Category Archive: Homecooked Food

Here’s a very simple and quick-to-whip up lunch which I prepared for the girls.

Green tea noodles with sesame seed oil, toasted sesame seeds, a drop of soy sauce and stall bought roast chicken and lean ‘char siew’ .

Before eating lunch, my girls will always have a bowl of fruits first.

Easy peasy meal without much preparation but I just hate the washing up after each meal.  I think I will need some time to get used to washing the dishes, after having had a live-in helper to help me for 10 years.

Here’s one of our typical dinners whipped up by the mil.  Nothing fancy and elaborate but I love them all.  Nothing beats homecooked food, cooked with good quality cooking oil, vegetables that are thoroughly cleaned and dishes cooked with love.  Dishes that we can all eat confidently without worry of lack of hygiene,  recycled oil and burnt wok remnants. And not to mention the comfy environment at home.  When my mil is around, I look forward to each dinner.  I await what she has on her menu. A different dish will be placed on the dining table almost everyday.  She sure can cook and bake very well and we all appreciate it.

Stir-fried organic red spinach,Taj Mahal rice (low in carbs), chives omelete, stir-fried curly long beans with roast pork and pan fried white pomfret fish.  The small bowl on the right is my mil’s 10-grain rice.

Last X’mas (which was just a few days ago), the hubs bought an XL size turkey and roasted it himself. With so much stuffings for the turkey besides having other side dishes, there was a big portion of leftover turkey at the end of the dinner. After our guests had helped themselves to packing away the leftover turkey before they left the dinner, we still had quite a big portion left. So I deboned the turkey — stored the turkey breast meat in a container and the turkey bones in a zip lock bag and kept them in the freezer. A week later, I shredded the turkey breast meat and sauteed it with some big onions and fresh Korean mushrooms and seasoned it with a dash of Lea & Perrin sauce, Terriyaki sauce and pepper. This dish would go well with rice, mashed potatoes or even a bowl of salad.  For the bones and turkey wings, I cooked it with porridge and added some roasted pork ribs. There is still another bag of turkey bones in the freezer. I think my kids will have another round of turkey porridge next week. Cooking a pot of porridge for lunch on a school-going day is one of the most convenient for me. Just dump the rice and the meat into the rice cooker and voila, 2 hours later, there is piping hot food for lunch and sometimes there is even enough for dinner.

What do you do with your leftover X’mas turkey?

Whenever my mil is around, we don’t have to make trips to the bakery or have pizzas delivered to our door step for she will be baking them for us. The girls just have to tell their grandma what they would like to eat and their wishes will be her command.

Here’s a yummy pizza that she whipped up for our lunch:

Crispy crust pizza with fresh button mushrooms, bacon, bell peppers and cheese, topped with avocado. Super yummy and it was completely wiped out within minutes!

Tired of cooking the same old dishes for my girls, I whipped up something different. As I had some fresh button mushrooms in the fridge and some chicken, I braised the chicken with fresh button mushrooms.  Fresh mushrooms can be pretty costly. A punnet costs over RM10.  If you want, you can substitute it with canned button mushrooms but fresh mushrooms taste better.

Seasoning used : organic soy sauce, mixed herbs, ground pepper, a pinch of brown sugar and a dollop of dark sauce.

The dish turned out to be very delish and my 3 little pernickety eaters gave me a 10/10 score 😀

Another meal on the menu that my girls never get tired of : fish soup with fish balls.

A wok of nutritious fish soup boiled for over an hour with pumpkin, tomatoes, 3 big chunks of fish, anchovies, garlic, a slice of ginger and Chinese cabbage …

A bowl each of Udon with yummy fish soup,  fish balls and seafood tofu for the girls. I’d say that this is a complete meal with protein, carbs, fibre, iron and great source of anti-oxidant from the bright orangy pumpkin and tomatoes. You can even throw in an egg or two for more nutrients.

My girls are not fans of pumpkin but if cooked this way, where the pumpkin is very, very soft like mashed pumpkin, they can just swallow it down their throats, without giving me the ‘mum, I almost puked’ look 😀

And here’s my lunch – fish, Chinese cabbage, fish balls and seafood tofu minus the noodles… the fish meat tasted very good with a dip of organic soy sauce.

When my kids, especially Alycia (who is the most fussy eater of the three) get bored with fried noodles, fried rice, noodles soup and sandwiches for lunch, I make them something that all of them love to bits – sushi and California rolls. My version of the sushi is a healthy one, complete with cooked minced meat with diced carrots, diced french beans, onions and garlic, fried eggs, cucumbers.  Nothing raw.

First I stir fry the minced chicken meat, diced carrots and french beans with chopped garlic and onions with a little low sodium soy sauce and pepper…

Then I mix the stir fried ingredients into the pot of cooked Japanese rice. I could not find Japanese rice vinegar to bind the rice, so my rice was a tad ‘loose’ and not sticky enough.

Then, lay the rice with ingredients onto a sheet of seaweed on a bamboo mat meant for making sushi, squeezed in some mayo, put in the strips of fried egg and cucumber and took a deeeeeeeep breath….. as I had no frigging idea how to roll the damn thing up…. I had seen my mil do it once or twice a few years ago and as if my memory is that good….

… so my sushi turned up to be a tad deformed and the seaweed just did not stick at the end to the body of the sushi.

BUT, my kids love them anyway… they gobbled down one after another and stuffed themselves so full that I was so worried they would puke, especially Baby who has eyes bigger than her tummy LOL!

Now, I must ask the busy hubs to show me how he rolls the sushi up or go to You Tube to watch it!

Fried rice is one of the easiest and tastiest meals to whip up in a jiffy. Plus I can dump all the left over overnight food to fry with the rice. My fried rice normally consists of chicken breast meat from the roast chicken (siu kai fan) that we take away for lunch (no one touches chicken breast meat but when they are all chopped up and fried with rice, every bit of the meat will be polished off!), sweet corn kernels (from left over sweet corn on cob that we buy from the night market), diced carrots (add sweetness to the fried rice), chopped sawi, eggs and sometimes I will fry some crispy anchovies as topping.  Oh not forgetting some chopped spring onions.  We all love spring onions and I will sprinkle loads of them into our dishes. They are nutritious and add flavor to the food.

My fried rice where ‘liu’ (ingredients) are more than the rice, yums!

The other day, I whipped this out for lunch for the girls – pasta with mushroom soup, fresh mushrooms, blanched french beans and some pan fried beef balls. This is one of the girls’ favorite food for lunch and it tastes as good as the ones from restaurants!

Ingredients used to make the sauce are 2 sachets of MSG-free Campbell powdered mushroom soup,  1 pack of whipping cream, 1 tablespoon of milk powder (for extra nutrients for the kids), grated block Cheddar cheese, some pepper and water.  You can cook extra portions and deep freeze them for future consumption.  Comes in really handy when you are too busy to cook a piping hot meal for your kids.