Itching for a Challenge

It's been a while since I've posted a cooking post. The reason is, of course, that I haven't been cooking much this year.

However, as the second trimester energy and nesting instinct kicked in, I have been inspired to do more -- Clean! Do some home improvement! Meet up with friends! And yes, cook! Over the last month or so, we've had various groups of friends and family over for dinner parties and pizza-pasta take-out. And I had fun rehashing many of my tried and true recipes: Caprese salad, Pork escalope, Prawn Aglio Olio Pasta, Bruschetta, Spaghetti Vongole in White Wine, Beef Stew, Roasted Root Vegetables, Mashed Potato. They all made an appearance.

As you can see, after all the get-togethers, Noey also got very proficient at the pose-on-the-brown-couch routine.

The husband was terribly pleased. "You guys should come over for dinner every Friday!" he said to ALL our guests.

I got the message. The fact is, while my Western cooking can be pretty good, my Asian cooking is pretty miserable. I blame the lack of good instruction. My Mum really isn't much of a cook (her talents lie in other areas) and I never really found a good cookbook to teach me the basics. So all I know is to reproduce some of my home favourites, and a couple of easy dishes I've picked up from my Mum-in-law. But there's only that much steamed fish that DD can take.

I pulled out all my cookbooks and hit on the next best idea -- Peranakan food.

I got the new Mrs Lee's Cookbooks out and got DD to flag all the dishes that he would like to try, and I'm going to cook my way through them, God willing. I included the Straits Heritage Cuisine book for variety and because I hope not to give us all a heart attack and gain 20kg with all that coconut milk!

DD was VERY enthusiastic. He flagged a lot of pages. I started a week ago and it's actually been kinda fun so far! I figured I'd blog about it to share my experiences and encourage me to continue. Let's see how long I can keep this up for!