We were having a super laid-back week last week… for a change . No school, no taxi runs, no hurry. So me and the teens decided to mosey on over to Tony Roma’s. Huge big lunch orders. This yummy onion loaf on the house.

Lots of laughs. Good service. Um, a little too good apparently. The maitre’d came over (surprise, surprise!) and asked about our meal. Good. Hmmm. Great. Hmmm. Yep. Hmmm. Those were my responses answered with my mouth closed. Well, almost.

On any other day, I would’ve flashed my big ol’ smile and rattled away. But not today. Even though the service was really quite good and deserved a big smile of satisfaction! Darn that parsley in my teeth !!

What would you do? Use it to scare away an over-zealous insurance marketing agent? I would !

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Admittedly I’m not a very good Chinese chef. Blame it on me not being very Chinese-y, I’m actually much more confident cooking Western food than I am Asian food. I would’ve loved to bring my entire brood out to Friday’s for pasta and pizza, but I have to instill some appreciation for Chinese customs and traditions in my young ‘uns, don’t I?

So this being Chinese New Year and all, I have to at least pretend to whip up a few simple Chinese dishes to make my ancestors proud . So here’s what I cooked for our CNY reunion dinner lunch (find out how our dinner became lunch) today.

Stir-Fried Kai-lan with Crispy Scallop Bits

An everyday dish of stir-fried Kai-lan (Chinese kale) funky-ed up with crispy dried scallop bits became a big hit with my say-no-to-veggie teens .

Claypot Pork Ribs and Tofu

My kids are big fans of Claypot Tofu (recipe is at my food blog) and I cook this quite often. But Claypot Tofu and Pork Ribs with carrot flowers and a sprinkling of wolfberries? Now that’s something different. Raine loved this and said it’s a brilliant idea to use pork ribs.

Spicy Thai-style Crispy Chicken

And my very popular Spicy Thai-style Crispy Chicken (recipe is on my food blog) with shredded carrots, cucumbers and onions is a hit with the kids as usual.

Braised Mushrooms with Phoenix Claws

And then we have Hip2bDad’s and my favorite Braised Mushrooms with Phoenix Claws. The name itself is enough to invoke sheer horror in my kids’ eyes. Phoenix? Actually there’s nothing pre-historic about this at all. Phoenix Claw is just a nice name for chicken feet !

Lotus Root Soup with Japanese Baby Scallops

And finally, we have my Lotus Root Soup with Japanese Baby Scallops which turned out so sweet and flavorful I would’ve hidden the entire pot to savor when no one’s watching .

There! Are we going to need diet pills later? I doubt it since there’s nothing very fattening here. And I think I might just have saved us a couple of hundred bucks cooking at home.

Here’s wishing all who are celebrating, A Happy and Prosperous Year of the Tiger. If you’re traveling out of town, have a safe journey. And to those who are not, have a Happy Valentine’s Day and a great weekend   .

Okay, so Chinese New Year is just around the corner and it coincides with Valentine’s Day this year. This time every year, we’d be trying to catch every lion dance performance in town. But not this year! Seems my teens have finally outgrown the obsessive lion chasing though we’ll still be picking a few spectacular ones to watch.

As usual, we won’t be traveling out of town like most folks. We prefer to avoid the rush and just visit some friends and relatives here in town. Now if we were going on vacation in Orlando, that would be a different story.

I’ll be cooking a simple reunion dinner at home on New Year’s Eve. Customarily daughters having been married out of the family are not welcome to have the reunion dinner with their side of the family because it’s believed that it’ll impoverish the family. Hahaha, I call it poppycock and fiddlesticks!!

They could, of course, ignore the superstition but my Dad celebrates it with his ‘new’ family and I’m technically an ‘orphan’ who never gets invited so… That leaves Hip2bDad’s side of the family where we’re customarily supposed to be having the reunion dinner with. But since his Dad also celebrates with his ‘new’ family, us ‘orphans’ decided to heck with all this nonsense and just have our own reunion .

On the first day of Chinese New Year, we observe a vegetarian diet. On the second day, I’ll be cooking the first meal of the year. As usual, we’ll be avoiding Chinese restaurants like the plague for the 14 days of CNY, away from the crowd and having to pay through our noses.

