As there are three of us for lunch today and very little time to cook it, I decide on a samusa thote. I buy three samosas the size of a fist each. The pastry is firm and crispy, not at all oily, and crammed with spicy potato, peas and fresh coriander stuffing.

A quick and simple dinner of stir-fried vegetarian meat in a sweet and sour sauce.

Making sour pickled beans is easy and within days they are ready. I divide the beans into two portions and stir-fry the first portion with chillies and onions for a quick vegetarian dish.

can’t seem to get enough of chillies and buy more this weekend. This time green chillies from the supermarket. I normally like to avoid supermarkets all together but for this recipe I need some processed cheese. Chilli and cheese may not strike as an obvious marriage of flavours but the combination works. The flavour of the chillies are enhanced by the creaminess of the cheese and the distinct taste of butter coming through.

There are six of us for dinner, two are vegetarians but eat fish. There is little time to nip over to the Sydney fish market nor start something elaborate. I settle on a rustic hearty vegetable curry with pumpkin, sweet potato, carrots and courgette. I stir in a couple of teaspoons of coconut cream to richen the sauce and tone down the chillies.

I had a wonderful dinner last night at a local restaurant called Fish Face in Sydney. I adore seafood and the fish there was beautifully fresh. I was eating a crispy-skin snapper topped with spinach and preserved lemons when I thought about chin maung kyaw – roselle leaf curry. The spinach and lemon combination reminded me of the dish, a good substitute when roselle leaves are unavailable.

This salad is wonderfully intense, not only from the aromatic crispy garlic and fresh coriander, but also because the roasted eggplants give it a distinctive smoky flavour.

This is a recipe that my mother recalls eating during the nine days of the vegetarian festival. Each year on the first day of the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, usually late September or early October, it was a tradition that the Chinese descendants followed in order to gain merit.