Another plus for cooking at home is that we get to have no spend days. What are these you may ask? As it sounds, no spend days are days that we don’t spend any money at all, and it can be useful to practice these once in a while to exercise control over our impulses to buy. If you’re interested to know more, here’s a video on Tedx talk platform on an account by someone who went by a full year without spending money (My No Spend Year | Michelle McGagh | TEDxManchester). More on this on my next blog post.

That being said, when we do choose to spend, we will spend on local small businesses and hawker stalls that could use with the help during lockdown times.

However for this post it will be a sharing on what we ate for lunch while working from home this week, basically a quick run down on what we prepared within 15-30 minutes cook time for two adults.

1. Teriyaki chicken with shrimp noodles and soft boiled eggs
Cook time: 20-25 minutes

The chicken pieces are thawed and marinated the night before in the leftover teriyaki sauce from the last weekend. Boil the shrimp noodles separately for 3 minutes in hot water, drain and set aside. Then fry up cut onions and garlic with bak choy . Combine the cooked noodles into the same pan. Make a space in the middle of the pan to fry up the teriyaki chicken pieces. At the same time, boil 2 eggs (soft boiled) separately. Last part is just to assembled into a bowl, and below is how it looks. Below is the final product.

2. One pan stir fried Lap Cheong with shimeji mushrooms, broccoli and egg
Cook time: 15-20 minutes

This is relatively quick due to every ingredient is cooked in a one pan (except the rice). Cook rice ( we used our Philips Pressure cooker rice mode) early in the morning. During lunch time cut up 2 lap cheong and stir fry in a pan (without oil as the lap cheongs will ooze oil), after that throw in the broccoli and mushrooms into the same pan. Turn off the flame, then throw in a knob of butter and squeeze in half a lemon ( for added flavor kick) and stir together. After transferring the ingredients to the rice bowls, fry 2 eggs in the same pan and place on top of the serving bowls.

3. Rendang chicken with steamed/fried Man Tao
Cook time: 30 mins (with pressure cooker for rendang and buns steamed separately)

I bought a pre-made rendang marinade packet for this recipe, so we did not have to prepare the raw ingredients. In the morning before work began I stir fried the rendang sauce in the pressure cooker then poured in the chicken cutlets, and then added evaporated milk to the mixture, stir to mix and let it cook together. In my case since we have the pressure cooker we set it to chicken mode and it cooked for 15 minutes on its own then keep warm till we are ready to eat at lunch.

Then as the sides I steamed 3 man tao buns, and hubby fried up additional 2 man tao, and voila, lunch is ready. The rendang was a tad salty due to the serving size for was 1.2 KG of chicken and I cooked half of that amount. As for the man taos , we preferred the fried buns over the steamed version due to the crispy outer skin. Apologies for the photo , I am improving my photography skills as we go along.

4. Teriyaki chicken chop with stir fried noodles and vegetables
Cook time: 20 minutes

Again we still had leftover home made teriyaki sauce, so we made teriyaki chicken chop on this day. Chicken chop was bought at RM2.50 a piece from a local supermarket and thawed the night before. We didn’t pre-marinade it this time, instead the chicken chop was fried up in a pan and the sauce poured over the chicken and simmered down to thicken. Separately cook the shrimp noodles and set aside, and then stir fry the carrots and bak choy ( another leftover vegetable in our fridge from the 1st meal to avoid wastage) together. That’s it, place everything in a plate together and enjoy.

5. Curry laksa mamee chef with crabstick and teriyaki chicken
Cook time: 15 mins

At this rate , you can see the teriyaki marinade was used in 4 meals ( one on the weekend for a fish dish, and three meals on the weekdays to use it up), and on this day we fried up balance chicken cutlets with the teriyaki. Then we cooked two instant noodles packet of Mamee Chef Laksa with crabsticks. This was the simplest of the 5 meals we had on that week and the quickest to prepare .

Special mentions and bonus meal
For quick and tasty noodle base I would personally recommend below kamfen noodles, the noodles are thin and has an el dante texture to it after cooking, its natural flavours go well as a base to any meat toppings or seasoning. They have also other flavours eg, egg and scallop flavored noodles. Cost per packet at RM8.90 for 10 pax at Aeon outlets.

Shimeji mushrooms , both the white and the brown types are about RM4 per/packet or they sometimes well in a pack of three for RM11.90

Bonus meal during the weekend? We still had chicken chops in the freezer so husband did fried chicken chop off a new recipe he found from Youtube, and cooked the balance man tao for the kids. Top it off with steamed brocolli and carots drizzled with Kewpie roasted semame salad dressing. Done , as Gordon Ramsay would say.

Hope this post gives you some ideas. On other weeks, our meals will change depending on what we got from our weekly groceries shopping haul (I tend to get when we eat with the kids) and other days we do go out to pack food (especially on weekends to spend more time with the kids). We eat with my in laws for dinner on weekday nights, where either we will pack for the whole family or my mother in law will cook up a meal.

Thanks for reading.

Hubs and I rushed to finish work earlier to leave the house by 6pm, to complete our shopping before the shops close at 8pm, follow by dinner in the car and then rush to get the kids home from grandparents (preferably before their bed time at 9pm).

Today, we choose to go to the Aeon Bandaraya (Jusco), and it was not just a random choice, no no, it was very intentional , in fact it was the furthest from our house compared to the nearer supermarkets ie. Tesco (Lotus) Cheng or NSK, but there was something alluring that made us decided to go there , something that we only managed to find only in this Aeon branch…. it was to seek out the Blue Ribbon ice cream.

When we reached the ice cream aisle, we managed to get THE LAST TUB of available Blue Ribbon. Hidden right at the back , amidst its competitors ( other ice cream of similar price point) Bulla. Out of the way Bulla! I tip toed and reached in to get the last tub. Although it was not my first choice of flavor that I wanted, I’ve had the Butter Brickle flavor before and it was good too (for the Butter Brickle flavor, its recommended to eat with Reese peanut butter chips for added boost of tasty).

For more information on their variety of flavors you can refer it here , but I’ve personally tried two of their flavors and my recommendation will be to go for their Peanut Butter Brownie flavor, photo below (taken from their website).

Taste
The taste is rich, and the brownie bits are found in fudgy like goodness in the ice cream, and the peanut butter, mmm-hmm, slightly sticky but blends well with the smoothness of the ice cream. It has become my favorite peanut butter /choco combo ice cream, ever (till I find another that can top this).

Pricing
How we found this ice-cream was from a post by a Facebook financial writer blogger Ringgit Oh Ringgit (linked here) when she shared a review of ice cream cost per-100ml-of-ice-cream by Feisal Kamil. Blue Ribbon sits only one level more expensive than Nestle Cremeria in terms of price. So if you are looking for an ice cream brand that is more premium but cost lower than say Haagan Daaz and Kapati ( till this day I can’t bring myself to buy a tub of Haagen), this ice cream may be for you.

Packaging
Just to give a mention here, typically ice cream packaging is of no particular interest to most but I want to say I support cardboard-packed ice cream more than plastic container packed ice cream. It’s more sustainable and cleaner for the environment to use paper packaging versus plastic, although it could be also that paper/cardboard packed ice creams will generally be pricier but in my position, I will favor the more sustainable packed foods.

So that’s it, if you are in larger cities I believe you have more variety but in smaller ‘towns’ like M_ _ _ _ a, we have to pick and choose but I ain’t complaining.

What’s my favorite ice cream flavor? Chocolate mint, and for this flavor there is another ice cream brand that is top in my books, for that I will share in a separate post.