Yelly Eats

Celebration plate!

I love Southern food.  I think it’s because I did stay in Atlanta with my relatives for an extended period of time.  I loved it when I had my first taste of collard greens and ham hock.  I loved it when someone served sweet potato mash.  I loved the pies too…especially pecan pie.

So to me, Southern soul food, proper Southern fried chicken is a dish to be served when one is celebrating something.  So I decided that I needed to serve a very Southern plate on a very special day: Easter!

Celebration plate

For Easter lunch, I made Southern fried chicken, coleslaw, biscuits (they’re like savoury scones) and sausage gravy.

Yum!

Yelly Eats

Oversharing my lunch!

My go-to recipe is my Salt and Chilli belly pork.  It is so easy to make.  But the challenge is what to pair it with.  I am more inclined to pair it with steamed veg.  Usually the broccoli-cauliflower-carrot medly or just the broccoli or just the cauliflower.  Or some leafy green vegetable like choi sum or kale wilted.

Today it was paired with green beans.  The recipe has come from The BBQ Book from Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube series printed by Penguin books.  The book was purchased mainly for Christian Stevenson’s (aka DJ BBQ) dry rub recipes (they are amazing!).  But I’ve made 2 things from his book now and they are all so great to eat!

The BBQ Book

The green bean recipe is called Woodstock Dan’s green beans and is a doddle to make!  You just need a little bit of oil, a smidgen of butter, green beans (of course!), a sprinkling of nutmeg and salt and pepper to season et voila!  You have Woodstock Dan’s Green Beans!

Woodstock Dan's green beans

Lunch was consumed really (really) quickly today!

Green beans and chilli pork

Yelly Eats

Desktop lunching

Sometimes all you need is a pot noodle and a bottle of soda!

This might not be the most healthiest of lunches (the sodium content is quite high, as you can probably imagine and soda is never really healthy, even if you do drink the diet kind because artificial sweeteners can be nasty) but it is the most nostalgic for me.  It remindes me of noodle soups that can be bought in the Philippines.  I must say I’ve tried the “Anglicised” pot noodles that you can buy in most of the supermarkets but have never really appreciated them.  I tend to like the instant noodle soups — pot or otherwise — that you can get in most asian groceries.  They seem to have more flavour (aka salt!).

I have a desk job and I do not drive (YET!) so I’m sort of stuck in the office during the day (unless I decide to venture out, which I do, if it’s not raining).  So anything that I can plonk into my bag is a good lunch really.  Most of the time I’ll have a sandwich or a pot noodle.  My desktop lunches are sometimes more adventurous, especially when I can be bothered to pack my lunch the night before or wake up early to put my lunch together.  Then I’m lucky because I have a salad or a rice meal.

I remember once walking through the office with my pot noodle and my soda and an officemate said that hot soup and a cold soda was a very weird lunch combination.  I wasn’t offended but it made me think.  I’ve always had hot food with a cold drink…something to do with what I’ve always had growing up.  It was always hot steaming rice, with a viand and a cold drink, be it a fruit juice or a soda, or even just water.  I’ve never really thought about how weird a hot-cold lunch combo would be to some people, but now that I think about it, it might be weird after all.  Maybe it’s a cultural thing?