Inventive meals for two

Home cook Elaine Chiou whips up all sorts of creative meals for two on a daily basis.

IF you think about it, hardly anyone cooks for two. There’s so much effort that goes into making a meal – the shopping, prep work, cooking and cleaning up, that it only seems worth the time if there are at least four people consuming the food. Which is also why most couples opt to eat out rather than go through all that trouble.

But for home cook Elaine Chiou, this goes against everything she believes in. Chiou is a media buyer who loves cooking and cooks every single day for herself and her husband. She thinks this daily ritual is much quicker and easier than most people are led to believe.

“You may think it’s not worth the effort, but that’s not true. So many times, I have thought about calling McDonald’s to deliver food, but that would take about an hour. So indtead, I’d look in my pantry and say, ‘Okay, I have noodles, I have prawns in the freezer, I have seaweed, I can just combine it.’ Within 20 to 30 minutes, you have a simple meal and you know you have controlled the flavour and the sodium and you feel good after eating it,” she says.

Ironically, Chiou never cooked at all until she was in her late 20s, as there was no culture of cooking in her family.

“I didn’t come from a tradition of people cooking at home, because my mum was very busy. So every time, we would just eat out. But I was very interested in trying my hand at cooking, because I love eating!” she says.

Since then, Chiou has gone on to experiment with recipes, starting out with Indian food because she married an Indian man who loves curries.

“I wanted to make tasty, authentic Indian curries, so I bought a lot of Indian recipes books and learnt those principles and applied them to other cuisines as well,” she says.

Chiou’s meals for two are one-dish wonders designed around invention – whatever strikes her fancy in the supermarket or whatever happens to be in her pantry or fridge. Like her saffron prawn pasta, which is made up of ingredients she had available at the time. The pasta is delicious, with fat, tender prawns, bursts of edamame, spinach lurking in the foreground and an opulent undercurrent of saffron to tie it all together.

“It came about because I was experimenting with prawns and pasta. One day, I just had this crazy idea to add saffron in it. And then I realised it needed something more, so I added chopped spinach because I had it in the fridge. And it’s the bomb! The spinach gives it an earthy flavour which is integral to this dish,” she says.

Chiou also loves noodles and says she cannot go two days in a row without eating it, which is why a lot of her dishes have been improvised to include noodles. Like her poached chicken in silken noodles, which was adapted from a friend’s poached chicken rice recipe. The tender chicken and noodles are accompaby nied a light, flavourful broth.

“I love my friend’s poached chicken rice so much, but I also love nooso dles, I tweaked it, added my own twist to it, and also perfected the technique of poaching the chicken, because that’s how I like it,” she says.

While many of Chiou’s meals revolve around pasta and noodles, her butterfish porridge is also a treasured favourite. The porridge is a silken, creamy affair accentuated by the aquatic flavours of fish and seaweed.

“I started making plain porridge for my parents. Then I saw butterfish in the supermarket and thought it might be an interesting addition. When I put it in the porridge, I realised it worked really well,” she says excitedly.

Some of her recipes also pay homage to her husband’s roots, like her lamb dalcha pasta which actually came about by accident. “I had heard of dalcha, but I didn’t know what it was and had never really tried it. But one day, I tried making lamb and added spices and dhal. And then I was thinking ‘There must be this dish in existence.’ So I started researching and found out that it was called dalcha. But I didn’t seek out the recipe, it came to me,” she says, laughing.

Ultimately, Chiou says she has been able to come up with all sorts of creative meals for her and her husband because the more she cooks, the more she understands flavour pairings and how to mix and match ingredients.

“I think you can go about doing this when you know combinations. Then you can play around with ingredients,” she says.

In the past two years, Chiou’s arsenal of recipes has grown so vast that she started a blog, www.ciou yourfood.com, solely to document her growing collection.

“I thought I should just write down my recipes, so at least I can refer to it later. And that’s what happened because now when I cook, I refer to my blog for recipes,” she says.

In many ways, Chiou says cooking has changed her life and made her a different person.

“I stopped going out to eat and took joy in producing food, not just consuming it. It’s been a very personal journey and I can see myself growing. That’s why I feel like more people should do it because it’s very easy to cook meals for two every day,” she says.