Swedish Meat Balls

The kids love the meatballs at Ikea. I've bought the frozen meatballs from Ikea and cooked it at home. It's yummy! Then I thought that I should try making the meatballs. Googled for the recipe and found a few.

CL recently ordered 2 cookbooks from Amazon--The America's Test Kitchen. I love the cookbooks! Thanks CL! These cookbooks are written by a team of people who tried out recipes. They will then give their recommendations on what works best and the reasons behind it. I thoroughly enjoy reading the books. There's a recipe on meatballs and I kind of modified it and incorporated with the recipes I found on the net. Tried it out for the first time. The secret to the meatballs being moist and tender is to add torn pieces of bread soaked in milk. I added a little too much of that. The meatballs were too soft and wet and it was rather hard to shape. Hence the horrible shapes! But it tasted okay and the sauce was tasty. Everyone enjoyed it...will certainly do it again. Made mashed potatoes and coleslaw to go with the meatballs.

Baked Rice

Everytime we go to Swenson's, my kids would always order chicken baked rice. Usually J would order something else so that he could have his share of baked rice as well(from Js share). It's really quite pathetic that the 3 of them have to share that small portion of baked rice. I thought it shouldn't be too difficult to cook up baked rice. Tried several times and it's really well-received by the kids. Hubby would eat it, but he wouldn't lap it up like the kids do.

300g fresh sausage (chipolata is good)--sliced
250g fresh button mushrooms -- sliced
1 head of brocolli--cut to bite size
5 cloves garlic --chopped
1 onion --chopped
salt and pepper to taste
1 can cream of chicken/mushroom
1 cup fresh cream
1 cup milk
shredded cheddar & mozarella cheese
4 cups of cooked rice

1. Fry garlic and onion in olive oil.
2. Add brocolli, then mushrooms, and then sausages.
3. Season with salt and pepper.
4. Add cream and milk.
5. Once the sauce is bubbly, turn off the fire.
6. Put rice on a baking dish. Top with sauce and sprinkle cheese on top.
7. Bake at 220 degrees for 15 minutes and grill for 5 minutes until cheese browns.

Creamy Tuna Pasta

Ran out of ideas as to what to cook for lunch over the weekend. Ransacked the pantry and saw the cans of curry tuna and chilli tuna. And since I have some cream in the fridge, decided to do a simple pasta. Fried some garlic and chopped onions, fresh button mushrooms then add the tuna and some cream and fresh milk. Really easy!
The kids love it too.

Popiah Party

At last CL is back from HK for the May Day weekend. My family loves popiah, especially those made by Ah Ma. She makes really good hokkien popiah! Since we love popiah so much, I just had to learn from Ah Ma, who has since passed down her gongfu to Jiji. What Jiji has taught me is by "agaration"--everything by estimation and feel and instinct. Well, Mummy and CL did not complain about the fillings, so I guess it's passable. At least now we can have popiah whenver we feel like it, just that it's a lot of work. But now that CL is back, we have more reasons to prepare it.

Also took the opportunity to try out the Kueh Pie Tee recipe from Amy Beh's website. It is really good! HN says they're good enough to be sold. The pie tee shells have the right crunch and texture.

Sunday Night Dinner

Mummy, KL and HN came over for dinner as usual. Cooked teriyaki chicken, yong tau foo and mango jellyfish salad. Experimented with the sauce for the first time. My colleague JH shared with me how she did the sauce. First fried some shallots,garlic and pounded chilli. Then added some plum sauce and a small packet of "chee cheong fun" sauce that was bought from the market. Added some lime juice and water, and finally thicken with corn flour. The yong tau foo pieces are then fried lightly. KL bought some durians over--D24 and "Ang Hei" (Red Prawn) They were GOOD! We also had plums(Australian) which I bought from NTUC today. Very sweet! Will buy some more! Then the usual fruit juice...





For dessert, G asked for Mango Smoothie. Went to a restaurant for lunch where we had baked rice and fish and chips as well as mango smoothie and a sundae for dessert. The smoothie did not taste very natural. So we decided to try it at home--using fresh mangoes, vanilla ice cream, fresh milk and orange juice.

J and G have been asking for muah chee also. Used to make it quite some time ago, using Leng's mum's recipe. But I've forgotten where I wrote the recipe, so surfed some food websites and got this recipe using the microwave. It's really so easy. Just mix 250g glutinous rice flour with 380ml of water. Add some shallot oil and microwave on high for 2 minutes, take out to stir and put it back to micorwave again for 1 minute, then stir again. Cut inot smaller pieces and toss in peanut-sugar-sesame seed mixture.