National Day Cookout

Hello! (:

My siblings and I had a red-and-white themed cook-out on National Day to celebrate the nation's 45th birthday! (: My sister, Nette, is the resident head chef so she planned the menu and was in charge of most of the cooking! I'm usually in charge of logistics, which means I'm the one buying the ingredients, the one arranging transport and doing the packing up of left-overs.

We decided to start cooking a little earlier this time because we've learnt from previous experiences that we tend to overestimate our abilities to produce cooked food in a short span of time and since we wanted to watch the parade on tv while eating our food, we'd to start earlier!

We managed to get everything around/ slightly after 6 so we didn't miss much of the parade! (: This is the cluttered coffee table with our starters and mains.

Toasted pita bread which tasted good on its own but it tasted even better with home-made hummus (photo below)!

A bowl of extra cherry tomatoes on the left and a container of hummus on the right! Nette's hummus turned out to be extremely scrumptious! (: I loved the rough texture and the taste! We dipped our pita bread into the hummus and consumed it happily!

This is probably our least red-and-white dish because it has quite a lot of green but you can't really see the green because cherry tomatoes, feta cheese and smoked salmon are sitting atop the bed of green lettuce! This was our attempt to have some vegetables in our meal!

We also had cold tomato soup (on the extreme right) for starters but that wasn't very well received. I guess people generally prefer warm soup! For our mains, we had risotto (on bottom left) that is mixed with some red wine for colour. My friend told me that the risotto wouldn't turn out red and she was right! It looks more like purple. The risotto tasted good too! (:

To accompany our plain risotto, Nette cooked 6 slices of pan-fried fish fillet, one for each of us. I think she has mastered the art of cooking fish fillets because they usually taste great!

We bought two bottles of sparkling red grape juice for drinks instead of having the usual soft drinks! We tend to buy sparkling juice for celebratory occassions and this certainly called for one!

Because certain fussy eaters in our family don't consume fruits, they refused to eat the strawberry shortcake that Nette made so Nette has to come up with non-fruity desserts for them!

This was her 'failed milk pudding' that didn't harden! Think we need to try another recipe in future.

Red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Initially, Nette wanted to make the cream cheese frosting on her own but I bought the wrong cream cheese (bought the ready made cream instead of the fresh one) so I saved her some work. The ready made cream cheese were a little too sweet for most people but I kind of liked it!

Last but not least, this is a shot of her strawberry shortcake! (: It tastes much better than it looks! There are still two slices left in the fridge and I'm thinking of having one later!

I felt contented after having this meal with my siblings (: Maybe we should consider have more themed-cookouts! (: Alright that's enough for my midweek ramble, off to the shower! Have a great week ahead everyone! (: