Flied Lice At Last!

After 4 months in Dubai, I have coooked fried rice at last! Waiting this long was pretty shameful of me since i come from an Asian background.

It's a great recipe to use up left over ingredients in. There was no encouragement needed for Aidan and Belal to chow this dish down.

Smoked Salmon Pasta Salad

This is a easy meal for summer cos there's minimal cooking involved. The dish is served room temperature or chilled. Summer in Dubai involves enough sweating without having to perspire when you’re merely eating!

All you need is cooked pasta, smoked salmon, green beans or snow peas, frozen peas, whole mustard, coriander or parsley, mayonnaise or salad dressing.

Wait until the pasta is cool, give all the ingredients a mix and chow down or you can chill the pasta salad in the fridge before eating.

Beef & Vegetable Couscous

It's fantastic how versatile couscous is. It looks similar to rice but it doesn’t have the same filling effect like rice does.

We always have a box in the pantry just incase we’re stumped as to what to cook for dinner. That’s when the trusty old couscous makes it’s appearance and we’ll serve it with sautéed meat and veggies. It saves the day every time!

Chicken Cari

YAY....another dish reminds me of home. Great to have on cold winter nights, not that we'll be seeing many of those in Dubai.

The recipe has definitely improved since making it the first time back at St. Peters. Crazy me thought Vietnamese curry actually contained CURRY....no! My mum informed me that the colour is derived from tumeric and not curry powder. So that explained by our lips were burning after I added ladel fulls of curry powder the first time I cooked it to get the yellow colour!

Live and learn.

Tuna Lasagna

If you ever want a slight variation to the good old mince beef lasagna, tuna is the go. Replace the mince beef with a can of tuna. And replace the tomato sauce with milk, whole grain mustard & Worcester sauce. The same layering and topping with cheese applies.

I never used to touch the oven but I am getting a good command of that piece of machinery now that I’ve overcome my fears. I will no longer restricted to baking cakes in woks!

And no longer is Aidan my only victim since Belal moved in! ........MUAHAHAHAHAHA !!!!!!

Vietnamese Ricepaper Rolls - Gio Cuon

Oh it was a great reminder of eating at my mum’s place when we had this dish for the first time in Dubai. It will be fantastic eating for the scorching summers here when you don’t want to eat anything that’s hot.

We didn’t have high expectations of finding rice paper in Dubai. Especially when we have seen for ourselves the lack of Asian grocery stores here, we just assumed that Asian grocery stores were everywhere in the world! There is the odd Pilipino supermarket but they don’t have a greater variety of products then the regular hypermarkets, just a wider range of brands of the same products. Oh well it’s better then nothing.

But be assured, the next carton we’re expecting should be packed full of Asian grocery items I instructed my mum to send.

And it’s crazy to say but I have been cooking more Vietnamese dishes while in Dubai then when I was living back at home – like anyone else I was thinking why bother paying attention when you live with someone who does it so well! Now that I’m not close to close to home, I’ve been raiding the internet for Vietnamese recipes.

Man the “Blue Dragon” brand of hoisin sauce I bought was extra salty, I had to water it down with what seemed like half a litre of milk before the sodium level dropped! Mental note: good heart attack ingredient when I want to get Aidan out of the picture.

Posh Tuxedo Strawberries

What a great way to encourage kids to eat fruit by disguising them in chocolate, in this case the kid is Aidan.

If you’re using the microwave to melt chocolate, it’s best to use the “defrost” option. This way it will prevent the chocolate from over heating and hardening up again. Use 2 minute intervals each time then check and stir until all dissolved.

The biggest inconvenience was the lumps in the chocolate, it wasn’t a soft smooth consistency. So I had to use a skewer to help spread the chocolate over the strawberries.

The white chocolate set quickly at room temperature but the brown chocolate needed extra help setting in the fridge. I didn’t have baking paper to line the plates to put the chocolate coated strawberries, so instead I used aluminum foil which was fine to peel

off the coated strawberries.

When you are finished the strawberries look too good eat because of the time and effort involved but don’t hold back, anything with chocolate is tasty for sure! While making the tuxedo strawberries, I think I managed to lick more chocolate off my hands then put on the strawberries.

Mini Quiche Lorraine & Shepards Pie on Leb Bread

This is a good way of using up leftovers. In this instance I have made quiche lorraine and shepards pie using Lebanese bread as the pie base, an alternative to dough bases and less messy.


Small oven proof bowls or muffin tins can be used to shape the Lebanese bread into pie bases and scoop in a few spoonfuls of filling/leftovers. Depending on the type of filling, whisked egg can be poured over the filling to create quiche-like pies or topped with cheese or mashed potato - absolutely anything to your liking and what a better way to use up ingredients.

A good tip from Belal's mum is to buy large sized Lebanese bread, cut them into the desired smaller sizes and freeze them. This way they will be as fresh as the day you bought them when defrosted. No more stale bread!