Dining With Jewelle

Last Tuesday was the Moon Cake festival of course.

As usual, we had a simple family dinner with everyone. Because each family have their own schedule, we seldom dine together despite having everyone living in the same house.

Of course, this meant a noisier than usual affair with Eu insisted on chatting with his cousin and Qi kept attracting her uncles’ attention. All these on top of our equally jovial matriarch, pleased at having all her sons sitting down together. Our’s a household where the female voices dominated the male voices easily.

Food wise, they’re the usual roast chicken, pork and mixed vegetables. Predictable but delicious nonetheless, and that’s what matters.

We did have some exciting experiment with these sliced abalone. As per the instruction, we served them fresh from the packet. Abalone was never my favorite type of Chinese food and this was no different as I thought it was too salty and too flavor-enhanced.

We forgot to get any lanterns for the kids this year though and must remember to get some next year.

Since there are quite a number of western expats in hubby’s company, sometimes they’d cater Italian food for a restaurant in Kuala Belait for their gatherings.

But being a typical Asian when it comes to food, he doesn’t consider dishes like pizza or spaghetti as main meal so he’d usually eat his dinner at home first.

Perhaps if he goes to award winning Italian restaurant with a wider range of authentic Italian dishes, he’d change his mind.

There is a restaurant in La Jolla of San Diego called the Trattoria Acqua which is rated as one of the top ten Italian restaurant in the United States. I think this is one of the few restaurants which publishes their full menu online and it was salivating just to read dishes such as these :

Pollo Picatta - Free-range lightly pounded chicken breast sautéed with lemon, butter, garlic, white wine and capers served with spinach and fonduta whipped potatoes

Cappa Santa alla Damaso - Jumbo Sea scallops and shrimp with our house-made tomato fettuccine pasta, fresh organic corn and a spicy lobster sauce

I think I’m changing my mind about Italian restaurants too. I definitely want to try one of the places when I do go over to California!

One of my daily must have is soup.

Qi expects it to go with her meal and she nearly always have a bowl of soup every day. In fact, “soup” is one of the first few word in her vocabulary!

Since I have my slow cooker a few years ago, it has been one of the most used piece of equipment in my kitchen. In my household, my sister in law brew soup daily for her family too and it was from her that I learn how easy it was to make delicious and nutritious soup. Since the first tong kwei soup that she taught me, I’ve moved on to brewing other kind of soups; herbal, tonic and ordinary soup with nutritious ingredients.

In fact, my soup making learning process could be clearly described by hubby’s verdict which started from “What’s this?” (first experiment) to “Weird taste” (wild experiment) to “Too much ingredient” (over-experiment) to his most welcomed verdict of “Very nice soup“.

One of my own favorite soup is the lotus roots soup.

I learn this soup from my mother in law and of course, whenever we go to places where tonic soup is served, this is one of the common ones too.

Lotus roots are available in most supermarket although at some places, they didn’t bother to scrape the excess mud off the roots that it can look very dirty. 

If you have never tried this soup you really should! It’s tasty, nutritious and if you’re Muslim, it goes well with chicken too.