Chicken & Broccoli Alfredo

My family loves pasta or any other types of Asian noodles. I find that pasta is an another easy to prepare dish that saves time. It is a staple that must have in my kitchen.

This is a family delight recipe and an easy to prepare one-dish-meal that kids will like too. The first time I cooked this meal was a failure since I underestimated the amount of sauce needed for one packet of linguine. I learnt my mistake. The second attempt was a success but this time I served it with shell pasta or/and macaroni. For this dish, the main ingredients used are cream of mushroom, Parmesan cheese, butter, milk, chicken and broccoli.

When it comes to baking, I will try to follow the measurement of the recipe but not so much for cooking. Cooking is fun in a way that i enjoy very much because there is no or little restriction of how much or many ingredients should be used. When you receive compliments from your family and friends and when it tastes good and to your likings, those are the guidelines and clues! :)

Tofu Chicken Balls Porridge

This morning I was very tired as I was barely able to sleep for more than 3 hours yesterday night. I was sorting out some works for my husband's business accounts until late night. To make the matter worse, I was not able to catch my beauty sleep since my 2nd little boy still needs at least two night feeds at the moment. The 2nd feeding, which was towards the dawn, was really a challenge as he just seemed irritated and didn't manage to settle himself back to sleep. When he fell back to sleep it was morning and I need to get up to prepare my daughter for school :( Luckily hubby chipped in to help though he went to sleep at about 3am due to his work. Appreciate his effort so so much!! I told myself to whip up something quick, easy, healthy and yet tasty for our lunch. I decided to cook porridge with minced chicken which I mixed them with crushed Japanese tofu, cilantro, cornflour and a little garlic salt.

My daughter loves garlic, onions, cilantro very very much and always asks for more. Not many children acquire this taste at her age and I am of course happy because that will make my cooking easier without having to omit those in the dishes. She loves nuts too, especially preserved peanuts. I added some of those in the porridge and served them with oven toasted anchovies. When it comes to cooking, nothing is more important than whipping up something with all easily accessible local ingredients that my loved ones love most, in no time, yummy, tasty and above all healthy!

Chinese Confinement Food

Hello... wishing all my Chinese readers 'Kong Hee Fat Choy' & Happy Chinese New Year. Today is the 8th day of the first month of the Chinese Lunar calendar and the whole celebration is going to end soon on the 15th day. Kind of miss my family back home in Kuala Lumpur because normally on this day, we will gather at nite for preparation of some ritual worship. Though I am not the believer, i like the mood of preparation and the small gathering we had to catch up.

This Chinese New Year I am not baking any pastries as I have just given birth to a boy, the second addition to the family. I am coping to be a 'new mother' again to a new precious life :) That also explained the long silence of my blog that I have not been updating for months!! For those who follows my blogs, I am sorry. Nevertheless, I really wish to share with you some of the confinement foods that I was 'served' during the first month.

During the first week of the confinement, i took nothing but mainly black fungus, ginger, pork, chicken and some Chinese herbs; brewed into soup mainly to expel clog blood and wind. During this period it is pointless to take too much tonic drinks as the body is too weak and 'windy' to absorb the nutrients. Vegetables such as broccoli, carrots, capsicums, snow peas were slowly introduced to the diet during second week. We believe that fish consumption should not be too early during confinement as this will cause a person to dislike fish when they grow older. My mum said that my grandmother was a good example of not heeding the advice that she hated fish when she grew old! Could this be just an old wife tales? I don't know but I insisted to consume some to boost up my breast milk supply. By third week onwards, the diet will include more nutritional foods with a good balance of tonic soups. I took quite a lot of different tonic soups like cordycep double boiled with chicken, ginseng black chicken soup, chicken double boiled with wine and 'tong kwai' etc. These were taken every night for supper. On top of these, I have been taking soups for both lunches and dinners for one full month! We also used different types of wine in the cookings such as ginger wine, red rice wine, yellow rice wine, black dates wine and blue dates wine.

I have been consuming plentiful of ginger ... about 13 kilo in just one month that I really could not believe it that I took that much! I have posted some photos of the confinement food that I have had. I love to eat them all and the best of the best is my favourite black vinegar pig trotters! Yum yum! Enjoy....

