Son

Beef and Carrot Soup

image

Beef and Carrot Soup

I am making a very simple Beef and Carrot Soup for dinner tonight. Beef provides the necessary iron nutrition for my toddler and I am pairing it with carrots because they both do very well together.

My son loves carrots, so I have added a little more carrots just so that he can mix it into his rice for dinner. I am adding a few slices of ginger, just 5 thin slices (5 being the number of Grace) just so that the beef soup would taste really nice. My maternal grandmother used to make this really nice beef and carrot soup for us kids when we visit on Sundays. So this is a really nice memory for me.

I am also adding half a slice of dried cuttlefish into the soup to sweeten the broth. Cuttlefish has that magic touch to bring the soup together and make it extremely tasty. I will complete the soup tonight with Chinese Celery. I recently discovered that food stall holders have been using a lot of the Chinese celery as opposed to the Chinese parsley for their garnishing. It appears, and I think it is true as well, that the Chinese celery’s strong flavour works very well with meats in general.

Just a simple and very easy recipe for dinner. Cooked in a thermal cooker for a good 10-12 hours so that the meats will be tender and soft for toddler and delicious for everyone.

Recipe

Ingredients

250 grams Shin Beef cubes
2-3 medium Carrots
Half a Dried Cuttlefish (really good for flavour)
Sea Salt (adjust according to your tastebuds)
5 thin slices of Ginger
2 stalks of Chinese Celery (to be added into the soup just before serving)

Method

1. As I am using a thermal cooker, I need a large kettle of boiling water for the soup. I am boiling the meat for a good 15 minutes at high heat before putting it into the thermal cooker for slow cooking.

2. I got Shin Beef cubes as they are cheap and since I am slow cooking the meats, it will be tender by the end of the day anyway, so the cheapest cuts of beef will be good enough.

3. The only thing that I need to prepare would be the carrots and ginger as the beef cubes are already prepared by the butcher, so that’s very convenient as I am always short for time in the mornings.

4. Peel and cut the carrots into bite size pieces. Then put all the prepared ingredients into the pot (just like the picture above) for the grand opening ceremony. Pour the hot boiling water into the pot and turn up the heat. Boil at high heat for 15 minutes and by then you should also be able to smell the fragrance of the beef soup taking shape.

5. Come back by the end of the day to re-boil the soup. This time, add the chopped Chinese celery and boil until it bubbles. The soup is now ready to be served.

Bon Appetit!

image

Delicious beef and carrot soup

Basa Bocourti Fish

image

Basa Bocourti Fish

The Basa Bocourti fish as the name suggests is really a Basa Fish aka the Mekong River catfish commonly found in Vietnam’s boutique street wet markets. They are very fleshy and are commonly found in their rivers. The fish when cooked has a nice sweet flavour unlike the cheaper Toman fish

This fish is also nicely filleted and packed at NTUC. Good for me because now I can just pick it up from the supermarket without having to haggle with the street side vendor, although I would gladly do the latter. There is something whimsical about market place values that the supermarket just can’t emulate.

Boil a very nice pot of porridge and lightly salt the Basa Fish and you will have a very nice fish porridge. The flesh when cooked is paper white and also flaky although not as firm as the Red Garoupa. There is virtually no bones with the fikkets which is strange but I am not complaining. So it is very safe for toddlers to have them for meals.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 Basa Bocourti Fillet (about $2.50 for a rather large fillet, portion enough for 3 pax)

The rest of the ingredients and steps you can follow the recipe for my Red Garoupa Fish Porridge.

Bon Appetit!

Bitter Gourd in Salted Egg

image

Bitter Gourd in Salted Egg

This is a restaurant grade recipe. Haha. Okay, I wish it was. I love eating almost everything in a salted egg sauce and nothing beats eating my favourite Bitter Gourd in my favourite salted egg sauce.

It’s a quite simple dish to make really, just that to do it well, you need to know what you are doing. So if you are game for something different, you can try this. It will rock your dinners and also impress a few friends.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 whole Bitter Gourd
3 Salted Egg Yolks
Half a slab of Unsalted Butter
1 tbsp of Castor Sugar
Chicken Stock (not from stock cubes)

Method

1. Clean and gut the bitter gourd of the seeds. Cut into half. Then steam at high heat for about 5 minutes. Then slice then diagonally into bite size pieces.

2. In a wok, add half a slab of Butter, if you need directions, then half a slab of butter would be 125 grams.

3. Add the egg yolks. These eggs are cooked and hard boiled. Using the back of your frying ladle, mesh the egg yolks into the butter. Make sure the egg yolks are nicely mixed into the butter.  Ensure that it is at low heat.

4. Add chicken stock made from boiling chicken bones. Just about 3 tbsp would be sufficient. Add Sugar to taste, maybe about 1 tbsp.

5. Once that is done, ladle the sauce over the butter gourd and serve.

Bon Appetit!

Batang Fish Porridge

image

Batang Fish Porridge

Another comfort food for those that are in dire need of much comfort. Yes, fish porridge is definitely on my list of comfort foods. I dont usually do fish porridge the way my mum likes to cook it, but since I haven’t been feeling all that fantastic, I thought I should do it like how mum cooks it.

