Foodie Fridays: East meets West

The hubby and I have decidedly different styles of cooking and tastebuds.  He prefers Chinese food (you should have seen how he was complaining about the lack of clear soup during our 3 week trip to New Zealand years back), while I tend to favour western style cuisine in general (I was happily having my clam chowder, fish and chips and lamb during that same trip. :p).  In the kitchen, he is undoubtably the better cook, having more experience cooking, and he is also more adventurous and willing to experiment compared to me.

You can see the difference just this week, which saw both of us cooking after my in-laws went back (when they were here, my MIL kindly took over the cooking :)).  Monday saw me craving pizza, so we made one using some of our ham stash (there was some offer the other time for some good ham, so we bought the whole roll, chopped it up and froze it).  There didn't seem to be enough pizza to go around (I had used some frozen pizza dough made from a previous attempt), so the hubby decided he would cook some fried rice for himself using some leftover rice.  So that night, I got this:

And hubby ate this:

Spicy fried rice, loaded with lots of sambal!

And both of us were happy.  :p  But we compromised and had a salad between the both of us too:

Our cooking styles differ quite abit too.  I would prefer to follow recipes and tweak them based on the ingredients I have, while hubby tends to be the "rummage the fridge and put everything in the pot" kind of person.  So the other day when he was on leave, he volunteered to make porridge for all of us for lunch.  While my porridge usually is a rather plain one with only a few ingredients, his was full of goodness: Potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, broccoli, silver fish, minced pork and egg...

And porridge is never complete without braised peanuts!
(But we try not to eat those too much, since they say they are loaded with preservatives)

Then when it came to my turn for making lunch for all of us another day, I decided to try making pappardelle in a simple carbonara sauce, but substituted milk for cream to make the dish a little healthier for us:

All in all, I admit I usually use way less ingredients than the hubby (which usually means I cook faster too, since there's way less stuff to chop!).   This sauce just used garlic, milk, ham, and cherry tomatoes (and I added a potato inside to thicken the sauce, instead of using cornstarch)...

But no matter our differences, its pretty nice that both of us do enjoy our food, and these differences have given our family a more varied diet.  And on days that our tastebuds can't seem to decide, we can always compromise on having a simple kway teow soup for the night! :)

Does your family have differences in terms of tastes when it comes to food?  How do you compromise these differences?