I said I was going to add some spinach into my next smoothie and I did. If you’re wondering about the title, here is the background on how the name came about…

I was adding the ingredients into our Vitamix when Aristotle walks past.

Aristotle: Green! I’m not having any of that!
Me: It’s okay. You don’t have to. It’s for me.

At this time, I already had reservations about trying to offer my “green” smoothie to Aristotle. After blending everything, I noticed that it looked brown – like a chocolate smoothie (even though there isn’t any chocolate in it) – so I offered a little to Aristotle. He eyed it suspiciously and I quickly added, “It’s a chocolate smoothie! Sort of…” He agreed to try it. His reaction after he did? “Mmmm, not bad.” And he drank a cup.

And that’s how it got the name “Chocolate” Green Smoothie…

What’s in it?

• 3 stalks of celery
• 50 grams of baby spinach leaves
• 100 grams of blackberries
• 1 medium orange, peel removed
• 1 medium banana, peel removed
• 1 tbsp honey dissolved in a 100ml of hot water and cooled with 8 ice cubes
• 200 grams of mango yoghurt (I used Emmi)
• 2 scoops of Bulla Wildberry frozen yogurt

Throw everything into a high powered blender, like a Vitamix, and blend it into a liquid. This recipe makes roughly enough for 3 IKEA glass tumblers (plus/minus – depending on the size of your fruits and veggies).

The key to a “green smoothie”, when your target customer is a child who avoids “green veggies” like the plague, is to make sure it doesn’t look green. Dark coloured or strong coloured fruits or veggies can help to mask the colour. In this case, the blackberries did the trick.

Forget The Sneaky Chef and Deceptively Delicious (which failed miserably anyway). If you want your kids to get their veggies, this is the way to do it: Frozen Yoghurt Smoothies.

I recently tried the recipe below and I reckon it takes a pretty perceptive palate to taste the carrots and celery. Raw carrots and celery are two veggies I find particularly hard to consume but I’d happily drink this anytime, anywhere. Compared to the recipes from The Sneaky Chef and Deceptively Delicious, I reckon you’ll get in a lot more veggies per serve in a smoothie. Throw in some power fruits and you’ve got a pretty potent nutrient cocktail.

So what’s in it?

• 3 stalks of celery
• 1 whole carrot, peel and ends removed
• 100 grams of blackberries
• 1 medium orange, peel removed
• 1 tbsp honey dissolved in a 100ml of hot water and cooled with 8 ice cubes
• 200 grams of mango yoghurt (I used Emmi)
• 2 scoops of Bulla Wildberry frozen yogurt

Throw everything into a high power blender, like a Vitamix, and blend it into a liquid. This recipe makes roughly enough for 3 IKEA glass tumblers (plus a little bit more – depending on the size of your fruits and veggies).

And that is how your sneak veggies into your child’s diet…

This is a simple recipe from my SIL that was a real winner with my biggest fussy eater so it had to go down in the undomestic goddess recipe journal. I figure that if I can find a good udon, smallest fussy eater will love it too.

Without further ado, here it is…

Ingredients:

• Dashi powder
• soy sauce
• water
• soba noodles
• beef, marinate with salt and black pepper
• spinach
• spring onions

Method:

• Add water to a stock pot. Bring to the boil. Blanch the spinach. Put aside.
• Use the same pot to cook your noodles. Set aside.
• Grill or pan fry the beef – just enough to seal it. You will be pouring hot soup over it later and it will cook further so don’t over do it now. Set the beef aside for at least 10 minutes before slicing it up. You can also roast a larger piece of beef and freeze the excess for another day. It’s great for beef sandwiches and other easy meals.
• In a fresh pot, boil more water. Add miso powder and soy sauce.
• Put noodles, spinach and sliced beef into a bowl for one person. Add boiling soup. Sprinkle diced spring onions.
• Serve with wasabi and soy sauce.

