Slow Cooker Whole Chicken

This is one SUPER DUPER easy slow cooker whole chicken recipe.  All you need are two ingredients, one whole chicken and a packet of Emperor Chicken spice mix.  In your slow cooker, add in the washed whole chicken, pour the Emperor Chicken spice mix on top of the chicken and give it a good rub to cover all sides of the chicken.  Put it breast side up and turn it to High for 5 hours.  When the internal temperature register as 180'F, it is done.  Soft and tender that it will be easily tear off with your hand.

A tip I learned from my friend's mom, to prevent the cover from moving, stick a piece of white paper in between the cover and the crock pot as shown.  It prevents the moving and  thus the noise and the sprinkling of water on the countertop.

Salted Chicken Egg Steamed Eggs

I made some salted chicken eggs a while back and I had no idea what to do with it.  Haha... you could say that was why I never bother to make my own or even buy salted eggs before.  But since I decided to make some the other day and my family members do not like to eat porridge, so there is no way that I can serve it with porridge.  I didn't want to waste the salted eggs so I made this!    It was so simple and blend well with the steamed eggs and not too salty at all.  I didn't season the beaten eggs for this reason.  Those tiny black dots were white pepper in case you were wondering.  I also added it in fried eggs, like a salted eggs fried eggs and my girls said it was good as well.

Pan-fried Tofu with Broccoli

I was trying on a new sauce called "Wan Ja Shan- Stir Fry Sauce" and I wanted to share it with you all.  It made this stir-fry dish delicious and I only used this sauce alone without any other seasonings.  You can make it into a one dish meal by adding some meat or poultry and serve it with a hot bowl of rice.  Or serve it vegetarian by adding some mushroom with a bowl of hot rice.  You should be able to find this sauce in the Asian supermarket.  You don't have to add a lot, just 1 Tbsp. should be enough for a whole dish.

Slow Cooker Spiced Chicken

I have been using my slow cooker quite often these days because I found it to be such a convenience.  I mostly used it for my Asian style recipes, Chinese herbal chicken tonic soup and Chinese dessert.  Today, I wanted to try it with a western style approach so I used whatever ingredients and herbs that I have in my house.  I loved sage and rosemary as I know these combination would work well together.  I am not disappointed at all as this got two thumbs up from both of my girls.  I served this with white rice and a Chinese style romaine lettuce side dish. 

Sweet & Spicy Tuna Arugula Pasta

I can't believe I made a mistake of buying a vegetable!  I was trying to pick up a bunch of organic spinach and some how mistook the organic arugula as the spinach.  Interestingly, even the cashier thought it was the organic spinach and charged me that.  So, I was clueless until the next day when I decided to wash my spinach.  When I took it out, it smelled different and then when I looked at the leaves, I realized it looked different and then when I checked the tag, it read organic arugula.  WOW!  What a surprise there as I never bought arugula before and frankly not too sure of how to cook it.  So, I searched online and found a recipe that I wanted to try and thought it would taste good.  So, this recipe was inspired by Simply Recipes.  I changed it a little bit to what I had at home at that time and it turned out delicious.  You all should try it too!
Even my husband took a second helping!

Simple and delicious!  Guess next time I can add arugula into my shopping list as I took some to make kimchi fried rice and it was good as well.  I stir-fried the rest with olive oil, chili flakes and sea salt.  How do you normally cook with arugula? 

Baked Butter Tilapia Fillets

Baked fish seem like the easiest way to prepare fish for me these days.  It is basically fuss free and ready in 10 minutes.  Since we like the flavor of butter and some crispiness on the fish, I used the dried chopped onion on the fish, it provides the crispiness to the fish fillets.  Also added some dried celery flakes, I guess extra celery flakes and onion won't hurt as those two are pretty much superfood.  Just season lightly with natural sea salt or Himalayan rock salt for the natural minerals.  Just pair it with steamed broccoli and carrot (if you don't eat carb or rice) and Viola and there you have it!  

Quinoa Chili

While browsing the coupon website, I came across this recipe.  A chili recipe that uses a slow cooker and quinoa.  As you know, I love love the convenience of a slow cooker so this recipe hit the spot.  Furthermore, I have about 3/4 cup of quinoa left that I wasn't sure what to do with it,  if I use it to substitute rice, it would not be enough, it has to mix with something more substance to make it into a meal.

