favourite recipes for everyday cooking and baking

At this point, some of you must be wondering why I am constantly cooking Japanese food. Well, Japanese recipes are often simple and span only half a page of a cookbook, which makes it less daunting especially when they usually come with a list of less than ten ingredients. Compare that to Malaysian cooking which may use spices and sauces from A-Z, with plenty of chopping, pounding, crushing, toasting, frying, simmering and keeping a constant watch while cooking. I hardly have half a day to spend doing all that especially now that I'm back at work, and it's impossible to keep the children out of mischief. Just today, while I was preparing pork chops for dinner, my little toddler managed to empty almost an entire bottle of shampoo all over the floor in the shower. So, anyway, as I was saying, I'm in the Japanese food phase recently and I decided to have a go at making Japanese potato croquettes (known as  Korokke , no prizes for guessing why). I haven't eaten them in a

I made this for dinner last week, and I asked Hilary if she liked it. She said "Yes" and I asked her why. She looked up from her plate of rice and teriyaki chicken and said to me with conviction, "Because...I love the chicken so much!". And indeed, she loved it so much that she had second and third helpings of the chicken (and didn't finish her rice!). This is my second post on teriyaki chicken this month. The first one was a Teriyaki Chicken and Egg rice bowl, where I baked and grilled the chicken in the oven with a sweet teriyaki sauce. This second version I'm posting today is based on Nami's recipe, from Just One Cookbook . I decided to try her version which uses onion and ginger in the marinade. When I finally compared my photo and hers, I realised that mine is 10x darker and blacker. LOL. I might have gone a little overboard with the caramelization and charring of the chicken. Nevertheless, it was very tasty and packed a punch from the ginger, with

As I was flipping through the pages of the cookbook " Essentially Japanese " by Hideo Dekura, I stopped at page 191 which featured a recipe for Vinaigrette Chicken (or Nanban-Chicken as commonly known in Japan). The words vinaigrette got my tastebuds tingling and my mouth watering as I could imagine eating succulent pieces of deep-fried chicken soaked in the sweet, tangy and spicy dressing (or sauce). I had never had this dish before, although once I ate it, it tasted very familiar, like something that would have been served as a side dish in one of those bento boxes. I enjoyed the combination of the sauce made from rice vinegar, sake, soy and sugar, with onions and chopped chillies, which was used to "marinade" or steep the fried chicken in before serving. This allowed the flavours to be well-absorbed into the outer layer of the chicken. I was surprised that with so much vinegar in the sauce, it wasn't as acidic or sour as I thought it would be, but then agai

I seem to be cooking a lot of chicken dishes lately, probably because I find that chicken is such a versatile ingredient that can be prepared in so many ways and rather quickly too. Also, I don't tend to get tired of eating chicken as much as I do other meats like beef, lamb or pork. In today's post, I am sharing with you a recipe for Dak Bulgogi by Hyosun of Eating and Living  fame. I'm sure many of you are familiar with her blog and the mouth-watering photos and recipes of delicious Korean food. I was captivated by photos of her Dak Bulgogi and couldn't wait to try making it too. So I went out to buy some Ssamjang, which is like a spicy soybean paste type of chilli sauce (or paste) that you will usually find at Korean bbqs where you add it to your grilled meats before wrapping them in lettuce leaves. It tastes so good with the chicken bulgogi! The marinade for the chicken is predominantly soy, ginger and honey, so it's quite similar to the Chinese version of honey