And this is what you’ll get…

So my hubby says I never take care of his health because I don’t bother to brew Chinese herbal concoctions for him so I decided to make this soup. This is another soup recipe I recall my mother making when I was a child. I didn’t have the exact recipe for it, so I went on the fly. The recipe you see below is how I did it. Alternatively, you can check out a more authentic recipe from Visual Recipes which includes some herb called Dang shen (also known as poor man’s ginseng). If I recall correctly, dang shen is quite bitter so I’d think twice before adding it.

Here’s my soup recipe…

Ingredients:

• Half a chicken carcass
• 10 Red dates
• 2 Dried scallops
• 1 handful of dried Goji berries
• Water (I used 2 IKEA bowls)
• salt to taste

Notes:

• Before making any soup, the norm is to boil the meat in water for a few minutes to remove the “meat scum” (or albumin). After that, you wash the meat and put it back into fresh water. If you can’t be bothered, the easier way is to boil the meat in water, skim off the meat scum, then add your remaining soup ingredients. Chicken is generally more forgiving than pork because it doesn’t usually have as much “meat scum”.

Method:

• Put all the ingredients into the slow cooker and let it cook for a couple of hours.

It should look like this minus the dang shen.

My Mum used to make this a lot when I was a kid and I loved it so I tried making it some time back. I was delighted to discover that it’s a hit with the fussy hubby as well so I thought I’d better write down the recipe before I forget what I did. Here it is…

Ingredients:

• 1 whole chicken chopped into pieces
• marinade: 1 tbsp oil, 1 tsp sesame oil, dash of pepper, 2 tbsp light soy sauce, 3 tbsp dark soy sauce, 200 ml water
• a few slices of ginger
• a few cloves of garlic (smash them)
• 1 onion, sliced
• 2 potatoes, peeled and chopped into large chunks
• 1 carrot, peeled and chopped into large chunks

Method:

• Marinade the chicken pieces with the marinade ingredients.
• Put everything into a stock pot.
• Add the ginger, garlic, onion, potatoes and carrot.
• Bring to the boil, stirring occasionally.
• Drop the heat and simmer for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• Remove from heat and serve.

The end result can be a bit oily so you might want to skim off some of the oil layer. You can also remove the chicken skin.

Variations: you can omit either the carrots or the potatoes, but I think you must have at least one of them to maintain the flavour of the dish.

Photos: again, I forgot to take some so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was good – not that it was much to look at anyway.

After years and years of annoying garlic-peeling, I finally learned how to peel garlic the easy way while watching my MIL prepare dinner one evening.

If it’s been annoying you, too, here’s what you do:

Get a meat cleaver - I don’t mean those small, pissy ones, I mean the big, heavy-duty ones you see the butchers wielding – like this:

Place your garlic bulb onto a chopping board then use the flat of your cleaver to beat the bejeezus out of your garlic and the skin will fall off on its own.

Okay, okay, I lie. There is a bit of peeling required but not much – just the little bits still hanging on.

It’s easier to do this if you have a heavy cleaver. Now I know why my MIL always insists on having such a heavy cleaver…

We have a problem with our rice storage – it always gets infested with weevils before we can finish the bag. Perhaps it’s because I don’t cook often enough so we take a really long time to get through it. Plus, our warm, humid weather doesn’t help. I also tried the recommended storage tips:

• store rice grains in air tight container
• add garlic cloves to repel weevils

Apparently, black pepper, bay leaves and cloves are also good for repelling weevils.

Recently, I stumbled on the best way yet – freeze our rice grains. Turns out that it is actually a method to prevent weevil-infestation. The recommendation is to freeze your rice grains for a week after purchase to kill the existing eggs. I find it’s easier to just keep them permanently in the freezer so I never have to worry about it. We don’t cook a lot so freezer storage space isn’t really a problem for us anyway.

It was suggested that I thaw out the rice for a bit before cooking it but since I usually set the rice cooker on timer a few hours before hand, this isn’t really a problem for me. I don’t know what happens if you cook it straight from the freezer. Nothing I suppose, but the more discerning palates might be able to detect the differences so you should probably bear it in mind.

For more tips on preventing weevils, check out WikiHow.

