the food we eat

while i'm sitting here full, fed and content after yet another satisfying meal, it might be a good time to finally update on whats been sizzling in our humble kitchen. this is the journey of discovery made by 4 novice chefs, who view dinner as the most important and grandest meal of the day.

ok enough of the introductions, we now present a small selection of our daily fare and let you be the judge.

(not in chronological order though)

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ok i'll stop keeping you in suspense...

Cabonara

a creamy italian specialty that has become one of our basic meals. we make it from scratch, mind you. no expensive, pre-made pasta sauce for us. jiams lives with this italian chef and his wife, so he learnt from them. it's rather complicated, and it took a few failures. you've to watch out when you cook the sauce, anything longer than 1 minute will turn it into omelette! but it's really fattening too, cos of the 38% full cream milk that goes into it, amidst everything else. so we've graduated from the bolognese that we used to cook the first week after we arrived. we've only had that one other time after that 1st week.

chicken rice - taste of home

we were greedy. we had both steamed (ok, boiled) and roasted (ok, grilled) chicken. the steamed chicken BUT the rice was authentic- check out the ginger and garlic and pandan leaves, and cooked in chicken stock. of course.

it was so good we cleaned up every plate, just like we do for every meal. debbie even threatened to drink the sesame oil gravy so as not to waste it... yum.

Ba Kut Teh

this was jianfeng's birthday dinner. cooked by wanshan, another SMU student with 3 precious packets of spices. we had about 11 people over for dinner that night. i miss bkt alr.

Japalang food: Fried Bee Hoon and Sambal Fried Rice

sometimes when we've lots of leftover liao, we cook the simple stuff like fried bee hoon and fried rice. chilli padi is the secret ingredient in that thing that left us wanting more.

carol specialises in japalang food, cos she's too lazy to look for recipes...

that's also a good view of our dining cum study cum everything table. (jiamin was out at training that night.) that sambal fried rice was rather fatal tho, some of us were hit with sore throat from that and then jiamin spent the next 2 days in bed discovering the joys of downloading movies.... on our network these days...

ba chor mee

excited and satisfied after a trip to 'chinatown', david managed to whip this up using flat egg noodles, chilli oil, oyster sauce, fishballs, minced pork, lettuce, tomato + other secret ingredients.

Frikadeller - Truly Danish

traditional danish meatballs, which aren't supposed to be round. it is said that there are as many recipes for frikadeller as there are chefs in denmark, and this is ours. i.e. the girls... minced pork + minced beef + minced onions + olives + egg + milk + an assortment of secret ingredients. next time we'll perfect the sauce.

Veggies - yes we eat our greens

some random veggie dish when we had rice and dishes...

salad to go with the frikadeller

Wholesome Chinese 3-Course Meal

Jiamin cooked this. yang cong niu rou (but he forgot to add the capsicum in so he made it a separate dish), soup, and stir-fried vegetables with too much oyster sauce.

Most of our chinese rice meals are 3 course. Debbie cooked this: Stir Fried vegetables in oyster sauce and garlic, tom yam chicken, clear soup with lots of stuff inside. actually we just had this today.

Sushi - getting adventurous now, aren;t we?

David attemped to make sushi... it was well and good... until we couldn't find the bamboo thing to roll the sushi, and all of us had seen it in the pantry some time before... sgh. so this is the resultant hand rolls we got.. still tasted really good, nonetheless, complete with wasabi and soy sauce.

Dessert: Apple Pie

David (see that smug look on his face?) promised that he would bake one some day, and so the rest of us eagerly waited. When the time (and apples) was right, this was the result - an extremely elated Jiamin. He was so happy he even consented to smiling for the camera, something he almost never does. (and after that he helped himself to 2 big slices....)

closing remarks

to some extent, there is economy of scale when we cook for 4 people. (jiamin might as well move in here right?) anyway the rice cooker cooks just enough for 4 people. but our kitchen is great, there is everything we need- a cool electric stove, crockery, lots of cutlery and big and heavy porcelain plates, a huge fridge (and another one that's called a balcony - more on that next time), equipment for blending, baking, roasting, you name it, we probably have it. thank God for a wonderful kitchen!

anyway, the story of the table cloth:

our poor wooden table is unfurnished, and after that massive ba kut teh dinner we had, there were were too many oil stains on the table, so we decided that we needed to get a table cloth. the sunday after that, there was a potluck lunch at church, and there were those red paper-like napkins which doubled up as table clothes, and debbie the brave girl asked if we could have one. and so we have a table cloth now, one that barely covers the table. so the boys, in their haughty arrogance, have condemned the girls and labelled them as clumsy, food-dropping creatures and now always place the table cloth on our side.

ok, so what's the verdict? you can be honest....!

(though debbie would give you a hint :))