Family Favourites

My kids seem to like my food best when I don't use recipes from books and cook as I see fit. These are their favourites.

Grilled chicken recipe:
A little soy sauce, a little dark soy sauce.
Grill.
5 minutes before it's done, I sprinkle a little sugar over the chicken.
Delicious.

Vegetables recipe:
A little oil, throw in shallots, wait for fragrance.
Next, I throw in 2 dried scallops because my mom-in-law gave me a giant pack (but it's optional)
and fresh shitake mushrooms...stir fry...
Next, in goes the sweet beans. This one takes a while to cook. I usually add a little water.
When the sweet beans is almost cooked, I throw in the bean sprouts.
Lastly add a little soy sauce and it's all done.

Sweet Potato Porridge

Whenever I had too much rich food, I would cook porridge to eat for dinner. This might look gross to some people but it's quite delicious. I cook brown rice, Japanese sweet potatoes and fresh Shitake mushrooms together. When it's almost cooked, I add some minced chicken and a pinch of soy sauce. That's it. Only my daughter shares my delight in this dish.

Butter Chicken

This is the most delicious chicken I have ever cooked! I rubbed Olive Oil margarine all over the chicken, inside out and baked using my Turbo Broiler. (I call it my flying saucer) Crispy and fragrant and dripping with margarine. Yummy!

Pancakes

When it comes to pancakes, I like to use different flour each time just to see what it tastes like. Generally the pancakes are popular with my kids when I use unbleached white flour. For this particular batch, I used pastry flour which gave it a different taste yet I can't quite place it. My children kept complaining about the funny taste yet they wolfed the pancakes down.

Green Tea Buckwheat Noodles

Buckwheat noodles look really gross but somehow I have developed a taste for them. I especially like the ones with green tea. These noodles go really well with Soba Sauce and leftover meat (that's my leftover from my oven baked chicken). However Soba Sauce contains MSG and I feel so thirsty after that so I usually just eat them without any sauce. Super gross. (It's an acquired taste. Really.) Sometimes I cook them for my kids for lunch and they really complain! But they still eat it.

Sweet Beans Are Made Of These

This is a stir-fry vegetable dish I frequently cook for my family. It is very easy to prepare. The ingredients are sweet beans, fresh Shitake mushrooms, fresh baby corns and raw tomatoes.

Oven Baked Chicken

This is the first chicken I had baked using my Baby Belling oven. I used a simple marinade of black soy sauce and black pepper. I was really apprehensive and rightly so. It took a really long time for the chicken to be cooked. I kept poking it and poking it. Everyone got really hungry waiting for it to be cooked.

Verdict:
It tasted really tender despite the amount of time it spent in the oven.

Postmortem:
Use smaller pieces of chicken next time to reduce cooking time.

Prawns with cashew nuts

I wanted to cook something light for lunch and I thought this was the perfect dish - prawns with cashew nuts from Heartymeals by Mrs Leong Yee Soo. Although I'm now a big fan of Mrs Leong, I don't care for her MSG ingredient. Those were the days when mothers would add MSG to every dish. I would never add MSG to something I cook. But I don't avoid it like I avoid coconut. MSG just makes me thirsty, it doesn't give me migraine like coconut.

I notice that Mrs Leong is also fond of using corn flour. I'm not so sure if I like corn flour - all sticky. I added snow peas and baby corn to the dish because I was late and didn't have time to cook the veg separately.


The snow peas were crunchy!

Verdict:
Everyone loves it.
Son hates any kind of nuts.

Postmortem:
Don't use corn flour next time.
Don't give son any of the nuts.

Turmeric Chicken

After days of eating from foodcourt again, I'm back at cooking again. I was still searching for the perfect turmeric chicken and this time I decided to try Mad About Food by Sylvia Tan.


The main ingredient for this recipe is turmeric powder and coconut milk which I substituted with HL milk. I added carrots and cabbages.


Yum yum


When my girl saw me preparing to shoot the dish, she put her face next to it and that's why she's in the shot. We eat it with french loaf.

