After revisiting Yip Kitchen’s kon low meen, or dried wonton noodles, I’ve been craving it like crazy. Of course I can’t be driving to Sunway Pyramid every time I want to eat kon low, right? And I hate going to coffee shops and hawker stalls because they’re so dirty.

At any rate, the hawker version only has wonton and char siew, or barbecued pork. But I like it with siew yoke, or roast pork with the crispy skin. So what to do? Make my own premium version at home with char siew, siew yoke and wonton. How about that ?

I buy the char siew, siew yoke, choy sum or Chinese leafy greens, and loose wonton noodle from the market. They come in, what I call, swirls. If you eat at the hawker’s, one swirl makes one plate of noodles.

For the wontons, you need wonton skins and ground pork seasoned with a dash of salt and pepper. To wrap the wonton, simply plop a teaspoon of meat into a wonton skin and fold up the sides to make a small bundle, giving the sides a squeeze to ensure the bundle doesn’t split open.

I usually have half a wok of water on the boil while I’m working on the other stuff. Once the wontons are wrapped, blanch them in the boiling water for 5 minutes till they’re cook through. Then blanch the choy sum which has been cut into 1-inch lengths. Leave aside.

For the sauce for one swirl of noodles, you need to lay these ingredients out on each plate (and you can vary the amounts depending on your own preference):

• 1+ teaspoon of dark, thick soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons of soy sauce
• 1 dessertspoon of oil
• 1 dessertspoon of oyster sauce

Place one swirl of noodles into boiling water. Use chopsticks to stir the noodles to prevent them from sticking together. It’s just like cooking spaghetti. But wonton noodles are finer and softer so you need to cook them for 3 minutes or less.

Then you need to kor lang hor which means scoop out the noodles and run them through cold water for 1 minute to cool them down. Then put them back into the boiling water and cook for another 1 minute. This process makes the noodles crisp.

Scoop out the noodles and place in the plate which has been readied with the sauce. Add in a few wontons and some choy sum. Use chopsticks to mix everything on the plate well into the sauce. Top with slices of char siew and siew yoke. For garnishing, sprinkle on some chopped spring (green) onions and Chinese parsley.

That’s it, you’re ready to dig in. Oops, almost forgot the pickled green chillies. If you don’t have those on hand, you can just cut up some raw red or green chillies. I eat mine with both pickled green chillies and raw birds’ eye chillies.

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I had two cans of mushroom carbonara sauce sitting around. They came free when I bought two bottles of Prego pasta sauce.

The last time I used sauce from a can, my kids didn’t care for the taste. So what was I supposed to do with these two cans? Cook ‘em, of course .

I used:

• 2 cans of Prego mushroom carbonara sauce
• 1 large onion, diced
• 6 slices of back bacon, sliced long
• spaghetti
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• dried parsley

Boil the spaghetti till al dente. In a non-stick pan, lightly fry the bacon in olive oil for about two minutes. Then add the onions and saute till they become translucent.

Pour in the carbonara sauce. Use a little water to rinse out the cans and pour that in as well. Bring to a simmer and add the spaghetti to the sauce. Mix well. Serve with a sprinkle of parsley.

I prefer mixing the spaghetti in the sauce while it’s still in the pan to spooning the sauce over the spaghetti because I find the sauce is more evenly distributed and sticks better.

Linguine or fettucine would’ve gone better with this sauce but I was fresh out of those so I used spaghetti instead. You can be really flexi with this and use any pasta you like or happen to have sitting around. Enjoy!

On super-busy days, the baked potato is a real time saver. My kids love it and I don’t hear a single complaint. A mom’s dream come true, huh!

There’s very little work involved and it only needs 3 ingredients:

• 7-8 medium Russet potatoes
• 6 slices of back bacon, cut into little square bits
• butter

I scrub the potatoes clean, wipe them dry and give them a quick coat of oil on the outside. Pierce each potato a few times with a fork and place them on a microwaveable dish or on a sheet of aluminium foil inside the microwave oven.

