5 Dishes Home-Cooked Dinner in an hour

Friends asked why don't I just buy all my meals or tingkat for the month. Afterall, it is normal for working mummies to be exhausted after a long day of work, hence have the "right" to be excused for not cooking dinner. 

But nothing beats homecooked food, even if they taste only so-so. I always feel that I can only make simple, similar and few dishes but the smiles on the faces of Laogong and the kids have always been my confidence boosters ^^

Beside it only takes me less than an hour to cook the 5 simple dishes, of which I spent 15-20 minutes thawing the frozen food and thinking of what to cook. Hahaha! 

While thinking of what to cook, I realized the "trick" is to do a variety of dishes that require different types of utensils and electrical applicances. You may end up with more pots and pans to wash but this allow us to mulitask, eg. within 15min, we can actually complete at least 3 dishes at the same time using different utensils and appliances. This method is good for families with children and adults having different food preferences, eg. Laogong needs a fried dish or processed food for every meal but does not like vegetables; Jamie loves white rice, broccoli, califlower, mushrooms and fried eggs but do not like fishes; James loves salmon, likes leafy vegetables but does not like eggs; mil is health conscious. 

But there are two other alternative methods for smaller families or families where everyone likes similiar food: 

1. Place your preferred meat and vegetables in a slow cooker, together with a pre-packed soup mixture or ingredients that can withinstand long hours of brewing, before you set off to work. When you get home, you will have a nice one-pot soup of protein and vegetables. You will only need to cook rice.

2. Otherwise you can cook an one-pot dish like fried rice, fried bee hoon, mian xian soup, claypot chicken rice etc. 

If you have the happy call pan or the air fryer, they can actually do more than you thought they can do. I will share more witth you as I do my "experiments". 

Anyhow, this is how I cook the 5 simple dishes in less than an hour.

First 20 minutes: 

1. Thawing of frozen food, such as hot dog, japanese seaweed chicken and salmon.

2. Cut hot dog and seaweed chicken.

3. Marinate thawed salmon with soya sauce

Next 15 minutes:

1. Cook Rice

2. Steam Salmon

3. Airfry seaweed chicken (checked every 7-8min and flip the seaweed chicken to ensure they are cooked thoroughly. 

4. Cooked Baked Bean with Hotdogs. Off fire when bake bean begins to boil and hotdogs begins to "open up" its "designs".

Next 15 minutes:

1. Cook Campbell Chicken Soup with Eggs. Add in corn starch into stirred eggs for the texture.

2. Fried Eggs with frying pan. Add soya sauce and serve.

Last 5 minutes: Serve the food. 

Ta-Da! Ready for dinner ^^ Haha! 

Cooking Tomatoe-based Spaghetti on Monday Night. Will share recipes ^^