed it to try to get rid of the outer skin of the beans. It's an additional step some people omit. I'm not sure what impact it has if you leave it on but I guess it's just one of those things that get handed down while the real reason has disappeared!

Next, I blended them in batches with some water. This is the tricky bit. You have to play "agak-agak" or estimation with the water and consistency. If there's too little water, the blender won't be able to move well and if there's too much, it ends up too watery. It can't be blended too fine either, which I learnt, as too fine beans don't yield much soy milk when it's squeezed through the muslin cloth.

Then we came to the tiring part! Put a little of the blended beans in a piece of muslin cloth and s-q-u-e-e-z-eeeee hard to get as much soy milk as you can! It was hard work! I didn't have a muslin cloth so I used one of Dad's old handkerchiefs which had to be sacrificed after too many squeezes! I had quite a bit of beans which yielded one big pot of soy bean milk after an exhausting hour! You'll be left with a huge pile of dry powder-like blended beans. My mom used to shape them into patties and fry them to be eaten like vadai which is a really good idea as they are really rich in protein and nutrients.

I cooked the soy bean milk with lots of pandan leaves to give it a lovely fragrance. You'll have to keep stirring to make sure the bottom of the pot doesn't burn and to prevent the "skin" from forming on the top. Add your sugar as you cook. You'll know when it's cooked when it's lost its "greenish" smell and taken on that familiar soy bean fragrance. When it's cooked, take it off the flame to cool and there you go, home-made pure soy bean milk! A healthy, preservative-free treat that's delicious icy-cold from the fridge! Go give it a try!

Warning: It's quite a bit of work though! Anyone knows how much one of those soy bean milk making gadgets cost?! Heh...

Garlic-less Dinner

I finally made it back to cook tonight. I've had a piece of beef sitting in the freezer for a while so stir-fried beef was on the menu tonight. I marinated it with some oyster sauce, worchester sauce and black pepper. While slicing up carrots, ginger and spring onions to stir-fry it with, I suddenly realised that the house was out of garlic! Hunting high and low, there was nary a garlic clove to be found! And to add to that, I had a bunch of sawi (mustard greens) soaking in the sink which we normally fry with garlic! Then again...this is, after all, the same person who came up with Junkie Chicken! So improvise I did!

The beef was fragrant enough with the ginger and spring onions. I made the mistake of frying it for too long so it came out a little tough and over-cooked. While cooking, I added a dash of soy sauce, a little more black pepper and because I'm Hokkien, a dash of black soy sauce! The mixture of sauces gave it a nice, tangy taste and the ginger made it very fragrant. I love using julienned ginger strips in my cooking. It somehow brings back warm memories of Mom's and Grandma's cooking!

A close-up of the stir-fried beef

Next came the vegetables. As I wondered how I was going to fry them without garlic, clever Bro suggested using some fried shallots Mom had left behind in a bottle instead. And I did just that, with a dash of oyster sauce. It didn't taste too bad but the sweetness of the shallots took some use getting to compared to the normal garlicky savoury taste.

I wanted to try plating it but I think my skills in that area still needs much improvement! Foodcrazee, can please volunteer some tips?! :)

Another close-up. Just so you can see there was actually rice underneath the egg!

Fresh Pasta

The recent pasta posts by BabeKL and S-Kay had me hankering for pasta too. With the thoughts of pasta on the mind, I tried to leave work earlier only to be caught in a freakingly terrible jam! Crawling at an ant's pace in the 11/2 hour jam it took me to get home only made me hungrier and visions of hot steaming pasta dancing across my mind didn't help matters!

Thank goodness pasta is quick and easy to prepare! I got home, chopped up some garlic, washed up some oyster mushrooms (Bro said this is the first time he had seen people eat pasta with oyster mushrooms!), got out the pasta and Prego sauce and we were all set to go!

I love fresh pasta so the menu tonight was Latina's Chicken and Mushroom ravioli

The ravioli was cooked in boiling water kept at a rolling boil with a pinch of salt before it was "shocked" with cool water to stop the cooking process. While the pasta was cooking, we prepped the easy sauce - A quick task of sauteing the chopped garlic in olive oil, cooking the mushrooms and adding the sauce to the mixture. We normally add black pepper, salt and additional Italian herbs and basil to the sauce as we find the commercial sauces a little bland at times. And in approximately 15 minutes, dinner was ready!

Voila! Chicken and mushroom ravioli with a fragrant and robust tomato and mushroom sauce (Foodcrazee, can pass for a menu description?!)

Finally, my pasta vision brought to life! The ravioli were lovely little parcels of pasta surrounding a tasty mixture of chicken and mushroom and the tomato sauce was robust yet light enough as not to drown the flavours of the ravioli. A very satisfying meal which made up for my cramped leg resulting from driving a manual car in the jam!

Note to self: There's probably a reason why people don't use oyster mushrooms in a pasta sauce! They produce so much water when cooking that we had to boil it down before adding the sauce so it wouldn't be too diluted!

Chicken Curry

My parents both cook fantastic chicken curry, both with their own versions. Mom's a quite a bit more complicated while Dad's the quick-and-easy method! Well, guess who's I decided to learn?!

Dad wrote down the recipe for me and even bought the exact amount of curry powder and tomatoes for me! I don't think he had much faith in my cooking skills! Oh, and there was a small cheat: a packet of mixed curry paste! Dad said he substituted it for his curry and it turned out just as good, plus it's half the work done.

