When Awesome Jaime officially launched her business, there was a little food partayyy where Tim’s mom prepared a traditional Filipino dish, the chicken macaroni salad. I thought it was possibly one of the nicest things I ate that week.

So I did what anyone would do in my situation: badger Tim’s mom for the recipe until she finally told me, yay!

A chicken macaroni salad? What’s so special about that, you ask? At the heart of it, it’s chicken + macaroni + mayonnaise. I suppose it’s always nice to revisit the basics and appreciate the absolute simplicity of ingredients. Again I’m just trying to fill out virtual white space; come on, everything tastes great with mayonnaise! :D

Of course by the time I got down to making it, I’d forgotten most of what Tim’s mom told me. Even the exact taste of it was a blur to me. Well soldier on regardless as I’d already bought the main ingredients. As we say in Malaysia, lantaklah…

So here was what I did: boil chicken breasts for about 20mins then shred them to pieces. Shredding chicken meat is really a thankless job and I don’t look forward to doing it again anytime soon. It really isn’t easy if you’re a slight OCD case like moi…

Cook macaroni according to instructions. After it’s cooked, remove the water then slip in a couple pieces of cheap cheddar slices. ‘Cos I’m too cheap to buy the ridiculously priced good ones.

Getting the chicken and macaroni in a chicken macaroni salad done

Next, add the shredded chicken and raisins together with the macaroni. Normally I hate raisins and would never deign to eat nor use them, but I’ll make an exception for this one.

Putting ingredients together require a full photo

Add salad cream and mayonnaise to the mix. Get a cousin to put in salt + black pepper + sprinkle of whatever dried herbs. If you’re unfortunate enough not to have a cousin like mine who would do these things for you, I suppose you could bloody well do it yourself then! :D

Adding sunshine and happiness

Mix everything together, mix well. Let it sit in the fridge for a couple of hours before serving.

Eat, nom nom nom nom! Someone’s maid who is Filipino told me that it’s exactly how they do it back home but I feel something was missing. Perhaps it was the lack of onions (Ryan don’t eat raw onions yet) and I went slightly overboard with the salad cream. If you want to give it a go, you should get the proper recipe and methods from This Little Piggy.

I got some really nice potatoes last week, wanted to make fries out of them but decided otherwise. Thought of making boulangère but I couldn’t be arsed to slice them. Somehow I got to talking about it with Ee-Lyn and she told me that she uses Jamie Oliver’s roast potatoes recipe. All hail YouTube!

I followed the recipe quite closely, used the butter version. Just cut the potatoes really small because I like the crispy parts more than the fluffy ones. Added dried mixed Italian herbs and a slight shake of cayenne with black pepper and salt. Friggin’ yum, I want to eat this forever!

In case my Mom thinks I’m not eating good (‘cos moms always think that when you don’t live with them), here’s a photo of my lunch a while back. Salad of coral, butterhead, rocket, cherry tomatoes, grilled mushrooms and capsicum tossed in a slight drizzle of Italian dressing, healthy has never been this delicious!

Need to think of what new things to cook, I’ve been quite out of it for a bit. Hmm…

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If you’re on Celcom, you should give the Celcom Talk-a-thon a shot to stand a chance of winning RM5,000 shopping money! It’s so easy to enter: just find out what was your average calls made in the month of July 2011, then make 3 more calls on top of that number!

Let’s say the average calls that you made in July 2011 was 3. So you only need to make 6 calls to automatically qualify for a shot at it. The draw down is on a daily basis from now until 30 November 2011, that’s a lot of chances for you to win RM5,000 shopping money!

More info at: http://www.celcom.com.my/talkathon

I got this Chilli-Lime Kabobs recipe from All Recipes. As I don’t have a BBQ grill readily available, I thought I’d substitute with the next best thing, as you’d see later.

I made the skewered version twice, then in other times just used the recipe and pan-grilled it. I quite like this recipe as I think it gives the chicken an extra kick. For the pan-grill version, I always eat it without any sauces because the chicken is tender and moist enough to be eaten on its own. I’d imagine a mango puree sauce of some kind would go rather well with this.
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Bell peppers, better known as capsicums here is really yummy. There is no room for doubts of its superiority because Chairman Kaga himself chose to bite into one at the opening scenes of Iron Chef. Then he smiled and began to laugh manically but that’s another story.

I roasted bell peppers on my gas stove the other day. It was great. Here’s how I did it:

1 – Have bell pepper. I chose red as it’s sweeter. Yellow works too. Green may be slightly bitter. Have gas stove. If your pan stand is not long enough to hold the fruit, then use a steel mesh like me.

Turn the fire to medium high, place bell pepper on top of pan stand/ steel mesh. Let the open flames char the fruit until it’s blackened. Use tongs to turn it to the other side, until all sides are blackened. Should be done between 7 and 10 mins.

2 – Remove the fruit into a clear plastic bag, close it and leave to steam inside for 15 mins.

3 – Use the plastic to help slide off most of the charred skin. Remove the rest of the charred skin using paper towels and/or knife. Use creativity.

4 – Slice the fruit open, remove the seeds. At this point, it’s still damn hot inside so be careful. At no point should you attempt to give up and wash the fruit with water to remove the seeds + black bits, as it will severely affect the taste (speaking from experience here!).

When you’re satisfied with the cleaning process, cut the fruit to slices. Eat it just like that, or use it as a side dish, or add it to your sandwich or wrap. The world is your roasted bell pepper!

Yes it’s a syiok sendiri title. I had this for dinner as part of my healthier eating for the Marie France Bodyline challenge. I let my Mom and Ryan have a taste. They really liked it. Three’s a crowd mah.

Har har har.

Village Grocer sells beautiful lemon sole (ikan sebelah) fillet. They look absolutely gorgeous and I couldn’t help but to buy a 200g pack that costs about RM7+. The next pretty fish available was the cod fillet, triple the price of my lemon sole.

What I’m using here is half of the entire fillet. The other half was cooked in a white wine sauce that didn’t make it and I don’t want to talk about it.

First, pre-heat your oven to 180°C for about 10 mins. While that is being done, clean your fish fillet using running water, then pat dry with paper towels.

Do you have some herbs and spices? Yes = Good. No = Bad. For this mixture, I used some:
Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Paprika Powder, Garlic Powder, Mixed Italian herbs, Salt + Black Pepper

I feel that you can basically use whatever you have in your kitchen. If the combination doesn’t turn out well, at least you learned something new, right? :)

Mix the mixture well, then add it to your fish fillet and coat thoroughly. You can add carrots to your baking dish as well to let them cook together. Saves time and electricity!

Bake for about 20 minutes. If you have a thicker cut of fish, then bake slightly longer lor.

Serve with aforementioned carrots and cherry tomatoes. Or whatever sides you wish to serve it with. I’m the one who has to eat healthier, you don’t.

Absolutely delicious! At least three people thought so! :)