This is a quick, spicy and flavourful chicken dish made with the ready-made Lee Kum Kee Ma Po sauce, and best served warm with steamed white rice.

• 170 g Chicken breast
• 1/4 tsp Salt
• 1/2 Egg white
• 1/2 tbsp Cornstarch
• 1 stalk Spring onion
• ½ Red bell pepper
• 60 g Lee Kum Kee Ma Po sauce
• 1 tbsp Salad oil

1. Clean the chicken breast and slice them thinly. Add in salt, egg white and cornstarch. Cut the spring onions into chunks and the bell pepper into pieces.
2. Heat up a wok with oil, stir in the sliced chicken. Add in the spring onions, bell pepper pieces and Mapo sauce. Stir until all the ingredients are well-combined and cooked.

Needless to say, these cookies are a true treat for any chocolate lovers, but they are so darn sweeeeeeeeeet.....that would even satisfy the utmost sweet-tooth craving. Except that, I can't really complain having these caramel bars with a couple of glasses of bone dry sparkling Riesling in the afternoon.

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Spread the almond on the baking tray and bake for 10 minutes until they are fragrant. Remove, cool and roughly chop the baked almond.
2. Line a 28cm square baking pan with baking paper and grease the paper with butter. Beat butter and brown sugar on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add flour and salt, and beat until just combined. Press dough evenly into pan, and bake until lightly browned, about 30 minutes. Remove and set aside.
3. Cut the chocolate into the smaller chunks and place in a medium bowl. Heat granulated sugar and water in a small saucepan over medium heat until amber, 10 to 12 minutes. Remove from heat. Add butter, cream, and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring until smooth. Cool briefly.
4. Pour over chocolate. Let stand for 2 minutes. Stir to combine, and let stand until cool, about 10 minutes. Pour mixture over crust. Sprinkle the chopped almonds on top. Chill at least 4 hours, or overnight. Cut into 24 bars.

General Tso's Chicken is not really a Chinese dish, but actually an American creation. It is a sweet deep fried chicken dish served in American Chinese restaurants.

1. Rinse the chicken breast and pat dry with kitchen paper. Cut into the inch dices and place them in a bowl. Add in salt, egg and 1 tablespoon of cornstarch. Stir until well mixed and set aside for 20 minutes. Mix the ingredients for the sauce in a small bowl and save for the later use.
2. Fill a large skillet with enough oil and heat until very hot. Coat the chicken dices with cornstarch and deep-fry until golden and crispy. Drain on paper towels.
3. Leave a small amount of oil in the same skillet and heat until hot. Stir in garlic, chillies and spring onion chunks. Stir-fry briefly. Return the chicken, bell peppers to the skillet and pour the prepared sauce over. Stir until all well combined. Remove and serve with steamed rice.

Lentils are loaded with nutrients, fiber, complex carbohydrates, and folic acld. Lentils are a low calorie, low fat, and cholesterol free food.
There are hundreds of varieties of lentils, with as many as fifty or more cultivated for food. They come in a variety of colors, with red, brown, and green being the most popular. Lentils have an earthy, nutty flavor, and some varieties lend a slight peppery touch to the palate.

Lentils are also an important source of iron. Eating lentils with foods rich in Vitamin C, such as tomatoes, green peppers, broccoli, and citrus fruits or juices, helps the body absorb iron more efficiently.
Lentils are also protein rich. They lack only one protein, methionine. Adding grains, eggs, nuts, seeds, meat, dairy products, or egg will provide a complete protein.
Soluble fiber in lentils acts as a scrub brush, cleaning the digestive system. This type of fiber also decreases serum glucose and cholesterol, and decreases insulin requirements for people with diabetes. from Lentil Facts & Lore

1. Rinse lentils thoroughly under cold running water and drain. Heat butter in a skillet until melted. Add in minced garlic and chopped onion, stirring until soft and fragrant. Add grated carrot, crushed tomatoes and curry powder. Stir briefly.
2. Add in lentils, vegetable bouillon and water to the skillet. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat and simmer for 40 minutes or till the lentils are soft. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve.

