Healthy quick and easy dinner on 14/07/2009

On 14/07, both of us felt somewhat tired and not in the mood of cooking our dinner. So et suggested that we buy salad from Jusco and have that for dinner.

Since salad is not a bad choice, after all it's probably time we eat something really healthy, we decided that salad it is for our dinner.

Et got the boxed Caesar Salad from Jusco supermarket. Or at the least, it's labeled as Caesar Salad, seeing that it does not even have the typical ingredients of croutons, eggs and parmesan cheese.

Here's what Caesar Salad are supposed to be like, according to Wikipedia.

What we did after getting home was to add more ingredients into the salad, to add variety and make it a more complete meal. We added the following ingredients:

• Hashbrown
• Egg
• Tomato
• Carrot
• Olive Oil
• Honey apple vinegar (from Eu Yan Sang)
• Parmesan cheese powder

The salad, together with miso soup, was a nice quick and easy dinner for us. Really healthy too :)

Quick home made dinner on 13/07/2009

With both of us working now, there is often little time for cooking dinner. I'm sure this scenario is a common thing seen among our modern society. We do try to make 1 or 2 home-cooked dinners every week, aware of all the benefits one get from having homemade meals.

For Monday 13th July 2009, we made pasta. We regularly make pasta as it is one of the quickest wholesome meal to prepare. For the day, we made Linguine Carbonara with Oyster Mushroom, Chicken Sausage and Sutchi fish.

Sidenote: Linguine is commonly misspelled as Linguini, as highlighted in its Wikipedia entry.

We stir-fried the mushroom, sausage and the sutchi fish together in EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil) before adding in the carbonara sauce. Lastly, pour the mixture over linguine cooked al-dente.

Results, one yummy wholesome dinner :)

Lunch and Dinner on 03/07/09

Today we remained indoors, not having any agenda to go outdoors.
That means we had home-cooked meals for the day's breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Breakfast was pancake made by et, but no photos taken this time.
We had the pancake together with peanut butter, honey, and banana. All eaten separately together with the pancake, rather than one big mix of everything.

As for lunch, we had Tom Yam Noodle. For the Tom Yam, we used Tom Yam paste, onion, tomato, chicken frankfurter, chicken meat, cauliflower, carrot, bell pepper, and mushroom. Unfortunately we had no bird eye's chili nor red chili to get the extra spicy kick. Nonetheless, we used chili flake as substitute which did a decent job. For the extra sour kick, we used lemon juice.
The result as you can see in the first photo, the amount of ingredient overwhelmed the noodle until the noodle can't be seen. lol



The first photo was taken before we 'attacked' the meal. The second shows et's bowl after she 'assaulted' her bowl. :)




Since we had some of the Tom Yam soup left from lunch, we decided to make Tom Yam Fish with the tom yam being more like gravy rather than soup. Into the Tom Yam, we added mixed vegetables, chicken frankfurter and fish slices. The fish slices are of the Pollack, marinated with some salt and pepper and pan-fried before being mixed with the Tom Yam. The photo below shows the resulting dish. The dish was ok, as the Pollack still retained some of it fishy taste. Sutchi would have been better, but lately we are less inclined on the Sutchi (aka Dory to some, erroneously). You can refer to this post for the reasons.


The 2nd dish for our dinner was Stir-Fried Cauliflower with Carrot and Bell Pepper. Other ingredient was onion and garlic.


Well, we managed to have our meals today with whatever we had in the fridge. Good to have some stuff in the fridge. Beats the hassle of going out just for meals.

Chocolate Cake

It has been close to a year since I last baked cake from scratch (scratch means not from cake mix :p) I fall in love with baking while relo in US, I started with cake mix, and slowly decided to try making cake from scratch. I got myself a small tabletop oven many years ago, it's still in service now. Hehe, good investment :) Anyway, I am not diligent enough in baking, sometimes not doing any baking for months.

Early of the year I bought a cup cake recipe book which comes with baking kits, so I decided to do some baking with the new toy (silicone muffin pan). And here it is, chocolate cup cake:

Dinner on 03/05/09

Tonight's dinner was home-cooked again. We had Kung Pao Chicken, Sambal Kangkung (water convolvulus) and Old Cucumber soup. The Kung Pao Chicken was done following a recipe from a food magazine. Turns out to be quite a good recipe. I, however, had put quite a lot of dried chilli which results in quite a spicy dish! Just the way I like it :)

The Sambal Kangkung was cooked using our own sambal belacan that was prepared by et.

Dinner on 03/02/09

Our dinner on Monday was delicious :) Two thumbs up for cw who prepared the food :D

Dish #1 is Butter Prawns. This is the 1st time we cook prawn dish at home and it turned out to be very nice, both the look and the taste...


Dish #2 is Otak-Otak. Otak-Otak is a popular food in Muar. Its main ingredient is fish paste, wrapped in banana leaf and grilled like Satay. This particular Otak-Otak was bought from Parit Jawa, a well-known seafood village near Muar town.



Dish #3 is Lily Bulbs Egg Soup. Hehe, it is an instant soup, but tastes good too...


Dish #4 is mix vegetables. We do not have any fresh vegetable in fridge, so frozen vege is our only choice.

Dinner on 02/26/09

Using yesterday's leftover beansprout, we made noodle for today's dinner. The base soup was a quick job using anchovie stock, kei chi (wolfberries), some peppercorn, salt and sugar. On top of the noodle, we mixed in plenty of stuff as can be seen in the photo below :)

We had fishball, seaweed, beansprout and siew bak choy. Yum yum...

