Showing posts with label Ready-to-eat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ready-to-eat. Show all posts

Saturday, 30 August 2008

Home cooking

I've started cooking at home recently, after months of keeping a non-oily stove.

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Home dinner one night, with store-bought roast pork, which I've grilled in the oven (to a crispy skin).

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Beijing cabbage with canned vegetarian 罗汉斋

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Bean sprouts with ready-soaked black fungus from the market

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Tofu with minced pork

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Dinner of wanton soup and sweet peas stir-fried with pacific clams

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These ready to eat wanton soup from CP brand is fabulous...one of the best frozen food around.

Pasta dinner tonight:

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With grilled spicy pork sausage, fresh brown and white mushrooms, assorted veggies and leftover pacific clams.

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While being grilled in the mini oven, the sausages somehow caused a little fire to be ignited in the oven! :-O

The oil dripping must have sparked off the small fire on the aluminium foil! >_<"

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Anyway, it was an extra tasty pasta dinner. ;)

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And I love my pasta keeper. It has holes that conveniently dispense exactly 100g or 200g of pasta.

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Saturday, 19 July 2008

Soups & Salad

Yummy and filling soups from The Soup Spoon are just the thing to eat for lunch when I'm feeling not particularly hungry, or feeling a bit out of sorts. There's a choice of thick soup, cream or tomato-based soups, or clear broth, with or without meat. It's not too heavy, easy-to-eat and yet not so light that it makes you go hungry too soon.

For a heavier lunch, one can always opt for the large portion, which comes in a bowl that's as big as the "碗公" (in Hokkien) that are typically used for soups in Chinese families in a communal eating setting. A small bun of your choice is served with each serving of soup.

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The day's special - Chicken Ciacatore (sp?) with Sage, which was very yummy with a strong taste of ang moh herbs

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Spicy Vegetable Gumbo, which was meatless

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One can take-away either the hot soup or this package chilled soup and heat it up at home. I opted for this because it's easier to handle cold soup on public transport.

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It contains some Japanese chicken soup/broth, enough for about 2 to 3 servings

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Sweet and yummy!

On another occasion, I went back to Food For Thought one day to try its salads. This time, I chose to sit at its empty bar counter as I'd wanted to see the food preparation and what goes into their dishes of mainly salad and sandwiches.

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The creamless brocolli soup was alright, though hardly exciting.

Now the Chinese Chicken (or was it turkey??) Caesar Salad was the one that bothered me. Instead of the usual Caesar dressing, it's dressed in a Chinese stewed pork sauce, which came from their special stewed 3-layered fatty pork (meant for sandwiches) and topped with fried ikan billis (anchovies). I knew this only because I'd asked them about the sauce.

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Salad leaves with a layer of shiny oil

While I'm ok with the Chinese twist of adding fried ikan billis and a Chinese-styled dressing, what was not ok was that they had first added some oil onto the salad leaves, followed by the stewed pork sauce which also had a layer of oil.

Gosh! I wanted to eat a salad coz I wanted something light, so I definitely don't want my salad to be piled with so much oil! There was enough oil for it to drip below the salad leaves onto the plate, and I've had to try to drain out as much oil as I could from the leaves before putting them into my mouth.

Secondly, I really didn't expect anything porky to appear in a chicken/turkey salad, so why did they not mention anything about adding pork sauce, and a rather oily one at that? What if customers were on a white-meat diet? Furthermore, the sauce was not even fantastic.

And finally, I AM NOT A PORKY PERSON (I will only eat some pork done in certain ways), so I absolutely hated it that they'd spoiled my supposedly-healthy lunch totally with the very porky, pork oil-laden and probably cholesterol-laden sauce! Not wanting to waste food, I ate them up, but I was so put-off by their mis-concept that I did not bother to give my feedback.

Needless to say, that was my last visit to that cafe.

Thursday, 22 May 2008

Another wonderful Jap product

Warning: This product is addictive!

By the standards of instant noodles, the Japanese ones always win!

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Five packs costs $9, but it's ok because we're worth it! (to quote a lousy cliche :PP )

I think this one is char siew flavour or something.

Update on 25 May:

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Served with baby spinach leaves, sweet onion and fish luncheon meat (black pepper flavour).

Friday, 2 May 2008

Salmon Tortilla & Green Salad

My Dinner tonight - a very easy to make tortilla wrap, which requires no cooking.

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Take leftover canned salmon, add a bit of lemon juice & black pepper and mix well.

I didn't add salt as the salmon was already salty since it came in a can of brine (made of spring water). Can add a little bit of chopped fresh dill, if available.

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Place a piece of lettuce on tortilla, leaving about half an inch of border around.

I'm using mini-Romaine lettuce (from M'sia), which can taste a wee bit bitter when eaten raw.

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Spread a thin layer of salmon on the lettuce leaf, but I spread too much.

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Roll up the tortilla firmly.

Slice into half and eat!

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There is a generous amount of salmon, so it ended up tasting a wee bit salty. Can counteract this by wrapping another piece of lettuce over the tortilla roll and eat.

There was also a green salad, before adding dressing.

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I luv these alfafa sprouts, although they tend to absorb quite a lot of the dressing. :P

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They are living sprouts and can be kept in the fridge for a few days.

Edited - Ps: I forgot to add 1 tsp of mayo into the salmon mix.

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

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

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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)

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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

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

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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

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

Saturday, 12 April 2008

More rojak sauce

There seems to be quite a few brands of ready-to-eat bottled rojak sauce around and they aren't expensive.

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These two have similar logos - a pyramid of "天" and a pyramid of "A's". Their packaging are almost the same too.

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Nice serving suggestion for fruit rojak.

Sunday, 10 February 2008

First cooking for the year

After feasting on too much rich food, one of our favourite comfort food to tuck into is porridge, eaten with simple dishes that helps to clear the jer-lard-ness from all the fattening, sugary food consumed.

On Sat (3rd day of CNY), I cooked 2 vegetable dishes, which are a bit too much, but I had to use them up before they wilt and waste away in the fridge. :P

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Stir-fried Beijing cabbage with carrots and fresh Shitake mushrooms

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Ti Hwang Miao (帝皇苗 or 帝王苗?) stir fried with Taiwanese vegetarian (mushroom) oyster sauce

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Instead of being simple, the meal was made slightly "complex" with the addition of CP brand Pepper Kicks (black pepper chicken)...coz we are greedy. :P

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The CP brand of ready-to-eat foodstuff is quite excellent; the other superb frozen product being the CP wanton soup with crunchy prawn wanton....yum!

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In the end, what was meant to be a simple meal to clear our system ended up as too much and too filling!!

>_<

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

Very nice dahl (lentils)




Ready to eat, from Mustafa.

It was nice and creamy...yum!

Must remember to buy this brand again.