a family meal- bacon fried rice

 With one Khmer, one Aussie and a fussy toddler its hard to find a meal we can all eat together but this worked! We all ate together and enjoyed it. Fried rice with bacon and whatever veg we had.

Pasta salad chicken meatballs

Beans, pasta, roast pumpkin and chicken balls i made from mince

Cooking and eating with one hand

Since i got back from aus ive started buying packets of mixed frozen veg from the supermarket. Its a quick and easy way to make a meal with veg. The whole going to the market (as opposed to the supermarket) and chopping thing is harder with toddler and newborn. Ive been cooking meals i can eat with one hand, mostly involving the said veg with garlic onions meat and various seasoning. This one pictured is chicken and curry powder. Quick easy healthy and freezable.

Pasta, egg, pumpkin, red caps., cucumber, olives, pesto (the sunflower recipe elsewhere on this blog)

Scrabled/fried egg with chives, noodles, grated carrot, cucmber and caps

j

Stir fried noodles

hot food

After living out of a bag over the last month, good to finally have my own kitchen again. I made somethng today I hadn't made before and it was yummy so I'll write it down while i remember:

Chopped chicken, onion, garlic. Mixed with paprika and peppers. Fried in olive oil. Added chopped up potato (2), then eggplant (1 small), carrot (1/2) and red tomatoes (3).

Ate with rice, might try pasta next time. WOuld be nice with chick peas, broccoli, french beans, other veg and or meat.

today's kitchen experiments include steaming beef with ginger and garlic
and making a banana cake in the rice cooker but using palm sugar instead of white -which makes it extra moist but i'm also using wholemeal flour instead of white, and coconut cream instead of oil/butter

pork meat balls

today i made these, i didn't have lemongrass though, and used saw herb instead of coriander
thai meat balls

pork pasta salad

So the "chicken" i got out of the freezer for my pasta salad turned out to be pork, so I changed dressings- I made one inspired by this dipping sauce that goes with thai meatballs. I say" inspired" meaning i made it but missing some of the ingreidients i didn't have on hand.

1 teaspoon chopped fresh coriander
3 spring onions, chopped fine
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1 garlic clove, chopped fine
1 mild chili, deseeded and finely chopped (optional)
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon honey

Read more: http://www.food.com/recipe/delicious-thai-style-meatballs-202089?oc=linkback

Chicken soup

Chopping galangal 

Lime leaf, whole garlic cloves "smashed" , green bits of lemongrass, chopped galangal 

Added oyster sauce, sugar, salt, fish sauce

Chicken

Chicken

and in goes the chicken

chopping "saw herb" (tastes like coriander)

After its been boiling for awhile (when the chicken is cooked I guess) he added the finishing touches, the saw herb...

...and lime juice.

And then time to eat! We had the candles on the table in case the power went off, but we didn't need them for this meal.

the bits you don't eat!

Soup- 3 mushrooms and sa om

recent food photos

Pork groeung

Today Soeun flavoured pork with a mix of spices called groeng, its usually used in stir fry. We usually use a mortar and pestle, but we don't have one here. Lemongrass, garlic, lime leaf, turmeric/lmit, galangal/romgdang

He put the lime leaf, sliced tumeric and galangal in some foil and put it over a flame, then into the little blender thingy. Still working out how to use it, the stuff didn't get as ground up as he would have liked.

Next in was chopped garlic and lemongrass.
,

Then he added some salt, sugar, knorr etc and the pork to sit in it for awhile. Then fried it and ate with rice! Yum!

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Chicken and ginger stirfy

I normally think of ginger as being used to flavour things, but in this Khmer stir fry its more of a veggie that you munch on. Also, I prefer pure meat, soft easy to eat, but Soeun prefers the way Khmer normally make it. I think they just chop the whole chicken up - bones and all.

minced pork

mix garlic, soy, sugar, salt, ginger, chives etc with mince pork and steam, or you could stir fry
nice with stir fried green leafy veg and rice
i got this idea from a singaporean in cambodia, so not sure what nationality food it is

i'm really missing cooking. atm we live in a college so we get fed most meals, excpet holidays (college/school and public), and Sunday nights. also we share a kitchen, 6 of us altogether with only 1 freezer! plus there is not much kitchen stuff, but i don't really know what is there yet and what isn't , i only find out as i need to use it, which isnt very often
and when i do cook i end up throwing out the rest of the bottle of olives, or the two servves of left overs, as we don't need to eat here much and we don't have much freezer space, so i'm not very inpsired to cook, exp as KS and I don' t have much food we like in common, so i'm mostl cooking for one(without being able to freeze left overs)

but today i did some pototoes in the oven, some bits of chicken in oil (coated in egg, flour and yummy stuff), with some nice raw veg (red caps, beans, carrots)
KS had some, as well as rice and kimchi

part of getting settled in places for me is having a place i can feel comfy cooking in, it was great at our last place to buy mixing bowls, measuring cups etc etc, and know they were mine and i could make my food, i don't have that here

Frozen meals

Over the last year or so I've been making some meals and freezing them to eat later, I usually use them for weekday lunches when I get home feeling hot and tired around lunch time. One of the meals I freeze is meat and veg with a peanut sauce. I fry garlic and onion then add coconut milk. After that I add peanut butter and/or peanut powder (I make it by pounding cooked peanuts). At the end I add some other seasoning- salt, pepper, sugar, chili sauce, fish sauce etc.



Another meal is tuna and veg in a cheese sauce. The sauce is basically thicken milk with cheese and other seasoning.