The beetroot are eaten boiled either as a cooked vegetable, or cold as a salad with vinaigrette dressing or raw, either alone or combined with any salad vegetable. Beetroot's main benefits are that it contains no fat, very few calories and is a great source of fibre.
I too added some left-over Dinkel potstickers, that need using up, to the salad. It might look weird, but really really delicious.

1. Heat the olive and Mazola oils in a skillet. Add in the chopped shallot and sliced garlic. Stir-fry for over medium heat until lightly golden. Stir in the dried rosemary and vinegar, tip in the beetroot wedges, and stir for a few minutes, allowing the flavours to develope. Remove from the heat and leave to cool.
   
2. Take out the beetroot wedges and put them into a salad dish together with the salad leaves. Pour the vinegar dressing over the beetroot and salad leaves. Toss gently to mix through. Finally, just before serving, toss in the feta cheese cubes and taste for salt and pepper.

One of my favorite ways to cook frozen fish is in flavourful rich curry sauce together with some veggies. A delicious dish for any time of the year, but particularly welcome and soothing in the cold winter days with some steamed rice.

1. Rinse and pat fish dry with paper towels. Cut into the 2-inch chunks and place them in a bowl. Add in the marinade and leave it for 10 minutes.
2. Heat a skillet half-filled with cooking oil. Coat lightly the fish fillet with cornstarch and fry them over the medium heat until light golden. Remove and drain.
3. Heat a little of oil in the same skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking. Stir-fry sliced onion until aromatic, add in peas, return the fish to the skillet, pour in sauce and gently stir to combine. Cover and cook for 5 minutes. Dish up and serve with the steamed rice.

The delicate, tangy and sophisticated flavours of Belgian endive matches perfectly well with the Feta cheese and walnuts. Belgian endive, also known as French endive and witloof, or white leaf, is a leafy vegetable that looks like a thin cylinder of tight, pale green leaves. The tangy, deep, well-rounded flavor is unmatched by any other endive.

• 1 Belgium Endive
• 50 g Feta cheese
• 50 g Walnuts, roasted
• 1 tbsp Olive oil
• 2 tsp Raspberry vinegar
• Salt and pepper
• 1/4 tsp Dried parsley

1. Roast the walnuts in the 180C/350F oven for 5-8 minutes. Remove and leave to coll completely. Whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper together in a bowl to make the dressing.
2. Trim off the base of Belgium endive with a knife. Gently remove the 9 outer leaves, one at a time. Rinse leaves and pat dry with paper towel. Cut the remaining endives into the small pieces. Rinse and pat dry. Place in a large bowl with roasted walnut pieces and crumbled cheese. Drizzle the prepared dressing over and toss until blended.
3. Spoon the salad into the endive leaves and arrange them on a serving plate. If there’s any left, then place them in the center of the serving plate. Sprinkle the dried pasley over. Serve with melba toast or crackers if desired.

Thank you, Happy Cook@Foodie's Kitchen and PearlYn@A Full Time Housefly for sharing this cool award with me. Thanks!

This is a dense lemony pound cake with cranberries and a lemon glaze all over the top and soaked into the cake itself. The recipe is adapted from the Essen und Trinken

1. Grate the zest of two lemons, careful that you are grating only the coloured part of the rind. And squeeze the lemon to extract 11 tablespoons of juice. Grease and flour a 32x11 cm loaf pan. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Whisk together the flour and baking powder in a bowl.
2. Cream the butter, sugar and pinch of salt with a hand-held beater until light and fluffy. Add in eggs one at a time, alternately mixing in a tablespoon of flour mixture after each addition. Pour in the whipping cream, and then 8 tablespoons of lemon juice and finely grated zest. Fold to combine. Sift in the rest of the flour mixture and gently stir to combine. Finally fold the dried cranberries into the batter.
3. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Place the pan on the lower second rack and bake for about 80-90 minutes. After 35 minutes, cover the cake with a foil greased with butter. Remove and cool the cake in the tin briefly. Then remove the cake from the tin and allow it to cool completely.
4. Sift the powdered sugar in a bowl and add in the rest of lemon juice. Stir to combine. Pour evenly over the cake. Allow the glaze to set before slicing and serving.

