Counting down 3 days!

Homemade food is ready!

Wholemeal molasses chocolate cake with chocolate chunks and sunflower seeds.

Recipe here.

Black chocolate chip cookies from FadRizals Cakes.

Baked ginger and lemon salmon with stir-fry spaghetti.

I'm a lazy cook. You knew it when I resorted to fixing salmon in an oven.

The batch of salmon we bought had its skin on but it was cut width wise, so I didn't have to cook the salmon skin down and then flip it. Salmon serves best with tomato or lemon, or anything with a refreshing sour tang.

Both recipes were adapted from Food and Travel's July 2012 issue.

Wholemeal bread with fruit jam.

Our home just ran out of stuff to snack on after finishing the last slices of chocolate cake. I diverted to bread, made in an oven.

Wishing I could top the loaf with raisins too, instead of nuts or seeds. I went overboard with the dusting flour (since it says to sprinkle generously). Don't do this or you'll be eating lots of flour over your bread.

Recipe adapted from Delia's Quick and Easy Wholemeal Loaf.

Nigella Lawson's old fashioned chocolate cake, wholemeal low-sugar remake.

Sugar is addictive.

One day I was craving for cakes and chocolates. But I can't afford to have so many chocolates in my cake - that would literally turn it into a brownie. So I turned to a less sweeter alternative by using low sugar cocoa powder and baking chocolates.

Through the day I whipped up an adapted version of Nigella Lawson's chocolate cake by substituting some materials.

It resulted in a chocolate-y and not too sweet (evidently for my mom too as she savoured as much as I did) cake.

The chocolate cake slices look plain without some icing sugar dust but I'm alright with that. My cake was crumbly. And because the top nearly burned, it's hardened, crumbles more than the rest of the cake.

You can amp up the chocolate by boosting the amount of chocolate chunks. Or make the cake more airy by using 200 g sugar as called for in the original recipe.

Bring back the butter rather than using vegetable oil. The better measure for the oil was supposed to be 3/4 the amount of suggested butter (131 g oil to substitute for 175 g unsalted butter), but I increased it to 170 g so that the cake would remain moist as wholemeal flour and molasses sugar soak up more moisture than plain white flour and white sugar. It's your verdict: 175 g butter or 170 g vegetable oil?

And throw in some nuts I'd say.

Life, changing, roasted broccoli.

I came across the Amateur Gourmet's makeover of Ina Garten's roasted broccoli, claiming that it was the best broccoli ever. Sure enough, it was followed with tempting pictures of broccoli florets and stalk roasted to perfection, with a tint of yellow and brown.

I do agree, roasting broccoli is a way to perfect the vege. So far my favourite broccoli was grilled at a local restaurant, it had a buttery, fragrant tang.

I omitted Parmesan and lemon from his remake after roasting ... Should have stuck to my lemon juice instinct 'cause I did not recall the exact recipe.

This was my second take on roasting broccoli. This time, I covered the broccoli completely in foil. It's to prevent the oil from splattering around.

The first? I had my vege burnt at the bottom as I was squinting to check the slightest browning which was made difficult because of the yellow lighting in the oven.

Beef & pork burger.

Hey all.

This is my take on V-day's dinner, a burger as he requested. This fella asked for pizza and stuff - all kinds of weird choices that couldn't survive a few hours' trip, so burger was my only go.

I made the burger's prototype on V-day eve and I only had the demo's picture. The real valentine's deal looked and tasted much better.

The beef-to-pork ratio for the patty I made was 2:1 but you can add and subtract as you like, or make it wholly from beef or pork. A regular patty would weigh 1/2 pound (roughly 226 g) but I wanted a thinner patty, so 150 g meat was my standard for one burger.

Spaghetti with pork and napoli sauce.

Have I expressed my concern over my low-carb diet that includes an eradication of white wheat foodstuff including spaghetti?

Well it turns out that boiled white spaghetti has a low glycemic index of 44 according to IDF, but still it is loaded with carbohydrates (43 g carbs in every 140 g spaghetti, as listed on Google) so eat in an appropriate amount. I've always been a small eater so that's not much of my concern.

Not sure how many variations of tomato sauce have I posted in this blog but here goes - my most used pasta sauce recipe at home.