My Domestic Art

Xin Nian Kuai Le Gong Xi Fa Cai Of all the festivals we celebrate, Chinese New Year has got to be the biggest, most extravagant, most elaborate and most important of them all. Weeks before the New Year, we have to do thorough spring cleaning, decorate the house, buy new clothes - red of course, stock up fridge, prepare red packets, go for hair cuts and the whole works. Even Mum had started preparing the foodstuff from days before the New Year, like all the soaking and chopping etc would have been done days in advance. Lucky for us, we always have reunion dinner at Mum's - all I have to do is bring ourselves and our empty tummies there to feast! My favourite is definitely the Salmon Yu Sheng. I wish I could have it all year round. I love the taste, the texture, the colour and the symbolism of it all. There's nothing quite like it, really! Toss it up and toss it high! Oh the amount of food we ate over the past few days!! 😋 Our family tradition for CN

I am always looking for ways to make cooking simpler and less time-consuming. Who likes to spend hours slaving over the hot stove in our sunny island... definitely not me. But I still want hearty, delicious, wholesome meals for the whole family. So here comes my favourite thermal cooker to the rescue. I have been using my thermal cooker a lot lately. It is perfect for making soups and stews. One of the greatest features of the thermal cooker is that it is an amazing one pot wonder. I can brown the meat, saute the vegetables, then add in all the liquid right in one pot. When I come back after a good 6-8 hours, what I have is a rich, warm, thick stew that smells divine. Perfect for any busy mum! If you don't have a thermal cooker, you can use a slow cooker instead. Always choose beef that has a good amount of marbling for stews. These have collagen-rich connective tissues that break down after many hours of cooking and become meltingly tender. My boys call them jelly and

This marks the beginning of the many makan sessions leading up to the CNY season. The hubby took me out for a rare lunch date today. The kids were all in school, he's free for a couple of hours, so why not... :P We started off with a glass of red and a bread basket. First time having charcoal croissant with gold flecks. Followed by Caesar salad topped with smoked salmon. Absolutely Ah-mazing! My main course was lamb shank with garden vegetables and mint sauce. It was so deliciously tender, moist and just slide off the bone. Yum yumz... Hubby had his usual beef steak with red wine jus. Finished off with blueberry tart and chocolate ice cream. And triple chocolate mousse with strawberry compote. Plus a side of dark coffee. It was a wonderful, relaxing lunch, with no kids running around and bugging us. A truly rare moment for me when I can appreciate the sight, smell and taste of the food in front of me, even managed to take pictures of the food when

We eat lots of tempeh at home. Tempeh is a traditional fermented soy product, originating from Indonesia, and is especially popular in Java. Tempeh is considered one of the superfoods as it has a high content of protein, dietary fiber, and vitamins. My hubby and I love its unique taste and texture. Unlike tofu, it has a firm texture and it has a lovely nutty, earthy flavour. Tempeh is very versatile and can be cooked in many different ways. I have tried and experimented with various ways of cooking tempeh but my hubby and I always come back to this recipe. This chilli tempeh is the best tempeh recipe. Ever! It is called Tempeh Orak Arik in Indonesia. My previous helper, who is an incredible cook, used to make this all the time. This is how they do it back in her kampong in Indonesia. She used to crush the garlic, shallots and chillies in the mortar and pestle into a paste and fry it in oil first. But I don't bother doing it anymore (yup, laziness) and I think this reci

The kids love their popcorn chicken. They always asked for them in KFC. The older one used to buy them a few times a week from the school canteen, until the school stopped selling them as they are now promoting healthy eating habits in school. 🙌 Those store-bought popcorn chicken are addictive but so unhealthy. They are too oily, full of preservatives, and all you get are little morsels of chicken parts which are coated in too much flour and flavourings. My recipe is much healthier, very easy, and still gives incredibly tasty popcorn chicken. They are deliciously tender inside and crispy on the outside. We can all enjoy them now without much of the guilt. And the boys declared that these are THE BEST popcorn chicken! Popcorn Chicken Ingredients: 250g chicken thigh - cut into bite-sized pieces 2 tbsp. light soy sauce 1 tsp oyster sauce 1 tbsp. fresh ginger juice pepper corn flour Method: Marinate chicken pieces in light soy sauce, oyster sau

