Here’s the fuss-free, sweat-free and easy to prep dinner that I dished out yesterday.
Roast chicken drumsticks (chopped into bite size) with garlic, onion, tomato and red bell pepper. In the morning, I marinated the chicken with HP sauce, soy sauce, Manuka honey, pepper, mixed herbs and some left over red wine in the fridge. Don’t worry, my kids were still sober after their dinner of red wine roast chicken lol!
Blanched organic baby okra and ‘night flower’ veggie, drizzled with Japanese Goma sauce.
For the kids’ lunch today, I was undecided whether to cook green tea noodles with the new sauce that I had bought from Isetan or mushroom pasta. Since the punnet of button mushrooms had been sitting in the fridge for over 1 week already, I thought I should just use it before they turn black. Fresh button mushrooms are darn costly, so I ain’t going to waste them. So I cooked fresh mushroom pasta with roast chicken today. This time, I substituted whipping cream with evaporated milk. One of my regular readers from Canada gave me the great tip of using evaporated milk to replace whipping cream. And the pasta today tastes just as delish as whipping cream cooked pastas! And the price of evaporated milk is almost 3 times cheaper than that of whipping cream! Thanks heaps for this tip Chris!
Fresh button mushroom linguine with shredded roast chicken meat (I bought an extra piece of roast Terriyaki chicken whole leg from AEON yesterday).
Tonight, I am going to roast chicken for the girls and I know my girls will be very pleased to know that when they come home from school la later ♥
Here is our dinner for tonight, which I have already prepared at 4:40pm, as rascal #2 has ballet at 6:30pm. For time-challenged WFHMs, there will be lots of one-pot meals without stir-frying, shallow or deep frying. The lesser washing and oil splatters the better… and the food is healthier too.
Steamed chicken drumsticks in tong kwai herbs, red dates and a dash of salt. 10 minutes before the flame was turned off, I added the brocolli florets. Easy peasy ya?
Mushroom pasta cooked with Campbell’s mushroom soup is one of my kids’ favorite lunch meals. I normally add in 2 punnets of fresh button mushrooms, onions and sometimes chopped carrots. This time, I cooked it with pan fried fish, to pump up their protein and DHA intake.
After briefly pan-frying the fish in a non-stick pan (lid covered as I hate oil splatters), I added water and 2 sachets of Campbell’s mushroom soup powder into the pot (with the fish in it) and let it boil. Once the powder is diluted and water boiling, I added the fresh button mushrooms. Let it simmer for about 15 mins to bring out the mushrooms flavor. Then, I added 1 box of whipping cream / thickened cream (you can replace it with fresh milk or powdered milk, which is less costly) and 2 slices of cheese.
Preparation time is about 1 hour. There goes my precious 1 hour but it’s worth all the time spent and sweat. As long as the kids love my homecooked food, time spent is immaterial ♥
My 3 girls are big fans of noodles, especially #2 and #3. There is a noodles dish on my kids’ menu at least 3-4x in a week as it is pretty simple and quick to prepare. My noodles dishes come in a variety of styles. Braised pork ribs with egg noodles is a new addition in my menu 🙂
The braised pork ribs can be cooked in advance. I normally cook a big portion and store them in a few containers for deep freezing. The ribs can be heated up and eaten with rice or noodles on days when I am busy with stock check and orders.
I bought the wanton mein aka egg noodles from Tesco, which tasted good and very springy. The tip to having springy noodles is not to over boil them. I blanch them for about 5-8 minutes. Once removed from the pot and strained, rinse the noodles in cold filtered water, then add in some sesame oil so that the noodles will not clump together to form a pile of starch when they have cooled down.
The noodles in this pic was seasoned with a dollop of dark sauce, organic soy sauce, pepper and sesame seed oil (this is a fantastic and healthy flavor enhancer which I use daily). Chopped spring onions add lots of flavor to the dish too.
That’s my kids’ lunch today – taken with my handphone, sent from my handphone to my email and from my email uploaded into my blog.
Preparation time + cooking + cleaning up took me exactly 45 minutes. After cooking this, I rushed off to pick up Cass. She is now happily gobbling down this bowl of pasta while I am chilling out typing this post 🙂
Strips of chicken breast meat cooked with 4 large tomatoes, 1 large onion, 1 punnet of fresh mushroom, 3 shakes of tomato sauce, a dash of salt, brown sugar, pepper, mixed herbs and dried oregano herbs. Wholesome and super delish.
I cooked a large portion, so the girls will have this for dinner as well. Alycia the rice pot will probably say she wants to eat the chicken with rice. And I’ll just need to blanch some organic french beans, boil 3 hard boiled eggs and make a veggie salad for them.
I cooked extra pasta for deep freezing for another day’s quick lunch.
What did you cook for your kids’ lunch today? Love to see ideas for wholesome and easy to prepare kids meals.