Hence this recipe is great as I have some canned beans in my pantry, quinoa, onion, chicken breast and spices in my cabinet.  Just put all in a slow cooker and the dinner is ready!  This is just an idea, you can play with your own recipe!

I also like to wish all my readers a Happy Thanksgiving holidays, drive safely, enjoy each other companies and delicious food.  I will be off during the week to spend it with friends. :-)

Cream Cheese Chicken Pasta

My quick way of disposing the cream cheese, use it to make cheesy pasta!  Or to make cream cheese chicken soup (old recipe back in 2008) or cream cheese pound cake (2009).  I got to admit, this cheesy pasta is a bit dry, so make sure you don't over-cook the pasta like me until most of the almond milk was evaporated.  Take it out when it's still wet.  Or just add more almond milk or milk (your choice).  Edda loved it and requested to finish the leftover.  Of course I warmed the leftover pasta on the stove in a saucepan and added more almond milk to make it creamy for her.  She said it was delicious!  I have 4 more ounce of cream cheese, more cheesy pasta or cream cheese pound cake to make....hmmm...

Stir-Fried Vegetarian Rice Stick Noodle

This was our first time trying the Jianxi rice stick and to be honest, I don't think it is suitable for stir-fry because the noodle is soft and not the chewy kind.  So, it would disintegrate when stir-frying.  The above picture is still fine but when I tried to heat up the leftover the next day by stir-frying it (trying to cut down on microwave usage by heating food up the traditional way), the noodle really broken out into smaller pieces.  Next time I would use this rice stick noodle in soup or as a cold dish.

My vegetarian rice stick noodle, again trying to incorporate as many different colors superfood as possible.

Bitter Gourd with Eggs

Bitter food is healthy food especially bitter gourd.  If your body feels heaty, bitter gourd will be recommended to you because it is a very cooling food.  But because it is bitter, I hardly ever buy it because my husband is a picky eater and I am not sure how well it will fair with my girls.

One day, while I was shopping at the Asian supermarket, the bitter gourd that I saw just looked so fresh and inviting that it was calling me to pick it up.  A Chinese chef that I knew told me to pick bitter gourd that has wide ridges, then it won't be that bitter.  I also sprinkled it with sea salt, hoping that some bitterness would come out as well.  Additionally, I took the safer route to fry it with eggs as my husband and girls all loved eggs, and would probably eat anything that contains eggs.

The result:  They all finished it.  My girls did complain that it is bitter, but I told them that's why it is good for you and eat them up and so they did.  Maybe I should also blanch it first to make it even less bitter?

Baked Sweet Potato Fries

What I did when I have some sweet potatoes at home?  Dump it into curry, turn it into fries and make a Chinese sweet dessert soup with it.

Since I don't really do deep-frying these days, I chose to bake it.  Baking it also easier as I don't have to fry them in batches, less time consuming, less messy (no oil spattering every way) and also easy clean up.  It might not be as crispy as the deep-fried one, but suit our family just fine.
 

Tofu Shirataki Noodle Soup

When their daddy was on a business trip, I just wanted something easy to make and good for lunch and dinner.  A big pot of slow cooker chicken stock that I can cook overnight just pop up.  Just so happen that we had some leftover rotisserie chicken breast and some fresh romaine lettuce and mushroom in the refrigerator, the meal was planned.

For dinner, instead of tofu shirataki, we had some whole wheat thin spaghetti as noodle and also par-boiled spinach as the vegetable.

Quinoa Salad with Black Beans

Have you ever heard of eat your beans, especially black bean?  When organic beans are on sales, I would love to grab some, mostly garbanzo bean, but now I also get some black bean and red kidney bean.  Got to have some beans in the diet right?

According to the Chinese medicine, green bean, red bean and black bean can detoxify the body.  Green bean is cooling so it is not suitable for women during their menstruation, but red bean and black bean are both considered a neutral food.  I have a recipe for these beans detoxification soup which I will share later.  Stay tuned!

This quinoa salad is pretty easy.  Like my recipe here, except added some black bean and cucumber and top it with shrimps instead of mixing it together.

