Cohabiting: Frozen lauk.

I know I'm not the most housewife-material of all, despite my goal to become one. Well, not really to become a housewife housewife, rather, to be a stay-at-home-mom with a steady income. Now how complicated is that? So much for a medical degree. 

But anyway, allow me to become a little domesticated this time.

Not sure if I've said it before, but I've been on placement in Burton for the last 6 weeks, coming back to Leicester only during the weekends. And as you can guess, I think I have completely spoilt Adam in a sense that he won't cook for himself when I'm not around. He'll opt for the take-outs and delivery instead.  And sometimes nasi with telur goreng semata.

Sedih saya mendengarnya. Tummy department doesn't sound like it's doing too well.

That's when I decided to come up with a plan - frozen meals. God bless whoever invented freezer meals. It's well known among the Westeners as their food aren't so much like ours, which have to nasi and lauk. And rasanya orang Melayu kalau masak memang terbaik, macam nak bersilat kat dapur pun ada. Living in the UK where bahan masakan Melayu can be limited, frozen lauk solves half of the problem. I'm still desperate for daun kesum to make asam pedas, though!

So last Thursday we went to Tesco for chickens, a whole lot of chicken.

This, whole lot of chicken. All 24 pieces of them, (yes I counted).

And another whole lot of bawang

Plus about half a kg of beef. The beef isn't part of the frozen meal plan, but because someone posted something about 'daging jeruk' on Facebook the other day, I thought I just had to.

It was literally this. Slices of meat layered with lime/lemon and salt prepped overnight in the fridge, and shallow fried in oil, onion and chilli the next day. I tell you, this totally feeds the kampung girl in me.

And now, skipping to random parts of the cooking process. Since I'm good at cooking and not cooking-while-snapping-momentous-pictures, you'll see only the beginning of it, as halfway through I realised that my ayam kicap was nearly burnt, and the curry paste was making a mess all around, so grabbing a DSLR was the last thing on my mind.

I decided to make 3 dishes - ayam kicap, ayam masak lemak and kari ayam. I wanted to do tomyam too, but decided against it as there's not enough pots and pans, and the freezer wouldn't take it as well.

Half-frying the chicken for ayam kicap.

Slices of meat for paprik daging - this was for actual dinner, not quite for freezing.

Adding onions before I left them a little too long and realising that it's slightly burnt.

Curry and chilli paste, a whole lot of curry paste. Lesson learnt, use less next time.

Tumis kari.

At some point my stove looked like this. My heart bloomed with pride.

And in the end the kitchen was a complete mess. 

In my ideal world, Adam would come home to wash them (I cook, he cleans), but my ideal world also consists of a perfectly clean kitchen after a successful freezer meals prep. And it helps that we have an open plan kitchen, which means the living room and kitchen continues in one open space. It would be impossible to sit and watch TV with this view on the background, nope.

The end product. The OCD in me bursts into joy!

Each container holds 2 pieces of chicken, enough for 2 meals at a time. The two containers on the right keep cili kering yang dah ditumis untuk masak lauk 'merah', like paprik and anything sambal. I know it would be more space-savvy if I use the ziplock bag, as they can be compressed, and they don't get freezer-burnt for a long time. But I'm not very keen on the idea of having to transfer them into another bowl for serving, and we're not keeping these dishes for a very long time anyway. I foresee these would be gone in a week or two - which means 2 weeks of no bersilat kat dapur, haha.

Wife job, done. And now back to the duty role of a student, phew.