Microwave on high for 15-16 minutes. The rule of thumb that I use is about 2 minutes per potato so it’s 8×2=16 minutes. The more potatoes, the less total time you’ll need.

The burning question you probably have by now is how do I produce a baked potato from microwaving ? Well, I could bake the potato at 350 degrees but it’ll take me an hour or more. Time I don’t have. So excuse the shortcut but it’s faster this way .

I fry the bacon in my non-stick pan till it sizzles and gets crispy. You don’t need to add any oil to the pan before frying because the little bit of fat on the bacon is sufficiently oil the pan. I prefer to use back bacon because it’s less fatty.

Once done, the potatoes can be removed. I make a slice lengthwise on each potato. Watch the steam, be very careful and be sure to warn the kids that the potato is very hot.

Top the potato with a generous blob of butter and bacon bits. Sometimes I sprinkle with chives or spring/green onions if I happen to have some around.

There’s endless ways to top your potato, of course. With tuna, sour cream and chives, broccoli and cheese, corned beef and onions, cream cheese and herbs… go ahead, be creative.

So there you go, another meal with any number of variations that won’t take you more than a few minutes to throw together. If you eat this outside at the deli, each baked potato easily costs you rm5-7. If you ask me, that’s crazy for something so simple that you can make at home.

I’ve been buying baguettes lately because I can never resist the buy one, get one free offers that some of the grocery stores are offering so often these days.

You’d think we’d have gotten bored and run out of ways to eat our baguettes. But no!! There’s always a new and more creative way to eat a baguette.

Me and the kids love baguette dipped in curry. It’s so yummy it’s hard to stop once you get started. If I lived in a cold country, heck I’d be cooking chicken curry every single day !

Never tried baguette dipped in curry? You don’t know what you’re missing. Actually curry is a cinch to make if you use my easy-peasy chicken curry recipe.

My cousin’s kids practically grew up on macaroni and cheese. She swears it’s so easy it’s not even considered cooking. She throws a handful of cheese over some macaroni and sticks it into the microwave oven.

My kids have always refused to eat anything that even looks like mac and cheese so I’ve never had the occasion to make any. Never mind, I guess it’s not too late.

This week, Steev, my eldest, has suddenly decided he’s got a thing for mac and cheese after tasting it at Friday’s twice last month. I do agree it does taste pretty good but my girls still wouldn’t touch it.

My recipe is actually pretty simple. Here’s what I use:

• 5 handfuls of macaroni
• 1 cup breadcrumbs
• 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
• 2 teaspoons cornflour
• butter
• salt and black pepper to taste

I get a pot of water boiling. Salt it a little and add the macaroni. Meantime, I grease a deep baking tin with butter. When the macaroni is soft, I pour it into the tin.

I make a roue with cornflour and water, and pour it in. I would use milk but because of the recent melamine scare in China, I decide not to. So in goes the roue over the macaroni in the tin.

Then I pour the breadcrumbs in. Season with salt and pepper. Mix well with the mac. Top off with the cheese and bake at 180 degrees F for 25 minutes.

The smell is heavenly. Steev gobbled up this entire tin of mac and cheese for lunch. I admit the end result isn’t as rich and milkily cheesy as it’s supposed to be. Next time, I’ll use milk.

I make the simplest spaghetti in town. I don’t have the luxury of making my own red sauce so I cheat a little by using pasta sauce in a bottle. It tastes good, saves me time, serves my purpose, so what the heck !

What I use is:

• spaghetti, enough for 4 persons
• 350 grams or about 2 cups of Prego pasta sauce of your preferred flavor
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, chopped into small chunks
• 6-8 cherry tomatoes, halved
• olive oil
• parsley

I start off by boiling the spaghetti in lightly salted water till al dente. This shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.

While that’s happening, I happily cut the onions, carrot and tomatoes. I cut the carrot into small chunks and blanch it first for a reason.

Carrots are hard and take longer to cook. By blanching it, it’ll be half cooked by the time it joins the rest of the ingredients in the pan.

