Simple dishes for parties
Sunday, June 19th, 2011I love cooking for parties and I just need to arrange them nicely and lay on our prettily wrapped up table where we do table tennis.
Although we can easily order just some foods from the caterers, I find that it is more challenging when I get to plan and cook all the dishes ourselves (of course, also with a maid to help out preparing the ingredients, and most importantly, washing up!)

Instant Curry Chicken using the A1 Curry Chicken Paste
With the easily available A1 Curry Paste @ RM3.50, who needs to pound ingredients for curry anymore? I just need to buy the paste, 1 coconut and 1.5 whole chicken to come up with this. It taste just as good as those my Grandma used to cook (mixture of spices in the curry powder from the Indian shop in the olden day).

Fried Mee Hoon
Next we cooked a pack of fried meehoon to go with the curry chicken. Not a very difficult task as we used to cook this sometimes. My maid can cook very well and I just had to leave this to her.

Crispy Nuggets and Cheesy Jumbo Sausages
Another great hit among adults and children, especially, are these Fried Nuggets, and Cheesy Sausages. For nuggets, I always go for the most pricey Ayamas Nuget Crispy (red and purple color packing). They are the best and you will never go wrong with it. To keep them crispy, we fried them last, 30mins just before the arrival of our guests. Cheesy Sausages (we like the Jusco Brand Jumbo Cheese Sausages) is over easy too, as we usually only boiled them.

Another simple dish will be Fresh Salad with a bottle of Thousand Island sauce. All we have to do was just washing up the lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cut and grate the carrots.
Besides all the above, we also cook Nasi Lemak, Fried Ikan Bilis and made a very nice bowl of Sambal with fresh tomatoes. I had Kakak pounded and cooked the sambal a day up front so we don’t have to cook and clean like crazy on the day of the party.
I am indeed looking forward what to prepare for my boys coming up birthday celebration. It is going to be a much simpler one as most of our guests will be little kids in school. Since it falls on a Wednesday, I’ll perhaps hold 2 small parties. One a day ahead at their playgroup on Tuesday and another on the actual day on Wednesday at their Mandarin class


