A Healthy Dinner For A Single Girl

Single Girl Food

I have this cousin sister who lives in Luxembourg, she's a single girl, living and working in a city far from home, far from anything resembling family. As expected, she misses home food.. I can only imagine how boring it must be to have to cook for yourself after a long day on the job. I have this album titled "Food" on my Facebook account where I post pictures of the food I cook. My cousin wrote to me this one time and said "I'm a fan of your album. I look at it while having my dinner and it makes my food taste nice :)" Isn't that the sweetest thing!!

If I was in her place I know I would find it extremely boring to cook for myself and would, most probably, end up just eating out or ordering in or picking up something on the way home. But I know I would avoid those frozen microwave dinners and frozen pizzas and frozen what-nots... loaded with all kinds of chemicals and who knows how long those things have been frozen. I dread to think about what those things do to your body.

But never fear when Anita is here. I shall come to your rescue with my favourite grilled chicken recipe. It   literally takes 10 mins to cook (though the chicken needs to marinate a little.) Combine it with a simple salad and voila you have a meal. You could fry this chicken as well... a little less healthy than grilled but it tastes amazing and I mix the chicken juices+marinade mixture left behind in the frying pan with a few spoons of rice. The flavour in that rice is truly amazing. You could also mop up the juices with a loaf of bread... Yummm!!

Here's what you need to make a meal for one:

A chicken Breast

2 Tbsp yoghurt

1 tsp ginger-garlic paste

1 tsp lemon juice

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

For frying, use about 2Tbsp oil

1. Make 3 shallow cuts on each side of the chicken breast. This helps the marinade flavour the whole flesh of the chicken breast as opposed to flavouring just the surface.. Personally I don’t like it when the flesh tastes bland.
2. Add all the ingredients for the marinade to the chicken and mix by hand. It needs to marinate for at least 2 hours. But I would suggest you marinate the chicken in the morning before going to work, that way the chicken will have the most intense flavour. Just make sure you refrigerate it.
3. At chow time, jus pop it on the grill. Give it about 5-7 mins on each side and it should be done. If your frying the chicken and you want to preserve the juices, fry on a low/medium flame and cover your pan with a lid.

When it comes to a simple vegetable salad, there's no particular recipe I follow. I just dice up my favourite veggies (Or whatever is available at home).. Today I used a Carrot, a Green Bell Pepper and i tore up some lettuce.

My salad dressing includes:

4 Tbsp Yoghurt

1 Tbsp Mayonnaise

1 Tbsp Mustard Sauce (I jus love the flaour of mustard sauce)

Salt and Pepper to taste

1 tsp Chaat Masala (Careful when you add this because it contains salt as well)

Mix the ingredients together and add it to the veggies. I like my salads gooey and dripping in dressing. Please adjust the amounts depending on your taste and your preference.

After having this for dinner you feel so healthy and good. The best part about this dinner recipe is that it'll fill you up without making you feel full... To the uninitiated, what that means is... There'll be room for Dessert!!!!!

Polka Dotted Piece of Heaven

Pound Cake with Choco-Chips

My friend gave me some chocolate chips that were lying around her house and that got me thinking, what else could I use them for besides the obvious choice which would be choco-chip cookies.


And that’s when it came to me, a delicious soft springy pound cake with a beautiful sprinkling of chocolate chips. I decided to stick to my tried and tested pound cake recipe and just fold in the chocolate chips at the final stage. You can also substitute a vanilla sponge cake for the pound cake. I just find a pound cake easier to make and I also love its buttery flavour. 


I love chocolate (who doesn't, right?). But I'm also one of those people who finds chocolate overwhelming. This recipe is wonderful because you can distinctly taste the chocolate and the butter and neither of them overpowers the other... A perfect balance of sweet and salty.

The ingredients

The list of ingredients include:

• 100g all purpose flour
• 100g butter (I use salted butter in case you’re using unsalted add 1/4 tsp salt)
• 100g granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup + 1 tbsp chocolate chips

Equipment: Small Loaf Pan

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Butter and flour a loaf pan.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt (if using).
3. Beat together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy. You can use a stand mixer/ hand-held mixer but honestly this is one of those recipes that does not require very vigorous mixing and so you'll do fine with just a spatula... think of extra cake you could eat because of all the calories you'll burn.
4. Add the eggs one at a time beating them in for about a minute each.
5. Add the vanilla extract.
6. Fold in the sifted dry ingredients.
7. Stir in the chocolate chips and pour the batter into the prepared pan.
8. Finally sprinkle 1 tbsp of chocolate chips over the batter. Cover the pan loosely with aluminium foil and bake the cake for 40-45 mins or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Remove the foil during the last 5 mins of baking. 
9. Let the cake cool for about 10 mins before demoulding and cooling completely.

Batter with a sprinkling of chocolate chips just before it went into the oven

Here’s some pointers to remember while baking this polka dotted piece of heaven:

• Don’t over-mix the batter. If using a mixer, use it on low speed.
• Cover the cake and bake it or else there’s a chance that the sprinkled chocolate chips will burn and taste bitter. 
• My cake got just a little over-baked in the sides and the bottom… that’s because I made a mistake with the temperature. I set my oven at 200C and realized it only after 10 mins of baking. Thankfully it still tasted good.

I should specify that this is by no means an original idea.  I did troll the internet and I found several recipes that were more or less similar to mine. But I decided against using any of those. The pound cake recipe is one I learnt in my very first baking class and I just added the chocolate chips.


I believe every baking session has a lesson for an amateur like me. Today's lesson was:
"Check oven temperature before you put your cake in."

A New Beginning

My life's taken a new turn... I was just a foodie, nothing special, jus another girl who loves to eat.. So, you can imagine my surprise when one day suddenly I realized that I not only had an above-average love for all things food but a love for cooking it as well.

I suppose it shouldn't come as a huge surprise to me, after all, my father loved to cook and his Sunday afternoon chicken was the highlight of our week. He would come up with the most amazing stuff.. He would spend all Saturday looking through recipes to find one that was jus right and then he wouldn’t follow it.. He would always adjust it and put a little bit of himself into his cooking.. I think the greatest gifts my dad ever gave me were his epic collection of recipes, his talent for cooking and his absolute inability to follow a recipe :)

So, here I am, declaring my life's purpose. FOOD!! But I do favour baking a little more than cooking. I take comfort in the fact that it’s so scientific... I have a bachelors degree in Chemistry and I guess that should explain my previous statement.. Baking reminds me of those countless days spent in a hot laboratory, with semi-dangerous equipment, mixing ordinary ingredients together that react and result in the most amazing things that look nothing like the original ingredients... Of course, just like chemistry, baking also sometimes has disastrous results.

I am blogging with the sole purpose of chronicling my successes and my disasters.. And in the process if I happen to help a few people realize their own love for cooking then I guess.. Mission Accomplished!!! I’ll be joining a local college for a professional baking course in 2 months and then I can start giving serious professional advice. But for the time being I’m a novice who loves this twist that the universe has presented her with

Now, it’s time for lesson no. 1. "Follow Your Passion!!!" Against all odds if you have to. If I hadn’t, I would be stuck behind a desk working 9-5, barely having time for me, my family and other things that really matter in life. There’s no better pleasure than doing something you love.

On a final note, I hope I can do justice to all the recipes I post on this blog and to all those individuals who try their hand at something new because of my recommendation. So here goes….