Category Archive: Homecooked Food

This is our dinner tonight….

Chicken bolognaise spaghetti and avocado-organic french beans-cherry tomatoes salad, sprinkled with  organic sunflower seeds and drizzled with Japanese sesame seed salad dressing.

Simple and wholesome and the kids loved it!

These days, I am into making salads as it does not involve garlic/ onion peeling and chopping and no stir-frying too. For busy WFHMs like me, we take the shortest way out, without compromising on the kids’ health 🙂

So happy to see my little one enjoying her dinner 🙂

This is the last meal that the mil dished up for us before we left for Ipoh and before she left for Hong Kong.  After she was done with this, she cooked a big pot of turmeric chicken for us, for deep freezing into 2 portions. All her homecooked dishes in the freezer will be our ration on days that I am too busy or too tired to cook. There are still 4 servings of dishes sitting in the freezer now.

Cantonese style fried yee mein with seafood consisting of squids, prawns, meat slices, veggie and egg sauce.  The deep fried yee mein was made from scratch.  The kids love yee mein but the mil does not fancy the idea of her grand kids eating deep fried noodles fried with oil from questionable source.  So she bought some raw wanton noodles and deep fried them herself.

Oodles of yummy homecooked noodles!

The girls told me that they wanted to have ABC soup, just like granny’s homemade Western ABC soup and I said no problem if they could help to peel and cut the vegetables. They could not be happier to help out in the kitchen!  And so here they are in action…

I only allowed Alycia and Sherilyn to help out as it involved holding a peeler and kitchen knife to peel and cut the onions, carrots, tomatoes and potatoes.  Cass could only watch and wished that she could help….

While granny’s Western ABC soup does not contain any meat, has soy bean milk powder and olive oil added and is blended, ours was Chinese style, i.e. cooked with meat and not blended. And they tasted delish as well, not to mention wholesome.

Our dinner on 16 Dec 2012 — Chinese style ABC soup  with rice, a meat dish and a blanched veggie too.

My mum is a health freak in an even more serious state than I am.  She eats pretty bland food, almost free from sodium and low in oil and sugar.  She plants her own veggie and herbs in her garden, makes her own jams from plums, oranges, strawberries, peaches, apricots and other fruits that she has excess, makes her own bread, makes the best kaya in the whole wide world and can bake very delish cakes and pies.

My mum has a stash of homemade soups kept in the freezer at all times, which she will heat up and put in some vermicelli or just eat it with some hot toasted bread whenever my dad is too tired to cook (my dad is the chef at home!).  My girls have never tried granny’s homemade capsicum soup and sweet corn soup and I am glad that this holiday, they finally had a chance to.  And they all loved granny’s soups to bits and gobbled up all her soups stash left in the freezer!  Since it was such a big hit, my mum made another batch of soup today, with carrots, cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes, celery, big onions and garlic.  It is so simple to whip up — contains no meat, no stir frying is needed and all you need are a big pot to cook the ingredients for about half an hour and then a hand mixer to blend the soup!

Granny’s homemade capsicum soup (made from red bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil and purple sweet potatoes as thickening agent) and sweet corn soup (made from sweet corns, carrots, organic soy bean powder onions, garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil and potatoes as thickener), garnished with sweet thyme homegrown from her herbal garden.

My mum omitted whipping cream as she is lactose intolerant and substituted it with organic soy bean powder.

The MIL made some buckwheat noodles from scratch the other day.  She used half the portion of the buckwheat noodles to prepare seafood noodles with anchovies soup for us.  The other half – she stir fried them with sliced beef, cabbage, black pepper and eggs the next day.

The next day, she made some kau chi (Chinese dumplings) wrapped with minced meat, minced prawn meat, chopped carrots and watercress veggie. Alycia is a huge fan of her ma ma’s  kau chi and she does not mind eating them everyday, 2x a day LOL!

Chinese dumplings served with julienned young ginger and black vinegar.

Oh yes, the MIL knows I eat no white flour products, so she saved some of the minced meat mixture and steamed them for me 😀

Here’s an easy peasy way to make homemade pizza without having to knead the dough from scratch.  Alycia and Sherilyn’s art class teacher gave me this suggestion.  She is also  a very busy WFHM with no maid and she whips this up for her 2 toddlers at least once or twice a week.

All you need are :

1) Wholewheat wraps. I use Mission Wraps wholegrain wraps.  I bought this from Cold Storage.

2) Pizza sauce

3) Fresh mushrooms (optional and we used fresh button mushrooms)

4) Cheese.  You can use cheddar cheese, mozarella cheese, parmessan cheese or those individually wrapped square processed cheddar  cheeses.

5) Bacon (optional)

6) Bell pepper, cherry tomatoes (all optional and these will add colors and flavors to the pizza)

Method
==========

1) Spread pizza sauce (you can also use tomato sauce or tomato paste) on the wraps. You can tweak this recipe to your own by using anything you can find in your fridge!

2) Lay chopped fresh mushrooms, bacon, bell pepper, etc. and cheese on the wraps

3) Bake in oven or toaster for 15 minutes and done!

If Health Freak Busy Mommy says it’s easy to prepare means it is easy! I shun anything that requires many steps, preparation, oil splatters and washing up. This requires minimal work and can be prepared in under half an hour. Even your primary school kids can prepare this dish on their own!

I am fortunate to have a health freak mil who stays with us as she often whips up healthy meals for us, using only fresh ingredients  and mostly organic ingredients  for her bakes.

Here’s another of her most cooked one pot meal – multi-grain fried rice with multi-colored veggie — red, green and yellow bell peppers, celery, beans, minced meat and fried eggs.

Since we still had a packet of Tea Egg Spices from Purple Cane that was about to expire, she whipped up a big pot of spiced tea eggs, enough to satiate my love for tea eggs for 3 days!

And oh yes, she also baked a tray of banana muffins on the  same day.

Here’s another very simple yet wholesome home-cooked dinner, which was 50% organic, 100% free from MSG and food additives:

Stir-fried organic sweet potato leaves with garlic, steamed brown rice, stir-fried pork slices with organic Japanese pumpkin (check out the pretty bright orange color of the pumpkin skin) and steamed salmon fish with julienned ginger, drizzled with organic soy sauce.  A very ‘ching ching tei’ dinner which does not leave us all running to the kitchen to down cups after cups of water to quench thirst.

What can really comfort a tummy is a hot bowl of homemade porridge. I am one who eats no or very little rice (solely for diet reasons) but when my mil whips up a pot of chicken or fish porridge with meat pre-marinated to perfection, I almost always succumb to a piping hot bowl. And the warm porridge can really comfort the tummy and mind on one of those stressful week days.

Fish and pork porridge, sprinkled with some crunchy meat floss from Taiwan.