She loves to use bay-kah fish which I don’t really have at ntuc, so I guess I just have to make do with batang fish. Same same but slightly different. The texture of the meat is kind of like tuna in a way. Maybe one of these days I might experiment with tuna to make fish porridge.

Mum would skin off the fish, chop the meat into a paste and season it with light soya sauce and sesame seed oil. All the ingredients that makes it great. I don’t know what else or maybe I wasn’t really paying attention. So this is my version of my mum’s fish porridge.

Recipe

Ingredients

A cut of Batang Fish (usually the lower part is best)
Some Tong Chai (this is some kind of pickled vegetable that is for flavouring soups)
Light Soya Sauce
Sesame Seed Oil
Half a cup of Rice (this is for cooking porridge)

Method

1. De-skin the Batang Fish or remove as much meat as possible. The meat is then chopped aggressively as if to mince it.

2. Once it is suitably minced, add light soya sauce and sesame seed oil to marinate the fish paste.

3. Once the fish paste is ready, you can spoon dollops into the plain porridge and stir until it is cooked.

4. Cooking plain porridge is easy. Add rice to a pot and boil with water until the rice breaks down.

5. Add tong chai to flavour the porridge and you can eat.

Bon Appetit!

Sweet Potato Soup

image

Sweet Potato Soup

Comfort foods are what we need when we really need comforting. It’s like the mother/wife replacement when they are not around you or if you are traveling on a long journey to somewhere far away.

One such comfort food would be the humble sweet potato soup eaten more like a dessert more than a meal. It’s the quintessential comfort food that most Singaporeans would know and if you were to smell it from a distance with its signature spicy gingery flavour, it ust oozes goodness and warm feelings of home.

It’s also just about the easiest recipe to make as well. Just wash and cut the sweet potatoes into bite sized cubes, add ginger, sugar and water and its ready to eat when it is softened.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 large pieces of Sweet Potatoes (for one person)
5 thin slices of Ginger
Sugar (level up to you)
Water (just enough to cover the sweet potatoes)

Method

1. Wash and cut sweet potatoes, of course peel the skin first. Cut into bite sized pieces. Easy to eat.

2. Cut 5 thin slices of ginger, any type will do. Add water to cover most of Sweet potato in the pot can already. Too much water is pointless.

3. Add Sugar to taste. Up to you. Once cook, and the test is to be able to smell the fragrance. Then serve.

Bon Appetit!

image

Swee Bo sweet potato soup

Chicken Macaroni

image

Chicken Macaroni

The foods of champions, the humble Chicken Macaroni has become the super-foods that parents love to give their kids. More so because it is so easy to prepare. Just boil the pasta, add boiled chicken and salt and you can eat.

Of course it is only true for the pure at heart. However in my less than perfect world, my Chicken Macaroni has to be done the hard way. It has to have all the necessary ingredients to make this dish truly special.

Why? You might ask. Well, why not? I am cooking for my family wat. So it has to be nothing short of special.

Recipe

Ingredients

250 grams of Dried Macaroni (for two servings, I use Barilla Elbows, they are kind of same same.)
2 pieces of de-boned Chicken Thighs
4 carcass of Chicken Bones (for making stock)
Handful of Dried Chinese Scallops
A few Dried Oysters
5-6 whole Garlic Cloves
Sea Salt
Black Pepper
Evaporated Milk

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water (about 1.7litres). Add to the pot with the carcasses of Chicken Bones to boil for stock. Skim the scum and excess oil off the surface of the broth.

2. After about 20 minutes boiling at high heat, remove and discard the chicken bones. Add the scallops and oysters to flavour the soup. Fry and sear the garlic cloves in a pan before also adding into the broth to cook. You may reduce the fire to a slow simmer. Now boil another kettle of water. This is for cooking the macaroni.

3. Cook the macaroni in another pot until soften (boil pass al dente). This is so that your kids can eat as well.

4. Marinate the boneless chicken thighs with salt and black pepper. Leave aside for at least ten minutes. Once it is ready, fry the chicken with a little oil in a frying pan, 3 minutes on each side. After searing the sides, remove and slice into thin pieces.

5. Then boil the sliced chicken pieces in the broth by using the slotted ladle technique to further cook the chicken pieces. Once cooked, place in individual serving bowls.

6. Check that the pasta is cooked beyond al dente by doing a taste test. It should be reasonably softened. Once ready ladle the cooked macaroni into the bowls with the boiled chicken pieces.

7. Add salt and a little evaporated milk to thicken the broth. Cook a while longer and you can ladle the chicken broth to the Macaroni. Serve hot.

Bon Appetit!

Easy as ABC

image

Easy as ABC

Day three of the new dawn. I am tired. My lifeforce seems to have been zapped by some mysterious incubus. Either that or I am still riling over the fact that baby didn’t like my black bean porridge that I made yesterday.

