EXCHANGE INTERFACE

It's not really pretty to be able to eat anything and find yourself wanting to eat just for the sake of eating.

I mean, I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it a while back, but now? Now, all I can think is that I don't need this food. I want it, but I could probably survive (right now, anyway) on two meals a day.

This morning I had fried rice - leftover from the challenge - with added Chinese sausage, shallots (green onion), and SPAM (yes, yes, I know), and a dash of soy sauce. It's my mother's fried rice and sometimes we'd have leftovers for breakfast the next morning.

Lunch was angel-hair pasta in the remnant of the ham bone stock that I was going to cook congee in (before I got tired congee altogether), with parsley and pork mince (left over from the challenge), and shallots. Lunch was pretty late because I was waiting for a friend to contact me about whether we were going to dinner tonight (we were going to dine with another friend, but her kids are sick so that got cancelled and rescheduled).

Right now, I can't decide if I want dumplings or lasagne.

An hour later: I ended up cooking egg, broccoli, and a bit of salmon for dinner.

Now I just have to work out why these two sides are fighting a war. *sigh*

All the pics that were supposed to go with the last post...

( kind of long )

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.