My own website

The last time I took out a domain name was sometime after my first book Congratulations! You have won was released. I registered the contest123.com website to help promote the book and listed all the on-going contests I could find. Unfortunately, the book did not sell well so I closed down the site after a year or two.

Now that I’ve got five books under my belt, it is time to become more professional instead of just relying on my blogs to establish an internet presence. I’ve signed up for a domain name, www.lydiateh.com which streamlines the information on my books. To make things simpler, I link back to my media gallery blog to grab the relevant pages. It was quite a breeze building up the website with the site builder programme which comes with the webhosting package. However, since I know almost zilch html, I can’t really tweak the site as much as I want to. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Quick meals

When I was a stay-at-home mum, I used to cook six days a week. Now that I’m working, this isn’t possible. For the first two months of working life, I catered food. For RM310 per month (weekdays only) to feed my family of six, it is a pretty good deal. There is no need to do marketing, prepare the ingredients and cook. All I need was two tiffin carriers for the caterer to load the food in. The problem is that my family can be quite choosy in their food intake. One day, there was cuttle fish cooked in chilli, four-angled beans and braised tau kwa. Of these three dishes, only the tau kwa suits our palate. We don’t like cuttle fish and four-angled beans, so our dog had a feast thanks to our pickiness.

After we stopped catering, it was economy rice galore. Every day we’d ta pau some dishes from the stall. We can choose what we like to eat, yet the family complained that the food tastes different from home-cooked meals. What a choosy bunch of eaters! In any case, eating out every other meal is no fun and isn’t very healthy either, what with the msg and all.

Now we’ve struck a compromise. On busy days especially those two days when I have to work nights, it is outside food.  On other days, we eat simple home-cooked meals. For those of you who are in the same predicament, you may like to try out some of these ideas. If you have any fast and easy meals to share, please do.

1. Put chicken and herbal ingredients in crock pot in the morning. In the evening, stir-fry some vegetables and open up a can of beans or fry some eggs to eat with rice.

2. Bah-kut-teh can be prepared in the crock pot too. Supplement with fast to cook vegetables such as lettuce. This can be stir-fried or added to the stew itself. If you’re doing the latter, it’s better to add the vegetables in a separate bowl of gravy so as not to alter the taste of the stew.

3. Spaghetti bolognaise. Dump a can of sauce, vegetables such as carrots, onions, potatoes even and minced meat into crock pot. Add an extra can of water and season with sugar and salt to taste. You can boil the spaghetti just before the meal or boil it in advance and refrigerate it before leaving the house.

4. Pasta with white sauce. Dump a can of sauce (Prego is a good choice) and add in diced chicken pieces, carrots, potatoes and a can of water. You can eat it with pasta or bread.

5. ABC noodle soup. Put chicken or pork, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes and onions into crock pot with sufficient water for making noodle soup. When you get home, transfer the soup into a pot for boiling over the stove. Add noodles to the stock. Yee mee, mee hoon or mee suah are good choices.

6. If you have no time to prepare any of the above, you can still customise a nice meal from dishes bought at the economy rice stall. Choose a dish with gravy, say chicken or pork slices in black sauce. Make sure you spoon in extra gravy. When you get home, boil some egg noodles. Drain away the water. In the same pot, add in the meat and gravy. Throw in some vegetables such as butterhead lettuce. Mix well and serve.

7. For a change, hot dogs or burgers would do nicely if you have young kids. For a faster and healthier alternative, boil the sausages instead of frying them. Burger patties can be put into the oven but you’ve got to watch the oven so that the meat don’t burn.

Now we only eat more fanciful meals on Mondays when it is my off-day.  We had Quiche Lorraine last Monday. I still have plenty of Calrose rice so maybe we’ll have sushi next Monday. Today we’ll have steam boat. Bon appetit.

P/S: Baking bread now only happens once in a blue moon when the urge to eat home-baked bread strikes  and when I’m in the mood.  The above picture showed my last attempt at baking buns which was a couple of months back – when the moon turned blue.

English lesson from NCIS

I was watching NCIS on a Monday evening when I caught a mini English lesson given by Medical Examiner Ducky.

He said, “Always use whom after a preposition.” I really hate the who or whom conundrum but Ducky (or should I say the script writer) boiled down the complexity to its essence.

Some examples:

• Andy saw the scouts, at least one of whom was armed, through the mist.
• Against whom did you protest if there was nobody present?

Examples from grammar-monster.

Jam Recipe

The Kota bridge has been clear for some months during non-peak periods. You could get from MPK across the bridge in 5 minutes. But this past week or so, you need 15 minutes to get across. I was wondering why until a friend enlightened me. He’s very aware of what’s happening in town as he zips all over town frequently. It’s Persiaran Sultan Ibrahim that’s causing the jam. The road in front of Public Bank is now pot-holed and coupled with inconsiderate bankers who obstruct traffic by indiscriminate parking along the road shoulder, you have a sure recipe for jam. My friend called up the road authorities and gave them a piece of his mind.

Get the contractor to resurface the road, he said.

We did but they won’t do it, they said.

You do it for them, and then bill the contractor, he said.

So smart-lah, my friend. Anyhow, here’s the recipe for jam. Anything to add to give more kick?

Jam Recipe

Ingredients

1. One inefficient and slow road builder

2. A dozen potholes

3. Two inconsiderate parkers

4. An ineffective town council

5. Road authorities with no bite

6. Rain (optional)

Method

Take one road builder. Spread its workers slowly over the road. Throw in some potholes big and small. Add two parkers who simply park anyhow. Stir in town council who’s slow on the job and road authorities with mild disposition. Kacau really well. For stickier jam, sprinkle with rain and the consistency will be so thick that it would take one year for it to drip from the spoon to the jar.

Parenting the KFC way

I have a thing for advertisements. When I was younger and wondering which career path to take, I seriously considered going into the advertising line. But after talking to a friend who was working in an ad company, I decided against it as I didn’t fancy the crazy hours ad people have to put up with.

So every now and then I like to comment on advertisements, especially the bad ones. Take KFC’s latest tv ad. It shows a mother looking on indulgently as her daughter messes up the kitchen in her attempt to cook dinner. Eggs are cracked into a big mixing bowl, complete with shells. Flour is added haphazardly. Can’t remember what else goes into the mix but the batter is stirred so vigorously that the mixture splashes onto things around the counter : the photo frame (on a kitchen counter?!), cups and what not. And all the while, the mother sits on a stool, smiling, saying nothing and encouraging her daughter to play chef, knowing that the end result is going to be unpalatable. But hey, that’s okay, cos KFC will save the day.

“Why is this a bad advertisement?” I asked my kids.

No. 3 said, “Because the girl is not cooking properly and her mother is not scolding her.”

I’m glad he got the idea. It’s perfectly all right to let young kids have a go at cooking. They’ll learn a life skill and have fun in the process (while they’re still young enough for cooking to feel like fun). But for the mother to sit there like a smiling ‘kayu’ and let her girl have her own way while wrecking the kitchen and doing everything the wrong way gets my goat. What sort of values are they trying to impart?

I prefer the old KFC ad which showed a busy career woman doing her shopping on the sly while working. She got the courier service guy to buy her vegetables and lowered down a basket to have her groceries delivered by the mini market downstairs. Now that was a clever ad.