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I confess yeen choy, or Chinese spinach, soup was not one of my favorites when I was growing up. You know how kids balk at veggies, I was one of them. Wouldn’t touch this stuff with a ten-foot pole !

This is one of my favorite soups now. I couldn’t resist buying this beautifully fresh bunch of yeen choy the other day. We had this soup at an expensive restaurant recently and I’ve been craving for more ever since.

You just need:

• a large bunch of yeen choy, or Chinese spinach
• a handful of dried anchovies
• a clove of garlic, sliced thinly
• 5-6 cups of water
• salt and pepper to taste

Yeen choy is not expensive and you need to buy a fairly big bunch as the tender leaves tend to shrink when cooked. You also have to be sure and do a thorough job of rinsing out the hidden sand and dirt in the yeen choy.

First thing, you need to chop the woody stems off the top of your bunch of spinach, leaving the tender leaves and stems. Then just hold the bunch lengthwise and twist to break the long stems into two.

My grandmother taught me that vegetables retain their sweetness and taste better when broken by hand than if you chop them up with a knife. I don’t have any scientific evidence to prove this but in my books, my grandmother is da best darned cook so I follow her advice .

Heat up your saucepan with a drizzle of cooking oil. Saute the garlic slices for 1-2 minutes to flavor the oil. Then add the anchovies and saute for another few minutes.

Add 5 cups of water, cover the pan and bring to a boil on medium heat. Next turn the heat to high, add in the Chinese spinach and boil for a few minutes.

You can add a few slices of century egg at this point. But personally I find they don’t add much flavor to the soup so I leave them out altogether.

Be careful not to overboil the soup as you don’t want your beautiful spinach to turn yellow. Season to taste. I remove the anchovies before serving. They’re completely tasteless after you’ve boiled the calcium goodness out of them (bleh!) so I just chuck them.

Restaurants tend to leave the anchovies and century egg in to make the soup appear less plain.

My kids tell me this soup looks like a bunch of grass floating in muddy water and it’s something a cow might want to drink, but certainly not them!!!

Looks aside, Chinese spinach is a rich source of protein, mineral and Vitamin C so this is very healthy soup we’re talking about. The soup is pure protein, calcium and mineral sweetness with very little fat.

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?

It’s back to school next week which means it’s back to preparing school lunches. I’m usually quite calm about it because I’m the type who can stick my head into the fridge and come up with something wierd but edible .

I’ve got 3 picky eaters who also happen to be teens. And if you know teens, they’re (1) always hungry and (2) very moody. So it can be a challenge trying to please everyone.

My policy is to keep our lunches simple yet tasty. It’s much better than me slaving long and hard in the kitchen for something my kids won’t even want to look at, let alone eat.

So I go with the flow and take note of what foods get raving reviews. This round, Mom’s chicken pie, toasties and bacon and cheese baguettes have been voted their top lunch favorites !

You can find more lunch ideas and recipes here that have worked out very well for us so far.

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?

I just haven’t been able to resist buying baguettes lately. My kids love the different toppings I’ve been putting on them. And obviously what better time to stuff yourself silly with baguette than when they’re on sale. Two for the price of one is so worth it.

I made this for breakfast last Sunday and again for lunch this week on my kids’ request. Simply lay strips of cheddar cheese slices along the length of the baguette and top off with a strip of streaky bacon. Pop them into the oven toaster for about 8-10 minutes.

I tell ya, the smell of bacon crackling in my oven toaster first thing in the morning is heavenly. I rarely buy streaky bacon but the bits of fat in it really do add a great sizzle of flavor.

If you’re making these as hor d’oeuvres for a party, you can cut the baguette into shorter lengths and stick a fancy toothpick in the center.

Skye stays back after school a few days a week, and I have to bring her a lunch box on those days. I know it’s a drag staying back on stifling hot afternoons so I try to cheer her up by bringing her surprise lunches that I know she loves.

This means I have to pretty much cook up something different each time. That’s why I started a new category for lunchbox ideas for the lunches I’ve been packing for her.

The other day, I was making chicken nuggets and needed french fries to go with them. I don’t normally do fries at home. I figure they’ll never taste as good as the ones at McD so I might as well buy from there.

But this time, I had a bag of frozen french fries in the freezer, the first bag I ever bought to try.

It doesn’t take long to deep-fry them, just about 5-6 minutes max.

See, they turned out very nice and crisp, not greasy even though I drained them in a strainer and didn’t use kitchen rolls to absorb the remaining oil afterwards. Skye loved it. Trouble is I can’t remember what brand french fries these are.

At wedding dinners, the second or third to the last course is usually fried rice or hor yip fan, fried glutinous rice wrapped in lotus leaves. But at the wedding we went to recently, they served spicy fried rice. What a twist!

