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Slow-cooked five spice pork belly with tofu and cooked egg recipe is super popular in my hometown. It is a must-have dish in every family table. I seldom cook it because John doesn’t like fatty food, but I truly adore … Continue reading
Melanie (sister-in-law) was hosted Christmas in 2008, and it’s nice to host this year in our new flat in Leeds. It’s like our Chinese New Year and everyone was so busy to prepare food, gifts and the Christmas mood.
I was in charge of all the food except the Christmas Turkey and dessert. Paul (future Brother-in-law) brought a really nice organic turkey and it tasted so good. John was in charge of pudding, and he decided he made the rich chocolate truffle tote. After a big meal, we had a walk, then played a game. We had a fabulous Christmas in our house.
Christmas is always about family, food and laugh. Hope you had a good Christmas as well.
Back home, when it’s Chinese New Year, our family tradition always have seafood hot-pot because Shantou is near coastal city. Seafood for us is everyday basic food. Basically you just have a chicken stock as the soup base or just water, and put any seafood and meat into soup, then at the end, you put more vegetable and noodle in, and simple as that.
Mum used to cook that when she was a little bit lazy and didn’t want to fuss to cook a proper meal. I always like that and it takes about 2 minutes to have a noodle soup on the tablet with fresh seafood and ingredient.
Ingredient: 1 fresh chicken stock /cube, seafood or left over food, 1-2 lettuce, some coriander and noodle or dumplings. Season is salt and white pepper.
Boil the chicken stock, (add some water depends how do you like) put the seafood in for 2 minutes, then noodle in for 1 minutes, add lettuce at last with coriander, season it with salt and white pepper. Job done, really to warm you up with fresh seafood and noodle soup. The soup will be tasty, fresh and noodle will fill you up as well Simple dish for cold winter!
After a big meal, traditionally we always drink some GongFu tea to digest our food and fattiness. Health and you can talk to friends all night long while you are sharing the tea culture.
I brought a fantastic beautiful Scottish beef fillet from the market, and I really wanted to make it simple, but tasty. I cut it into small pieces, then cooked it each side for a minute in a hot grill pan with simple black pepper and salt. At the end, splashed a half lemon or lime juice on top, then add a little bit coriander and chilly (optional) Job done. Simple but true beauty! The beef was melt into your mouth and tasty incredible.
I chose Strawberry Ice Cream dessert for tonight, simple but fatty!!! Sometimes lady needed a special treat.
John bought me Jamie Oliver‘s 30 minutes Meal on this Friday as a present, and I absolutely love it. We followed the book, and tried the ‘oozy mushroom risotto, spinach salad, quick lemon & raspberry cheesecake‘. It was so professional and so tasty. I have to admit that was one of the best mushroom risotto I had tried, certainly better than a lot of restaurants. The dessert was so easy to make and tasted incredible. We were so happy for the results and everyone can do it. It took us 45 minutes and it was dead simple.
Normally we eat a lot of home-made good food at home. In the past few weekends, we bought fish and cooked them with simple recipes. Last night, I pan-fried cod fish with garlic asparagus, and mash sweet potato, add one roast big mushroom. It was so simple, but extremely tasty. Do you like it when you see the picture? It was so delicious.
Since we bought the panasonic SD-257 bread machine, and used to make all kind of bread. It’s a good purchase because we eat bread so often. It is incredible to use and you can enjoy fresh bread every day. We wanted to try to make some pizza bread, then we made our own pizza with delicious Italian Ham and salami, and home-made tomato chilly sauce. It turned out so pretty and delicious.
It’s 100% home-made with fresh ingredients and it encouraged us to do it more in the future. I do like cooking and spoil myself with a lot of good food.
It is getting hotter in July, and it feels like the proper Summer now. It is sunny all the time, and the temperature is around 18-25 degrees – perfect summer temperature for me, not that sweaty, but nice with cool breeze. We decided to do a home-made cocktail at the weekend, so we tried the Pimm’s with a lot ice, lemonade, strawberries, few orange and little mint. It tasted gorgeous and nice pretty red colour for summer drink.
It is the perfect fruity drink in Summer time. I was sitting my lounge chair in our balcony and sun bathing at the weekend, drinking the Pimm’s and listening to some chill out music.
What a wonderful weekend. We will try Gin and Tonic next week. Happy life.
John ordered a recipes book how to make bread from River Cottage because we always eat a lot of bread at home, so we thought, why don’t we make our own bread with nice organic flower and no any artificial ingredient.
As we are always focus on healthy and tasty food, so we try to home-baked and cook for every thing possible. At the weekend, we made our hands dirty and tried to kneed our own bread. First weekend, we tried to make the basic white bread – it turned out so great, and tasted even unbelievable as well. You can see it from the picture above.
Second weekend we made the brown bread with pumpkin seeds inside and outside. It looked very nice as well, but it was a heavy bread to eat. I am so happy the bread turned out so great and tasty. I think we will continually make our own bread and eat healthy.
We also will make our pasta sauce this weekend, because we cook Italian food so often, why not? Our next step for our life is to buy our own house and grow our own vegetable and herbs.
I enjoy baking and cooking different types of food at home. Normally we cook Italian and British food at home, though I could cook some indian or chinese sometimes, it take a lot of preparation and the chinese ingredients are expensive here. I always think my Mum cooks the most amazing chinese food. However, I discovered that my Mum tends to put some pork and nice real meat stock inside the food, but John doesn’t like much pork because it is too fatty and greasy he said.
As John nowadays can eat some beef and it is cold winter snow day. I decided to make some Jamie Oliver’s recipes. Beef stew is the easiest winter food. It tastes meaty with different herbs. You can eat with some garlic bread or some Jasmine rice. Superb!
I always cook Bacon Asparagus Tortelloni and it is the quick and health dish, but delicious. Asparagus needs to be careful, hot water 3 minutes, and ice water for 1 minutes, then fried with garlic and butter 1 minutes. It will be the most crunchy tasty Asparagus ever. Trust me. I think I know different herbs and meat combination since I learned so much from the chef from TV.
I made some of the scones from James Martin’s dessert book, eat with clotted cream and Jam! As the dessert expert John said it was the most moist inside, crunchy outside and delicious scone ever, and better than a lot of shops are selling. It gave me so much joy and confident about my cooking.
The pumpkin pie we normally make at the weekend. I just made some chocolate cookies yesterday. I love cooking and I think it is nothing happier than people you love eating well and enjoying the food.
Good food, good music and good accompanies, then Happy Day!