Tag Archives: madras lentils

A new year and a new generation – 2025

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Happy New Year! 2024 was a busy year as new challenges and adjustments were at the forefront. I’ve been active on Yelp writing restaurant reviews and hitting up hard to get into restaurants. I’m still struggling with Meta, which consists of Facebook and Instagram. This time it’s spammers who wanted to steal my content. I know it’s a very competitive market out there. So, if anyone out there can provide input to help improve this account, that would be great.

Since this is the middle of the week, I began the game plan last night on New Years Eve 2024 with my traditional lucky foods menu. Thanks to Whole Foods and Lidl, I was able to achieve that.  To start, I had my traditional 12 fruits, which I was able to obtain:


Oranges, blueberries, avocado, apple, pear, strawberries, grapes, raspberries, Kiwi, mango, lemon, and lime. That turned out I had 13, well, to be fair. I had 12 pairs of fruits and 1 banana.

For my meals, I search recipes online to find inspiration with the ingredients I had to work with.  So I made the following:

  • Cornbread with bacon and swiss cheese,
  • Biko – glutinous sweet sticky rice with brown sugar, coconut milk and vanilla
  • Sauteed collard greens in bacon fat
  • Honey Chili Crunch Salmon
  • Boiled Soba Noodles
  • Madras lentils

Today, the celebration continues with consuming leftovers and cooking the remaining soba noodles with mushroom and kale.

Check out my posts on Instagram at @tablespoonsandteaspoons. Stay tuned for an exciting 2025.

Songkran – Thai New Year

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Happy New Year! Well, today is Thai New Year. Since it’s a “New Year’s Day,” it’s time to post something for 2024.

For New Year’s January 1st, I’ve cooked a lot of lucky foods.

1) Twelve fruits: pomelo, lemon, lime, apple, persimmon, kiwi, orange, grapes, pear, star apple, honey Grapefruit, tangerine.

2) Pork- pork spareribs adobo

3) Fish – Baked Maple Syrup and mustard salmon

4) Cornbread – Corn bread Muffins

5) Pork – Bacon wrapped asparagus

6) Lentils – Tasty bite madras lentils

7) Noodles – Jovial cassava spaghetti

8) Greens – Blanched Yu Choy

Six weeks later, Chinese New Year – Year of the Dragon.

I made more lucky foods.

1) Dumplings

2) Soy sauce chicken

3) Roast pig

4) Vegetarian pancit

5) Lumpia

6) Baked Maple Syrup salmon

7) Nian Gao

8) Shrimp Rice Noodles

Now it’s Songkran, which is celebrated in Buddhism throughout most of Southeast Asia. Unlike the 15-day festival celebrated in the Lunar New Year. This New Year is celebrated for three days. It is a religious festival where water is poured to wash away the old year. The day begins in the temple where monks are offered food in exchange for a blessing and words of wisdom. Then water is poured on top of the Buddha statue to purify and cleanse sins and bad luck.

I was doing some research on the foods to consume during Songkran. So far, I have found some dishes that is worth having during the water festival.

Prawn Pad Thai – Zabb Zabb
Satays – Zabb Zabb
Chicken Satay
Shrimp roll and fried tofu – Ayada
Som Tum- Ayada
Shrimp Pad Thai – Ayada

I am hoping that we get to dress up for Thai New Year. I can’t wait to share more stories and post on Instagram @tablespoonsandteaspoons.

Stay tuned and Suk San Wan Songkran!