A family that eats together, bonds together. Having a heartwarming meal together with your loved ones offers quality time to know what goes on in each other’s life and inevitably enhances family bonding and relationships. Sadly Singaporeans are moving away from such simple pleasures in life due to heavy work commitments & hectic lifestyle.

To bring back the good old days where families cook and eat their meals together, Daniel (Daniel’s Food Diary) organised bloggers-for-bloggers initiative #CookForFamily. I am thrilled to be one of 100 bloggers who are privileged to be part of this meaningful project. The initiative was pretty aligned with my personal goal of picking up some cooking skills from Mom. But I shall start with a really simple dish – Fried Rice (??).

First, we steamed the rice. Mom has a really odd preference to literally steam the rice in a separate container within our rice cooker. The reason she gave was that the bottom of the  built-in rice cooker container had blacken over the years so it’s more hygiene to steam rice this way. We are still using quite the old school rice cooker, hopefully Mom will take my recommendation and try out some of these good pressure cookers for her cooking. 

Next, we make sure that the vegetables were properly rinsed to get rid of dirt and residual insecticides (if any).

Once that’s done, we started to chop the carrots into thin slices.

These carrot slices were then stacked and diced again into even smaller morsels.

This is the approved finished version.

Next, we turned our attention to the long beans. When Mom went off to discuss 4D results on the phone with one of her BFF, I was left in charged. Look at the long bean bracelet that I created! 😛

Unfortunately, my long beans failed to pass Mom’s stringent requirement. She diced them into even smaller pieces to make sure that they cook fast with the eggs.

Our final ingredient that needed chopper action was Mock Ham aka Ham Substitute. It imitates the texture, flavor and appearance of Ham. This was introduced by my aunt, a strong vegetarian advocate.

Eggs were our final ingredient to complete the preparation. I seriously did not know so many eggs were actually used in our usual fried rice. We have to first break the yolks before we start the beating. We can stop once a nice yellow texture is achieved.

Cooking started with frying of long beans and later carrots over oil & a little pinch of garlic.

In goes the eggs & it turned out to be quite a pretty sight. 🙂

By now, our steamed rice was ready.

Steamed rice was added after we have quick fried the Mock Ham.

Threw in our previous egg concoction ….

And introduced black soy sauce to add in more flavour.

Start tossing everything together violently for a good 5 minutes & Voilà! We have our family portion Fried Rice. This was enough to feed a family of 6.

Here’s how the final served product looked. Not my Mom’s proudest creation but she was really happy that I am taking initiative to learn her culinary skills.

There you have it. It’s not too tough to get your family members together for a #cookforfamily session. If the 100 of us bloggers can do it, we are absolutely sure you can as well. Have fun & share with us your experience in the comments below.

You may also like to check out my posts on other delicious food places here