Hasselback Potatoes from Sweden

I recently went to Paris for a work trip and ate so much while I was there. The portions of serving were huge, so I tried my best to order mainly dishes with vegetables to get enough fibre throughout the day. We had crepe-like galettes, filled with spinach and cheese, vegetarian momos at a rather authentic Tibetan eatery, grilled octopus in curry sauce (the octopus was really delectable!), French sweet desserts, grilled vegetables tomato pasta, an atas lunch which served great risotto etc. On my last night there, a huge plate of eight slices of foccacia with avocado, ham, rocket leaves and shaved cheese toppings was served to me, alone. I had thought that most antipasti dishes were small dishes – appetisers. I was so wrong. I only finished the toppings and one slice of foccacia anyway. And brought the rest of them home since I was going to fly out the next morning. What a gastronomic adventure! It wouldn’t have been possible, really, without the great company I had during the trip.

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Pork & Tofu Dumpling (Wanton Style)

This dish is my to-go-to whenever I visit Chinese restaurants or eateries which serves up large plates and bowls of dishes. I love eating dumplings, especially those served with nice chilli oil to dip them with. My current favourite so far is the Spicy Sichuan Chilli Oil Wanton, which are served with a nice vinegar based dressing to dip them in. This one here uses a similar type of dressing – for more information on how to combine the sauces, you can visit the link given here. If you are lazy to prepare another dip, just use lao gan ma chilli oil.

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Pasta With Eggplant & Tomato Sauce

This dish of pasta with eggplant and tomato sauce is for all eggplant lovers out there. It adds a lovely texture and bite to the pasta, and makes the dish a lot healthier, of course. If you are in a hurry to whip up dinner, just dice up all of the eggplant and cook them in the tomato sauce itself. That will save you a whole lot of time.

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Eurasian Sotong (Squid) Black

This is the Eurasian take on squid stir-fried in onions, garlic, dark soy sauce and squid ink. This is adapted from the a similar dish in Portugal. My mum also stir-fries squid in dark soya sauce once in a while though the Teochew tradition has never actually used the squid ink to fry our dishes – just simple dark soya sauce.

To be honest, this is my first time using handling the ink sacs from squids, and I must say it was a very fun experience. It was really amazing how a small sac like that could produce so much ink! And the ink was pure black – a natural dye that can’t be replaced by any artificial colouring. Love it.

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Easy Chicken Stew

I’ve cooked many different types of chicken stew before, and mostly with potatoes: Chicken & Potato Stew, Korean Andong Jjimdak etc. The former is easy to make as you will just need to dump all the ingredients into the slow cooker to let them cook and braise. It’s gravy is thicker and great to eat with plain rice. The latter is a mixture of sweet and savoury, served with sweet potato noodles which is great to slurp up the braised gravy with. This one here takes a slightly longer time to simmer and is lighter in its flavour and texture. You can slurp it up as it is and it probably makes for a good winter soup to warm your spirit.

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