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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 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 .

Nando’s at 1 Utama is newly renovated to create perhaps a more cozy ambience. It’s nice, I like it. I just make sure we get one of the tables off the walkway to avoid having passers-by peer at us when we’re eating.

I ordered the Peri Platter, their largest set meal of a whole chicken with 5 side orders (or what they call, sidelines). We finally got around to doing the math and decided the larger set is cheaper.

We used to order individual sets because we have different heat level preferences of very spicy, spicy or mild. Beware, the very spicy is too spicy even for me, the Chili Queen!

Truth is if we order mild for the large set, those of us who prefer more fire in our chicken can always add the Peri-Peri sauce of our desired heat level. So it works out pretty good that way.

The large set comes with 2 bowls of Mediterranean Rice (rice cooked with green peas, carrots and onions) and a bowl each of their Fresco Salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and coriander with a sourish dressing, I love this), Coleslaw and Old Style chips.

The kids wanted to try their Peri Wedges & Creamy Peri Dip which turned out to be just your regular wedges and the dip was, um, ordinary.

I like Nando’s but I consider it just too expensive for a chicken meal, albeit one that’s flame-grilled with their famed Peri-Peri sauce. A meal like this set us back by over rm85 just four of us. That’s over rm20 per head, much too steep for a family meal.

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!

We walked past Tony Roma’s and I was reminded of the set lunch we had there a while ago. That time, we were also walking by when we saw their promotional banner. I thought all the lunches were the same price but when the menus came, I realized I’d missed seeing the word ‘from’ before the price.

So never mind, we were attracted by the offer of free soda refills. Each set came with Oxtail Soup which was packed with flavor and salt! If I could somehow mentally switch off how salty it was, I guess I’d say it was pretty good soup.

I ordered their least expensive set lunch, the Grilled Chicken which sounded rather good on the menu. But I hadn’t expected it to be so rubbery and boneless and small.

The fact that it was one flat piece of white meat gave me the shivers. Tastewise, it was kinda sweetish in a flat sort of way and not at all what I envisioned Grill Chicken to taste like.

As you can see, their servings are rather small so it’s to be expected that their Fish and Chips would be too. Frankly two small slices of fish fillet is hardly enough for a ravenous teenage appetite.

The Barbecue Chicken was the best choice. The quarter chicken was moist and yummy albeit a bit too burnt for my liking. I really wished I’d ordered this instead of the Grilled Chicken.

Gotta love the drinks though. Free refills are always nice after a long day shopping. But if only the main meals could’ve come in bigger portions, we wouldn’t have to be looking for something else to eat the minute we stepped out of the restaurant .

Once in a while, we like to live the high life at the Tropicana Golf & Country Club in Petaling Jaya, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Dining al fresco at the Golfers’ Terrace with a light breeze blowing over the undulating green is a whole different experience altogether.

Not to mention having something as mundane as Nasi Lemak, coconut milk rice with chicken rendang (on the left) and anchovies, nuts and sambal chili (on the right) served in such a classy presentation.

Don’t you just love how the Nasi Lemak looks in this mile-long rectangular dish? I can almost hear the classical music playing ever so gently in the background while the spiciness of the sambal and rendang set the high notes on my tongue on fire.

The Fish and Chips comes with a creatively messy look, piled skyhigh, on a square dish. This dish sure packs a crunch.

And okay, whoever’s heard of Cantonese Fried Noodles served in a bowl, huh? Isn’t this classic? It keeps the noodles and the thick eggy gravy hot till the last drop - a very clever idea.

I love Cantonese Fried Noodles but they’re mostly available only at night-time hawker stalls. This one is fried with chicken and shrimp only (no pork, never mind, I’m not big on pork anyways!) and tastes so wicked with the fresh red chillies, I tell you .

Golfers’ Terrace is very popular with, who else, but golfers on the weekend. I’m strictly a textbook golfer so I’m only there for the food . And yes, the quality of their food has improved recently and the presentation is certainly much classier with the new crockery.

Of course, I can’t complain about having obliging staff at my beck and call. Aah, such is the good life! Once in a while, it’s nice to live it up and make-believe you’re rich and famous. Autographs, anyone ?

We haven’t had pizza in a while. At one stage, the kids were eating too much cheese and they were starting to turn pudgy, so we really had to lay off. Cheese isn’t all bad and the kids do love pizza. So I decided to do a pizza on as a baguette topping for Skye’s lunchbox.

What you need are just a few simple ingredients.

• a baguette, cut into foot-long lengths, then split down the middle
• pasta sauce
• frankfurters, sliced
• grated mozzarella cheese
• grated cheddar cheese

I first ‘butter’ the pasta sauce on the baguette slice spreading it rather thick. I use Prego as it’s already flavored with herbs and mushrooms and whatever else. I don’t have to add anything to it.

Next I roughly distribute the round slices of franks all over the open-faced baguette and top off with a generous sprinkle of mozzarella and cheddar.

Because we were going to have to bake these in batches anyways, I decided to use my toaster oven. Shove in about 4 slices for about 8-10 minutes till the cheese is melted.

My kids say this tastes like ‘the real thing’. I say it beats the thin crust pizza because it’s slightly thicker (so it’s more filling for someone like me with a skyhigh metabolic rate) and oh so crispy on the outside.

On occasion, I also like to have a variety of other toppings on my baguette. You can get more interesting ideas for baguette toppings here.

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.

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!!

We were going to the movies. No plans for Mother’s Day. As it turned out, the only movie tickets left were front row seats. Whatdya expect? It’s a Saturday night. So forget the movie.

It was close to dinner time at the mall. Friday’s happened to be just down the hall. How convenient! One day too early for Mother’s Day but what the heck! We were starving!

This is one of the appetizer choices for the 3-Course Meal which my son ordered. Fried Calamari, lovely with lemon juice and salsa. Of course, he wasn’t going to eat it all. We all dug in and it was gone in three minutes.

The Mushroom Chicken Mushroom is one of our favorites. Cute name. The mushrooms are done two ways, deep-fried and in a cheesy sauce over the meaty chicken breast. The mashed potato is heavenly.

We decided to give the Chicken Parmesan Quesadillas a try. The picture on the menu looked good. It came draped in diced tomatoes and a drizzle of Jack Daniels’ sauce. I like the way it’s presented and my son assures me it tastes pretty good. I didn’t get a chance to try it. He ate it all up before my fork could wing its way over .

This Chili Garlic and Shrimp pasta is my all-time Friday’s favorite. If I’m too tired to think, this is what I’ll usually order. The sauce is slightly sourish because of the capers, I think. It’s packed with flavor and those shrimps are oh-so crunchy.

I decided to give the Jack Daniel’s Shrimp and Chicken a try this time. The chicken fillet steak goes with the mashed potatoes, tomatoes, and beans… but the deep-fried shrimps seem a little out of place.

The Jack Daniel’s sauce is too sweet for me, and I wish the long beans weren’t so aged and tough, otherwise it would be perfect.

We go to Friday’s pretty often. Their portions are large by Asian standards but lately, we notice that while the prices seem to be remain pretty much the same, the portions are smaller than they used to be.

I doubt it’s because we’ve become bigger eaters. Typically we can’t finish one serving each. I used to not order at all but just eat out of the kids’ orders and even then, I’d end up really stuffed.

I saved the best for last - dessert from the 3-Course Meal. Here comes this Vanilla Sundae we’ve all been waiting to dive into. Happy Mother’s Day!!