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Huat’s on my plate: Cooking up good vibes with Rozz

Cooking for one can be fun, cathartic and environmentally-friendly too. Watch and learn from this Lush 99.5FM DJ

Huat’s on my plate: Cooking up good vibes with Rozz

In 2016, Rozz will make a foray into the world of YouTube with full recipe videos.


Photos: Rosalyn Lee

Rozz eats, Rozz cooks and #rozzrecipes are delightfully easy for anyone looking to whip up a home-cooked meal.

If her short 15-second cooking videos on Instagram (@heyrozz) are anything to go by, it is that you don’t need to be a cooking whiz to be able to cook a good and hearty meal for yourself. For food inspiration, take a quick scroll through the Lush 99.5FM deejay’s Instagram feed which is a glorious visual feast for the eyes, by that we mean the smorgasbord of food pictures, chopping board flat lays and cooking videos – not selfies or #OOTD shots. There’s something for everyone -- whether you like cooking or not.

A friendly word of advice though, don’t check it out at 12 midnight like we did, on an empty stomach, because god knows the next thing you’ll be looking for is the frying pan.

Like any regular person who can make a soup and do a fry-up, these posts are not intended to show off her cooking abilities and are instead her means of spreading “good vibes” to the people around her, said Rozz (Rosalyn Lee), whose healing journey through cooking began after her breakup with ex-boyfriend Justin Vanderstraaten last year.

ondeh ondeh cupcakes for a series of local food recipe videos for Lush 99.5FM. To top it off, she even made her own condiments, such as pandan essence and gula melaka, from scratch with the use of pandan leaves and freshly grated coconut.

The chicken carcass which she brought home from dinner was made into a pot of chicken soup the next day.



Rozz may come across as a person who spares no expense – or effort – when it comes to food and satiating her cravings (just like that one time she and her younger brother flew to Japan for sushi at Sukiyabashi Jiro, weeks after watching the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi) but you’d be surprised to learn about her economical ways in the kitchen.

She once brought home a chicken carcass (leftovers from a beer can chicken meal with friends) thinking she can make soup with it -- which she did. Sharing about her attempts to repurpose ‘leftovers’, Rozz said, “It’s a known thing that chicken rice stall owners usually keep the bones to make soup so I thought I’d just do that to make soup too.

“I don’t usually do it unless it’s substantial – if we’re eating chicken wings I’m not gonna collect everyone’s bones,” she laughed, “But if it’s a whole chicken, I would.”

Rozz shares with us what other food items can be repurposed and what she usually does with soon-to-expire food in her kitchen. Find out more on the next page.


More Huat’s On Your Plate stories:
Kym Ng’s journey to domestic goddess-hood
Waste not, want not with Kate Pang



Rozz loves her hawker fare as much as her atas restaurants and would stop at nothing to get something good.Toggle: Have you ever tried cooking your own Chinese New Year dish?Rozz: My brother and I lived together (he moved into his own place last year after getting married) and I try to keep the CNY thing alive because we finally have our own home. So I made this peppery soup – it’s a Hokkien thing with pig intestines but I don’t like intestines so I substituted it with a lot of shell fish, sea asparagus and all kinds of mushrooms and I’d put abalone in it with pork and lots and lots of pepper. I’d also make chap chye (mixed vegetable stew) and steamed prawns.How often do you cook now and what type of meals do you usually cook for yourself?Hardly, actually. I’d look at my schedule and if I have lunch and dinner free or if I don’t have to work – I’d buy food for the
Expect to see more recipe videos on local food, such as the ondeh ondeh cupcakes featured this week, by Rozz on Lush 99.5FM’s YouTube page.What’s the most complicated food recipe you’ve attempted so far?I got given a box of ondeh ondeh cupcakes and I’m like ‘I gotta learn how to make this!’ so I went on the internet and tried to find a few recipes on my own. It’s really tough because there are so many parts to it. I don’t believe in using pre-made pandan essence so I bought my own pandan leaves from some heartland supermarket, chopped it up, blended it and squeezed the juice. I had to make the gula melaka as well and so I bought freshly grated coconut that was hard to find, mix that together, set aside then make the batter and the cupcakes. The cupcakes didn’t look green until I baked them which is so strange! It looked cream in colour but once it came out from the
Omelettes are great for using up leftover ingredients – if you prefer a twist, consider adding in your favourite chips like Rozz did with her sunny side up on the right.There are days where you’d whip up a ‘whatever’s in my fridge’ meal too, what is your favourite way of cooking with soon-to-expire ingredients?It’d usually go into an omelette. Chop it all up and put it into eggs – especially chives. You can make that into an onion-style omelette too. If not, you can put lots of ground chili powder, cumin and it’d be transformed into a fresh new dish. (Check out her simple recipe for Spanish eggs on the next page)As someone living by herself, how do you keep track of the food you have in the kitchen and in the fridge to prevent wastage of food?I don’t buy a lot and if I buy something I know it’s there. I have cancelled meals or postponed appointments with people just
Rozz has been saving up a bag of prawn heads and shells (left) in her freezer to make a pot of prawn noodle soup broth.Only 13% of Singapore’s food waste is recycled on a yearly basis, the remaining amount is incinerated and sent to our one and only landfill, which is expected to run out of space if habits don’t change. What do you think are some simple habits people can adopt to cut back on food wastage?I think when people shop for food, something they can take note of is there’s a best before date and a sell by date. I’m not really concerned by sell-by dates because that’s just shelf life and the date people need to get it off their supermarket shelves but it doesn’t mean it has gone bad. If it doesn’t look bad to me, if it doesn’t smell bad, I’d still use it. For the best-before date, it’s a bit tricky when it comes to milk but if it’s pasteurised, doesn’t

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