Food & recipes » Hip to be Mom

The weather’s been just beautiful. Heavy rain overnight for the past few nights leaving the days cloudy and breezy. Nonetheless, it’s another quiet weekend for us.

Life in the city can be mundane if you don’t consciously go and seek out fun things to do. But seeing as how one person’s entertainment can be another’s sleeping pill, this whole idea can be the subject of a huge debate.

The girls and I have just spent 3 hours in the kitchen baking more of, yes, those scrumptious chocolate chip cookies we baked last weekend …

… and a carrot cake. Some of the batter went into cupcakes for Skye’s recess.

Friday night, we were caught in massive Friday night traffic which turned our 20-minute drive into 2 hours. So on the way home, we rewarded ourselves with a yummy Chinese dinner at almost 9pm!!

An unearthly dinner hour for us, I know, but the night life here is anything but quiet, so finding a place to eat or shop is as convenient as Self-inking Stamps. Even late at night, traffic is still crazy, and restaurants, stores and malls are open late.

Saturday, we had lunch out as usual, just before our grocery run. And that’s basically it. We’ve been holed up in the comfort of home since then except for taking Tyson, our beagle, for his evening walks.

How’s your weekend going?

So Skye’s finally gotten tired of her store-bought recess food. My kids don’t eat food from the school canteen. From day one, I’ve had them bring food from home although most of the time, I have to admit they’re store-bought cookies and such.

Anyhoo, Skye decided it’s time to pamper herself with homemade recess food… and so she and Raine helped me make these amazing chocolate chip cookies.

First cream together

1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg

Skye did most of the work creaming the mixture but here’s Raine, our diva with her Batman-themed fingernails, taking over for a while so Skye could snap a picture.

Add the dry ingredients and continue mixing till the dough comes together.

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips (someone added extra chips when I wasn’t looking )

Raine did most of the work of plopping spoonfuls of the dough on a baking tin.

Bake at 375 degrees F for 10-15 minutes. Our kitchen quickly smelled like chocolate heaven and even Tyson, our little beagle with the big appetite, ran round in circles wagging his tail hoping to catch a treat.

Well, here they are, the chocolate chip cookies that came out of the oven. So so good that if fingers could drool, I’m sure they would .

This weekend, we’re making ourselves a carrot cake, and a few more batches of chocolate chip cookies to give away. Pretty excited about that.

What are you up to this weekend? Any baking in your plans?

Okay, here we are, a new week, another Monday. Happily I accomplished a couple of small things this past weekend. A little more than I usually do at least .

This morning, I finally got around to trimming my own bangs. They were beginning to resemble overgrown weeds. And I got my new blog header up – (from left to right) flowers on sale at the farmer’s market, Cheesecake Factory’s shrimp and fries, red flowers from the roadside, my favorite Baja Fresh salad, and sunflowers in full bloom. Like it?

Yesterday, we made pancakes from scratch. For months now, I’ve been buying baking supplies, a little at a time, at the encouragement of my girls, and stashing them away for lack of motivation to do much with them. So I’ve been buying and stashing, buying and stashing, and then, nothing!

The poor butter has been in and out of the fridge since round about Thursday last week, waiting to be used for the pancakes I’ve been promising the girls since June, or was it February? Time to put those baking supplies to good use.

So I marched the girls down to the kitchen going, if you want pancakes, you’ll have to help me make the batter. And they happily agreed. Just like that! Now our pancake batter is sitting in the fridge waiting to become today’s lunch.

Saturday night, we had two dinners. Consecutively. We had dinner at Fridays. As you might’ve guessed, in the Land of Diminishing Portions, the servings can be pathetically inadequate and we were still hungry after eating this, this and this.

So we casually strolled over to Vietnam Kitchen with our hungriest puppy dog eyes and proceeded to eat a set meal to share. I’m not sure if I should call this an accomplishment but I wouldn’t recommend doing this too often .

Waiter: What would you like to drink?

An office worker at the table beside us at a restaurant: Hot iced lemon tea, please!

For the record, it was my girls who caught this exchange, not me !

Meatless

Posted by Clairity 2 Responses »

Jul 192011

Well, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it’s vegetarian day at the Hip household. The girls and I stopped by the Buddhist temple for a quick vegetarian lunch. The food is free for a small donation of whatever amount you wish to give and one more thing, you have to wash up after your meal.

To save myself the trouble of figuring out what to cook later, I bought these vegetarian dishes for dinner.

A sweet and sour dish of assorted veggies – cucumbers, tomatoes and pineapples

A spicy vegetarian curry of cabbage, long beans, eggplant and bean curd

Vegetarian never tasted so good but still my picky eaters opted out. So I made them roasted potatoes and carrots instead while they whipped up a large bowl of instant mushroom soup to share.

We still have some treasures stashed inside our fridge. Whenever we go to Target, we would raid their Lindt shelves and walk off with at least 10-20 of their Lindt chocolate collection.

We’ve been saving these Lindt dark chocolate to savor slowly. One square of these orange-flavored ones is enough to take us by auto lifts straight into chocolate heaven! These are so-so good, I tell ya.