cooking with two kids and no helper? cooking would probably be a mayhem or a wee bit hectic.
my first tip: one pot/dish everything.
it is my shortcut way of cooking. haha. hey, it makes you really creative about cooking the kind of food that could possibly fit in a one pot dish, which usually means a type of meat and veggies, accompanying carbo should be like rice, bread or pasta. so far, I have excelled at these dishes:
1) 酿豆腐 / yong tau fu with additional meat balls and veggies thrown in
2) oxtail stew (ooo tender fall apart beef)
3) beef stew (a tomato based stew)
4) beef bolognaise (from scratch thankewberry much. none of those jar thingys)
5) alfredo pasta
6) shephard’s pie (mmM..mashed potatoes, yum!)
7) a tofu with minced pork hotpot
seems like Chinese food..not a lot of one pot everything eh? Buuuuut you can steam food!
my second tip: invest in an electric steamer
my electric steamer is a hand-me-down and it is a God-send. With Ollie, I have burnt so many dishes it is not funny. You know..cook/fry halfway, monster fusses, tend to monster, forget about dish, smells something burning…uh-oh. Yup. That kind of situation.
With an electric steamer, I just pop some chicken marylands (basically chicken thighs with the drumstick and bone in) on a plate, with ginger, some 花调酒 (rice wine), some sesame oil and scatter some wolfberries on it, and we are good to go. With two tiers, I can steam chicken or eggs on one tier and have a double boiled soup on the upper tier! Major lifesaver.
my third tip: FREEZE your food.
before QT came along, I kinda starting trialling out what food would freeze well and what wouldn’t. I was already freezing meat stock that I use for cooking chicken macaroni soup. It was so handy to make litres of stock, put them in sizeable containers (usually about 2.5 containers for us) and then freeze it. It came in really handy whenever we wanted to have chicken macaroni soup, or some stock to cook 白斩鸡 for chicken rice.
It went on to freezing little packets of soup in breastmilk storage bags for Ollie. I would cook some soup for dinner and then scoop out 2-3 bags of 200mls to freeze. So whenever Donald and I preferred some curry for dinner, the soup would come in for Ollie to have it with his rice instead of curry. Toddler meals solved!
Other foods I have frozen so far (both for family meals and toddler meals):
– bolognaise sauce (with beef and carrots)
– sayur lodeh (veggies & fried beancurd)
– mushroom soup
– pumpkin soup
– miscellaneous soup packets for Ollie (老黄瓜, ABC soup)
– kimchi stew
Freezing food..saving my sanity on days that I am too lazy to cook and yet feel guilty about going out to eat unhealthy food. Haha.
Seriously, motherhood really does make one get creative to work around the kids!