The slow cooker is the undomestic goddess’ godsend. After burning two pots (because I forgot about them), I’ve given up trying to cook anything that requires long periods of simmering over the stove. Unfortunately, you can’t really get very far with that when you’re cooking Asian-style. The typical Asian dinner includes a soup, a meat dish, a veggie dish and rice. And the typical soup usually requires long hours of simmering so you can extract every last drop of flavour from your ingredients. Since I’m masquerading as my family’s version of Martha Stewart for Asian cuisine, that meant a solution has to be found and this is it:

The slow cooker. Just throw in your soup ingredients in the morning, set it to cook while you go about your day, and by dinner time, you have scrummy Asian soup just the way your mother used to make them. What’s not to love about a slow cooker? It has since become one of my top kitchen appliances.

Not that I’ve actually figured this bit out but it seems slow cookers are not only good for making Asian soups. You can make just about anything in a slow cooker (including bake a cake) if you know how. In fact, there are a whole host of books devoted entirely to recipes using the slow cooker. Now that we are fully aware of the wonders of the slow cooker, we’ll be sure to explore this area of cooking further.

It is a fact that Undomestic Goddesses burn pots. It is inevitable. If you don’t, then you’re probably in the wrong place because this post is not meant for you.

So you were cooking something on the stove, forgot to watch it and now you have an inch-thick, charred mess on the base of your pot that is not scrubbing off. What do you do? Is the pot condemned? Should you start looking for a replacement?

Before you rush off to the nearest department store, there are a few tips to try before you decide whether to dispose of your pot or not. Having burned the contents in my pot twice before (quite severely, I might add – like this and this), I can safely assure you that there is no need to get a replacement pot.

How to remove severely blackened, burnt food from a pot?

1. Remove the unburnt food.

2. Cover the burnt parts of the pot with water.

3. Add vinegar (copious amounts – this is one case where more is definitely better).

4. Add Cif (be generous).

5. Leave the pot overnight.

6. Scrape off the burnt parts with a metal spoon and you’ll be amazed by how easily it comes off. If there are still bits stuck, just repeat steps 2 to 6 again.

Also make sure you have a good sponge. The Scotch Brite Heavy Duty Scour Pads are awesome! They are even better than steel wool. Alternatively, use the scouring surface of the Scotch Brite Heavy Duty Scrub Sponge. There are a lot of copy cats in the market and I used to think they were all the same until I tried the real Mc Coy for myself.

I did see some other suggestions like using Bicarb Soda and bringing the liquid to the boil but I can’t say that these had much effect on my pots. Just in case you’re wondering, the above methods were used on stainless steel pots. I don’t know the effects on fancy non-stick pots and pans so I’d thread very carefully there. Good luck!

Fried rice – this simple goodie will save you every time unless your children are Aristotle and Hercules, in which case, they won’t go near it with a ten-foot pole even though they’ve just been crying hungry for the past half hour while you frantically scramble to throw dinner together taking every short cut known to woman-kind. Fussy eaters aside, this is a terrific dish to serve up when you’ve got old rice and random ingredients that you don’t know what to do with.

Here’s how I like to do my fried rice (with hubby’s preferences in the brackets)…

Ingredients:

• 2 bowls of rice cooked from the day before (or whatever you have in leftovers)
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• dash of pepper
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp light soy sauce
• 1/2 tbsp concetrated chicken stock
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 100g of frozen veggies – I like a mix of carrots, peas and corn because they give the fried rice some colour (if hubby is eating, it should be green beans, bean sprouts, or spinach)
• 100g of chopped pork, chicken, beef (whatever’s your fancy)
• 1 chinese sausage, diced (if hubby is eating, I omit this one)

Method:

• Break up the rice clumps and mix in sesame oil, pepper, chicken stock and salt.
• Cook the veggies and set aside.
• Fry the garlic with the meat and set aside.
• Pour beaten eggs into the wok and half cook.
• Add in everything else – rice, vegetables, meat and seasoning.
• Mix well over the heat.
• Serve.

The end result looks sort of like this except instead of prawns, it should be pieces of meat. You can add in a few prawns if you fancy but you have to bear in mind that you will have to de-shell them and that takes up extra time and effort.