Tar Pao Dinner

On a whim, I went to tar pao these for dinner tonight.


All in environment-unfriendly take-out boxes


Tar-dah!!


From Max Cafe - one pork sausage and the other with herbs + 2 sides and came with a bowl of chicken corn soup.

The sauteed veggies of carrots, zucchini, brinjal (non-soggy at all!), cauliflower & whole garlic cloves (browned) were absolutely delicious. I feel like trying to 偷师 from the chef!


Something's hidden underneath the sio pek chye - from the food court above the bus interchange.


It's a big chunk of pan-grilled saba (one-half of a large mackeral) sitting on a bed of sauteed, sweet onions. The set came with rice and seaweed soup.


Don't think this is just any plain soup. It's simple but oh, so delicious! I don't know why, it just taste very good. I think I like the stall owner's style of cooking.

It was a good and satisfying dinner.

Pasta & Fish Dinner

I haven't been cooking much for the past couple of months. I used to cook about half the time, but one day I just decided not to waste so much time after work just to cook a dinner for two, which would be devoured within 20 minutes. I would use the time saved to do the relaxing things that I like to do, or exercise at the gym or just do nothing! :))

However, I decided to cook dinner tonight since I am on 2 days' mc for sore eyes. It's extra time given to me by the doctor, or 是 eye bacteria 赐给我的~！ Haha! :P

The ingredients for pasta, i.e. whatever that's available at home



Two pieces of salmon which had been sitting in the freezer



Finished product



Looks more like mee goreng...?!?


It was a bit dry, coz I didn't want to dilute the sauce

The extras - grilled salmon on a bed of baby spinach leaves



The SO's TV dinner


Now we're both TOO FULL !!

Now I wonder if I should cook tomorrow??

Salad days

Salad-eating days are here, what with the meltingly-hot weather nowadays.


The other reason for eating salads is to get rid of tummy bloatedness and this humongous water retention, which had stubbornly stuck to me for almost 2 weeks!

Er... I assumed and hoped that it's water retention and not weight gain...!?! :-( The SO doesn't mind eating more healthily and lose a few pounds, although nobody will say he's fat lah!

There was a saba (mackeral) salad, which we had last week, with red wine vinaigrette dressing.



The saba was purchased from Carrefour, already cooked, which I think is a great concept, coz they can then sell off whatever unsold raw saba that's leftover at the end of the day.



It was a big piece of fish, almost as long as my small oven.


I think the saba was pre-marinated coz it tasted savoury and sweet, with no need to add any sauce.

For lunch today, we had "chapalang" salad, ie the "anything-goes" salad.


There was broccoli and green beans (blanched in boiling water), celery, tomatoes, capsicum and onions...

...lightly dressed with Japanese sesame dressing.



The protein came from a can of "Whole squids in their own ink" - yep, that's what the packaging says in English.



Plus some wonderfully-fragrant Atlantic salmon, also from a can.


Whole squid in its own ink + salmon salad, topped with a dollop of black squid ink. I found the squid ink to be quite delicious, if you don't mind the whole black thing.

Of course, since we're not small eaters, eating a salad for lunch means we need to have snacks for afternoon tea, which we usually do, anyway. ;-)

Stir-fry vegies & oden

Some new dishes which I've cooked/prepared recently (for the first time*).

For Monday's dinner - Stir-fried watercress*, with wolfberries


We always eat watercress cooked in soup in our family, and at the in-laws' home too, but now that the new, smaller breed of watercress is available, it isn't too old/fibrous, so can taste quite nice stir-fried.

Plus Japanese Oden*, a popular street food (I gathered)


The soup is too salty and which I don't think we should drink too much of, even though I'd added extra water.

Chilled Oden package - ready for boiling; enough for 2.5 pax




For Tuesday's dinner, I cooked the big bean sprouts*, with shimeji mushrooms and capsicum


This (soya?) bean sprouts is quite fibrous, and the "bean" part remained very crunchy/ slightly hard, even though the fibrous strips were already well-cooked till soft.

This is almost like the only fish we cook at home regularly - grilled salmon, with ground black pepper and lemon


In addition, we had the ready-to-eat fish toufu for dinner as well...so it was a very very full dinner! :P

Recent food sightings

Rectangular muffins from Cedele bakery - Blueberry-cranberry and Cuppucino



Fried Tilapia from Carrefour - fried and saltless



The "Ang Golly" that EJ mentioned; the English name is sea bream (I didn't know that!)



Red Delicious #4015...today's the day to buy 4D. ;)



There's no more MaLing at the provision shop *sob*, only the ang moh Tulips brand and this Yifon, which has ham and yet is cheaper than the ham-less ML (that's how much prestige ML commands in the market!)

Tilapia (fish)

Dear cat aunty, this is the red tilapia aka 尼罗红。



Seeing that I was taking a photo of his fish with my HP, the young uncle at "aunty lucy" supermart became curious.

I told him I'm taking it to show a friend, after which, he very kindly fished out one fish from under the layers of shaved ice for me to take a better picture...haha!



It's a popular fish with the Thais.