And that’s about it. Got a whole stash of festive cookies, mandarin oranges, drinks and flowers for the altar. Not much left to do except finalize my two menus. We don’t traditionally decorate the house with festive symbols, plants or lanterns. The kids have some new clothes which we bought over the Christmas holidays. Hip2bDad and I don’t bother with new clothes. No trips to the salon for any of us either, yay!

And we’re set for a whole week off school, that’s all we care about . Call us boring, call us weird but we’ve always done our own thang much to the horror of our extended families. We’re not your typical family. So the way we celebrate Chinese New Year shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone !!

With 4 picky eaters in the house, me included, it’s quite a challenge coming up with food we all like. This Thai-style crispy chicken is our current dinner favorite. It’s a dish we often order when we eat out at Chinese restaurants. Since it’s such a hit with everyone, I decided to cook it at home…

… um, without a recipe. I’m not very good at following recipes. I like to just grab ingredients on the fly and dunk them all in. Surprisingly this dish of lightly fried chicken topped with shredded carrots, onions and cucumber in Thai chilly sauce turned out very tasty eaten over rice. My kids lick the platter clean every time I cook this.

Go ahead and give my easy-peasy Thai-style crispy chicken recipe a try. You can adjust the heat level to your family’s taste and still have it taste as good .

Okay, so we’re on this fish and chips binge right now. We’ve had it two weekends in a row… New York fish and chips which the chef must’ve drowned in breadcrumbs before dropping into the fryer, then generously topped with melted cheese. Mmmm, swimmingly good!

And as if that’s not enough, I even ventured to make my own fish and chips for lunch on a school day. Fish and chips ‘homecooked’ in heaven complete with salad and tartar sauce, yum!

So we go through these cycles of food obsessions when we simply must go back and eat the same thing over and over again. Then there’ll be a lapse when we’re on the prowl for a new obsession…

… when we’d gladly go back time and time again to have our tongues singed silly by the spiciness of peri-peri chicken. And all those weekends chomping down Vietnamese pork chops over rice, by the end of which the cute waiter knew our orders by heart and had become our personal server. And not forgetting that incredible garlic shrimp pasta which we never seem to get tired of.

Are you as crazy as we are, or crazier? Do you obsess over a merry-go-round of food like we do?

There was a time when we hardly had any leftovers when we ate out. My three caterpillars would lick their platters clean. Lately though, that’s not been the case. It’s certainly not because the serving sizes have gotten larger. More likely, my caterpillars are past the chomping phase and waiting to morph into butterflies.

Forget weight loss products. With leftovers, Mom gets more than her fair share. And a new form of after-dinner entertainment is born.

For a long time now, I’ve been trying to get the kids to switch to eating wholemeal bread. My bad that I started them on white bread when they were younger and now they hate the coarse texture of wholemeal.

Recently the price of white loaves went up. But even before then, we’d noticed the slices becoming thinner, more airy and nothing more than empty calories. The kids were famished long before recess every day. There was our turning point right there. Now it’s wholemeal all the way for us! Yay for healthy diets that work!

This is a sponsored guest post written by a Press Release on behalf of PBM Products. Post powered by Sponzai.

GORDONSVILLE, VA., December 2 , 2009—PBM Products, LLC, a leading infant formula company that supplies store-brand infant formulas to Walmart, Sam’s Club, Target, Kroger, Walgreens, and other retailers, has received a favorable jury verdict and a $13.5 million damages award in its false advertising lawsuit against Mead Johnson & Co., the operating subsidiary of Mead Johnson Nutrition Company (NYSE: MJN) (“Mead Johnson”), the makers of the national-brand Enfamil® LIPIL® Infant Formula. Mead Johnson is 83 percent-owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb.

PBM’s lawsuit claimed that Mead Johnson engaged in false and misleading campaigns against PBM’s competing store-brand of infant formulas, suggesting they do not provide the same nutrition as Mead Johnson’s brands. PBM’s store-brand infant formulas cost up to 50 percent less than Enfamil® LIPIL®. The $13.5 million in damages awarded by the jury in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is one of the largest damages awards ever for a false advertising case.

