Here is a wall I made for Facebook with the highlights of our Xmas holidays. As you see we dressed up, I finally made a 'real' Pandan chiffon cake (using the extract I bought from a local Chinese shop instead of just vanilla and green dye) and we had sushi as a starter for our Xmas meal (followed by roast lamb and fruit cake).
We visited the in-laws up north for New Year's Eve and I ate too much so I put on weight but lost some already as we are back eating normal meals and I am sure that packing up decorations and hoovering the rooms properly (ie moving furniture rather than skirting) burned some calories too. My motivations to eat less are simple, my stomach has not been too happy and I need to get back into my work trousers!
We are also back on having family dinners at weekends as my daughter comes back from the after-school club famished and can't wait till my partner is back. I admit I don't cook stuff from fresh all the time for her, but I am quite discerning using frozen food, luckily they now sell good-quality fish fingers and chicken bits that have no additives and my daughter likes the baby veg mixtures. She also loves pasta and pesto and we always reserve a portion if a suitable meal is cooked for our dinner (barring a too spicy curry). Usually if she has a freshly cooked meal it is a milder curry or a Chinese-style stir-fry.
A few years back I used to write recipes for madeformums (and photograph results too) and I remember having to make homemade fish fingers. I also shared my own childhood recipes, like the Italian-style rice pudding I linked to. I grew up in Italy and my grandparents had a restaurant, which makes it difficult for me to eat at any Italian restaurant in this country as I start comparing or correcting the wrong spellings in the menu.
Aside the Pandan cake (click here for YouTube video recipe), I also made Paul Hollywood's Lardy Cake and this banana cake to use some overripe bananas, my first ever microwave pudding. I haven't done as much baking (and that includes the fruit cake too!) in months.
