It’s been 3 weeks since I embraced the single mum of three kids lifestyle – we dismissed our helper in December 2024, and Le Papa works overseas.

I am blessed to be able to work from home most days and be here for my kids when they come from school, but this also means making sure that lunch is ready for them when they are back. I don’t really have a lot of time for this amidst my busy work day, but with some trial and error, I think I have finally mastered the art of getting lunch ready in under 15 minutes, with the help of a lot of frozen supplies.

Recently, I had to do up a quick pan mee for Mr Un, who was rushing for an afternoon orientation programme, and I am sharing my process here for fellow busy mothers, who are unable to spare 2 hours daily to prepare an elaborate lunch.

My 15 minutes mala pan mee 🙂

I love the Oriental pan mee, and used to bring back packs of it from Malaysia whenever I had a chance to visit, but now it’s available in Singapore via Shopee / Lazada for about $2.30 per pack ☺️ I now have it in three different flavours just in case I need a quick fix – I am only missing the soup version, but I very much prefer their dry pan mee.

I followed the instructions to cook the noodles for 7 minutes in boiling water. In the meantime, I emptied the seasoning into the serving plate, and when the noodles were done, lifted them directly from the pot into the plate to toss with the seasoning.

A kids’ favourite – CP prawns. I decided to get the jumbo prawn version cos it was on sale, and it has a much plumper prawn with a firmer and more chewy texture. The instructions provide for soup seasoning but I did not use them as I was not serving dumpling soup.

The instructions call for 5 minutes in boiling water – I simply re-used the water from boiling the noodles to boil the dumplings. Since I’m re-using the same pot and water, it takes me a total of about 13 minutes to boil both the noodles and dumplings.

I like to pop in some token vegetables – fresh vegetables don’t keep very long and since I only cook lunch for 1-2 people, and not daily, I like to use frozen vegetables, where I can use as much or as little as I want without worrying about the rest of the vegetables going bad.

While the noodles are boiling, I pop the vegetables I need into the air fryer, at 180 degrees for about 10 minutes.

My vegetable of choice today was asparagus – this one I use also comes with mushrooms and little frozen white cuboids that turned out to be the accompanying cream sauce.

When the vegetables are ready, I take them out of the air fryer and place them on the pan mee, and sprinkle on the ikan bills that came with the pan mee pack.

Et voila~ That took only 15 minutes of my lunch time and I was able to get back to sort out some work emails while waiting for Ms Deux to come home from school.