Verdict:
Everyone loves it but wants more chilli.

Postmortem:
I can't believe it's not spicy enough!

Semolina Crunchies

I finally bought a conventional oven. After looking at models after models, I settled on Baby Belling tabletop oven as it is the right size and it doesn't self-clean. I'm very anti self-clean. I think self-cleaning reduces the lifespan of an equipment. That's just my theory.

The first thing I baked was semolina crunchies which was such a success not long ago. I used the same recipe from Teatime Delights by Mrs Leong Yee Soo.


The Baby Belling took up my last remaining tabletop space!


This is the part I dread. Making the sticky dough into rounds.


I wasn't used to using a conventional oven and my cookies were rather uneven. Still they tasted good.

Prawn Fritters

My girl and I love prawn fritters and if we could, we would just eat them all day. I told my girl that I would look for the recipe for prawn fritters batter and I found it in Singapore Heritage Food by Sylvia Tan.

I really wanted to get this recipe right because my girl would definitely compare it to her grandmother's prawn fritters.

Okay, cooking prawn fritters is hard work. The frying is hot and scary. I'm so afraid of the oil scalding me. I used my Meyer stainless steel wok to fry the prawns. What a big mistake. The fritters stuck like glue to the bottom of the wok. I had to change to my Scanpan non-stick wok. This is such a great wok. It can do anything. I've had it for 2 years.




Golden prawn fritters


This is how we eat it - brown/white rice, broccoli, chilli/ketchup sauce.

Verdict:
My husband said they were good but they needed to be eaten as part of a big feast of other food. Hmm.
My boy was okay with it. He managed to eat 4 and he doesn't really like prawns.
My girl said they were too salty and told me she preferred her grandmother's prawn fritters.
I did find the fritters too salty but ate too many to care.

Postmortem:
Use very little salt next time.

Rich Turmeric Chicken

I love turmeric anything. I don't know anyone else who has a thing for turmeric. I had been dying to try out Rich Turmeric Chicken from Hot & Spicy Treats by Mrs Leong Yee Soo. Finally I got all the ingredients I needed. And it's a lot of ingredients - corriander, cumin, cinnamon, curry, lots more ... and evaporated milk! This is the first time I come across a curry dish which does not use coconut milk. I was so excited. And confused. I had thought turmeric chicken uses just turmeric....


My goodness, it's so yellow. For once my gravy turned out thick instead of watery.


And this is how I eat eat - with mixed white/brown rice and a tall glass of grapefruit juice. (I also have a thing for grapefruit)

Verdict:
My girl said it's too fragrant but she liked it especially the gravy.
My boy said it's alright and I could cook it again.
My husband thought it was good.
I actually found the cumin too overpowering. Definitely too rich for me.

Postmortem:
This recipe did not achieve the kind of turmeric chicken I liked. Too much of everything.

Chilli Prawns

I like a little chilli now and then. Unfortunately I'm one of those people whose sinus gets drained after eating chilli. In fact, whenever my nose gets blocked, I just eat something spicy and .....


Here are my ingredients for my chilli prawns. Onions, capsicum and 1 tablespoon of ground chilli mixed with a little water into paste. The capsicum is not too appropriate but I wanted to use it up.


I stir-fried the onions in my WMF stainless steel frying pan until fragrant. Next I added the chilli paste and stir-fry quickly before it starts to splutter. I add the prawns and cook till it turns pink. I add the capsicum before the prawns get fully cooked.


You can't really tell but the prawns are really large.


This is how we eat it - with mixed white/brown rice and chye sim(okay, not too sure if it's chye sim) cooked in seafood soup.

Verdict:
My kids say - not enough chilli!

Postmortem:
Don't hold back the chilli.

Chicken Moolie

I am a big fan of chicken curry but since coconut milk, a major ingredient in curry causes me migraine, I only eat it if I cook it myself and substitute it with milk. Recently I tried Chicken Moolie (chicken in spicy coconut gravy) from Mrs's Lee's Cookbook by Mrs Lee Chin Koon. I have become a fan of Mrs Lee as I find her recipes rather easy to follow and her instructions have sufficient information for a beginner cook like me.

