All Food Recipes

Since Aquarians love fruits, serving one isn’t enough. I’ve mixed some of the best yellow fruits with orange juice for a simple yet tasty salad.
Cut up mangoes, honeydew melons, lemons slices and mix with Mandarin orange segments and golden raisins. Arrange the fruits attractively in a bowl. Mix orange juice with a little Cointreau and 7-up. Pour over the fruits and serve immediately.

Choose a chicken of any size. If you are organising a sit-down dinner of, say, six persons, you might be better off preparing six spring chickens. Your guests will surely be impressed as they are likely to believe that you have gone through a major production number just to feed them.
Chickens roast beautifully with the simplest marinate. Just rub a little soy sauce and pepper all over the bird. Brush with corn oil and get it into a moderately hot oven. If you’re unsure about how long your bird should remain in there, consider this general rule. It’s 15 minutes for every 500 g of the chicken plus an axtra 15. While the chicken is baking, baste it with its own juices in the roasting pan.
To make a delicious stuffing, combine chopped fried ham with chopped onions, finely diced apple, chopped celery leaves, clove of garlic, chopped walnuts, some thyme and breadcrumbs. Add an egg to bind. Stuff the chicken and seal the ends by stitching them up or secuting with toothpicks.
When the chicken is ready, scoop out the stuffing and serve it separately. Don’t leave it inside the chicken for you guests to excavate!

If you want to cook like a chef but don’t have the time to master the intricacies of the kitchen, Singapore chef Florence Quinn offers the following “cheat sheet” to bring out the best in your meals:

1. Can’t find good ripe tomatoes for pasta sauce or a simple soup? Buy a good Italian brand of plain canned peeled tomatoes. Tomatoes are usually canned when at their best, very ripe, full of flavours and definitely tastier than any tomato that is harvested too early so that it can withstand long storage and transport.

2. To add extra flavour and texture to vegetables for a salad or a soup, roast them first with a bit of olive oil and some sturdy fresh herbs such as thyme or rosemary. Try it with potatoes for a roasted potato salad, and squashes and pumpkin for soups.

3. Buy dry spices whole and keep them in a dry and cool place - they’ll keep for years. Before using, roast them in a dry pan to release the flavours, then grind them down with a mortar and pestle or an electric coffee grinder. Use right away when the flavours are the strongest.

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Eating low-fat but deliciously is as easy and painless as scarfing a pint of Haagen-Dazs’ Cookies & Cream… (stop right there!). Promise. Stick to the menu for a week and you’ll never go hungry or crave for sweets, coz this balanced high-energy diet lets you have your cake, and cookie, and eat it too. For the lactose intolerant or those not partial to milk, substitute with low-fat soya milk. Alternatively, you trim more fat with skim milk. If you’re a veggie freak you’re in luck - load up on the raw stuff till they sprout from your ears. But remember, even if yourself, extra weight doesn’t pile on overnight. Simply get right back on track the next day. The aim is for steady, gradual loss - no more than half a kilo a week. Here’s to a trimmer, healthier you!

MONDAY
Breakfast
1 glass fruit juice
1 cup ready-to-eat cereal topped with 1 banana and 3/4 cup low-fat or skim milk
1 slice toast with 1 tsp butter or margarine
coffee or tea

Lunch
90 g grilled skinless chicken breast on whole wheat bun with tomato slices, shredded lettuce and 1 tsp salsa
1/2 cup coleslaw
1 cup low-fat milk
2 fig cookies

Dinner
1 serving linguine stir-fried with green beans garlic
spinach-mushroom salad with 2 tsp vinaigrette
1-2 slices wholemeal bread
1/2 cup fruit sorbet

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An age-old story has it that some 5000 years ago, a few tea leaves blew into a cup of hot water held by the mythical Chinese emperor Shen Nung. the ruler declared the resulting brew a considerable improvement over plain water. Moreover, he recommended it as a remedy for kidney trouble, fever, chest infection and tumors “that come about the head.”

Shen’s prescription may have been extravagant. But today’s biomedical researchers are finding evidence to confirm other centuries-old lore about the drink’s powers to prevent illness and prolong life.

“It appears that the components in tea might help reduce the risk of a number of major chronic diseases, such as stroke, heart atack and some cancers,” says Dr. John Weisburger, a senior member of the American Health Foundation, a research center in Valhalla, New York.

Drinking tea may even fight tooth decay. All this is good news fro most of the planet: tea is the world’s most widely consumed beverage, next to water, with an estimated one billion cups drunk daily.

ANCIENT TONIC.
In countless cultures throughout history, tea has been regarded as a medicinal wonder. Over a thousand years ago Buddhist monks drank tea for religious reasons - to help them stay away during meditation. (This effect we now know is caused by caffeine; tea roughly half the caffeine of coffee.)

The monks also believed tea had curative powers, and as Buddhis, spread, so did tea - and the claims for Shogun Minamoto Sanetomo lay at death’s door from overfeasting when a monk prescribed a regimen of prayer and tea. When the shogun recovered, that was evidence enough for his countrymen to take up the brew.

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350 g (12 oz) desiccated coconut is the equivalent of one fresh nut. Put it into a pan and pour over it about 150 ml (1/4 pint) of water. Heat it gently until the water just starts to bubble (if it actually boils for a short time, this does no harm). Pour this into a liquidizer and add enough cold water to make the amount of santen you require. Run the liquidizer for 20 or 30 seconds, then sieve the resulting mush, forcing it through the sieve with your hand and squeezing the coconut flakes as dry as you can. If the recipe calls for thick santen, the ‘first extraction’ is sufficient. If you need thin santen, put the coconut back into the liquidizer, add more cold water and repeat the process. If you have no liquidizer, you can still squeenze and sieve coconut and water, several times over if necessary, until you have the consistency and quantity you require.

Creamed coconut can be bought from many grocers and supermarkets, and also from stores. It comes in compressed dry white slabs, looking like half a pound of lard. You can use it as a kind of ‘instant santen’ - but only in those recipes 9e.g. Sambal Goreng) where santen is added at the and, after the main process of cooking is complete. Simply cut off a chunk from the slab and put it in the pan; it will melt, excatly as butter does. If you find, in almost any dish, that your sauce is going to be too thin, this is the easiest and quickest way to thicken it at the last moment.