CNY 1st Day Brunch & Dinner

It's been a tradition that we have brunch (breakfast/lunch) for the 1st day of the new year. This year we had steamboat. It's a rather easy way of getting food ready on the table. Okay, I don't deny that I'm too lazy to cook...Hehe. Anyway, I forgot to snap pictures of the steamboat. Never mind. It's just like any steamboat that you guys prepare. The soup is boiled with chicken bone and lots of anchovies for 2 hours. If you want tomyam, all you need to do is to get the tomyam cubes from Tesco of Giant. Of course it's made of AJINOMOTO, but what choice do you have?

For dinner, we had quite similar food. I have to admit that I'm not a Shangri-la chef, but I'll be experimenting more of the recipes from cookbooks. Hopefully we'll have more varieties of food next year.

The easiest to prepare is definitely the 'yau mak' in oyster sauce. In English, 'yau mak' is Romainne. Just steam the Romainne in boiling water for 1 minute, then pour in some oyster sauce and add shallot oil. Caution : don't cook the Romainne too long, otherwise the leaves will be too soft and you won't get the crunchy bites.


We had steam pomfret in teochew style because my wife loves this dish. It's also quite easy to prepare.


We also had lemon chicken. Deep fry the pre-marinated chicken and then add the lemon sauce. Where to get the lemon sauce? Bingo! I got it from Tesco... It comes in a packet for one serving. However, the lemon sauce is too sour, so you have to add some water and other ingredients to dilute it eg. honey, sugar, etc.

Next is butter prawns. This is my favourite. Although it didn't turn out to be what I expected, it still tasted good.

Another prawn. This time it's prawn in bread crumbs. Prepare the prawns (peel the head and shells), dip in egg and add to the bread crumbs. Deep fry until golden in colour.

If you do cook yourself, you'd notice that most food that I cooked are deep-fried. Why? It's easier to prepare, definitely. But it takes up too much time. Unless if you use more oil. But then again, after deep frying, what are you gonna do with the oil? It goes down the sink.... So, why waste?