I REMPAH (pound together) ginger and shallots. No, just kidding. I don't rempah anything. I use an electric mincer. The fragrance from frying the rempah ingredients is fabulous. My son loves the smell of rempah and would go "Mmmm, what are you cooking?"

I used HL fresh milk. It doesn't have the the richness of coconut milk but I don't know what else I can use.


I used my Scanpan non-stitck wok to cook the curry. I wonder what other people use to cook curry?


Looks oily and spicy.


This is how we eat it. With white rice and stir-fried broccoli.

Verdict:
My kids love it but they said to make it more spicy next time. What?!
My husband said it didn't taste like curry, was too watery and lacked fragrance. Still it was alright.
As for me, I thought it was great.

Postmortem:
Cook it again. Don't withhold the chilli. Add more tomatoes/potatoes to thicken the gravy.

Semolina Crunchies

My kids love to eat cookies and I spend a fortune on them. I've always wanted to bake cookies but never had the nerve to start. In Secondary school, I was a tomboy and opted for Technical Studies instead of Home Economics. So I never learnt to bake.

Recently I got this cookbook Teatime Delights by Mrs Leong Yee Soo which had a deceptively simple recipe for Semolina Crunchies. The ingredients were simple enough - self-raising flour, salt, icing sugar, semolina, butter, egg and milk. I decided to make my first cookies ever.

My girl measured the ingredients for me while I took care of the mixing. I didn't like rubbing the butter with the flour. It was gross. When I had to roll the dough flat it kept sticking to my hands. I added flour till it finally stopped sticking. That was frustrating. I had watched my sisters bake when I was young. I don't remember this icky sticky part at all.


Finally I baked the dough in my Turbo Broiler. The problem with baking with a broiler is that the heat comes from the top and the cookies get browned outside fast but inside they're still uncooked. I had to bake at a low level in the beginning and at a higher level at the end. That helped to ensure the cookies were cooked evenly.


The cookies turned out pretty good. My kids ate them so fast I had to be quick to photograph them.

Verdict:
My son says they're not as good as Marks n Spencers but please bake them again!
My girl loves them.

Postmortem:
Sift the flour used to add to the dough. And bake more next time.

Roasted Chicken Alfredo Pasta

I love Alfredo Pasta and longed to cook it myself. I went through some cookbooks but the recipes were too complicated. So I decided to wing it.

Here's how I cook it.
1. Melt some butter in pan. Spread it round.
2. Pour in Light Cream.(I got it at Cold Storage)
3. Stir until it starts to get thick.
4. Add parmesan cheese. Mix it up.
5. Pour over pasta.
6. Sprinkle parmesan cheese over pasta.
7. Sprinkle some mixed herbs.


This is what I cooked for my girl. Alfredo pasta with leftover roasted chicken.

Verdict:
She loves it but added that the chicken is very important. Without it the pasta would not taste good.

Postmortem:
Alfredo pasta should not be eaten on its own.

Char Siew

My son loves his char siew and he lost his beloved char siew stall when the coffee shop was renovated. The char siew stall was ruled by a quarrelsome odd couple who weren't married to each other. The man/woman carving the meat was a large don't mess with me kind of person. Other than the cleaver she was always wielding, she looked like she could punch hard. The man taking care of orders was a nazi who would humiliate you if you didn't pay attention when he pointed at you and shouted, "You, you, what do you want?" And heaven help you if you don't give your order right. The worse part was the couple was frequently in the middle of some verbal war. Each time I survived ordering my son'e char siew rice, no chilli, take away, I felt like I had escaped death.

Since my son was fussy about his char siew - he rejected plenty other stalls, I had to cook it myself. I got the recipe from Mrs's Lee's Cookbook by Mrs Lee Chin Koon.


