spaghetti meat-a-balls

I’ve always been afraid to cook spaghetti bolognaise from scratch. I'm not entirely sure if this trepidation comes from either the lack of confidence that it can be tastier than pre-bought bolognaise sauce (I know! What a foolish notion) or just from a lack of confidence, period.

chinese tomatoes & eggs 西红柿炒蛋

When my older sister introduced me to the deliciousness of chinese tomatoes & eggs half a year ago, it fast became one of my go-to meals when I’ve got nothing in the fridge.

oxtail soup

I cannot tell you how much affection I have for my grandmother. Because of her, I now have a multitude of comfort-food dishes which I can draw on. But, more importantly, these dishes always bring back to me such fond memories of her.

And now, I have the pleasure of sharing these simply great food with my dear husband. But, I do hope you will enjoy it as much as we have.

Without further ado, I bring to you oxtail soup (sop buntut). There are a many different ways and a many different ingredient variations in which you can cook oxtail soup. But this particular one was my grandmother's version and one that I have known all my life and loved.

honey glazed pork ribs

When I was a small girl, I always loved it when we have honey glazed pork ribs (baikut madu) on the table. It seems like such a luxury to have, with its golden honey coating the crisply fried succulent pork ribs pieces. I used to think that cooking them must be so complicated and hence never tried it.

One day, though, I woke up early, my mum was serendipitously cooking the pork ribs, so I stayed and watched. I don't know what I was so hesitant about, because it was nothing difficult, it only needed minimal ingredients and it's bloody delicious!

red soup

For you non-asians, I know what you're thinking, what the heck is red soup (or sup merah)! It's actually a very common recipe in Chinese families. I'm guessing that it's made up during the war when the only meat they could find was the canned variety.


Every family has a different recipe, this is my family's recipe which I have modified a bit. My mother got this recipe from my grandmother, and now she has given it to me (plus her modifications).

I guess that's how family recipes are passed down, you might choose to add a little bit of this or that and adapt the recipe to make it your own. I do have to say that you cannot modify or remove the tomatoes as an ingredient. The tomatoes are the crucial ingredient which makes the soup red.

not-so-authentic-but-darn-good spaghetti bolognese

As the name suggests, this recipe is by no means authentic, but darn it, it's nothing short of great. I, like many other working persons, don't have the time to make my own pasta sauce (that's what I tell people, in fact I'm just lazy). I'm also not confident that if I do make my own that it'll be as good if I used store-bought pasta sauce. This way I know my spaghetti bolognese will always be delicious. My favourite pasta sauce is Paul Newman's bolognese sauce.

This recipe is good when I need to increase my vegetable intake but don't really feel like eating salad or stir-fried vegetables. You can say it's the cop-out way of eating vegetables. I finely grated carrots and chucked them into the sauce, I can't even tell when I eat it. When I made this last week, I totally forgot about the parmesan cheese, so I went to the nearby Italian deli and had parmesan freshly grated in front of my own eyes, and honestly it did make a difference to the dish. It's not that puke-smelling synthetic parmesan cheese off the shelf.

i'm-so-lazy pork ribs soup

I credit this recipe to my fiancé's mother, thanks auntie! It's so easy and yummy, I cook it when I need some comfort food but can't be bothered going through all the preparation. The even-lazier version is without the chinese salted vegetable (aka xian suan cai, aka 鹹酸菜). I make the even-lazier version more often because I am too lazy to go to the chinese shop to buy the salted vegies.

i-feel-better-already chicken porridge

The past few weeks, a particularly nasty strain of bug has been spreading in my workplace. Everybody is dropping like flies. I wasn't feeling too super myself. Ideally, I would like to have someone cook me my most favourite comfort food, chicken porridge. Since no one was here to do that, I had to cook it myself. I don't know why, but chicken porridge always gives me that warm comfortable feeling, it chases the cold away and makes me feel so much better.

As this is my own recipe, all measurements are to my taste. I encourage you to personalise it to your own taste.