Keeping it simple…

I have not been cooking very much these days now that I am spending a lot of time in my garden, a few hours in the morning and also in the late afternoon and evening.

However, I would make sure that I have a good breakfast but usually, it will be something very simple like if there is any leftover rice, I would fry it and eat before venturing outside. This was my ikan bilis (dried anchovies) belacan (dried prawn paste) fried rice…

…that I cooked the other day.

Good Friday was a day of fasting and abstinence for us and we had one light meal in the evening for dinner. I just cooked some plain porridge and had that with salted eggs and fried thinly sliced french beans. It is amazing how with just one cup of rice, you can end up with one big pot of porridge…and the next morning, as there was some leftover, I cooked this sweet potato porridge…

…and I fried an omelette and grilled a slice of bacon, cut them thinly and threw them all in. It tasted really great but the next time, I think I would use the latter two ingredients as toppings instead of cooking them in the porridge – they seemed to have lost much of their taste because of that.

Saturday, we had a great lunch and in the evening, we went for my brother-in-law’s birthday dinner and on Easter Sunday, after the morning service in church, we dropped by here for brunch. That evening, my girl said that she did not want to eat out and would prefer having dinner at home. That was why, in the end, we decided to have a simple steamboat dinner as my brother-in-law from Bintulu did give us some very nice and fresh prawns…

…that day when he came back for the Ching Ming Festival. We still had two big sea cucumbers in the freezer, left over from our Chap Goh Meh steamboat dinner with my dad sometime ago…and we made some meatballs and bought some quail eggs, sweet baby corn, golden needle mushrooms, some soft tofu and these curly green vegetables…

…and we just threw all those into the boiling bone-stock soup that my missus prepared.

We also had some thinly-sliced beef…

…in the freezer so we dipped it ourselves in the boiling soup to eat and enjoy.

My girl wanted some of these Korean potato noodles…

…to go with the soup and I boiled some for her.

There you have it, our Easter celebration – nothing fancy, nothing grand, just a simple steamboat dinner…

…at home.