The lotus root is a root vegetable that is indigenous to Asia, and is found underwater. The meat of the lotus root has a texture that is slightly crunchy, and mildly sweet. They can be eaten as fruit, sliced and stir fried, or stuffed with glutinous rice in its flue-shaped holes and steamed as dessert. Tender young lotus roots are good for salads while starchy mature lotus roots are good for making soups.

Lotus roots helps stop diarrhea, clears Heat and improve appetite. They contain much iron, vitamins B & C. The rich fibre content of lotus roots stimulates peristalsis and relieves constipation. Drinking 2 to 3 glasses of lotus root juice a day can stop bleeding of the esophagus an stomach (vomiting blood); bleeding of the rectum, intestines or stomach (blood in feces); nose bleeding or gum bleeding. Lotus root soup also serves similar purposes. Patients with high fever can drink it cold, while those with steady temperature should drink it warm. Drinking water chestnut juice mixed with pear juice can help clear phlegm while mixing it with grape juice and carrot juice eases dry tongues. Chinesefood Recipes

1. Stir-fried the finely chopped onion with a bit of butter until fragrant. Mince the ginger and lightly beat the egg. Pat the lotus slices dry with kitchen paper towels. Finely chop the chicken breast, add in stir-fried onion, minced ginger, egg, cornstarch, soya sauce, salt and pepper. Stir vigorously in one direction until the mixture has become thick and elastic.
2. To make a sandwich, spread the meat mixture onto each 8 lotus root slices, and cover with the rest of lotus root slices. Lightly coat each lotus root sandwich with cornstarch. To fry, set a large deep pan half filled with oil on medium heat until hot. Fry the prepared lotus root sandwiches until both sides lightly golden. Remove, drain and place them in a serving dish.
3. Stir all the ingredients of the sauce in a small saucepan on low heat until it has thickened. Pour the sauce over the lotus root sandwiches. Serve.

This strawberry tea chiffon cake has the flavor of refreshing fruit tea and is moist, tender, and light with a fluffy texture. I also used matcha tea powder for this chiffon cake as I wanted to clear up the cupboard. You can use the cake flour instead for the recipe if you have no green tea on hand.

The high oil and egg content creates a very moist cake, and as oil is liquid even at cooler temperatures, chiffon cakes do not tend to harden or dry out as traditional butter cakes might. This makes them better-suited than many cakes to filling or frosting with ingredients that need to be refrigerated or frozen, such as pastry cream or ice cream. Chiffon cakes tend to be lower in saturated fat than butter cakes, potentially making them healthier than their butter-heavy counterparts. The lack of butter, however, means that chiffon cakes lack much of the rich flavor of butter cakes, and hence they are typically served accompanied with flavorful sauces or other accompaniments, such as chocolate or fruit fillings. Wikipedia

1. Sift flour, matcha tea powder and baking powder together in a mixing bowl. Beat together 20 grams of sugar and strawberry-scented tea until blended and sugar has completely dissolved. Whisk in the salad oil until emulsified. Add in sifted flour mixture and mix until just blended. Add in one whole egg and egg yolks. Combine all the ingredients until you obtain a smooth batter.
2. Beat egg whites with salt and lemon juice over low speed until frothy and foamy. Gradually add in sugar in 3 portions, increase speed and beat until stiff but not dry. Carefully fold 1/3 of egg white mixture into flour mixture to lighten it and then another one third, finally fold the mixture with the remaining whites. Make sure no white streaks remain.
3. Pour into a 26-cm ungreased tube pan and spread evenly. Bake for about 75 minutes until done in the center of 155C/310F oven. Remove pan from oven and immediately turn upside down on the neck of a glass bottle to cool for at least 1 hour. Unmold after it's thoroughly cool.