beloved bel

Happy Easter everyone, hope you are enjoying this long weekend. A bit slow on updates here as life has been very busy.  We are doing some major house renovations at the moment so we are living in a construction site (pretty much), although the builders have tried their best to leave the house as liveable as possible.  Our kitchen is gone now so having meals is a bit challenging these days.  (We bought our first - yes, first - microwave two weeks ago in anticipation of the loss of a cooking facility!)  And then there is much packing to be done.  Oh don't even remind me... it's a massive project so until things stabilise I will blog more about it.  It's all umm.. very exciting yet very stressful as you can imagine.  Living outside our comfort zone at the moment! On a happier note, I have some Spring pics to share. We took a walk in a park a few Saturdays ago and saw flowers blooming A beautiful magnolia tree We were in Kingston two Saturdays ago and this bea

Of late I've been experimenting cooking hawker dishes from home.  Maybe it's because we had stocked up on food in our recent trip and so Chef Bel has been on a roll. Here are some cooking stories from the past month. 1) Shallot oil We ran out of shallots in our kitchen and I was inspired by my grandma to make a bottle of it.  I got a packet of shallots and started chopping them one Saturday morning.  I cooked it in oil and guess what, I burnt the first batch (boohoo).  I started again and this time determined not to burn them, I think I didn't brown them enough so now I have half a glass bottle of limp looking chopped shallots immersed in oil.  It doesn't look very appetising and I am wondering what to do with it. Verdict: 0/5 2) Char Kway Teow  Thanks to a dear friend who introduced me to this Singaporean lady's website.  She has so many recipes and one of which is a local favourite, char kway teow.  I had extra flat rice noodles one weekend