The marinade is easy enough. Salt, sugar, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce and water.


Looks salty


This is what I use to grill my meat. It's a turbo broiler.


Looks delicious


This is how we eat it - with white rice and boiled bean sprouts.

Verdict:
Everyone loves it. My son said to cook it again.

Postmortem:
Get less fatty meat and use either salt or soy sauce, not both.

Salmon in teriyaki sauce

My son loves salmon in teriyaki sauce and usually I would just drizzle the salmon in teriyaki sauce and grill it. Very simple and he loves it.

Ever since I started cooking from recipes, it seems cooking any old how is now beneath me. I wanted to try salmon in teriyaki sauce (what else?) from Cooking To A Degree which featured recipes from people who used to study in the U.K.


The marinade includes sugar and Thai fish sauce. Sugar? I hesitated but added it anyway. I ditched the fish sauce because I cannot stand the taste.


Pan frying in my (sob) WMF stainless steel frying pan. I think the fire was too high because the oil was splattered everywhere.


Got a little burnt. I only looked away for a few seconds. Garnished with fried garlic and lime juice.


And this is how we eat it. White rice, sweet peas, egg and salmon bone soup with Korean Ginseng powder

Verdict:
Although my children managed to finish their dinner, they did not like the salmon. They felt it tasted weird.
I thought the salmon tasted weird too.

Postmortem:
Sugar and teriyaki sauce don't mix. Maybe it was the lime? Or the missing fish sauce. Definitely not cooking this again.

Minced Chicken Cutlets

My mother-in-law used to cook these minced pork cutlets which were delicious but she never got the saltiness right. It was always too salty and we would be left feeling quote husband "thirsty for the rest of our lives".

I'm still ploughing through The Eurasian Cookbook by Mary Gomes and sure enough there is a Corned Beef Cutlets recipe. No, we're not a corned beef eating kind of family except for husband but then he eats everything. I substituted corned beef for minced chicken and hoped for the best!


What goes into the minced chicken - soy sauce, egg, soda biscuits, potato and ground black pepper


All nicely mixed


I pan fried using my WMF stainless steel frying pan and the cutlets turned out really nicely browned


And this is how we eat it. White rice, minced chicken cutlets and boiled unflavoured cabbage. No, I'm not being cruel. My kids love boiled cabbage. It's the truth.

Verdict:
My girl said she didn't care for the cutlets but she still ate quite a number of them.
My boy was pretty direct. He didn't like them and told me not to make them again.
I LOVE them. They were tasty and not too salty.
My husband tasted the cutlets 3 days later and complained they tasted old.

Postmortem:
My kids don't like minced meat. Accept it.

Honey Chicken Wings

I cook out of desperation. Having relied heavily on my favourite foodstall just 2 mins from my flat all these years, I was devastated when my "personal cook" did not return after the coffee shop was revovated. Only the bad stalls returned. After weeks of paying for bad food, I decided I would cook. And none of that usual boiling, grilling, pre-mix, call my mother for information sort of thing. I would cook using actual recipe from cookbooks.

I have The Eurasian Cookbook by Mary Gomes. Her food looks familiar - like stuff my mother has cooked. I chose Honey Chicken Wings because my children love chicken wings so I can't go very wrong.

Chicken wings with the marinade. What's in the plastic tube is pancake honey. The spoons contain minced garlic and minced ginger.


I was supposed to get coriander leaves but bought Chinese celery instead.


I think that's too much water!


While the chicken was simmering, I could smell the fragrance of the ginger and garlic and it was heavenly.

I was supposed to cook until the gravy had dried up. But I added too much water (I followed the recipe!) and the chicken wings were wetter than desired.

My celery wilted!


Verdict:
My girl said it was too spicy for her but she doesn't mind the chicken.
My boy likes it and said I could cook it again.
My husband who ate the chicken wings the next day likes the fragrance.
I thought the chicken tasted really good. My mother has definitely cooked this recipe before.

Postmortem:
Go easy on the ginger and garlic and less water next time!