Dinner on 02/25/09

I found a recipe for Pad Thai (Thai Style Fried Noodle) while cleaning up my messy documents, and I got interested to try it, since Pad Thai was one of my favourite food in US. So today, I cooked Pad Thai for dinner, after we finally have prawns in our fridge :p


The main ingredients for the Pad Thai dish from the recipe includes noodle, prawns, roasted peanuts, preserved radish, bean sprout, shallots and garlic; and seasoning are tomato sauce, thai chili sauce, tamarind juice, sugar, fish sauce and chilli flakes. We also added carrot, cili padi and curry leaves which are not called in the original recipe :)

As can see from the photo, the Pad Thai does not look like actual Pad Thai, and in fact the taste was not exactly like Pad Thai too :( This 1st attempt was not successful. Hmm.. I guess I put in too much tomato and chilli sauce, and cooked a bit too long. Anyway, I'm going to try cooking Pad Thai again in the near future. I guess I will have to do more homework before I make 2nd attempt.

Lunch on 02/21/09

We had stir-fry spaghetti for lunch today, prepared by et :p
We added many ingredients to the spaghetti. Hehe, basically whatever suitable raw food available in our fridge. This is one of the reason I cook spaghetti quite frequent last time, great flexibility on the ingredients :)


This time, our stir-fry spaghetti has purple cabbage, carrot, chicken sausage, chinese sausage, dried mushroom, onion, garlic, and lot of Italian herbs, garnished with chilli flakes and dried parsley.

Dinner on 02/20/09

For today's dinner, i prepared Baked Salt and Pepper Chicken. This dish is one of the simplest to make and also happens to be one of the most delicious too.

Dinner on 02/17/09

Dinner today is sumptious again with Pan-Fried Pollack in Creamy Chives Sauce, Sweet Pea Sprouts Stir-Fried with Garlic and YuZhu soup.

The pollack fillet is first lightly pan-fried before the chives sauce that had been prepared separately are poured onto the fish fillet. This dish has always been one of our favorites. We'll share the recipe soon.

The sweet pea sprout (Cantonese: tau miu) is stir-fried with garlic, with a little bit of salt and light soy sauce. Quick to cook, nice to eat. What else to say... :)

This YuZhu soup is also one of the favorites for its easy preparation and great taste. Yuzhu is known in English as Fragrant Solomonseal Rhizome and its Latin name is Rhizoma Polygonati Odorati. More info here. Basically you throw in some meat, yuzhu, carrot, red dates and kei ji (wolfberries) together for soup. Voila! Nice-tasting nutritious ready to be ... ;)

This photo is actually et's lunch for the next day which is today's dinner. Looks nice :) Especially with the brown rice.

Dinner on 02/13/09

Dinner on 02/12/09

We only have purple cabbage in the fridge for today's dinner. We need a meat based dish, so we decided to open up a can of luncheon meat. Instead of pan-frying the thin sliced luncheon meat like we always do, I decided to try one of my favourite dish by my mom. It has been long time since I eat the dish, and I missed it! In fact I do not know how to cook the dish. I just remember the luncheon meat is cubed, plus lots of onions and black soy sauce.

This is the output ... :-) The taste is quite good (can't be too wrong with luncheon meat :p ), but definitely could be improved. We should add more onions...

This is also our first time cooking purple cabbage. We were attracted with its color in Supermarket and decided to bag it home. We stir fry the purple cabbage like we do for green cabbage. Purple cabbage is crisper than green cabbage :) This is only 1/3 of the whole cabbage we bought, so we are going to explore other ways of cooking purple cabbage soon... :D

Dinner on 02/11/09

Today's Dinner (10/02/09)

We had a nice dinner tonight. The great food was prepared by cw :)
First up was the steamed broccoli. Steamed for 10 min to perfection with the electric steamer, its natural taste was enhanced with the addition of oyster sauce.


Second dish of the night was the Butter Pollack. It's a twist to one of Malaysian favourite dish, the Butter Prawn. Pollack was used in place of the prawn. It tastes good. :) Recipe will be coming along soon.

Our 1st Sushi Making Experience

We like to eat sushi.. and one day we decided to DIY sushi..
I bought a sushi recipe book in book fair... and after got all the ingredients..
we started our sushi project :-)

The output...
















Sushi making is time consuming, but it's fun & surprisingly our self-made sushi taste very good.. :)

What's cooking on Dec 23rd 2008? The dinner we had ..

The dinner we had on 23rd December 2008...







Stir-Fried French Bean and Carrot with Fishcake






and ...






Pan-Fried Pollack Fillet in Creamy Chives Sauce







Looks good? :)
They tasted good too. Too good in fact, that we forgot to have the photo taken until we had partly devoured the fish. :p

We'll share the recipe for the fish in another post soon. The creamy chives sauce was our creation inspired by one of Ikea Malaysia's salmon dish in its restaurant.

Dinner on 01/16/09

Recipe #2: Homemade Pancake

I made some pancake not too long ago, which cw likes a lot... :)
Below is the recipe for the homemade pancake...



Ingredients:

1.5 cup ........flour
3.5 tsp ........ baking powder
1 tsp ............salt
1 tbsp ..........sugar
1.25 cup ......milk
1 ................. egg
3 tbsp ..........butter

Methods:

• Mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a mixing bowl.
• Melt butter.
  
• Add butter, milk and egg to earlier mixture, mix well.
• Heat greased egg-pan and pour approximately 1/4 cup of pancake mixture to the pan.
• Remove the pancake from pan once both sides are brown.
• This should get you about 8-9 pancakes.

The pancakes can be served plain, or with peanut butter, jam, honey... etc.

-et

Dinner on 01/14/09