I cooked salmon and shrimp linguine for lunch today. Salmon is my favorite fish. It doesn’t matter if it’s smoked salmon, raw salmon as in sashimi, or any other type of salmon, I love it. I’m someone who would really appreciate this Smoked Salmon Trio.

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Some friends of ours went absolutely nuts when we were on holiday in Phuket, Thailand. No, not because of the beaches or the shopping, though Phuket is a beautiful beach resort with great shopping to boot.

They couldn’t wait to taste the fresh oysters! The oysters are served on their shells. You squeeze some lemon/lime juice all over and just gulp them down RAW!! I didn’t try it, it freaked me out.

But I like oysters in egg omelette which is the only kind I’ve tried. This recipe of holiday oysters with cocktail sauce sounds like something I might like though.

You need:

• 1 pint shucked oysters (30 to 48 per pint)
• 4 cups all-purpose flour 1 cup cracker meal (or crushed crackers)
• 2 cups vegetable oil for frying
• 2 tablespoons butter (optional)
• 1 tablespoon sea salt
• CrabPlace.com cocktail sauce
• Lemon wedges

Prepare the oysters. Combine the flour and cracker meal and dredge the oysters in the mixture. Let the oysters sit, refrigerated, for 20 minutes.

Heat the oil to about 350 degrees on medium heat. Add in the optional butter. Fry the oysters until crispy, about 1 to 2 minutes per side. The oysters are done when they’re golden brown and crispy.

Transfer the fried oysters to a plate lined with a paper towel. Sprinkle sea salt to taste and serve hot with spicy cocktail sauce and lemon wedges. This makes 6 to 8 servings.

How to clean fresh oysters:

Scrub the oysters and place them in a large bowl. Make sure to discard all broken shells or oysters that won’t close. Fill the bowl with enough cold water to cover the oysters.

Shake in the cornmeal and stir. Let the oysters sit for 3 to 6 hours, to let them purge any sand. Remove the oysters from the water and rinse thoroughly.

I used to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with my gal pal in California. That’s where I had my first taste of roast turkey and I’ve gotten hooked ever since.

Since Thanksgiving and Christmas is only a month away from each other, she would try not to have roast turkey twice. Actually I wouldn’t have minded having turkey twice in a month but well, I wasn’t calling the shots.

So she would either have ham or a pork roast for Christmas. It’s nice to have something completely different to look forward to, like some plump scallops, for example.

Or lobster tails? I rarely see lobsters sold anywhere, only served at fancy restaurants.

But if you live in the continental United States, you can shop The Crab Place for award-winning Maryland seafood and have it delivered fresh to the your doorstep. They offer discounted weekday shipping to different parts of the US so you should definitely check that out.

On the Black Friday weekend from November 28 thru December 1, 2008, you can use this link to save 25% off their award-winning Maryland Lump Crab Cakes.

I love crab cakes dipped in chili sauce. I don’t think they ship internationally but I’m definitely checking out the free seafood recipes on their site for some ideas of what to cook for Thanksgiving in case I really can’t find that turkey .

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’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.

My daughters were attracted by the souvenir store selling Forrest Gump collectibles adjoining the newly-opened Bubba Gump Shrimp at The Curve in Mutiara Damansara. I’m a fan of Tom Hanks but not of the movie, Forrest Gump. But the girls seemed excited to check it out, so we did.

Stepping inside the restaurant is like stepping into one of ‘em ole time cabins in Greenbow, Alabama. We wound our way through narrow hallways and climbed the rickety wooden stairs to our table on the verandah.

I almost jumped for joy when I saw that they have clam chowder on their menu. It’s hard to find restaurants serving clam chowder since it’s obviously not a popular item with locals. But it’s my favorite!!

Their Old Fashioned New England Clam Chowder is exactly what I’ve been hankering after, complete with authentic New England oyster crackers. It’s very robust, very rich but a bit too salty.

The items on the menu of predominantly shrimp didn’t exactly jump out at us, and I’m glad we did the wise thing by ordering main meals to share instead of one each.

The Captain’s Fish and Chips came on a page ripped out of the smalltown Alabama daily newspaper featured in the movie. Interesting .

But I can’t say the same for the fish. The fish tasted fishy no matter how much lemon we squeezed on it, which can only mean it wasn’t fresh to start with.