Threadfine cooked in a few types of rice wines, ginger and dates
Soy sauce chicken with onions
Dried Longan, Red dates and some herbal chicken soup for lunch
'Mui Choy' (A Type of Sweet Chinese Vegetables) stewed with pork
Simple ABC soup
Pork Liver with plenty of ginger
Forever Green Snowpeas with ginger and carrot
'Ka Char Ma'/'Yi Mu Choa' (A type of Chinese dried herbs) cooked with chicken and wine
Strictly red residue rice wine with chicken
Fried Chicken marinated with ginger and soy sauce
Pig Trotter with black Vinegar
Pig Stomach Organ Soup with lot of pepper
Chicken Chinese Herbal soup
Steamed Chicken with Black Fungus and Ginger
Steam Fish with Ginger, Red Dates and Black Fungus
Pig Liver Soup with Black Fungus and Pork
Ginger Fried Noodle
Chicken Lemongrass Soup
Fried Spinach with Ginger
Fried Threadfin with plentiful of Shredded Ginger on top...yum!


This is not a confinement food but the morning breakfast that my husband prepared for me before I went to give birth :)

Mini Strawberries & Chocolate Chips Muffin

I had a little 'free' time this morning, so I thought I could quickly whip up a tray of muffins rich in strawberries flavour by using the balance of the strawberries milk and yogurt in the fridge. At the same time, I was really excited each time getting my daughter involved in my baking projects. She loves helping me to crack eggs, add in the different ingredient and do the mixing. Watching her stirring gently the batter amazed me! It is so wonderful to see her so happy doing all small little things together with me in the kitchen each time!

I didn't refer to any particular recipe but just recalling the ingredients and the volume used for the sunny morning muffins. I think they are still in my head as I had baked them not long ago.. I hope :) I substituted the orange juice with the strawberries milk and maintain the amount for most of the ingredients used except the walnuts and other fruits. I made a mistake here. I should have increased the volume for the strawberries milk since the chocolate chips that I added in to the muffins were dry and create no moist as compared to the strawberries juice and blueberries for the sunny morning muffins!

The muffins were heavy and a little bit dry. I would not pose the recipe here as I think it wasn't a success project. Nevertheless, the consolations that I had were that they looked really cute, sweet and adorable in the pink mini muffin cases and that my dear husband and daughter liked them!! Think they didn't mind the heavy texture nor the cakey one :)

Fried Angel Hair ala Peranakan

We are supposed to have spaghetti with mushroom tomato sauce on Sunday but my husband mistook the angel hair with spaghetti. So we had that for our Sunday's dinner. I didn't know how to estimate the amount for the three of us so I ended us cooking more than what we could finish! I was thinking hard what was I supposed to do with the balance boiled angel hair that was still sitting in the fridge. I wish to have something Asian for today's dinner and cleared the balance of the noodles. I decided to fry the angel hair Ala Peranakan.

If you are a die hard fan of yellow noodles which the original Peranakan fried noodles should be, you may not like this dish as much. All the three of us aren't so I thought of giving it a try and fry it following the peranakan fried noodles recipe. It tasted very good as the angel hair didn't absorb the gravy as much and as quickly as compared to the yellow noodles. The noodles were not soggy nor dry even if you were to consume much later. As the taste of the angel hair is light it didn't spoil or deviate much from the original taste!! In fact to me I think it gives the traditional recipe a twist of new taste. I will cook this again as my daughter and husband like this much more than the authentic peranakan fried noodle!!

Ingredients (for 3 pax)
8 pcs of prawn
24 prawn heads
1 tbsp of salted soya bean paste
1 palm size fish cake (sliced)
3 tbsp of minced pork
2 stalks of off spring leaves (cut into 2 inch length)
8 slices of Chinese cabbage (chopped)
1 red chili (chopped for garnish)
2 cloves of garlic

Method
1. Boiled the prawn heads with 1 cup of water for about 20 minutes and leave aside for stock later

2. Fry the garlic and bean paste until fragrant

3. Add the minced meat and continue to stir fry. Add in the prawn and fry for about 30 seconds.

4. Add in the cabbage and the spring leaves. Continue to fry for a while.

5. Add in the fish cake and the stock and let it boil.

6. Season to taste.

7. Add in the noodles and stir fry for another 30 seconds.

8. Garnish with chopped red chili.

Notes:
1. The authentic peranakan fried noodle calls for shallot paste instead of garlic but to make my job easier and since I don't have any more shallots left at home, I just improvise!

2. The original recipe will taste much better with chye sim instead of cabbage and uses the pork belly rather than minced pork.

