Jan Talkmeme - cooking at home

theladyscribe: You always have such interesting photos of meals you're eating in (I'm assuming) cool restaurants, but I'm curious about what you cook at home! Any go-to meals? Or dishes you only cook for special occasions?

Cooking at home tends pretty simple, actually. Steak with a bit of seasoning, vegies on the side. I love salads, but I'm so lazy at making them, and these days I'm spoiled by my garden; I want tomatoes that taste of something, not of nothing! In summer, though, coleslaw (cabbage, fennel, carrot, onion, red wine vinegar, mayo) is amazing and delicious and wonderful.

Breakfast is usually an egg; on a weekend, I might add smoked salmon or something else. Sometimes it's a full fry-up - eggs, bacon, mushrooms (cooked slowly), but that's pretty rare (I usually save the big breakfasts for eating out, which I do more often than I should).

I tend to cook a meat - like a haunch of beef or chicken - and then eat it several nights in a row (or sometimes over the course of a week), as much as I'm feeling like eating.

I'm going to have to be a lot more careful about what I eat in the coming months - my cholesterol is ridiculously high, and my family has a history of heart disease so I need to be careful.

5 basic meals
- bolognaise
- roast chicken (beer can chicken - always good)
- garlic and anchovy pasta
- mustard beef (roast beef)
- soy sauce chicken (usually chicken drumsticks/wings, in soy sauce)

celebration meals
It's hard to describe 'celebration' meals for me - they tend to be things that my mother/stepfather cook for family dinner kind of things.

- hainan chicken
- stewed pork belly in red bean tofu sauce
- lion's head meatballs (pork meatballs with wombok quartered and steamed in garlic sauce)
- eight treasure duck (stewed whole duck stuffed with eight other foods)
- pavlova (this is my specialty for Christmas)

For Chinese New Year (coming right up), there's usually a dish called 'tzai' (in the Cantonese), which is full of funguses and tofu and thin rice noodles, and is completely vegetarian to bring in the new year. There's also New Year cake (sticky gelatinous rock-sugar-flavoured deliciousness) and in my family deep-fried, sesame-rolled, red-bean buns which I know as 'tzin-dui'.

Not sure what's happening for CNY this year.

My family does cooking really well, which is also why I'm a big foodie; I had good food from an early age, and while my twentysomething tastebuds could take McDonalds, my fortysomething tastebuds revolt. If I'm going to have a burger, it's going to be the full-fry deal from a milk bar.

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