Maybe he wasn’t accustomed to the taste as yet; maybe it was his first time trying it. I have come to realize that kids take a while to like something. It was the same experience with ice cream. At first he didn’t like it. Now he does.

So maybe one day he will develop a penchant for my black bean soup. I spent quite a bit of time cooking his porridge last night, and used quite a bit of the soup to cook it as well. *Grr* I think he kind of humored me a little and ate some at the beginning but I guess the taste was too foreign for his liking.

So today, I decided that I would make ABC soup again. Actually I wanted to make chicken soup, but since I already started defrosting the ribs last night by mistake – I decided to heck it. Chicken soup can be for tomorrow. Or maybe tomorrow can be lotus root, peanut and pork ribs soup. Hmmm..

I also realize by now that I may have overbought my ingredients for the week’s cooking rituals. There is no way that I can finish cooking all that I bought for the week, by the end of the week. I need to buy less. I also realize that it is near impossible to cook for baby without eventually cooking the same stuff for myself. Ok, I admit I have been lazy.

If you want my recipe for my ABC soup. You can check my post soup for three. Baby loves ABC soup.

Baby Spinach Chicken Soup (Stock for Infants)

image

Baby Spinach Chicken Soup (Stock for Infants)

We are always experimenting with different flavours to get baby to taste and get used to different types of foods. One way is via the soup method as a stock for the porridge that we cook.

So hopefully he will like his green vegetables next time when we cook it. We love vegetables so it would be tragic if baby doesn’t. So we really need to engineer his meals so that he will eventually join us in our meals.

This is a simple three ingredient soup stock. Again it is for infants, so there is no salt to be added. It is just pure flavour and all the goodness in the ingredients. I just went to the wet market early this morning to get the best produce before some aunty gets it.

I got a huge bunch of baby spinach and a chicken carcass (bones only). And just a little ikan bilis for flavour. This recipe should make about seven 120 ml cups of stock for baby’s porridge for the week.

I included a little before and after photo for comparison.

Recipe – serving for seven 120 ml cups

Ingredients

Baby spinach (a huge bunch)

Chicken carcass (bones only)

Ikan bilis (7-9 pieces)

Method

1. Wash the baby spinach first as these contain a lot of sand. Wash till the water in the pot is clear. Soak also the Ikan bilis in a small bowl of water.

2. Place the chicken in a pot. Then place the baby spinach together with the chicken. Sprinkle the Ikan bilis all over. Pour about 1 litre of water into the pot and boil on low heat.

3. The soup is done when the flavour escapes the covered pot and you can see the fat of the chicken on the surface of the broth. Allow the broth to cool before pouring into the containers for freezing. This should provide for seven servings of 120 ml of soup stock for porridge.

Bon appetit!

image

He>i Daddy (Musing)

image

He>i Daddy (Musing)

It’s a special title and an even more special place of honor. Not everyone can enjoy that title and it takes a certain passage of time and much uncertainty before someone is entrusted with that title of “daddy”.

Firstly the child needs to speak the words, but more importantly know the words. That day seems near as he knows who “papa” is already and fatherhood is certainly much more fulfilling in ways I could never have imagined.

Living life now is living life for him, to care for him and take care of him. He came as a tiny infant helpless and could only express cries or silence. His range of emotions simple and uncomplicated. Raw and immediate. There is hardly time and space that I am unaware of his existence. Our lives are forever intertwined. He is a part of me as I am a part of him.

It is a different way of life today than it was yesterday. A life with a child. A dependent, dependent on you. Your time of living your life and doing the things that you used to do has come to a good end. Now it is a season of routines, schedules and timeliness.

After being daddy, you assume responsibility and suddenly time becomes finite and I can almost see time in compartments and how I can and must manage it. It is a journey that I would encourage all to take. Never mind if you are unsure at this moment, but I guarantee you that it is a good transition, a good change.

Join me.

Birth (Short Story)

Ho Sim Lang

He screamed a loud screeching cry as air filled his lungs and he tasted unclean air for once in his life. His father stood by the side and smiled as the doctors pulled him from the gaping wound with umbilical cord still attached. His mother still in a state of semi-disarray, unaware of the happenings shielded from her eyes by the cloth. All she could hear was the sound of metal clanging and shuffling of feet and the words of the doctor telling the nurses to act and execute procedures.

Doctor: “Come come, Papa, come cut the cord!”

The doctor motioned the new father to cut the umbilical cord and for once in his entire life, he was VIP to the most significant moment in the life of another person. The feeling was indescribable. It was a good feeling. Like facing the sunrise on the edge of a cliff and just simply being awed by the brightness of the sun as it embraced him. He remembered that beautiful moment, and again felt it now albeit under different circumstances. The cold operating theatre is now filled with happiness, tears, and much joy.

The nurse wrapped the baby in shiny foil and tagged the infant after showing the father the baby for any distinguishing marks. He was perfect and without blemish. His father was pleased. Very pleased.

“He is a handsome boy!” He said to his wife. She smiled a faint gesture as she saw him for the first time, and felt all that she felt when she carried him for those days on weeks on months.