My special own dish.

Am struggling to stay on Cohen with all these stressful times and have been preparing my food ONE way. Guess it gets easier when it becomes a routine thing and requires minimal thought when I cook my meals. It works super well with seafood like fish (including them tuna chunks from the can), prawns and crab meat.

What I do is chop some garlic and onions till it's really fine. And for a real kick, I use two chilli padis (you can use normal chilli but if want a kick, go for one chilli padi, two for a real damn good kick - the kind that will clear your nose and get you sniffling) and chop them up too. With olive oil, heat up the pan and brown the garlic, onions and chilli. Once they have browned nicely, throw in chopped tomatoes and mushrooms. For mushrooms, I use a mix of enoki (that I have blanched using boiling water just before this), and any kind of mushrooms that I have around. I also love this brown crunchy mushrooms that are usually used in soups but I add a strand or two that I chop roughly to add crunch. Will have to find out what it's called.

After all the veggies have soften, I add in the fish (or whatever I want) and fry it till the meat cooks. Then end off with salt, pepper and basalmic vinegar and swish them around. If you want to make this a bit wetter, add more tomatoes as it will mush up and makes a nice kind of sauce.

Below is a picture where I used Red Snapper to cook with the veggies. It's still moist and fish tastes alot better moist than too dried.

When out over the weekend, we try to pack lunch so that we can actually catch a movie and then have lunch out and then continue to do what we want to do. Being on Cohen is quite a chore cuz the places that have Cohen friendly eateries are not located in town but at rather god forsaken locations. So used tuna as it will last a little longer without being in a fridge and it can be eaten cold (of course will be nice warm but...). So we usually find a nice quite spot, buy some fruits and drinks and have our own 'feast'. Must confess that it's tough when everything around us smells so much better. Yes am obsessed with food. But am a true blue Singaporean and we enjoy our food!
Tried with some frozen crab meat and I guess it could be better. The crab meat wasn't very tasty. Guess that what happens when meat gets frozen and it takes away any taste so fresh is always good. Was edible but will be awhile before I try this again. Prawns are great to do it this way and cooks real fast so when I don't have time, I go for the prawns - thaw and cook real quick!

Over the weekend, for one of my meals, I made this using the same recipe. But tried with beef. Had a small piece of beef and used Slawek's recipe and marinated it with salt, pepper, basalmic and a squirt or two of Braggs. It would have been better if I had left it overnight but thanks to poor planning, I left the meat aside for only about 20 minutes.

Browned it on a hot pan for 1-2 minutes each side and then pop it into the toaster oven for 15 minutes. It depends on how well you want the meat done. Love mine well done. Made the veggies the usual way and made it a little 'wetter' as I wanted to eat it with the meat. Also used the juices that came from the meat and added it to the veggies when I cook them. And surprise surprise, it actually goes damn well with the meat. And the meat was nice and soft.

So looks like will be cooking this style for some time now. It takes about 30 minutes in total to prepare and cook the food. Longer for the meat though. Anyways, that's it for now. Got to try and find a new way to cook my meals because am not sure how long I will be happy with cooking it this way. Okay for now but with my short concentration span .....