Win the Cooking With Kylie Kwong Dinner Range With Woolworths!

Win a chance to feed your family and friends Kylie Kwong style with this competition for Woolworths! We also learn more about how Kylie grew up and what sort of food her beloved mother Pauline cooked for her and her friends.

Kylie with her mum Pauline to her right

When Kylie Kwong talks about her childhood, you get the sense that it was one filled with food. She describes scenes like Christmas Day with an enormous extended family of 70 (10 siblings on her late father's side and 9 on her mother's) and makes comparisons to The Joy Luck Club scenes in the kitchen. Born into a fourth generation Australian family she and her family with her mum Pauline would regularly have people over for dinner every fortnight-mostly caucasian neighbours who would be introduced to her mum's cooking.

Kylie says, "Almost every fortnight in my childhood my very social and gregarious parents would hold large dinner parties for about 12-14pax each time - we were the only Asians in our neighbourhood at this time, so most of their friends were caucasians and just loved my mother’s home-style Cantonese cooking."

Kylie goes on to describe the dinner parties. "The guests would then arrive and be seated around our large dining room table - Mum and I would be frantically putting the final touches on all of our dishes and then the BEST part of the dinner party was serving our food to our guests - the wide smiles and gasps of glee and gastronomic delight on their faces as we placed and announce each dish on to the table was so satisfying and gratifying to Mum and I. We just loved offering our heart and soul to people through our cooking."

She tells us of her childhood friend Helen Adams who she would regularly share meals with at each other's houses. Her mother Pauline's food became an area of pride and she knew that when she invited friends over for dinner, they'd love Pauline's Cantonese food as well as Pauline's version of roast chicken (made with hoisin, plum sauce and oyster sauce) while Kylie loved Mrs Adams' savoury sausages and mashed potatoes.

Just recently Kylie launched new co branded range for Woolworths called "Cooking With Kylie" based on home cooked Chinese meals. There are ready-to-heat meals, sauces and kits to cook meals from scratch. My favourites from the range were the scratch kits and the sauces. There are two scratch kits: a Crispy Chicken with Sweet and Sour Sauce and Prawn Dumplings with Ginger and Coriander. These are based on what her mum would serve.

"All of the ready-to-heat meals and sauces for example are based upon my Mum’s recipes which she cooked for us as a family and also taught all those years ago, back in the 70’s - ‘Chicken with Cashew Nuts’, ‘Chicken with Honey & Ginger’, ‘Beef with Black Bean & Chilli’, ‘Fried Rice’, ‘Mongolian Beef’ and the ‘Crispy Chicken with Sweet and Sour’, ‘ Master Stock’. The prawn dumplings is more of a recipe from my Billy Kwong menu yet Mum did do a version of ‘prawn wontons’ back in the day."

The other favourite item of mine was her Master Stock which you can use to cook pork belly and mushrooms in - that's all she used in it but the dish was divine. There is also a honey and ginger sauce, black bean and sweet and sour sauce. I liked these products the best as it allowed me to cook things fresh for the best texture but the sauces allowed me short cuts and the black bean and the honey and ginger are particularly good.

Everything in the scratch kits is measured out and chopped and all you have to do is put them together and cook the ingredients so that everything is cooked fresh. The instructions are on the flip side of the sleeve and are easy to follow. The chicken is Australian RSPCA Approved chicken while the prawns are responsibly sourced Australian seafood. I made the dumplings and the chicken with some rice in under 30 minutes.

Thanks to Woolworths one lucky reader will get the chance to host a Kylie Kwong dinner using this range by winning a $200 gift voucher! Just enter by leaving a comment telling me what the favourite dish from your mum or dad was when you were growing up! Please leave your answer as a comment and you can enter once daily. The competition is open to anyone in Australia. The competition closes at Midnight AEST on the 23rd of August, 2015. The range is only available in NSW, QLD and Victoria in 406 stores.

Edited to add: the winner is: Michelle M. of NSW!

Lots of Love,

Lorraine
xxx