Vietnamese Style Grilled Beef

I don't buy pork and beef in my house anymore.  As you can see in my blog, I hardly have any new beef and pork recipes posted in recent year.  I bought some recently because my husband wanted to eat grill beef when we go camping.  But since I hardly ever buy beef, I had no idea which cut of beef to buy or which cut is good for which.  Anyway, that picture was taken when we did the Korean style BBQ on our campsite.  But we had Vietnamese style grilled beef and Malaysian style satay chicken instead. :-)

Chicken Curry with Sweet Potatoes

I don't buy potato unless it is on special occasion and organic.  To me is why eat potato when you can eat the superfood sweet potato?  In the Asian supermarket, we can buy all sort of different colors sweet potatoes, from purple, yellow to orange.  I like to buy the purple variety because not a lot of time we get to eat purple color food.  But for adding to curry, yellow and orange colors sweet potato is preferred.

I was planning to make a pot of curry chicken and just so happen that I had some sweet potatoes that were starting to sprout so of course I had to eat it quickly.  Thus, this idea was born.  I loved it a lot because it added an extra sweetness to the curry.  Next time if you have a choice, always pick the superfood!

Tofu Shirataki

Finally I got my chance to try the House Food's Tofu Shirataki!  I gotten my chance because those coupons were just irresistible!  Whole Food accepts one manufacturer coupon and one in house coupon, so when combining the two, I only paid 30 cent for each packet, irresistible right?   A plus for me is it is also Non-GMO certified, gotta love that!

I thought that noodle made with tofu must be soft and fragile but this is not the case, with added yam flour, it is actually chewy and doesn't feel like eating tofu.  Seeing the cashier just dump the packet across the scanner, they probably know that it is not as fragile as its name implies.

I took a picture so that you would have an idea of what it looks like.  One packet is just enough to serve one, not a lot.  I served mine with stir-fried cabbage and Korean style spicy chicken.  Both recipes can be found in my blog.  Then, just mixed it all together and season with a little fish sauce and white pepper.

Stir-fried Chinese Long Beans with Chicken

You can buy the Chinese long beans at the Asian supermarket.  I don't think you would miss it because it is long and green.  If the long beans look fresh and green, I would buy it.  In Malaysia, we love to fry it with sambal belacan (chili paste) and make it into a spicy dish.  However, since I have some leftover grilled chicken breast, I decided to make a non-spicy dish out of it.  You need to fry it in oil so that it will be crunchy and crisp and delicious.  These long beans are good in fried eggs too where we chopped the long bean into small cubes.  I think I have that recipe in my blog from years back.

Vegetarian Mapo Tofu

I loved mapo tofu!  The usual mapo tofu is cooked with ground pork and since I stop buying pork and too lazy to mince some chicken breast, I created a vegetarian version.  I substituted the ground pork with fresh shiitake mushroom, of course you can use the meaty portabello mushroom too (or crimini or button mushroom).  Since mushroom is good for us, I try to cook more mushroom dishes. 

How to eat Nagaimo? 怎么吃山药?

Nagaimo as it is called in Japanese or  huái shān (淮山) or shān yào (山药) as in Chinese is a nutrient rich tuber/ root vegetable that is loaded with health benefits.  山药 literally translates to "mountain medicine" and has been used in traditional Chinese medicine long time ago.  You can read more about nagaimo and the nutrition facts here.  The Taiwanese cooking show that I mentioned before introduced me to this way of eating the nagaimo.  It is so easy to prepare and I just need to pound it and mix in with my rice or noodle, so why not?  You can buy the fresh nagaimo at the Asian supermarket.  It is not very cheap but not too expensive either.  Since I am the only one who eats this in my family, I usually buy a small piece, the above picture is 1/3 of what I bought.  I cut about 1/3 of the tuber, wash it and peel it (be careful as it is very slippery, it might cause itching if you are sensitive but you can soak it in vinegar water first), then cut it into smaller pieces and place it in a Ziploc bag and pound it with the back of a cleaver or an empty bottle until mushy like picture shown above.

Slow Cooker Spiced Cauliflower

My second dish using a slow cooker (not counting soup and dessert).  While typing this post, I realize that I can actually add garbanzo beans.  Oh well, will sure to remember it the next time I make this.  Just add 1 can of garbanzo beans (drain) into the mixture if you like (to make it a one dish meal).  Since the day I made this was Monday, so it was a meatless Monday dish for us.  I am trying to cook more meatless meal again (need to lose some extra weight!) since I have not been too discipline lately.  We really enjoy this easy vegetarian dish and hope you like it too!