This is the easiest lantern we've ever made. The 2 boys managed to make it by themselves with no help at all. It only requires 5 ang pow packets. Fold the 4 corners so it forms a diamond. Staple each packet to the next at the top along the folded edge. Do all 5 and form a circle. Bend and puff the middle then staple the bottom part. Before you staple the last 2 ang pows together, put a ribbon/string in, which has been stapled to a piece of paper so it doesn't slide out. This is for hanging the lantern. Join the 2 corners of each ang pow and staple in the middle to form a curved top and bottom. Done and hung up in their room. This is the last lantern we are making this year. I think we've had quite enough. The rest of the lanterns are here: 1. CNY Ang pow lantern - lucky star 2. CNY Ang pow lantern - lucky eight 3. CNY Ang pow lantern - Chinese coin 4. CNY Ang pow lantern - wheels of fortune/ flower 5. CNY Ang pow lanter

Every Chinese New Year, I try to hunt down the best pineapple tarts. There are so many of these pineapple tarts out there and everybody seems to have a personal favourite. There are also lots of different versions nowadays; open-faced, closed tarts, cheese topped, gold-dusted, rectangular cakes, and numerous newer, more creative flavours. In the quest to find our favourites, I have tried so many over the years and my waistline has suffered for it! 😝  Below is our family's favourite. And the few that I am willing to run an extra 30 minutes on the treadmill for. 1. Bake Inc This has to be our favourite. My family likes the closed pineapple tarts with cheese as the cheese flavour is subtle, the pastry is buttery and melts in the mouth, and the pineapple jam slightly sweet. It's the perfect combination! We always get them from Takashimaya during the CNY Fair. And they are freshly baked on the spot. When we purchased them, they were still warm from the oven and they s

Have you heard of the cabbage soup diet? It's basically a quick fix solution to lose weight and to lose it fast. You spend a week, and no more, eating unlimited amounts of this low-fat, low-calorie cabbage soup. This diet should NOT be done for more than 7 days. The classic cabbage soup has no butter and no chicken, but uses chicken stock to make the meal very low calorie. But I find the taste very blah.... And I feel peckish the whole day if I have it for lunch. I decided if I'm going to try any sort of cabbage soup diet, it has to taste great. It has to be satiating to keep me going the whole day. I don't think it's possible to stick to any diet if it feels like a torture. So, I made my cabbage soup with all sorts of other goodness but is still very low calorie. And the best thing is it's super tasty and delicious! It's warming and comforting to the stomach. I am not a hard-core dieter and I don't do the cabbage soup diet strictly. But this is wh

We were out shopping one day when we came across a book fair. My son insisted on borrowing some money from me to buy something but refused to tell me what. He told me to go ahead and do my own thing while he stayed at the book fair to browse. I didn't think much of it till a few days before Christmas, he took out a nicely wrapped present for me...  *heart melt moment* 😍 Inside was 3 recipe books. It was the perfect gift for me. Despite all their argumentative devil-may-care attitude, he noticed that I like to read recipe books. I am also quite certain it was his first time wrapping a present, ever! So sneaky... But awww, my boys can be the sweetest sometimes! I let him choose what he wanted me to cook based on the recipe book. And he chose this. It looks simple enough. As with all recipes, I like to change it up and adapt it according to my taste and what I have in my pantry at that point in time. Salmon Corn and Peas Chowder Ingredients: 400g sal

This lantern requires a whopping 30 ang pows to make. I put off making this every time as it takes such a long time to make and my fingers would be sore after so much folding and stapling... But this lantern is just too big and pretty to pass up! My boys were like "It's so nice, Mum, can you make one for my class too..." 😏 The boys are encouraged to contribute some CNY decorations for their classes. But it's getting harder to get 30 ang pows of the same design each time. The shops nowadays are trying to be more hip and less conventional that I often get a pack of ang pows all in different colours/design. It's so annoying right! Like I can't use them to make lanterns and I can't even give them away as it's strange to give out ang pows in different colours, lest my nephews/nieces think they are all colour-coded and start comparing! (or maybe I'm just over-thinking here...) This lantern is simple enough to make. But please set aside some