Month: September 2013

Sweat-Free Crockpot Cooked Kaya and Homecooked Meals

This is my third attempt in making kaya (coconut milk + egg jam) using the crockpot and this time, the texture has improved as I used my most helpful kitchen helper – the Shimono food processor to blend it after cooking the kaya in crockpot for 2 hours.

This is a sweat-free and easy-peasy way to cook wholesome and lip-smacking kaya.

All you need are eggs, coconut milk (santan) and sugar — all in equal amount.  For my recipe, I used 1 big soup bowl of coconut milk (from 2 coconuts), 1 bowl of free-range chicken eggs and 1/2 bowl of organic raw brown sugar.  1 bunch of pandan (screwpine leaves). Even with reduced sugar, my kaya was still sweet.

For time-pressed lazy mothers, you just dump everything into the slow cooker and stir every 15 minutes.  If you have the time, the pandan kaya will have a more attractive bright green hue as well as a stronger aroma of pandan leaves if you squeeze out the juice of pandan leaves into the kaya mixture when it is cooking in the pot.

Once you have tried your own homemade kaya cooked using only natural goodness, you wouldn’t ever want to buy commercially made ones that are super sweet and have food additives.

And below picture was my ‘East Meets West’ homecooked dinner yesterday…

1) Tangy chicken fillet with fresh Portobello mushrooms

2) Butterhead lettuce, broccoli sprouts and alfalfa sprouts, chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, Emmentel cheese and seaweed salad.

served with Japanese rice cooked with pandan leaves.

I had intended to cook Terriyaki chicken fillet but when I opened the fridge to search, I then remembered that I had thrown the bottle of expired Terriyaki sauce a few months ago!  So I just whacked whatever marinate sauces I could find in the fridge and came up with this very tasty chicken dish marinated with Lea & Perrin sauce, Japanese Aba Ponzu citrus vinegar, soy sauce, black pepper, Maple syrup and organic agave nectar. The 2 ripened tomatoes and 2 huge onions added so much tanginess and flavor to the sauce.  Needless to say, the chicken dish was a hit with everyone, including the one that’s the hardest to please – the foodie hubs 😀

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Easy Peasy Homecooked Meals

It’s been almost a week since the MIL left for Hong Kong and the girls are still pretty happy surviving on mummy’s simple and no-frills meals.

Here are some of the simple one-dish platters that I had dished out…

Dinner on 30 Aug 2013 – Stir-fried Chinese cabbage with sawi and minced meat in egg sauce. The 3 little fussy eaters loved this dish and commented that they do not mind having this everyday. Now that’s music to my ears 😀

Dinner on 30 Aug 2013 – also reheated the frozen pre-cooked braised Hakka pork dish that the MIL mass-cooked for us before she left.

Dinner on 3 Sept 2013 – 1) pasta with homemade pesto sauce and roast chicken.   2)  Brocolli-chick peas-cherry tomatoes-celery salad with Emmentel cheese and chia seeds.

Tonight dinner’s menu will be terriyaki chicken fillet with big onions and Portobello mushrooms and a fresh garden salad consisting of butterhead lettuce and alfalfa sprouts. HFM only serves healthy food and striving to go as natural as possible and trying hard to steer clear from food laden with food additives.

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Hectic Start Of September 2013

First, was the red code emergency alert on water supply cut on our country’s Merdeka Day on 31 August 2013.  Our neighborhood was one of the affected areas and our friends living in our neighborhood (in houses) had their water supply cut. We still had our water supply and I guessed that we were using the condo’s water reserves in the water tanks.  I enlisted the girls’ help to find every possible container in the house to store water, including their ‘masak-masak’ set.  Then jolted hubs from his sleep to bring us to the nearby mini market to buy bottled water and pail before they are all sold out.  At the mini market, the situation was chaotic with every shopper rushing to grab a few boxes of bottled drinking water. When the mini market almost ran out of bottled water with long queues at every counter, hubs drove to another convenience store to stock up on bottled water for his shop and kitchen as he had several events to cater to that day. Long story cut short, my mission was accomplished, though it was super stressful for me as I had yet to pack for our yearly 1-day retreat at Hilton Sentral. We were to check in by 2pm and I had not packed the bags yet.  We also had a booking for lunch at PJ Hilton at 12 noon.

Almost every shopper who was  at the mini market bought 2-3 boxes of bottled drinking water.

Our ration of bottled water…to be used for drinking or bathing if we were hit by the water cut too.

After spending the whole morning scurrying to store water, buy water and pack our bags, we were all famished as we only had some durians for breakfast. We then had a sumptuous buffet lunch at PJ Hilton before checking into Hilton Sentral for our stay.

When we returned home on Sunday afternoon, I found out that my modem was spoilt, shucks!  I had  many emails and messages to reply to my customers and without internet would mean big trouble for me! Thankfully I could still rely on my handphone but my phone’s internal WiFi is pretty slow.  Our house phone was also not functioning.

Next, we found out that our Astro decoder was also not functioning, double whammy!

I spent my entire morning today making calls to Unifi, Astro, Sherilyn’s daycare (she is starting after-school tuition cum daycare effective today), Pos Laju, Alycia’s soon-to-be guitar teacher and our insurance agent.  I also had to make umpteen trips out to fetch the girls to and from school and to and from the tuition centres and had to rush back to meet the postman, insurance agent and Unifi technician.

Internet has just been restored and I have a short window of time to do my work online before I rush out to fetch Alycia back from tuition. Then it will be time for me to cook and after cooking, I have to make another mad dash to the tuition cum daycare centre to fetch Sherilyn home. What a hectic day it has been for me!

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HEALTH FREAK MOMMY