If Ian can cook, so can you.

For those of you who do not know by now, I love to cook! I do it for interest, love and a form of therapy when I am upset. Special thanks to my mum and sis for they spurred my cooking interest with the good foods that they have cooked and introduced to me (I, like many of you, use to only want to eat Macdonalds for breakfast, lunch and dinner). Special thanks also to my two chefs in Temasek Polytechnic, Chef Jasmine and Chef Eileen. And last but not least, Fang Tai! It's the lady that cooks on TV at 4pm in the afternoons during "Huang Jing Lian Hua", she made everything look so easy, with her "shao xu" (little bit) of this and that. And suddenly I realise that all the people that inspire my culinary passion are women. And they say that the best chefs are men.

"That's my Sis on the left, and my Mum carrying Granddaughter Izzy"

Today I'm just gonna put up to recipes, one rather simple and the other a little bit troublesome to make.






Smoked Salmon on Cold Cucumber Salad.

Ingredients:
100g Smoked Salmon
1 Medium Size Cucumber
1 Tablespoon of Mayonnaise
Salt and Pepper to taste

Steps:
Using a vegetable shredder, shred cucumber into 1 inch shreds and mix it with mayonnaise and season with salt and pepper.
Put a tablespoon of cucumber salad onto a Chinese soup spoon, roll a slice of smoked salmon into a shape of a rose and place it on top the salad.
Serve cold.

Seafood Chowder (I used Fish and Mussels for this dish) - Taken from Women's Weekly cookbooks.

Ingredients:

600g boneless white fish fillets
300g mussels
50g butter
1 small leek (200g), sliced thinly
1 trimmed celery stick (75g), chopped finely
100g bacon, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon plain flour
3 cups of milk
3 medium potatoes (500g), cut into 1.5cm cubes
1 cup dry white wine
300ml cream
½ cup coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley
Dinner rolls to serve

Steps:

lace white fillets in a pot fill with water, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer uncovered. About 5 minutes later, after the fish is cooked through, remove from pot and leave aside to cool.

Heat up a pot filled with water and bring it to a boil, and put mussels in. After 3 minutes and the mussels start to open up, drain the pot and leave mussels aside. Once cooled, remove mussels from their shells (unless you like to serve it with the shell on).

Heat up large pan or soup pot, melt butter and cook garlic and leek till the leeks soften. Add bacon and celery thereafter till bacon is brown and crisp.

Add wine, bring to boil, cook, stirring occasionally until wine has been reduced to a third. Add flour, stirring for about a minute and add the potato and milk, simmer uncovered for about 20 minutes or until potato is tender.

Stir in cream and add fish (break them up to 1.5 cm pieces as well) and mussels and cook till heated through and season with salt and pepper. Garnish with parsley and served with baked dinner rolls.

Oh well, as you can see, I got time here in Aussie to do stuff like that so yeah, I'll put up my recipe for Jiao Zi (Dumplings) someday, once I sort out how to make the skin. Well for those of you who think you can't cook, can always try, my first attempts, are most of the time, unsuccessful. So try and try again, and you might find some fun and joy in it.