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 made a very simple Thanksgiving dinner, with a difference, since I couldn’t find any frozen turkeys selling at my regular grocery stores.

I bought 9 slices of frozen Australian lamb chops and decided to grill them. I marinated them with salt, pepper, half a cup of ginger juice and 1+ cup of barbecue sauce for about an hour. That’s it.

My oven has 3 built-in functions - microwave, grill and bake. I chucked the whole pan in and grilled the chops, sliced parboiled potatoes and sliced onion rings for an hour.

Meantime, I prepared the tropical salsa. I diced one onion, one tomato and a few sprigs of parsley. I opened a can of cubed pineapples and added that to my bowl with a few tablespoons of the syrup. A quick squeeze of lemon and I’m done .

This simple grilled lamb chop is a nice change from the black pepper lamb chops which I sometimes buy pre-marinated from the store. This is non-spicy that even younger kids can eat.

We had dinner twice at TGI Friday’s last month, and it typically sets us back by over rm250 each time. Although my kids love the food there, I’m sure there must be a more homey, less expensive option.

How about this? A sumptuous homemade meal of black pepper lamb chops, soft potatoes and mesclun salad for a fraction of the price. Sound good?

I bought 5 large slices of black pepper lamb chops from Jusco for rm20+. Besides the price, the other thing I love is that they’re pre-marinated and ready to pop on the pan when I get home.

Hey, tell me, what’s not to love about someone having done your homework, eh ?

So all I do is cut one large onion into rings. I heat up my non-stick pan on high, and add a fairly big drizzle of olive oil. First I throw in some of the onions and leave for a minute before layering on the first batch of lamb chops.

I lower the heat to medium and cook each side of the meat for about 5 minutes before turning over. In fact, I add two tablespoons water into the pan to make absolutely sure the meat is cooked through.

Once the water evaporates completely and the oil sizzles again, the lamb chop goes on a plate with the parboiled potatoes, lightly sauteed in olive oil.

I use a bag of prepacked fresh mesclun salad that comes with lots of rocket (aragula) and lettuce. To that, I add whole baby carrots and cut celery with a generous squeeze of thousand island dressing.

That’s it! This whole meal costs me about rm40 for the four of us. And yummy doesn’t even begin to describe the taste of this homemade Western meal. My kids booked me for an encore right there .

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!

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 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!

We go vegetarian two days a month on the first and fifteenth of the Chinese moon. Though I’ve been doing this all my life, it was only in recent years that I realized it’s healthy eating.

At the mere mention of the word ‘vegetarian’, people tend to shrink back and think bland and boring. But quite frankly, vegetarian food isn’t and doesn’t have to be.

I mean, look at this yummy vegetarian curry bursting with tofu, cabbage, ladies’ fingers (okra), long beans, and a ton of Indian spices.

There’s 2 types of tofu in there - taupok (or what I call, tofu pockets, which is the round brown piece) and foopay (or tofu sheets, which are the flat brown sheets). It’s anything but bland and boring.

This is what I had for lunch two days ago. Vegetarian curry over plain rice noodles fried with cabbage and carrots. It tastes sooo good!

On days when I have veggies that have been sitting around in the fridge too long, this is the kind of easy mixed veggie stir-fry I like to do. It’s the quickest way to get rid of a flurry of veggies in a hurry (hey, that rhymes, I’m a born poet !).

You’ll need:

• shrimps, just a handful will do
• broccoli florets, cut into inch lengths
• baby corn, cut into inch lengths
• carrots, cut into small chunks
• black Chinese mushrooms
• enoki (stringy pinheaded) mushrooms
• garlic, chopped
• oyster sauce
• salt and pepper to taste
• sesame oil (optional)

First, heat up the wok (a pan will do as well) with a fair drizzle of cooking oil and chuck in the chopped garlic. For a great stir-fry, you want to work quickly and keep your wok on high heat. You don’t want to brown the garlic, just to give the oil some fragrance.

Add the shrimp, carrots and black mushrooms. Give it a few quick stirs. Then add the broccoli and corn. Drizzle oyster sauce all over, add a bit of water (if you like it saucy) and simmer for a few minutes to let the veggies cook.

Add the enoki last as it’s very quick to cook. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle some sesame oil just before serving to give it a nice whiff of added fragrance.

See, it’s quick and easy and it’s got a bit of everything in one dish. Great eaten with plain rice.

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.

Hardly a day goes by when I don’t have chillies in my meal, whether fresh or cooked. I just gotta have it .

Frankly once you get the hang of it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it in the first place.

Cooked chilli is less fiery than fresh ones so if your tongue is not seasoned yet, start with something mild, preferably cooked.

Once you get the hang of it, you can graduate onto something a little more spicy.

Take your time. Leave the fresh fiery chillies for when you turn pro. Some tongues need to go to Chilli School for years before they can take the heat, and some just never graduate.

But at least try, okay? Because chilli not only tastes heavenly, it’s seriously good for you. It contains tons of Vitamin C. If you have a cold or feel one coming on, eat something hot and spicy and next thing you know, your itchy nose is gone!

Another useful thing to know about chillies is that if your tongue is on fire, drinking cold water will NOT douse the fire. You got to fight fire with fire. The best fire extinguisher is hot water or tea. I guarantee your fire will be put out in no time and you’ll happily get your tongue back .

My neighbor presented me with this bowl of killer chillies. I have no idea what its name is but I swear it sent me right through the roof, and I’m someone who regularly chomps on fresh bird’s eye chilli which is known to be super-duper fiery. So don’t try this at home or anywhere else and always wear a safety helmet !