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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 bought some taupok, or tofu puffs from the market because I was thinking of trying my hand at making my own vegetarian curry. But I changed my mind when my neighbor said she’d get me a tub of vegetarian curry from the temple.

So I decided to stuff the taupok with some meat and fry it. I think some restaurants serve this as an appetizer or hors d’oeuvres. Taupok is a roughly 2-inch square tofu puff that’s hollow inside.

So what you need is:

• 10-15 taupok, cut into half
• 100 grams of ground pork
• 2 cups of cooking oil
• salt and pepper to taste

The first thing I do is to season the ground pork with some salt and pepper, and leave aside while I cut the tofu puffs into halves.

Using a teaspoon, I stuff the ground pork into the hollow of each taupok half. Then I heat up the cooking oil on high heat and drop the taupok in, one by one.

I kept my stuffed taupok very basic as I was in a bit of a rush. But if you’re planning to serve these as hors d’oeuvres, you can pretty up the stuffing with shredded carrots and green (spring) onions.

I serve these hot from the wok with chilli sauce and ketchup right out of the bottle, provided there’s still any left after the kids are done pinching .

Most of the time, I use ladies’ fingers in my chicken curry but I like them stir-fried as well. Ladies’ fingers, also called okra, is one of the more versatile vegetables and lend themselves well to a variety of cooking methods.

The ingredients you’ll need for this very simple yet tasty dish are:

• 12-15 ladies’ fingers, sliced thinly at an angle
• 1 large red chili, sliced thinly with seeds removed
• 1 clove of garlic, chopped
• cooking oil
• soy sauce
• salt and pepper to taste

I normally cut off the pointed tips of the okra to keep the slices consistent. That’s just me. You can keep them if you want to, no biggie .

I drizzle a bit of oil into my wok on high heat and throw in the garlic to flavor the oil for a few minutes. Since I’m working with high heat, I have to be quick.

In go the chili followed by the ladies’ fingers. I give it a few quick stirs and add a wee bit of water and a drizzle of soy sauce to help the cooking process and so the veggies won’t burn.

Season with salt and pepper and it’s ready to serve. Goes great with rice. It couldn’t get any easier than that!

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?

Once upon a time, I used to watch those 7o’clock Hong Kong family serials on TV and the thing that struck me most is how frequently the ‘families’ are shown drinking or talking about drinking soup and tongsui.

Tong sui literally translates to mean sugar water, or sweet soup commonly eaten as a dessert or during tea time. It’s a big feature in Cantonese meals and is considered to be a comfort food drink.

One of my all-time favorites is leen chee tong sui, a Cantonese term for lotus seed soup. I love it when they serve it as dessert in the last course of wedding dinners.

It needs just a few ingredients.

• a cup of leen chee or white lotus seeds
• a cup of pak kor or gingko nuts, shelled and skinned
• 2 cups dried longans
• a handful of pak hup or lily bulbs
• rock sugar to taste

Fresh gingko nuts come in a shell. You need to crack that open with a nutcracker and soak the pods in hot water to loosen and remove the skin.

Bring a pot of water to boil. Throw in the lotus seeds, gingko nuts, dried longans and lily bulbs. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer on low for 2 hours or until the ingredients are soft. Then add rock sugar to taste.

Lotus seed tongsui can be served hot or cold. I prefer mine chilled because I’m always trying to beat the heat. So I either dunk in a handful of ice cubes or stick a bowl in the fridge.

This is a soup that’s not only yummy, it really healthy too. Lotus seeds strengthen your kidneys and spleen. Gingko nuts boost your memory.

Longans are high in iron content so they’re good for your blood, dizziness and insomnia. Lily bulbs are good for coughs because they strengthen your lungs.

Oh, and I usually add sueet yee or white fungus as well. But I’ve run out so I didn’t this time. The white fungus adds a crunchy texture to this fruity, nutty combination and makes it doubly yummy.

You can also throw in a small handful of red dates to sweeten the whole deal. If you do use red dates, remember to reduce your rock sugar.

I’m not a big fan of rice to start with so when the weather is stifling warm like it is these days, I find rice even less palatable. So sometimes I opt to cook porridge instead. It’s nice and soft and so much easier to swallow. Served with a few simple savory dishes, it makes a very rustic meal.

In the old days, the working class Chinese survived on these sorts of meals. This was considered a poor man’s meal because the plain porridge and savory dishes are the simplest and least elaborate of meals.

We have salted egg which you boil and de-shell just like a normal egg.

As for the anchovies, just fry in a little oil till crispy. They don’t smell fishy and they’re very rich in calcium with the bones intact. In fact, when my kids were just getting into solids, I used to crush up the anchovies into a coarse powder and sprinkle into their porridge.

Then we have the main dish which is mooi choy, a sweetened preserved vegetable, finely chopped. Just fry it with some oil, finely chopped pork and fresh red chillies and a drizzle of dark, thick soy sauce. No need to add salt as the mooi choy is sweetly saltish.

The plain porridge combined with the sweetness of the mooi choy and the savory of the other 2 dishes makes this one of my favorite meals for a hot day!

Since we’re all poorer for rising fuel prices, this is quite an appropriate meal . But actually if you were to have this meal outside, it can be quite costly these days.

My kids want something to snack on while watching the Olympics. Since we don’t happen to have crunchy snacks around, I suggested making them chicken fingers and french fries. There was a huge resounding ‘yay’ from my kids!

I first made these chicken fingers a couple of weeks back. I was doing a post for Four Foods on Friday about oven bakes when the sudden inspiration for this recipe struck me like lightning.

The chicken fingers turned out to be an instant hit with my kids ! Okay, tell me, which kid doesn’t like crispy, crunchy boneless chicken pieces??

The recipe is very simple. I just use chicken breasts cut into broad strips and marinated salt, sugar, pepper and chilli powder for an hour now.

Again I’m using the ‘grandmother’s method’ of not measuring the ingredients but just using approximates. If you like spicy, add more chilli powder otherwise tone it down, it’s all up to you.

Then I drizzle a little cooking oil over the pieces to lightly coat them. Then dredge the pieces through a combination of flour and finely-grated parmesan cheese. Line up the strips on a greased tray and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or till golden brown.

Served with french fries, the kids tell me it’s just like eating McDonalds or KFC! Thing I love is these are oven-baked so they’re not greasy. They’re crisp and the parmesan cheese is what makes it taste so-oo good. Great Olympic finger food!

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.