I drizzle some olive oil into a non-stick pan on medium heat and saute the onion till transparent. Then in go the tomatoes and blanched carrot chunks, followed by a good shake of the pasta sauce from the bottle and a sprinkle of dried parsley.

No, I don’t use the pasta sauce straight from the bottle, uncooked. Even though the pasta sauce is supposed to come with onions, garlic and mushrooms, I like to add more of my own.

Sometimes I add more herbs and some sugar to tone down the tartness of the fresh tomatoes. On a good day, I’d throw in broccoli flowrets and French beans as well. Notice I don’t add any salt at all because that’s already in the bottled sauce.

So yeah, that’s it and it took me less than 30 minutes from start to finish. Lunch is served.

This is definitely a great recipe to have at short notice. We observe two vegetarian days a month and sometimes it’s hard finding vegetarian dishes the kids like. At the same time, since the kids love this, it’s a good way for me to reduce our meat consumption.

I have half a bag of Tesco’s spiral pasta left. I bought them to try but they’re much softer than my regular Australian brand, San Remo. My kids, the picky eaters that they are, knew right away that it was a different brand.

Today I decided to camouflage the softness of the spiral pasta by using them in my pasta bake. My kids loved it so much they didn’t notice the difference at all. Haha, gotcha !

Okay, here’s what you need for this very simple pasta bake.

• 2 cups of fusilli, or spiral pasta
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 carrot, finely cubed
• 100 grams of ground pork
• 2 cups Prego pasta sauce
• 1.5 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
• 1.5 cups shredded cheddar cheese
• drizzle of olive oil
• dried parsley

I first boil the spiral pasta in lightly salted water. I’m not worried about keeping it al dente because I’m going to bake it afterwards.

While waiting for the pasta to boil, I prepare the sauce. Drizzle some olive oil on my non-stick pan to saute the onions, garlic, carrots and ground pork.

I add some water to soften the carrots before adding the pasta sauce. Bring to a quick boil, give it a quick stir and remove from heat.

I grease a baking pan lightly with olive oil. Next I throw in the drained spiral pasta, pour the sauce over it and stir to mix well.

Top off with a generous amount of the two cheeses and a quick sprinkle of dried parsley.

Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes. I turned off the oven but left the pasta bake in while I went to pick up my daughter from school. Twenty minutes gives the pasta time to absorb the sauce and for the cheese topping to brown a little more.

I had a fairly large pan (photo shows a quarter of my actual pan), enough to feed 3 hungry teens just back from school. The spiral pasta was soft and made a great base.

The dish wasn’t too meaty but had a bite to it. Although I used quite a lot of onions and garlic, the taste wasn’t overpowering. Very nice. Go ahead, give it a try .

Well, I wished for rain and I got rain. So I have to cook some rainy weather food to warm up our tummies and to chase away the sniffles caused by the alternating cool and hot weather.

Chicken curry is the best thing ever and my kids love it. They’ve been trained to eat spicy food from young. It’s a gradual process. Just expose them to spicy food and pretty soon, their tastebuds will be conditioned.

It’s not too difficult to cook chicken curry at home. The end-result is really worth the effort. You need:

• 1 large chicken about 1.5kg, chopped
• 6 ladies’ fingers, cut into half lengths
• 4 large potatoes, quartered

• 3 teaspoons mixed spices, usually consisting of fennel and mustard seeds, coriander
• 4 tablespoons curry powder mix (use the prepacked mix for meat)
• santan, or coconut milk from 1 coconut
• 4 stalks lemon grass, crushed
• 4 stalks curry leaves

• 6-8 cups water
• cooking oil
• salt to taste

First thing I do is to heat up some oil in the wok, or pan. Throw in the mixed spices and leave to pop for a few minutes to flavor the oil.

Add the curry powder mix, then the stalks of lemon grass and curry leaves. Fry all together till the spicy fragrance fills your kitchen and gets your neighbors drooling with envy .

