Curry Chicken

On our return trip from Malaysia, we bought a lot of ready-made ingredients for cooking, such as Tean's Gourmet Chicken Curry . We have tried a number of ready-made curry mixtures & paste. Most of the time, the results were not that good.

But for Tean's Gourmet Chicken Curry, it was surprisingly GOOD!

So next time, if you go Malaysia, try to get one back & try. :)

Serve 4 -5
Instructions:

1. Cut 1 whole chicken into chunks, marinate with Tean's paste
2. Heat 2 tbsp oil, put in 2 finely chopped red onions, fry abt 2 mins or until fragrant
3. In high heat, put in the chicken with paste, fry for about 4 mins
4. Pour in 250ml water & 5-8 potatoes, cut into cubes, simmer for abt 20 mins
5. Pour in 200 ml evaporated milk (to replace coconut milk)
6. Simmer until chicken is cooked through & adjust the taste with salt if necessary.
7. Serve with rice or roti prata.

My tips:

1. Do not follow instruction on the pack, it is better to put lesser amount of water to simmer the curry, because it may overcook the chicken while the sauce is too diluted.
2. For healthier choice, always replace the coconut milk with evaporated milk.
3. Add potatoes for some fibre intake as well. As a guideline, the amount of potatoes should be roughly the same amount of chicken meat.

Malaysia Trip - Melaka (Part III)

Melaka, 我来也！Here we come.
For Melaka, I would just recommend you to indulge into Melaka Chinese Specialities - chicken rice ball or Nyonya food. If you go to Melaka without having one of these, you have never gone to Melaka.

For the one located beside the bridge, the rice ball is better than the chicken. As you can see from the photo, the chicken is not as nice as what we have in Singapore, but definitely, what we can learn from them is how to make a decent chicken rice ball.

For those who know how to cook, surely, you know how unhealthy a rice ball is. For it to stick together, you must blend in a lot of chicken oil.

Opps! I ate a lot. ><

My Pan-Peninsula trip has finally come to an end.

My next trip will be just before Christmas, and I will be going home once again. ^^

Malaysia Trip - Penang Nov (Part II)

Finally, we had arrived Penang, after 6 hours of driving from KL. We were like snails slogging through heavy downpours for most of the journey.
We went straight to Air Itam towards Penang Hill for late lunch, with CY's granny as tour guide of course. ^_^ The temporary stall was located on the road, left hand side.
We had fresh sugarcane juice, without ice. It's so fresh! OMG, how come we couldn't find this kind of juice in SG huh?

For each of us ( 3 in total), one bowl of kwey teow teng (rice noodle in soup) with fish ball. This is just any Penang food you may give a miss when you are in Penang, but you will want to have it when you are in Singapore. In other words, it's not the best in Penang, but at least the best in my SG heartland.

For our dinner, we had traditional steam white chicken with 1 bowl of porridge and Chinese poh piah because we didn't want to stress our stomache. ;) These were just OK.

The poh piah is definitely different from what we have in Singapore because it's served with some sauce. See below?

In the next morning, we had our breakfast in a kopitiam (coffee shop) along Air Itam Road, nothing spectacular too, just Jawa noodle (below) & hor fun (2nd below) & Penang lor mee (3rd below). The serving was a bit small so it's just nice when came to our lunch.

What I would highly recommend is this Restaurant Lasia (along Air Itam Road as well). There is a stall called Ah Keow economy mixed rice stall which only opens for lunch, but strange thing is that it's so-called lunch hours normally operates from 1.30pm - 3pm+ only! If you come with empty stomache, better prepare yourself with some snack because she will not even guarantee her stall to be opened from 1.30pm because Aunty Ah Keow takes her own sweet time to prepare her dishes.

Quality food mah!

This kind of business will not survive if don't have the real skill. Of course Aunty Ah Keow has some. Her dish is really something worth waiting for. So CY's Ah Ma ( granny) was also waiting Ah Keow to serve her (see below). :p

That day, Ah Keow had this special curry. Super yummy but I couldn't eat much due to sore throat! >< Stir-fry salted bean & chili clams, my favourite! I really wished (during that time), nobody would compete their chopstick's speed with me, phew~~ This is R...eally my clams NIRVANA. How nice if I could have that kind of skill.... dream dream dream ~~Grill eggplant with sambal chili & fried onions & garlic, CY's favourite. Nah....Nah...Nah....this is really something different from Ang Moh grill, some Nyonya touch, a bit of Chinese also. that's it.

Its flavour? PERFECT!

Finally, the Chinese roasted pork, what we called Siew Pak. When Aunty Ah Keow was cutting the roast pork, CY could hear the cutting sound from far FAR away! 3 tables away to be exact. Crisp~Crisp!

It's earthy.

Anyway, if you come to Air Itam, you should come here to have a visit. Total damage? RM23.70. However, do note if you order fish or prawn, you should expect the bill to be 50% - 100% more because Aunty Ah Keow really thinks her seafood worth that kind of price. But then again, if the food is nice, I think we can pay slightly more. For Ah Keow's is definitely worth every cent.

Last but not least, the real chef is CY's granny, her more than 60 years of cooking experience is no kidding. She can transform any simple dish into an indulgence anytime. Real chefs don't need spectacular ingredients to make a great meal. Even if it is rice & water, if you cook with your heart, it can be so good that you can eat it plain. Granny's home-made pan-fried bread with curry chicken stuffing which we had on our way to Melaka, made our trip worth-while. :)

Cheers!

Malaysia Trip - Kuala Lumpur Nov 08

If you notice, we are missing in action for about one whole week!

