Hip to be Mom» Food & recipes

Vegetarian never looked this glam

Clairity — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:40:47 +0000

From as far back as I can remember, the first day of Chinese New Year has always been a vegetarian day for us. The whole idea of going vegetarian is to start the new year by abstaining from killing/harming any living beings in accordance with the 5 Precepts of the Buddha’s teachings.

My grandmother would be up at the crack of dawn to prepare a big (and I mean, huge) bowl of a mixed vegetable and mushroom stirfry. This is the staple dish eaten over rice every single year, even now, and also a regular dish on other vegetarian days of the year.

My kids never really liked this dish. But they’ve been very good about it and have been eating it year in, year out without complaints. Until this year, that is.

Recently, I replicated Chili’s classic nachos at home and it was such a hit that my girls have been calling for an encore. So this year in lieu of that veggie stirfry my girls so dread, we had homemade nachos which are as colorful and glam as disney hotels?

The good thing about making these nachos at home is that we can have, like Skye happily announces, unlimited lettuce, salsa and sour cream unlike at the restaurant where we have to split hairs over the small portions of toppings. Their nacho slices are considerably larger than ours so we have to make a little go a long way.

For my nachos, I use cheddar and mozzarella but you can pretty much use any cheese you like. Bake till lightly golden, and top with sour cream, shredded lettuce and homemade salsa.

So so delicious and so so glamorous you barely even notice it’s vegetarian. I mean, look at this, there’s just no way!

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Not your regular reunion dinner

Clairity — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:22:42 +0000

Okay, so our reunion dinner is done for another year… and just in case you’re wondering what we ate, well, I’ll let the picture do the talking.

Scrumptiously moist roast turkey with brown gravy, roasted carrots and potatoes, a simple salad of lettuce and mandarins and red wine

Simple and refreshingly different. Our ancestors are no doubt frowning down on our bold deviation from tradition going, where the heck is the food with auspicious names y’all? With all due respect, somewhere along the line, someone must’ve been born with a non-conformist chromosome!

Long story short, my girls loved our Christmas turkey so much they got me to go out the week after Christmas to grab another frozen turkey for the reunion. Which is a very simple affair as there’s just us chickens at our dining table at home.

For the next 15 days, we’ll be avoiding Chinese restaurants like the plague, unless we get invited out and someone else is footing the bill. A girl friend of mine started this tradition and I must say it’s a darned good one. If you can have Chinese on any given day of the year, why pay double or triple to eat half the regular portion of the same, probably poorer quality food with souped-up auspicious names? Makes no sense.

On that note, here’s to good food, good health and a fantastic year of the water dragon .

Snippets of our weekend

Clairity — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:07:44 +0000

What a Sunday! The girls and I were up early and we got to work right after breakfast. Yup, 5 hours in the kitchen baking up a storm. Nevertheless it was a long morning well spent. We baked granola bars, 2 huge loaves of wholemeal bread that’s going to last us a week and chocolate chip cookies (recipe here) which I was planning to give away as a gift but we’ve already munched through half the container.

The bread and granola bars are for my girls to munch in school. Homemade bread is much more substantial as a breakfast food than the airy bread sold at the store. The granola is to tie them over the long school hours.

Saturday, we trawled the mall. I know, I know, we have nothing to buy and we really should try to avoid the malls on the weekends from now on because Chinese New Year is next week and the malls are busting with folks trying to get their last-minute shopping done.

But when you live in this city, there’s practically nowhere else to go on the weekend except… the mall. We just need to get out of the house for a few hours. So that’s where we had both lunch and dinner out Saturday.

And now we’re ready for another crazy week ahead. Bring it on!

By the way, what was your weekend like?

A place to destress

Clairity — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:09:14 +0000

For the past couple of weekends, the girls and I have been sneaking off to a little Japanese place which serves these gorgeous dragon rolls. Japanese is one of our favorite go-to’s for stress relief, and these weeks have been kinda stressful. So what the heck, right?

Quite honestly, we can’t decide which one of these dragon rolls we like better. They taste different but they both taste so good. I love drenching my roll in wasabi even if it makes me sneeze sometimes when that powerful pungence travels up my nose .

