Herbed Garlic Bread

Making your own garlic bread is a point of no return- once you learnt how to do it, you will never want to buy those frozen garlic bread from supermarkets or from any pizza fast food restaurants. It is not only easy but the taste and crunch is so much better and fresher. The best thing is that you can make the garlic bread paste and store in the fridge for breakfast spread as and when you like or even for grilling your prawns or marinating your chicken/beef.

So each time I make, I will make lots of it to store. It will come in very handy!

Ingredients
- 10 cloves of garlic
- 250g of butter (whole block)
- chopped parsley (best if its fresh. I couldn't find. So I used dried)
- olive oil
- 1 tsp of salt
- grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

Steps
1) Peel the garlic and add into the blender together with salt, parsley and olive oil. Just add enough olive oil to smoothen and blend the mixture.

2) Blend the above ingredients first

3) Then add the unsalted butter in, batch by batch and blend

After that, you will just add up like margarine texture but with the garlic and herb taste and smell. Really yummy.

Then you just spread it on your french loaf or any kind of bread, top with parmesan cheese (optional) and toast it!

Serve this with a warm bowl of soup or just simply for breakfast! So easy with only 3 steps, you've definitely got to make it your own!

Mee Goreng

This is a very comforting dish that my helper has made it to be. Though it is not very healthy, I enjoy having the various kinds of ingredients all coming together to make this dish so tasty!

Basically, this is yellow noodles cooked with sambal belachan. I have the steps to make sambal belachan in this blog.

So you basically fry this with minced garlic, onions, bean sprouts, prawns, squid, fishcake, noodles, spring onions (the top green ones) and sambal belachan. Then you can fry an egg as a side and sliced cucumber and tomatoes as well.

It is very easy. Great dish for breakfast or lunch!

Sambal Belachan

My Indonesian helper, Wina makes really good sambal belachan. She would always whip it up on the spot, just before she cook the dish for dinner. So everytime she cooks sambal belachan with kang kong, long beans or sweet potato leaves, I would be happy just to take the whole plate of veggies and eat it all up!

Ingredients (for 2):

- 4 whole shallots
- 3 cloves of garlic
- dried prawns
- dried chilli
- 2 tsp of belachan

Blend the above ingredients. Then you fry it. Add salt and sugar to taste with the blended ingredients in the frying pan. Always prepare it fresh when you want to eat it. Don't store it in the fridge.

Here's what I had last night. So yummy!

Boiled Sweet Potato Leaves with Sambal Belachan

You can also use the basic sambal belachan recipe with seafood and meat. But the only difference with seafood and meat is that, its best to add assam. So if you want to cook with prawns or squid, you can slice onions and fry it with your sambal belachan. Then you add about 2 TB of assam in it to get the sourish taste.

My helper made this dish months ago.. definitely worth trying if you love spice!

Squid with Assam Sambal Belachan

Laksa

Ingredients (serves 4)

Blend the following (refer to picture below for quantity) with a little water:

Laksa Paste:
Candle Nut (Buah Keras)
Coriander Seeds (1 tsp)
Shallots
Normal Ginger
Yellow Ginger (Tumeric)
Blue Ginger (Galangal)
Garlic
Lemongrass-finely sliced
Belachan (1 tsp)
Soaked Dried Chilli

Below is the laksa leaves

Soak the dried shrimps in water and blend it before frying the paste

1) Put oil in the frying pan

2) Fry blended dried shrimps into the pan until fragrant

3) Pour in blended spices paste together in the pan and fry for about 15 mins

4) Add in few laksa leaves midway while frying

 5) Pour in a bit of coconut cream (to your liking)

6) Result of the laksa paste

Below are the ingredients to add to your noodles (it's basically what you like to eat with)- prawns, cucumber, fish cake and finely chopped laksa leaves

Boil the noodles and beansprouts

For the laksa gravy, you add the paste which you made with about 1.5 bowls of water, add tau pok (bean curd skin puffs) and you can add more coconut milk or milk to your liking.

Then plate it up like this! Added my favourite cockles to it! For me, without cockles means its not laksa! So that is a must have ingredient for my laksa!

If you want a healthier version, just replace coconut milk with normal milk. Enjoy!