Hmm... Why is that so? Well, that's because we went back to Malaysia for holiday!

So, as a result, we couldn't' continue our entertainment on the road....which is cooking of course. In other words, there is no cooking-related posting here. However, we would like to present what we had eaten over the week on our way to Penang, Malaysia, to and fro.

Our first stop was - Kuala Lumpur.
We stayed in the Impiana KLCC Resort & Spa, which could overlook the Petronas Twin Tower from our room. We stayed at the 13th floor, so there's nice top-down view. Not bad huh?

At the hotel cafe, LHC had Nasi Goreng Kampong, which was good & filling. But I found that the fried chicken was a bit oily. Overall, it's still a decent meal.
CY had sore throat, so he had Hor Fun with Vege, which was quite yummy. Vege was fresh and there was Wok Hei! Wow...not bad for a hotel cafe. We were just simply too exhausted to go out if not, would surely go for some nice restaurants around the city with my sister or brothers. :p
But after full resting, we gained back our energy. We went to Sungei Wang ground floor entrance for dinner. There, we had stir-fry broccoli, it's fresh and crunchy. I enjoyed the fried garlic that went along.
This was good too. :) Roasted duck and Soy sauce chicken.
Dipped into this chili...slurp slurp! Couldn't ask for more...actually, I started to have sore throat during this dinner but I simply ignored! >< Then we had this Lo Han Guo (罗汉果) dessert. It was truly authentic.
This HK Fried Yee Mee was quite nice. I enjoyed it because it has a lot of vege inside. :)
That's all for KL now. I will bring you to Penang in my next post.

Stay tuned. ;)

Basil Sardine with Oat Porridge

Oat porridge is one of my favourite breakfasts, normally prepared by CY. He cooks oat with just water & some salt, let rest. Then, prepares some side dish to go along with it.


This breakfast set was prepared by him before we went to Penang. We had Basil Sardine with Oat Porridge. Simple and nice.
It's heartwarming. :)

Instruction for oat porridge: Cook in accordance with instruction shown on the package.

For Basil Sardine

Ingredients:

1. 1tbsp of oil
2. 50 ml of water
3. Some Basil leaves
4. 1 yellow onions, sliced
5. 1 medium can sardine in tomato sauce
6. 2 tbsp tomato sauce
7. salt & sugar to taste

Instructions:

1. heat 1tbsp of oil, fry the onions for about 1 mins
2. pour in the can sardine & 50 ml of water
3. simmer for 3 mins
4. add tomato sauce
5. cook till sauce thicken
6. salt & sugar to taste
7. basil leaves, teared & garnish in the end
8. done.

Beware of Alcohol!!

The raging effect of alcohol can be unbearable, do drink responsibly.

After six cans of beer...

After two glasses of wine....


After two bottles of wine...shared of course.

After too many Margaritas...


After one LARGE Vodka


After three Martinis....


And....


After one bottle of Tequila...

So...DO NOT OVER-DRINK!!

Year - End Equinox Outing with 100 Stars Learners!

10th Nov, 2008. A day to remember.

Monday afternoon, 3 of us, the main teachers of our tuition school, brought 11 top students to Equinox restaurant at the 70th floor of Swissotel to celebrate their successes and more importantly, to reward their hard work.

These students deserved it since they took pride in their work and meticulously completed them each time. All these effort did not gone into waste, they did well in their year-end results: 3 of them TOPPED their COHORTS in their schools (yohoo!), 6 of them topped in their respective classes (clap! clap!) and many others have also made remarkable progress with us.
Thus, with this honour, the Learners stepped into the restaurant filled with pride, welcomed by waiters. The customers must have been thinking: these bright students should have done something great.

Hmm... After a brief amazement in the "mighty" scenary from the top floor, we tucked in without delay! The patrons graciously let the kids have the first go at the food.
I carefully recorded down their choice of food, one by one. As you can see, they would eat anything sweet or deep-fried. To them, delicious food doesn't have to be elaborate!

We had brownies.
Dessert.
One more. Pancakes were hot favourites!

Although Mommy can make them at home but this is definitely different cos we had it at the 70th floor!

Of course, a meal is not completed without chocolate! Now you see it...
Now you don't!
Fried rice, noodles and cupcake! Now you notice that these kids don't really care whether it's simple or cheap food. They just enjoyed the food without concern for the price tag. To us, this experience is priceless.

Most of them enjoyed simple food because their simple tastes can be satisfied easily .

Although to a lot of people, they might think that this is just a waste of money because kids don't really KNOW HOW to enjoy good food but who cares? I see a strong message on reaping their own fruits of labour, the taste of success, an unusual reward and a memorable event in life. To me, these are all worth it.

As for teachers, we had our shares too!

The banana pudding.


Prawn noodle.

Sashimi.

Cheese dessert, chawanmushi & pie.

Sushi. We were all enjoying good food in good company. :)

After which we took a lot of top-down shots .

I have shown some of these in class today, some students started asking me: When will the next outing be?

Well, it will definitely be a different one. But we promise, something as interesting as this year's outing, if not more!

The criteria for going to Equinox: 100 stars

How to earn 1 star?

1. Do homework with pride and handing up ON TIME
2. Win in games/competitions during lessons
3. Score 100% in spelling test
4. Read 5 story books & give comments
5. Learn 25 new vocabularies & pass the Q & A
6. Improvement of 5% in school exams
7. Scored more than 90% in school exams
8. Improvement in the mock tests

How 1 star can be deducted? We meant business.

1. Not bringing homework
2. Not following teacher's instruction
3. Not asking parents to sign their journals
4. Not behaving properly
5. Not respecting others