Add chicken pieces, then the potatoes. Fry for a few minutes before adding water to the mixture. Season with salt to taste. Cover the wok and allow to simmer till the chicken and potatoes are softened.

Add the ladies’ fingers followed by the coconut milk. Simmer till ladies’ fingers are softened. Use medium heat throughout the cooking process.

Chicken curry can be a one-dish meal if you’re in a rush, We typically eat it with rice and papadam. Papadams are round crackers made from chickpea flour and Indian spices. Very tasty, I tell ya!

They’re sold in packaged sheets at the Indian store and I fry them myself at home. They make a delicious accompaniment to any meal of curry. My kids sometimes eat it on its own as a snack or with a topping, sort of like a nacho.

Some of my Australian friends have developed a routine of eating Indian curry rice on Fridays. They would run to the nearby Indian restaurant to buy back a mountain of Indian curry and rice.

When they come to KL, they will insist I take them out for spicy Indian food. Who says Caucasians can’t take the heat? Some of them are even better than me and I’m supposed to be the resident Chili Queen!

I bought a pack of prepacked ham chips (or ham bits, or ham cubes) at my deli. I decided to freeze them because I wasn’t going to use them the same day. You can still see the ice in the photo below.

Ham chips come from the odds and ends of slabs of ham, so they’re priced very cheaply compared to your regular ham slices. I like the fact that they’re cubed and ready to use. When I have leftover ham slices, I cut them up into cubes too so it makes sense.

I chucked all of my ham chips into this gorgeous fried rice. Yummy. They’re such a change from the Chinese sausages I usually use in my yummiest fried rice or spicy fried rice recipes.

There are so many other ways you can use ham chips - in pizzas, pastas, salads, toppings. How else would you use them?

Tofu is a chef’s gift. It’s so versatile you just can’t go wrong. When I can’t think what else to cook, it’s always tofu that comes to mind. And there’s a million things you can do with it.

The claypot tofu is one of our family favorites. It’s a one-dish meal, so easy and it’s got everything in it. When my kids were teething toddlers, I would feed them just the tofu with rice and a bit of gravy.

The idea of using the claypot is to keep the dish piping hot while you eat. So yes, this makes the perfect winter dish. Bleh, I wish we had winter here. I break out in perspiration whenever I eat this !

Okay, on with the recipe. As usual, I don’t really measure my ingredients so these numbers here are just to give you a rough idea. Go ahead and adjust the proportions to your liking.

• 3-4 squares of tofu, cut into smaller cubes and fried lightly ahead of time
• 10 medium-sized shrimps, deveined
• a handful of dried Chinese mushrooms, soaked in water to soften (you can also use fresh mushrooms)
• 1 carrot, thinly sliced into 3″ lengths
• spring (green) onion and cilantro, cut into 3″ lengths
• 1 clove garlic, diced
• 2-3 tablespoons oyster sauce
• sesame oil
• salt and pepper to taste

Before I do anything else, I typically heat up some oil in my claypot and lightly fry the tofu cubes on medium heat. Frying hardens the outside of the tofu slightly so the cubes hold up better and won’t disintegrate to bits when you add all the other ingredients. When browned, carefully lift them onto a dish and set aside.

Add some oil to the claypot and give the garlic a quick stir or two till you can smell the fragrance. Turn up the heat. Add the carrots, shrimps, and mushrooms and saute for a few minutes.

Next add the tofu cubes and oyster sauce. Add 2-3 teaspoons of flour to 1/4 cup water to make a light gravy (yes, the gravy is super-tasty!) and allow to simmer for 5 minutes. I try not to stir the ingredients too much to avoid breaking up the tofu.

Season with a few drops of sesame oil and salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with spring onions and cilantro.

Remove the claypot from the fire straight to the dinner table and serve it directly from there. Be careful now! The claypot is very, very hot and so are its contents.

Be VERY careful handling it especially if you have young kids around. You want it keep the pot far from their reach so they won’t accidentally burn themselves touching the sides.

So simple, so yummy, so healthy, so soft even toothless toddlers and seniors will love it. What can I say?