Living with a great cook and a foodie hubs who is in the food catering industry, I need to have steely will power not to succumb to temptations of sinfully delish food all the time. And thank God I have that steadfast self control to resist the grub and determination to exercise everyday 😀
These are some of the highlights of the mil’s homecooked goodies last week:
Homemade buckwheat noodles with anchovies soup, fish balls and fu pei…
It was her first time making buckwheat noodles using organic buckwheat flour…
She also made bubur cha cha for dessert with thick coconut milk. I could still resist the buckwheat noodles but the bubur cha cha with thick santan? How can I say NO to coconut milk? I go bonkers over coconut milk and can gulp down a cup of coconut milk in one sitting. I am nuts over coconuts LOL!!
Fried fish only tastes good if it is eaten immediately while it’s still warm and out from the frying pan within the same hour. For left over fried fish that is kept in the fridge and reheated in the toaster or oven the next day, some how I find that the taste and texture of the fish lack freshness and juiciness. You will know that you are eating stale fish for overnight and reheated pan-fried fish. Fish like salmon where the meat is firm and harder than other fish will be even tougher if the fish is reheated in the oven or toaster the next day. I do not fancy eating overnight fried fish. Here’s what I suggested to the mil when we had quite a bit of left-over pan-fried salmon fish the other day:
Fried rice with pan-fried salmon fish, capsicum, celery, carrot and fried eggs. Yummy and healthy and the stale pan-fried salmon fish tasted even better when mixed and masked in this interesting one-pot dish!
Without a live-in maid, my mil and I have to alter the dishes on our menu. There are now lesser elaborate dishes that cause oil splatters, though my mil still prepares pan-fried fish and pancakes using our newly acquired Happy Call Pan (HCP), which is a gift from my mum.
Here’s what my mil prepared for the girls when the hubs and I attended a dinner last weekend and left the 3 girls behind:
She boiled a pot of veggie soup aka ABC soup in the afternoon using chicken breast and ribs. For dinner, she dumped in 3 chicken drumsticks into the pot of ABC soup and briefly cooked them. Then she blanched some french beans, green leafy veggie and rice vermicelli.
There you are… a bowl of nutritious and delicious noodles cooked with love, which is a very complete meal and the girls love them!
I am very thankful that my mil has a passion for cooking and baking and she actually does not mind whipping up good food for us all. And she does not mind doing the dish washing as well (which is the chore which I hate the most), thank God for her ! 😀
Maggie mee (my girls’ way of labeling instant noodles) is my girls’ all-time favorite comfort food. That is because I hardly prepare instant noodles for them. Even if I do, the sachet of flavouring with MSG is not added into the soup or noodles. And there will be other side dishes like eggs, seaweed, fish paste and veggie to accompany the noodles to make up for the lack of nutrients just from the noodles.
On days when I am too tied down with work, I will whip up meals that I can prepare in a jiffy with minimal preparation and cleaning up like sandwiches, cold green tea noodles, Udon and instant noodles, like this one:
Instant noodles flavored with sesame seed oil, a few drops of thick soy sauce and sodium-reduced soy sauce. It would taste better with fried onion oil but due to time constraint, I skipped this. Well, the noodles was tasty enough without the fried onion oil or the sachet of MSG. I also made some pan-fried Terriyaki chicken fillet and sliced up some cucumbers to dispel heatiness. Every strand of noodles was polished off!
No doubt, the forbidden food always tastes oh so good! Actually, even I love instant noodles but only allow myself a rare treat of a few slurpfuls once in a blue moon. My ideal bowl of instant noodles is one which is soup based and curry flavoured, topped with spam meat or a jumbo sausage, an egg and lots of shredded cabbage. Simply divine and satisfying but I have not had this sort of comfort meal for exactly 10 years, ever since I found out that I had PCOS and had to stave off carbs from my diet.
Here’s yet another bento set lunch for my girls prepared this week, something that’s quick to prepare and does not need elaborate preparation and cooking. For busy working mums like me, you can cook a big portion and deep freeze in smaller portions for future consumption. The Terriyaki chicken strips go well along with rice and noodles.
De-boned chicken drumsticks cooked with Terriyaki sauce, garlic and organic cabbage, Japanese style – on top of a slice of low-sugar wholemeal walnut bread spread with Tesco’s mayonaise made with free-range chicken eggs, mango as starter and chocolate cake for dessert, washed down with a mug of chilled Ribena with Refresh.