The ready-made curry paste

I first marinated the chopped chicken with heaps of diced onions and quartered tomatoes. Then added the first lot of curry powder, mixed into a paste.

Put in more diced onions to brown, added the marinated chicken and the curry paste and leave it to simmer and cook.

And ta-dah! Curry chicken! We ate it with baguette slices. Delicious!

The secret in making it taste good is to use lots of diced onions. It makes the gravy nice and chunky and the onions give it a lovely sweetness. The paste made the curry rather spicy and there was quite a bit of oil I had to scoop out halfway through cooking. I think I'll try it again without the paste next time!

But I must say, for a first attempt, I don't think I did too badly. Although I'm still waiting, with bated breath, for my Dad's verdict from the few pieces I left him to try!

Mom's Magic Touch

Hi all! I've been staying away from computers and the Internet for a while after a small procedure to my eyes. But I'm back in action now!

Mom cooked a heart and tummy-warming bowl of mee suah (a delicate rice flour noodle) for lunch. It was something so simple yet so delicious! She did up a soup stock of dried oysters which made the soup incredibly sweet, then added some seasoned minced meat. An egg went in to be poached before the mee suah was blanched in the soup and quickly taken out. Mee suah has great absorbant qualities and the tendency to "expand" so it has to be quickly blanched and eaten before it starts its absorbing all the soup!

Here it is! A hot, steaming bowl of mee suah

We truly enjoyed every last noodle and last drop of soup! I don't know what it is that makes anything Mom touches taste so good! It must be the magic touch all Moms seem to have! :)

Teochew-Moi

Is it possible to get tired of food? Well, I definitely was! 3 wedding dinners 3 weekends in a row = too much rich and oily food. Well, this calls for "Teochew-Moi (Teochew porridge)" therapy! Teochew-Moi is plain and watery rice gruel eaten with an assortment of small side dishes which add flavour to the porridge. This was what we had:

Clockwise from the top: Pork, salted egg, duck, stir-fried cabbage and tofu

This was cabbage, sliced thinly and stirfried with some chopped garlic. It would have been great with some dried shrimp or anchovies for flavour but none in the house!

Braised pork slices with mushrooms and a boiled egg, courtesy of Mom from her weekend trip. It was yummily fragrant and a perfect condiment to the porridge! When will I ever be able to cook like she does?!

A few pieces of leftover roast duck slices and a hardboiled salted duck's egg. Salted duck's egg is one of the best accompaniments to plain porridge! The salty egg white and creamy egg yolk makes any ol' porridge taste really good!

This tofu dish is also really easy to do and is a nice light dish to have. Just pour boiling water over soft tofu pieces to lightly cook them, quickly prepare a simple sauce of oyster and black sauce, add fried garlic, fried shallots, chopped chillis and spring onions if any and you're ready to serve! One of my favourite dishes!

All this eaten with a warm, comforting bowl of rice porridge. Bliss! :)

A "cooking" post

What was dinner last night? Stewed duck noodles!

Preparation:

• One carrot
• One packet of noodles
• And one box of frozen stewed duck!

Okay, so it's not quite a cooking-from-scratch post but it does involve turning on the hob and taking out the pots and pans! :P

This is the reason why I love having leftovers in the freezer. Because any leftovers can be turned into a delicious and quick meal with some imagination! Poking around in the freezer last night yielded a box of leftover duck stew. It was only too easy to pop the lot into a pot, slice up a carrot and leave it to heat up.

And while it's heating, boil up the noodles, drain it and voila, a delicious meal in mere minutes!

Competition for the duck noodles hawker!

A close-up of the duck and carrots on a bed of noodles

Lesson: Don't throw away the food you can't finish! It makes cooking life so much easier! :)

More Chicken Wings

My earlier post on the chicken wings frenzy reminded me of a yummy chicken wings recipe I learnt from A in Sydney. A dash of light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, pepper, minced garlic and ginger to marinate them then pop them into the oven to grill. Oh, an a dash of tabasco sauce just before grilling to give it that zing!

Here they are, in their just-baked glory! It turned out nice and sticky from the dark caramel soy sauce. And the spicy kick from the Tabasco sauce was just nice for our Malaysian taste-buds!

I know it's a ridiculously easy recipe but I wasn't kidding when I said I couldn't cook! :p We had it with some stir-fried vege and rice.

What a healthy looking plate of vegetables!
This nice meal was for dinner. I hope to try my own hand at those wings here soon!

The way breakfast was meant to be!

J's sis in Oz, whom we stayed with, had a cosy apartment with a lovely kitchen and the most wonderful collection of kitchen gadgets! So lazy, home-cooked and substantial breakfasts were a daily feature in our Sydney itenerary.

Just an idea of what our typical breakfasts were like! On the right are a combination of pork and beef sausages. Australia, like the UK, has delicious sausages filled with spiced minced meat. Those are such a rarity in KL and we made sure we ate our fill everyday! This, in addition to bacon, eggs and a tomato for presentation and fibre - a hearty start for the long day ahead! I came very close to buying home some sausages for my foodie siblings who love them but figured they probably wouldn't survive the flight home!

We often ate breakfast with a noisy chattering bunch of breakfast buddies! These delightful lot of wild lorikeets and cockatoos, with the odd pigeon or two would often fly in for a bite with their human counterparts!

What a lovely way to start the day! How I miss those breakfasts, especially when a quick bite of bread is all I have time for now!