The Mama Blue’s Southern Charmed Fried Shrimp was nice and crunchy but tastewise, there was nothing special about the shrimps.

Since we were all starved, I ordered a pasta, Of Course We Have Scampi!, a linguine cooked with capers and garlic, which somehow failed to live up to its name.

As with any pasta, the sauce is what makes the dish. This sauce was watery and much too sour. But what it lacked in taste, it made up for it by a really generous helping of shrimps.

I confess we ordered Shrimper’s Heaven because we liked its name. But if we were expecting it to send us to Seventh Heaven at first bite, we were bitterly disappointed. Even the sauces failed to get us there.

While we were waiting for our food to be served, the waiter came up and attempted a bit of trivia pursuit with us. He told us he’d give us a prize if we got the answers right. My kids took him to his word. But when we asked him about the prize later, he said those questions were “for entertainment only”. He didn’t have to mention a prize, we would’ve played anyways. But to offer the false hope of a prize and then try to squirm away from it later is not funny, even if it’s meant as a joke.

Bubba Gump’s ambience is definitely “sweet home Alabama”. Gotta love the tables with wooden crate shipping marks, a ping-pong bat that’s actually their drinks and dessert menu, and a tin bucket containing the kitchen roll (home-style serviettes) and bottled condiments.

Not to mention, the fun with number plates. The blue sign saying “Run Forrest Run” means everything is hunky-dory, leave us to pig out. This red sign is to signal the waiters for service. If they don’t notice the sign, just start waving like crazy!

All in all, if there’s one thing I’m going back there for, it’ll be their Old Fashioned New England Clam Chowder… after my credit card recovers from shock, that is!!

This is one of the many funky snacks DH brought home from Japan. At first, I thought they were frozen baby crabs that I’m supposed to use for cooking. But on closer look, these are crunchy crab snacks made of real crabs. Interesting!

The entire crab can be eaten, shell and all. They taste slightly sweet and the crabs are small enough that you can pop them in whole. It took me a while to psych myself up to taste one but they don’t taste half bad at all. Looks like an awfully rich source of calcium too .

I’ve looked around in the local Japanese grocery sections but I don’t see them here. I gave my friends some to try and they were thrilled because they’ve never seen anything this funky .

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 ).

I have a four-angled bean plant in my garden which is blooming right now with these beautiful beans here. It’s a shame I forgot to take a photo of my plant before I harvested the beans . Now I have to wait till the next time it fruits. But here’s a picture of my bountiful harvest…ta-da!

Beautiful, huh? Well, there’s truly nothing like freshly-harvested, homegrown beans cooked and eaten within minutes. No fertilizers, no insecticides. It has a natural sweetness you can’t get from the ones you get at the market.

Most people cook these beans (also called kacang botol or winged beans) with sambal belacan (or chilli paste). But I prefer to keep mine simple when I’m using homegrown beans because I don’t want to crowd its incredible freshness and natural flavor.

So just a few simple ingredients, that’s it.

• garlic, chopped finely
• a handful of shrimps, shelled
• a handful of 4-angled beans, cut into .25 inch lengths
• sesame oil, salt and pepper, to taste

Heat up the wok (or frying pan). Drizzle some cooking oil and add the garlic to flavor the oil. Add the shrimps and fry quickly before adding the beans.

Lastly, give it a quick drizzle of sesame oil, and a sprinkle of pepper and salt. A few flips with your spatula and you’re done. Time to enjoy the crunchy sweetness!

For me, the highlight of Chinese New Year is yee sang, or raw fish salad. If I even step into a Chinese restaurant during the fifteen days of Chinese New Year, it’d be solely for this dish.

Otherwise, I would avoid Chinese restaurants (unless I’m invited to dinner) till CNY is over. If we decide to have a big feast out, it’d be anything but Chinese. I much prefer to toss yee sang at home, thanks.

Fish (the Chinese homonym for ‘excess’) is used in this once-a-year festive salad to signify more than enough prosperity, happiness, good health, good luck and everything good. So if you want to be successful in the coming year, you got to toss this and toss it high!

This is a colorful and fun dish that both young and old will enjoy tossing. Everyone grabs a pair of chopsticks and dives in. It can get a bit messy trying to toss it as high as possible but it’s a whole lot of fun.