Birthday Lunch at Yen's Kitchen...

This is one of my kitchen crew members. I've known her since she was seven. Yesterday was her seventeenth birthday but we chose today to celebrate as today is a public holiday. A public holiday which I still work as usual but I always have time during lunch hour. This year we planned to do all birthday celebrations differently. Each of them will have their very own lobster and we don't intend to hold any big parties like last year until we got so tired. So, I'm the only one cooking and I can manage.

I asked her a week earlier what she wanted. It's either Western cuisine, Chinese or Nyonya cuisine. She chose Nyonya cuisine which went very well with the neighbour who loves spicy food. All of us love spicy food but my own curry kapitan chicken was too spicy for myself... huhuhuhu but it was perfectly nice for everyone else. I blended my own curry paste. Don't ask me to buy from those stalls selling all sort of paste. I got headache looking at that. Isn't it easier to blend your own paste and cheaper also?

I made jiu hu char as well, something I love very much and hubby helped me with the seasoning. I was really busy until I thought I was gonna break my back standing in the kitchen after rushing back from my morning class. I scheduled our lunch at 1p.m. and everyone has arrived except that the food was ready only at 2 p.m. *sigh* Nyonya cuisine is one tedious cuisine to prepare.

Otak-otak, each person one. Hubby took such a long time cleaning and blanching the banana leaves then making them into boxes. It took just 10 minutes to steam and they turned out perfectly well, too. But it took us less than a minute to scoop everything out and throw away the banana leaf box. Daun kadok was plucked from my garden, same goes for the kaffir lime leaves. 

I boiled a pot of fish maw soup with self-made prawn balls and threw in some carrots and a small yam bean to make the soup sweet. A whole cabbage was thrown in as well. I love fish maw. Quality fish maw can be bought from Tesco as it's the Chinese New Year season now.

I prepared all those four nyonya dishes while mi mama made salad. Then Judz brought porky from Klang but I couldn't find the photos. I think I missed out taking the photos.

You know when I look at this photo, I don't know what I'm doing actually. I thought I won't be hosting anymore dinners and lunches and parties but I jumped to the opportunity of having a public holiday and dived straight to host a birthday lunch. I think I like hosting eating events. Hehhehehe... but it's a small scale one for today.

There were not many photos taken as we were very hungry. Our side of the table attacked food the fastest. We even grabbed the plates from the other end of the table and we finished them in no time at all. These people here have steel stomach. We were very full already until we could barely move but then we couldn't wait to start on dessert. 

Two of the cheesecakes were hacked. The round chilled chocolate cheesecake was prepared by another kitchen crew. The batik Nutella cheesecake was done by mi mama. So, this year I can retire from baking birthday cakes.