Skye’s favorite is this unagi rice. Unagi is Japanese for eel. Well, I try to think of this as fish, not eel when I’m eating it. It’s not hard because it smells heavenly. And I would dab my spoonful all over with wasabi.

Raine loves this beef rice and I have to agree. We rarely eat beef at home so this is kinda a nice little treat for us.

And let’s face it, we all love tempura. For me, it would be a sin to go to a Japanese restaurant and not order tempura. So ebi tempura (shrimp) and yasai tempura (assorted vegetables) is a must.

Not to forget that piping hot green tea. Looking at these pictures is making me drool. We definitely need to do this more often.

6 reasons to be excited and 1 not to be

Clairity — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:17:41 +0000

First, the good news. This morning, I looked out the window and all the stars were aligned in the dawn sky. Tis the perfect day to head to the gym with Raine. We worked our butts off (literally), came home, rolled up our sleeves and started baking.

Within an hour and a half, we had the first 4 reasons to be excited. We were done baking 2 loaves of wholemeal bread and 1 carrot cake, and making the batter for pumpkin pancakes. Easy-peasy, right?

Oh, a friend brought us practically half a fresh produce sectionful of seasonal fruits and veggies from his farm. What were we going to do with all those carrots?

But apparently the carrot power was just a little too much for my fingernail and IT BROKE!! *sobs* That’s the bad news.

I hate, hate, hate breaking my nails, grrr! I had to rush upstairs, remove my nail polish right away and cut all my other nails short to match. Bummer! On the brighter side, surely that must mean I’m now qualified for the handicap parking spot (Reason #5 maybe)?

They say that everything happens for a reason. So I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, breaking my nail might have something to do with my spanking new iPhone 4S. Since I got it last weekend, I’ve wasted a few hours of my life rekeying all my phone contacts from scratch.

In the process, I’ve noticed how my long nail was getting in the way because now I have to use my fingertip instead of my fingernail to type. Yup, I’m sure that’s how I weakened my nail causing it to break today. Oh well!! Sometimes you ask for an orange and life gives you an Apple *shrug*.

Incidentally, these incredibly clear food pix were taken with my new phone (Reason #6) which looks like the billion other iPhones out there that a billion of you already have. So I’m late to the party again, huh?

Ringing in 2012

Clairity — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:19:37 +0000

I know this is supposed to be a brand new year and all but it just doesn’t feel like it. Maybe I’m caught in a time warp or something. This time last year, we’d just spent a freezing New Year’s Eve at Universal Studios, Hollywood and were headed south to Sea World, San Diego on the next lap of our tour of ~~duty~~ theme parks. That was some New Year’s to remember.

This New Year’s Eve was very different. We were out early doing a major grocery haul to stock up before prices shoot up overnight like they have a way of doing. I do this every year end. I don’t like to be caught out nor ripped off, so if it’s stuff we use every day, why not just buy them all up now? So we came home with 2 shopping carts full of stuff .

For dinner, I made lasagne and roast potato wedges just like my girls requested.

What an awesome combination! The potato wedges were crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Simply out of this world.

Raine was telling everyone, Eat slowly so you can savor every bite!

Dinner was simple but scrumptious. The fireworks, not so much. Truth is I could hardly keep my eyes open. Midnight is way, way past my bedtime. I might’ve been ~~sleep walking~~ sleep driving to the fireworks, I don’t know. What I do know is that the atmosphere was definitely not the same without Steev and all his photographic equipment in tow and the usual excitement about picking the perfect vantage point.

We really should’ve stayed home and watched a movie instead because the fireworks were, well, for lack of a better word, lacklustre this year. Not that it mattered though. We could barely make out a fraction of the fireworks shooting up over a clump of trees. And when we thought it was all over, turned out the guy manning the fireworks might’ve fallen asleep. As soon as we crawled back into the car, the fireworks started up again. Oh well!

As for the traffic snarls that kept us out for a half hour or more in previous years, we were in for a pleasant surprise. We breezed in and out of there like it was any other ordinary day. See what I mean about this new year’s not feeling like new year’s at all.

Well, okay, that was me. How did you ring in the new year?