Spicy Beancurd with Chicken

Sometimes I just needed my spicy food!  I could hardly go more than a day without any spicy food.  That's why I always have a bottle of my homemade chili in oil in the refrigerator on days that I cooked non-spicy food so that I could have that as a condiment.  If you are new to my blog and want my chili in oil recipe, you can do a search within my blog on the right panel.

I could proudly say that both of my girls are well trained in handling spicy food now.  They can eat this with no problem.  They can even eat the spicy Korean instant noodle and one day even brave enough to want to sample my chili in oil.  For your information, my chili in oil is extremely spicy and I was shocked that they wanted to try it.  I gave them a dot to try because they asked for it.  They quickly searched for water after they had it, yeah even my 4 years old dare to eat my chili in oil. :D

This dish was easy to make as well, just required an extra step in pan-frying the tofu first.  If you want it healthier, you don't have to pan-fry the tofu.  I did it for the texture and crunch.

Mixed Veggie and Chicken Thai Style

This could easily be a one dish meal because it had all the goodness in one plate.  Lean protein from the skinless and boneless chicken breast, celery (lower blood pressure, anti-cancer compounds), zucchini (vitamin C), carrot (beta-carotene, good for eyes sight and anti-oxidant) and wood ear fungus (high in iron, good in blood circulation, low in calories and prevention of tumors).  You know, it might be hard to keep track of the nutritional benefits of each fruit/veggie.  But once you know that what fruit/veggie is good for you, just make sure that it's on your lunch or dinner menu often.  Making sure your plate is colorful is important too as different color provides a different nutritional benefit for your body.

2-2-3-4-5 Sticky Ribs

 

I was bad at cutting through the bones, that's why my ribs were in big pieces.  I tried to cut it into half but my cleaver just won't cut through.  So, I gave up before my cleaver ended out with more teeth.  LOL!  Anyway, I bought some ribs when it was on sales and I wanted to try something different instead of cooked it with Bak Kut Teh and I remembered this 2-2-3-4-5 Braised Chicken dish that I cooked before which I adapted from a ribs recipe.  So, since I had some ribs now why not gave it a try and this dish was born.

When this dish was cooking, it didn't smell too good in the house because of the vinegar.  But once it was cooked, I couldn't taste the vinegar at all.  Tasted pretty good to me.  But since it was cooked in an hour to an hour and half, the meat was not fall off the bones tender.

Lastly, Happy 4th of July to those who celebrated!!!

Pandan Kaya Sponge Cake

This is the most basis sponge cake recipe uses only eggs, sugar and flour.  I flavored it with pandan paste or you can use pure vanilla extract for the vanilla flavor.  I made this because I just made a bottle of pandan kaya using my bread maker and I wanted to have it with some sponge cake.  I had used this sponge cake recipe for swissroll before and this recipe works well for me.  If you have been my avid reader, you should realize that I always stick to the recipe that works well for me.  Not quite adventurous as to try other sponge cake recipe.  Or simply put, just used the one easy sponge cake recipe that does not require to separate the eggs into egg white and did it like the chiffon cake method.

This cake was spongy and delicious with the double pandan flavors from the cake and kaya.  Quite fattening I must say, that's why it was served in small pieces, but one piece was never enough.

Italian Cheese & Herb Fettuccine

Lazy me called for lazy lunch.  I found the Philadelphia cooking creme a short-cut for creamy based pasta.  I always have frozen mixed vegetable for fried rice, Japanese curry and pasta in my freezer and packages of dried pasta in my pantry.  So, this was an easy lunch to whip up.  I only need to thaw a boneless and skinless chicken breast, sliced it and seasoned it.  Another alternative is to use the canned tuna or tuna in pouch for a quicker preparation.

This noodle dish was rather inexpensive.  1 package of pasta was $1 (on sales), 1 container of cooking creme was about $3 (with coupon), 1 chicken breast was about $1.50 and the mixed vegetable was about $0.25.  So, total cost for this lunch was about $5.75 and it served 4 persons.

Sharing this with Presto Pasta Nights hosted at Ruth of Once Upon a Feast and  "S$20 Budget Meal"  or "US$15 budget meal" hosted by Cuisine Paradise.

Banana Oat Walnut Buns

I created this recipe because I needed to use up my over ripe banana.  Before I would make a banana cake with it but these days I make my own bread for breakfast and just so that on that day I needed to make a new batch.  I didn't use whole wheat flour for this because I thought it would be better with bread flour alone.  However, I also wanted to make it healthier so I added oats and walnuts.

I loved the result, it's soft and fluffy with a tint of banana fragrant.  I could also taste bits of chopped walnuts in each buns.  The buns can be eaten as it or spread with your favorite jam.  As you can see from the above picture, this recipe yields one square pan, one round pan and one loaf pan of buns for me.

I am also submitting this post to Aspiring Bakers # 8 and this month theme is "Bread Seduction" hosted by Sweetylicious.