Home cooking

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


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


Beijing cabbage with canned vegetarian 罗汉斋


Bean sprouts with ready-soaked black fungus from the market


Tofu with minced pork


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


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

Pasta dinner tonight:



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


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! >_<"



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



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

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



Stir-fried Beijing cabbage with carrots and fresh Shitake mushrooms




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



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



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!



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

>_<

Japanese curry & cabbage

I was on leave today, and decided to prepare some lunch. Since we'll be going over to a friend's place for a gathering and dinner later, there won't be a chance to cook dinner, so I thought I'll cook the Japanese curry which I'd been planning to cook, before the potatoes decide to sprout!

I've had tubers sprouting at home, right on the food shelf, until they look like alien things, like the "alienated" sweet potato.



Anyhow, I cooked the Japanese curry using S&B brand of Medium Hot curry paste, as the SO is not quite into spicy food, but it didn't taste a teeny bit hot at all - even the SO said so. I think even if they come out with a Extra Hot version, it would still barely taste a little hot for our Asian palettes.

Here's the chicken curry with the "disappearing" Hokkaido potatoes. I've added some ground coriander and chicken stock to add more flavour.




The market stall had these Hokkaido potatoes on sale, so I bought a couple of big, round tubers to try. When raw, they had the texture of crispy apples!

During the process of cooking, they've somehow disappeared, leaving me with barely half the quantity of potatoes in odd, tiny shapes. I thought I'd scoop them up into a separate bowl before there was nothing left!




The lunch, served with steamed rice.



The Beijing cabbage at this time of year tastes extremely sweet and crunchy in texture. Stir-fried simply with garlic, fresh young ginger and a bit of chicken stock, it tastes so fresh and sedap!

Sunday lunch

We had:

- Stir-fried fresh mushrooms,

- Toufu with minced pork, and

- Stir-fried kang kong with vegetarian XO sauce/paste.

Eaten with rice porridge.

Lunch on Saturday

I decided to whip up a simple dish to eat with the leftover rice from the night before.

Braised tau gua (bean curd) with pork, Chinese leek, preserved black beans, (vegetarian) oyster sauce, and some leftover capsicum and the remaining (vegetarian) XO sauce.

Black olive rice (leftover tar bao back from The Soup Restaurant last night)



I wonder what kind of rice was used by the restaurant? It doesn't look like the Thai jasmine rice. Basmati rice, maybe?



Japanese-styled salad which comprise of Thai mini cucumber (or Japanese cucumber), the sweet pek chai (Wong Bok) and sliced green chilli (optional). The salad tastes like the Korean summer kimchi, but nicer.

(Note: can add a bit of sweet onion next time)

Here's the seasoning used to marinate the salad (for up to 2 hours), purchased from the place we love so much --> Daiso, the $2 store!



Lunch...yummy!

*slurp!*

A regular dinner at home

I cooked dinner last night:

- Stir-fried greens (Romaine lettuce)
- Grilled salmon
- steamed (frozen) black pepper chicken siew mai

All served with a bit of hot, steaming rice. It's a very simple meal which didn't require much preparation, but because it was so fresh and hot, it tasted really good. I enjoyed it very much, so did SO.

Ahh...the simple joys in life.

:)

The simple meal

* Fried tau gua with garlic sprouts
* Stir-fried cabbage
* Fried rice topped with crispy shrimps

(no meat except for the crispy shrimps)