Quick Fix Meals - Simple and yet Delicious

There are not many eating places within close proximity to this apartment that we are staying here in Beijing. Even though there are a couple of local fast food joints in the neighbourhood, we rather stay indoor than to walk in the cold just to get our daily meals settled. So I ended up having to prepare home cook meals every single weekday even though I'm suppose to be on vacation.

Since we would only be here for a few weeks, I could not bring myself to stock up too many ingredients. Hence, fixing 2 meals a day proofs to be quite a challenging task especially for someone who is not a good cook to start with.

With a rather empty pantry, I could only prepare very simple meals using minimal ingredients, seasonings and utensils. There is no wok in the kitchen, so I can't even cook fried rice as the frying pan that's available is too small and shallow for any serious stir frying!


Thank goodness my kids don't mind having porridge for their lunch here. Back at home, they would definitely prefer having their favourite takeaway food from the hawker centre than to eat the usual porridge I prepare for them. Only barely two weeks, they already miss their laksa, nasi lemak, chicken rice, fried carrot cake, char kway teow and roti prata!


This bowl of porridge is cooked with short-grain rice or what the locals refer to as "大米". Unlike long grains, it is quite sticky and I had to keep adding water to the pot of bubbling porridge. Yet, I still ended up with very thick and gooey porridge, very much like the baby food which I used to prepare for my kids when they were still toddlers.

To make a simple minced beef porridge more appealing visually, I threw in some frozen vegetables to an otherwise plain, mono-tone meal. There were not a single word of complains when I served the porridge with lots of pork floss as toppings ^_^'


It turns up to be a good thing that I have to work within some constraints, otherwise I would never discover that I could actually make roast chicken with just salt, pepper and some butter! These delicious drumsticks were seasoned with a generous sprinkling of salt and black pepper. When the oven was preheated to 200 degC, I rubbed some butter all over and under the skin before popping them into the oven. Less than half an hour, I was rewarded with a tray of roast chicken drumsticks...with crispy skin and tender juicy meat. The trick to getting crispy skin? Just make sure that after cleaning the chicken, pat dry with paper towels...make sure it is very very dry before seasoning with salt and pepper as you do not want to create any steam in the oven.

Now, I am all set and ready to roast a chicken for our Christmas eve dinner ;)