I was going to give this course a miss like I usually do. I’m not much of a rice person though most people assume that being Chinese, I should love rice by default .

At any rate, my kids convinced me to try this. They say it’s different and it’s tasty. In fact, they liked it so much (my kids? rice?) they made me conjure my own recipe for it. The verdict: “it’s the same as the one we ate that night, Mom”. So I guess I didn’t do too badly, eh .

A simple twist to the same old fried rice. You need:

• a large bowl of cooked rice (leftovers would be great)
• a handful of medium-sized shrimp, deveined and cut into 2 or 3 smaller pieces
• French beans, diced
• carrot, diced
• fresh red chillies, finely chopped
• a tablespoon of chilli powder
• garlic, finely chopped

I’m using the ’simply grab and go’ method of measurement here, just like my grandma used to do it. Proportions depend entirely on your own preference and those you’re cooking for.

I like it hot with lots of veggies but my kids can’t take too much heat and “we hate veggies!”. So I try to strike a happy medium.

First of all, I heat up some cooking oil in my wok and flavor it with the garlic. Then I add the carrot, French beans, chillies and chilli powder and saute till fragrant.

The shrimps go in next. Stir that around for a bit so it absorbs the flavors before you add the rice. Season to taste and you’ve got yourself a one-dish meal with carb, veggies and seafood. Goes great with a hot cup of Chinese tea afterwards.

I’ve been cooking lunch this entire school week. No kiddin’! I used to cheat by buying the kids’ lunch like once or twice a week. But you know the thing with gas prices these days so hell, we gotta try and cut cost.

I made my kids’ favorite pan-fried fish fillet today and paired it with rice simply because we haven’t had rice for lunch all week! Wha-at, no rice and we call ourselves Asians? Shame on us !

I’m using dory fillets here. If you’ve ever eaten fish at a restaurant, you know it’s darned expensive and you walk out still hungry because the servings are so small. Well, that’s me anyways .

The fillets I buy come frozen in packs of 4 or 5 pieces each and cost less than 10 bucks. I heat up some olive oil in a pan and chuck in a handful of chopped garlic and fresh chillies to flavor the oil.

The fillets go in next to be pan-fried till they’re cooked through on both sides. If the fish is flaky when you cut through it, then it’s cooked. A sprinkle of salt and pepper to taste, and we’re done.

Meantime, my rice is in the rice cooker bubbling away. I blanch 1 carrot and a handful of French beans, both finely cubed, to soften them up a bit. I melt some butter in my pan and add the carrot, French beans and 1 tomato, also finely cubed. Fry them for a minute.

The rice goes in last. Give it a good toss with the veggies in there. Add salt and pepper to taste. And we’ve got a healthy lunch with veggies, fish, carb and a spicy kick to boot.

The thing I like about Sunday mornings is that they’re so lazy and laid-back. One of the kids suggested we go out for breakfast this morning but the rest of us were just too lazy to budge.

We spent a half day at the movies yesterday and we’re headed out for another movie in a bit where free lunch will be provided - yay!

So I figured let’s have a simple, down home breakfast, it being Father’s Day and all, and then go pig out at the movies afterwards *muahaha*.

This is what I came up with. I prefer to buy back bacon because it has practically no fat. If I buy strip bacon, we end up stripping out the strips of fat anyways. There, how’s that for using the same word 3 times in one sentence !

My eggs are sunnyside up but well done. Always. I’ve never trusted anything else since the time I had scrambled eggs (I suspect they weren’t cooked well) on a flight and ended up with my head stuck in an air-sick bag on the entire 18-hour flight from Honolulu to Singapore. Now that’s a tough lesson but I’ve learnt it well…done.

Porridge is a great comfort food for days when you’re feeling under the weather or have no appetite. I start out with 1 cup of rice in double the amount of water. Boil on low heat so the grains get a chance to slowly open up. Add more water if it starts drying up before the rice turns soft.

I cut up a bit of pork into thin slices and season with salt and pepper, and a light drizzle of cooking oil. Meantime I have a handful of dried oysters soaking in a bowl of water. Later I have to carefully rinse out the oysters because there’s usually bits of sand caught in it.

When the rice comes to a boil, I add the dried oysters, pork slices and a handful of dried scallops, washed. Keep adding water and keep the heat low to give the porridge time to soften and a chance for the sweetness of the pork and seafood to be infused into the porridge.

When you’re satisfied with the consistency of the porridge, season to taste with salt, pepper, sesame oil and a sprinkle of chopped spring onions. That’s it, simple. You’ll notice I didn’t add a lot of oil. I like to kinda keep it plain.

Incidentally McDonald’s has a chicken porridge (below). What’s interesting about this porridge is that it’s garnished with chopped spring onions and chilies for that spicy kick (I can’t complain, they seem to know my taste ).