Archive for March, 2007

If you like fruits, cheese and cakes… you’ll love these fruity cheese cakes. Enjoy!

Strawberry Cheesecake

Mandarin Cheesecake

Ubiquitous Blueberry

Green Tea Cheesecake

With Strawberry Puree

Cherries

Pumpkin

All berries

There has been talk about the pros and cons of eating fish. Some eat it because of its ‘good fat‘. Yet some avoid it because of its methyl mercury content. However, its nutritional benefits seem to outweigh the risks involved. So it remains a popular choice for healthy eating. Just take note of the guidelines to the safe consumption of fish and you should be OK.

If you’re looking for a simple and healthful way to enjoy fresh fish then you would like the recipe below.

• 1 whole big white flesh fish of your choice (about 1 1/2 kg)
• 1 tsp. paprika
• 2 whole tomatoes chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, cubed
• 1 red bell pepper, cubed
• thumb-size pc. of ginger, julienned
• 1 stalk celery
• 1 stalk leeks

1. Clean the fish but do not remove tail and fins. Make a small slit at the back.
2. Season with salt, pepper and paprika. Let stand for 1 to 2 hrs.
3. Mix tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and season with salt and pepper. Stuff the mixture into the fish through the slit.
4. Set fish in a steamer, cover with ginger, leeks and celery. Steam for approximately 1 hr.
5. Garnish with strips of leeks. Serve with soy sauce, fish sauce or sesame oil.

Since I got married nearly 3 years ago, I now cook almost everyday. In the first months, I discovered its hard work cooking for two! Fresh vegetables I bought perished before I get to use them and our fridge was filled with leftovers. It seems that I am not alone. I found books, articles and websites to help those who cook for two. In this post, I hope to share the numerous online resources on the topic.

First up are books. These are the top three picks from Amazon on the subject:

1. Healthy Cooking for Two (or Just You): Low-Fat Recipes with Half the Fuss and Double the Taste
2. Cooking for Two: 120 Recipes for Every Day and Those Special Nights
3. Quickies for Couples: Fast, Fresh Recipes for Two (Quickies, 1)

I can’t help but notice: Why do books on cooking for two have such long titles? Anyway, next up are recipe sites that have sections devoted to the topic:

1. Recipe Goldmine - The recipes here look easy to do. They are mostly soups, salads and side dishes.
2. All Recipes - Over 500 recipes for two. Read up on the reviews and ratings for each recipe before trying them out yourself.
3. Recipezaar - Scroll to the bottom of each recipe page, and find other recipes compatible to the one you’ve chosen.

Finally, we go to some useful websites. The ones I like the most are Lifehacker and the OAMC site. Lifehacker has collated a lot of great tips from its readers on the topic of cooking for two. I hope you will find them as interesting as I did.

On the OAMC site you will learn about “Once A Month Cooking”. Basically, you cook big batches and freeze it in small portions. Because of this, OAMC is also called “Freezer Cooking”. It makes a lot of sense since preparation and clean up does take up a lot of time. With OAMC, most of time you just need to take the portion needed - say for two, reheat it and you’re done with dinner. I have yet to try OAMC but I found their step by step guide quite useful. It will help us save time and money for groceries. Ordinarily, I’ll go to the grocery every week. But following their tips, I can reduce the frequency to once a month.

There’s also a vegetarian OAMC plan in Recipezaar. I think I’ll find this one really useful, since I find myself preparing less meat dishes and cooking more vegetables. I love that clean up after preparing vegetarian dishes is less of a hassle. I don’t have to go crazy sterilizing everything I used, for fear of salmonella and other malodors left on my kitchenware.

I hope you like the resources I posted here. If you have more you can leave a link to them in the comments below.