3. Needless to say it is best to eat the original one with 'belacan' = shrimp paste chili but not for this new dish which i think best to eat just with chopped chilli!

Pancakes with Blueberries & Strawberries Syrup

I still have craving for blueberries and bought another two punnets from the supermarket since they are having discount now. Never planned to cook this simple meal for breakfast. It was very impromptu as I was lazy to go out to get breakfast this morning. Thought of making strawberries syrup as there were still some balance in the fridge. My daughter and I love the blueberries syrup a lot. The only drawback was that the pancakes were not fluffy enough as I didn't add enough baking powder to the pancake batter. Just wanna to use less chemical ingredients as possible at home! :)

Ingredients :
Pancakes
1 cup of plain flour
1/4 baking powder
1 egg
1 tbsp grapeseed oil
1 tbsp castor sugar
1/2 cup of milk

Blueberries syrup
125g blueberries
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 of water
1/4 tsp cornstarch
(Cook all ingredients in a saucepan and add cornstarch the last to thicken the syrup)

Strawberries syrup
4 - 5 pcs of strawberries (chopped)
1 tbsp sugar
(Add sugar to the chopped strawberries and let it rest for half an hour until the juice is oozed out)

Method
1. Mix all ingredients (except oil) for pancakes for about 1 hour and let it rest in the fridge.
2. Add in the oil and stir well just before frying the pancakes
3. Use a ladle and scoop the batter to the non stick frying pan. Flip the pancake over when the bubbles stop forming
4. Cook for another 30seconds to 1 minute and serve hot with your preferred syrup!

Sunny Morning Muffins

I bought some bananas, strawberries and blueberries over the weekend and happened to stumble to the Food Network.com website when I was searching for other blueberries recipes. The craving for blueberries is still lingering in me!! I baked the muffins following the recipe this morning for our breakfast. My husband and I both ate 5 each. My daughter enjoyed it very much too and she has it again for her snack later in the day at school. I thought of freezing some for snacks for the week but they are too good to resist or keep for the rest of the week. You just can't stop eating them especially when they were just out from the oven!!. It tasted so good that I know I will bake it time and again. What's more it is healthy and smart way to get the children eating more fruits and use up whatever balance of fruits you have in the fridge.


The muffins are moist not dense, fruity, fragrant with the mixture of berries, bananas, lemon and they are nutty. The light cinnamon and nutmeg spices blended in extremely well with the fruity flavours of the muffins. The taste of the strawberries, blueberries, bananas, lemon is significant by itself but none is overpowering the other. It was really a balance and a good combination!!

Sunny Morning Muffins

Ingredients

Wet ingredients:
1 cup strawberries, chopped and mixed with 2 tablespoon of sugar.
1 cup of sugar
1 ripe banana, mashed
2 large egg (room temp)
1/4 cup vegetable oil/ 56g melted butter
1 lemon, zested

Dry ingredients:
1 1/2 cup of flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
pinch of ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp of ground nutmeg

Fold in :
1/2 pint or about 1 cup of blueberries
1 cupped of chopped walnut

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180 deg C/350 deg F. Line the muffin tray with muffin cases

2. Mixed the chopped strawberries with the sugar and leave it aside for at least 15minutes to let the juice out.

3. In a mixing bowl, sift the flour with baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt.

4. Melt the butter (if you are using butter) and leave it cool to room temp. In a medium size mixing bowl mix the butter with egg, banana, lemon, sugar and strawberries.

5. Add the dry ingredients in 3 batches to the wet ingredients until just combine.

6. Fold in the blueberries and walnut and fill the batter 2/3 full in each muffin cases.

7. Bake for about 30 minutes*1

Notes:
*1. I have increased the baking time to 50 minutes as I find that the muffins are still very wet at 30 minutes.

2. The amt of salt is high compared to other muffin recipe but it wasn't salty at all.

3. May try to use more lemon zest if you prefer strong lemon flavour. I may try to substitute the lemon with orange zest and I think the muffins will turn out nice too! :)

4. I divided the batter into 2 as I want to make some without walnuts as I know she didn't know how to eat them

5. Both version i.e with or without walnuts taste as good. I love both infact i find the ones without walnuts are more intense for the fruity flavours.

6. Sprinkle some walnuts as topping if you prefer.

7. The muffins are flat and perhaps due to the fruity ingredients.