There are two different types of mee siam that Singaporeans love eating. One is the traditional Malay style rice vermicelli with a spicy and tangy thick soup gravy that you eat the vermicelli with; the other is a recently evolved fusion take which is stir-fried and less spicy. The latter version is frequently served at buffets as the main dish as it can be prepared halal, this being one of the key requirements for serving food at events and festivals in Singapore.
A chocolate cookie recipe is probably one of the most common recipes to try out for those who are baking for the first time. Not for me though, I have never baked any in almost ten years of my journey of recipe blogging and never have I once been tempted to do so as well. The nearest I got to it was the lactation cookies that I baked for myself during my breastfeeding days two years ago, which was very different because the cookies were more flaxseed and rolled oats than they were chocolate.
Back when I was heavily pregnant in 2015, neither could I move around much nor engage in much activities. I was therefore very reliant on surfing the web and doing things online to keep me going by the day. One of the things that I did was look for online courses on Coursera. There was one particular course that caught my attention – ‘Stanford Introduction to Food and Health’ – a course conducted with videos by Dr. Maya Adam from the Stanford University. One of the things that she demonstrated in her videos was how to make chicken tenders from scratch and how to make them better than the ones sold in fast food restaurants or frozen fridges in the supermarkets.
I remember the time when I attended the Inaugural Teochew Festival at the Ngee Ann City in 2014. I was about three to four months pregnant then and was having morning sickness constantly throughout the day. It definitely wasn’t the best time and opportunity to go to a food haven like this one. Most people were there to devour all the Teochew goodies and all I could do was look at what people around me were gobbling up – oyster omelette, pork trotter jelly, green chives dumpling and Teochew kuehs etc. How I wish I could everything as well!
This is a simple soup to have that’s really tasty, cheesy, filling and heavenly by itself. In it lies all our favourite ingredients – macaroni and cheese for the big guy, chicken and carrots for the small guy, and basil and red bell pepper for me. The best thing about it is that I don’t have to cook a separate bowl of pasta or rice to go along with it because it is already a main dish in itself, fully loaded with all the healthy goodies such as tomatoes, leeks and garlic.