I had several tries cooking this Terriyaki chicken recently but the texture of the chicken in the earlier rounds were a pretty dry. This time, I cut the chicken drumstick meat into smaller and thinner strips and marinated them with a little corn flour along with Terriyaki sauce, pepper and a dash of Lea & Perrin sauce. And voila, the chicken meat turned out juicy and very flavourful. Another lesson learned – use chicken drumstick to cook instead of chicken breast. My 2 older fussy pots had no complaints this time 😀
Simple meals can be made to look really appetizing and enticing if you do some ‘touch up’ or ‘make up’ to it, like placing the food in nice bowls, plates and decorating the food. My princess wannabe is one such aesthetic fella. She likes food decorated tastefully and presented to her, like it was fit for a princess. Since I don’t have the time to do tedious deco on the food like some bento enthusiasts who would spend hours decorating their kids’ meals elaborately, the least I could do is to arrange her meals in a bento set since she is one Japanese foodie. Each day, there is a different bento set for her. This is just one of the sets:
Home-cooked Jar Jiang Mien (Udon used) with carrot-orange-apple-celery juice (home-blended) and a free-range chicken egg. The egg was later mashed and added with some mayo and pepper.
Yesterday, I made bread Sushi, presented to her in a bento set meal too and this fella was grinning from ear to ear when she saw her set. Pix of the next bento set coming up soon…
My girls love fried drummets, nuggets and fried chicken. While shopping for groceries at Bangsar Village, I saw some raw chicken drummets at the frozen meat section. I hardly see raw chicken drummets at the frozen meat section at the supermarkets that I normally frequent, so I was really excited and got 2 packs. But I had a problem. I did not know how to fry them. So after google searching for fried drummets recipe, I modified the recipe a little and the end result was very successful. The fried chicken drummets turned out to be golden brown, crispy and very, very delish! My girls love them to bits. The fussiest of the lot – Alycia even asked to bring some to school the next morning.
I replaced the plain flour with rye flour (50%) and corn flour (50%) and used olive oil.
I marinated the chicken with turmeric powder, pepper and sea salt. Before frying the drummets, I dipped the drummets in a bowl of beaten eggs, then dipped them in a bowl of the flour mixture, then dipped into the egg mixture again. Next shallow fried the drummets until they turned golden brown.
The delicious crispy fried dummets, free from MSG, low in sodium and no other food additives. Tasted as good as restaurant ones, yums!!!
I had forgotten that there was still a bag of purple sweet potatoes that I had bought from the night market. When my maid reminded me about it about a month later, I told her that we had to finish off the sweet potatoes that night itself, lest they rot in no time. So that night, everyone ate purple sweet potatoes in replacement of rice. Nevertheless, there was still some rice, specially cooked for my ‘fan thoong’ aka rice addict. Can you guess who the fan thoong is among my 3 girls?
What’s on the dining table? Steamed pork ribs with fermented bean paste, pickled plums, tomatoes and garlic. Stir fried leafy green veggie which is a must-have everyday, some vegetarian dishes bought in the morning, steamed purple sweet potatoes and steamed multi-grain rice. Healthy stuff eh?
The forbidden fruit is always so juicy and tasty even though you do not really like it. My girls are absolutely crazy over maggie mee, which is their version of instant noodles. That’s because I hardly ever allow them to eat. Each time they see kakak or daddy slurping salty and spicy maggie mee from their bowls, they would run to them and beg to have just one spoonful. Whenever I am in the mood to cook maggie mee, like say 4-5 times in a year, there will be shouts of ‘YAY’ and ‘YAHOO‘, LOL! But the maggie mee that I serve my kids are without the seasoning and MSG from the packet of noodles. I make my own sauce or soup to go with the noodles.
Soup made from fish, anchovies, pork slices and garlic….
Then add in some Chinese cabbage and fish paste….
Onion omelette for added protein and nutrients….
And here’s the maggie mee that I serve my kiddos for dinner…
Free from seasoning and MSG and they like it anyway! Every strand of noodles was wiped out that night, even the flesh from the fish!
These are some of the dishes that I whipped up last week. You may be wondering why all so porky?? I had used minced pork in most of my dishes. That’s because the pork seller (don’t know whether he deliberately or accidentally) put 2 packets of minced pork into my bag instead of 1 and charged me for 2 packets! So with so much minced pork, I had to add minced pork in most of my dishes and also whipped up a minced pork pattie dish. The results were all good. My 3 fussy eaters loved all the dishes that I cooked… and I am beginning to feel that I am a better cook each passing day *gloats and floats in air* hehehehe….
Stir fried purple cabbage with lots of garlic and minced pork…
Pan fried prawns with soy sauce and wine aka kon cheen har loke…
Pink beans + red beans + pork ribs soup….
Stir fried young lotus roots with minced porky again…
Stir fried leek with minced pork yet again…
And minced pork pattie. It was my first time making pork pattie and it turned out fantastico, very delicious! The only ingredient that I had forgotten to add in was chopped onions. Anyhow, the pattie was still very tasty. I added these ingredients to the minced pork mixture before pan frying them : 1 tbs sesame seed oil, 1 tbs of corn flour, ground mixed pepper, a dash of brown sugar, sea salt, soy sauce, spring onions, an egg and about 1 teaspoon of rye flour. The texture was just right and not coarse or dry at all.
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