Health Freak Mommy ~ The Joys And Throes Of Motherhood
Since it's still CNY, Sherilyn whipped up a few Chinese dishes for dinner yesterday and today:
1. Mock crab meat soup with mushrooms, dried shredded scallops, black fungus and shredded chicken meat.
2. Koong Po chicken with cashews. She toasted the fresh chilies for over 10 hours to produce dried chilies for this dish.
3. Yam basket (Fatt Put)
Lunch today was Mee Siam with chicken rendang and deep fried quails (burung puyuh goreng berempah) from hubby's shop, Catermate 😋
Sherilyn turned 16 today!
I asked her what she'd like me to order for lunch and dinner and of all the food, she requested for a foot long Subway sandwich and Subway choc chip cookies, albeit she could make way tastier and healthier sandwiches and cookies. She also requested for Fire Tiger boba and jelly tea and salted egg fried sotong 😆.
Her wish is almost always my command and we ordered all her favorite food and had a low-key birthday celebration at home.
Haru is a super duper light sleeper, so light that she would even know that we're next to her when we tip toe to take a brief peek at her when she naps. 
When Sherilyn was younger, she used to tell me what she'd like to eat and her wish was my command. Now it's the other way around. I tell her my request and she would execute it. All I have to do is to buy the ingredients and she would gladly dish them out 😍.
Caveat: this is only possible during the MCO. When the MCO is lifted and she's back to school, she won't be able to cook for us anymore.
Our Tuesday dinner this week brought us down to memory lane, back to the year 2019 where we could travel anywhere to fix our cravings. In that particular year, we were hooked on North India food. We especially loved Tasty Chapathi @ Damansara and Khan's Indian Cuisine @ Bangsar South. Now that we are not allowed to cross district or dine in, we have our in-house teenage chef to satiate our cravings. Sherilyn prepped all these from scratch herself, assisted by the TMX6:
1. Butter chicken
2. Palak Paneer
3. Naan
4. Passion fruit and vanilla ice-cream
Sherilyn even made the cottage cheese herself, for the Palak Paneer. Everything is super yums!!
Here's Haru saying peekaboooooooo! She loves playing catching and hide-and-seek with us. She's looking more like a cat now at about 7 weeks old, though her face sometimes still resembles a tiger cub. We all love her to bits!
MCO lunch on Thursday, 4 February 2021 ~ Just because it's still the gawd damn MCO with no end in sight to the pandemic, we get to enjoy more of Sherilyn's kitchen trials 😐.
Today she cooked Bibimbap for lunch, prepped from scratch - from the kimchi to the pickled radish, marinated spinach, zucchini and bean sprouts and bibimbap sauce.
All those colours! This would put anyone in a good mood! 😋
Sherilyn whipped up yet another labor-intensive dish ~ Pork Wellington served with red wine shallot sauce, French potato puree, caramelized onions with Italian Balsamic vinegar and seared zucchini.
This girl is truly a sucker for challenges and competitions since young! She hardly settles for cooking simple and easy dishes but likes to try out new recipes.
Pork Wellington is such a labor intensive dish with a slew of ingredients and Sherilyn made everything from scratch, inside out -- from the puff pastry to the crêpe, red wine shallot sauce, French potato puree and the pâté (with minced mushrooms). The French potato puree and mushroom puree were done by the TMX6.
As long as the MCO doesn't end, we're going to be chef Sherilyn' guinea pigs, trying out new dishes almost daily 😁
Another skill that Sherilyn learned as part of producing this dish is opening a bottle of red wine with her dad's wine opener! 😁 The red wine shallot sauce is truly amazing and gives the Pork Wellington a moreish flavor.
2020 was a difficult year for most of us and it's spilling into 2021. Many of us felt like we were challenged at all fronts, emotionally, financially, physically and more. Not only has the Covid19 pandemic roiled the entire world, it has caused severe disruption to the lives of many people. Millions of people all over the world have lost their jobs and with there no end in sight to the pandemic, more people will continue to lose their jobs. I've seen pilots switching jobs dramatically to such jobs as Grab delivery rider and food seller (there's even a pilot who's now driving a hearse to earn a living) and those in the tourism sector now selling food and vegetables by the road side. Of course there are some who are still safe and protected as the industry that they are in are not affected by the pandemic. Those in the groceries business, pharmaceutical, face mask and gloves, IT and manufacturing of IT components are some of the industries not affected by the pandemic. Good on you if you have sat for an isaca cism exam as the certificate will prove valuable to you if you're now looking for jobs such as Network Engineer, Information Technology (IT) Manager and Systems Engineer.
I bumped into my neighbor at the car park the other day and chatted for a while. We were talking about how MCO 2.0 would kill the country's economy. I thought that he was also impacted but he told me that he's very thankful that his IT business has not been impacted at all. In fact, business has been good throughout the lockdown as more people are staying home and everyone is now reliant on IT to get through their daily routines from learning, meetings and making purchases.
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Our kitchen was a hive of activity today. Sherilyn spent the entire day making her 3rd batch of classic red kimchi while Alycia and Cass made pancakes. Sherilyn also made her first batch of Baek Kimchi (White Kimchi) for Alycia and me who can't stomach her spicy red kimchi. She did all these in between zoom church youth fellowship meeting and entertaining Haru, our new baby kitten. Then she cooked dinner.
Some of my Facebook friends asked what I actually do everyday as I don't need to cook anymore with the MIL around now and a fantastic teenage chef who loves cooking. As usual everything else that no one likes to do - litter train and care for a 4-week old kitten, cleaning cat's litter, scrubbing bathrooms, moping the floor like 20x a day and the endless laundry 😬. And I have my own online writing to do as well as help hubby in his online food delivery business.
Such a big batch of kimchi. Can you imagine the amount of work needed to produce all these! But Sherilyn ain't complaining. She finds so much satisfaction and joy cooking and baking all her favorite food.