“This decision by a jury of the people confirms that Mead Johnson’s ads have been false in suggesting that there is a nutritional difference between our store-brand formula products and their products, when in fact the only major difference is price,” said PBM CEO Paul B. Manning. “Despite Mead Johnson’s scare tactics, parents are assured that PBM’s formula products are as high quality and nutritious as Mead Johnson’s.”

U.S. District Court Judge James R. Spencer issued his written rulings yesterday following the November 10^th jury verdict. Judge Spencer’s written rulings permanently enjoined Mead Johnson from making any false statements concerning PBM’s infant formula, including the claims Mead Johnson previously made in Enfamil advertising that “It may be tempting to try a less expensive store brand, but only Enfamil LIPIL is clinically proven to improve brain and eye development,” and “there are plenty of other ways to save on baby expenses without cutting back on nutrition.”  The Court also ordered Mead Johnson to retrieve from the public domain all advertising or promotional materials containing these or any other false claims about PBM’s store brand infant formula. 

The details of the decision and the complaint are posted online in full at:

· http://www.pbmproducts.com/docs/Order_Laches.pdf

· http://www.pbmproducts.com/docs/PBM_Complaint_MJ_III_LIPIL.pdf

The nutritional supplements under examination in the case are two fats, DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and ARA (arachidonic acid), which Mead Johnson calls “LIPIL®” solely for marketing purposes and touts as promoting infant brain and eye development. PBM’s claim focused on Mead Johnson’s direct mailing to more than 1.6 million parents of an alarming blurry picture of a child’s cartoon duck next to a clear picture of the same image which suggested that anything other than the Enfamil LIPIL® blend of ingredients is inferior and will result in poor eye and brain development. Other parts of the false advertising campaign consist of statements that only Enfamil LIPIL has been proven to confer visual and mental benefits on infants, and store-brand formulas are a “cut-back in nutrition” compared to Enfamil.

PBM successfully argued that these advertisements were false and misleading especially since PBM store- brand infant formulas have the same nutrients at the same levels as Enfamil. PBM infant formulas are formulated to contain DHA and ARA, and are sourced from the same supplier in amounts which equal or exceed the DHA and ARA in Mead Johnson’s Enfamil LIPIL®.

This decision marks the third time PBM Products has sued Mead Johnson for false advertising claims. On the prior occasions Mead Johnson admitted that it made false claims about PBM’s products. It is also the first false advertising case to focus on the issue of DHA and ARA nutritional ingredients in formula, which were introduced into the market in 2003 and have become a staple in recent years by many brands as key components for infant development.

“This jury verdict should send a significant and clear message to Mead Johnson about the way it conducts marketing and advertising for its brands,” said Manning. “This lawsuit also demonstrates our complete commitment to defending our products and the valuable brands of our retail partners.”

“As a parent and supporter of children’s medical research, I take a personal responsibility in assuring our customers that the products we produce are healthy and nutritionally equivalent to brand names like Enfamil® LIPIL®. It is important, especially now, for parents to know that there are lower priced yet highly nutritious store-brand formulas that will provide the same benefit to their children as any national brand name formula product,” Manning added.

The U.S. infant formula market is estimated at $3.4 billion and the global market is estimated at $7.9 billion.

All of PBM’s formulas, and for that matter all of U.S. infant formulas, are subject to the exacting standards of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), pursuant to the Infant Formula Act of 1980. This legislation vested FDA with the authority to ensure that all infant formula products sold in the United States provide the necessary levels of identified nutrients required for the growth of healthy babies. For more information, visit this FDA link.

PBM Products was represented by the law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP. Partners from the firm’s advertising practice, Harold P. Weinberger and Jonathan M. Wagner in New York, led the team.

About PBM

PBM is privately owned and based in Gordonsville, VA. PBM companies specialize in manufacturing, distributing, and marketing consumer food, nutritional, and pharmaceutical products. For more information, visit www.pbmproducts.com.

Enfamil® LIPIL® are registered trademarks of Mead Johnson & Co.