A Busy Saturday !

I think I've been lazing around for too long, yes 6 weeks is a long long time. Besides baking & cooking (clearing my deep freezer in fact !), I've not been preparing food & freezing them for easy meals. My deep freezer is almost empty, got to do something since the girls going back to school....

After my morning run, I'm off to the market stalls at Foh Sang. Got some ribs at the butcher, a 'kampung chicken' & 2kg of chicken bones from the chicken seller, next to the fish mongers but didn't buy anything because hubby don't like smaller fish, so fillet is the only thing on my mind. We adore garouper but it's difficult to get fillet of this fish nowsadays, even snapper is nowhere to be seen, that completed my marketing.

After breakfast with hubby, I started my day of toiling in the kitchen. The 'kampung chicken' was packed into a container & sent into the freezer, for making soup next week. As for the chicken bones, I cut away all the neck attached to them as I find making stock with them 'scary' ! As usual, all the bones blanched, dumped into a large soup pot with onion, carrot, ginger, Jin Hua ham, spring onion, dried scallops & oh I found a bag of prawn shells in my freezer so that went into the pot too.

While the stock is cooking, I took out my slow cooker & soup pot from the kitchen cabinet, it's some Asian dessert time. I still have some dried bird's nest pieces that my mum gave me during my CNY trip home, so it's time I reward myself. I've used 8 pieces today, together with some American ginseng, 8 pandan leaves tied into a knot & some rock sugar, all these went into the soup pot, ready to be double-boiled. Oh, hubby saw on a TV programme that by adding boiled eggs to the pot, you get a nice aromatic sweet soup. So I tried with just 1 hard boiled egg, in fact you need to fill the bottom of the soup pot with hard boiled egg, I didn't know that only after the sweet soup is done, 6 hrs later. Nevertheless, it does give off a nice aroma when I lift the cover of the pot. I made the girls eat the egg, they said it was very sweet !

While the chicken stock & the bird's nest soup was cooking, I whipped up my cake batter for 2 cakes order. Now that the oven is baking too, I marinated the pork ribs that I bought this morning with some soya sauce, sugar, pepper, ginger juice, crushed garlic, Shao Hsing wine & set this aside for the flavour to penetrate the ribs.
The girls finished my last 2 pieces of apple streusel pie this morning, since I still have some pandan juice left from making the pandan swissroll few days ago, I whipped up another batter for a pandan chiffon cake, a healtier version, no coconut milk, of course the cake will not be as aromatic as one that contains coconut milk, but at least enough to satisfy my craving for cake today !

After all this, I deep fried the marinated ribs, placed them into a container as well & froze them so it'll be easier for me anytime I want to have some braised ribs. Saturday is the day I spend time on food preparation as I'm a person who gets really cranky when I'm busy with my baking & there's no almost ready food in the freezer that I could easily cook & serve at meal times !

Since there's no luck on fish fillet, I got to turn to frozen Dory fillet. I know that frozen taste is not great & the texture of this fish is soft but looks like this is my only choice. After thawing the fish fillets, I cut them into smaller pieces, seasoned them with a pinch of salt & lemon pepper, dredged them through flour, then beaten eggs & coat them with panko breadcrumbs. Every piece is lied flat on a try & sent to the freezer for them to firm up before I store them in zip-lock bag.
It's almost 3 pm when all these are done & I've produced 2 large bags of garbage !
At least now the freezer is packed, there's no worries about my girls' lunches next 1-2 weeks.
I was so busy & the kitchen so messy today, taking pictures didn't cross my mind. I'll post a few of the cakes that I've baked for the past week.
Tonight we're having dinner with friends & their kids, at least I can really relax, I've baked a black forest cake to bring to the gathering, will post it up when the cake is cut.....