Pa, Mi! I can cook!





























Ha. I couldn't resist. Perhaps people with lower self-esteem feel the need to boast more. Anyway, no matter. Talents, or rather, significant accomplishments should be shared... Things like these don't emerge from the 27 West Street kitchen all the time. Except from Xiaomeng. Hm, she's a really good photographer too. I will get a canon digital camera if and when miser yilun decides to get a camera.

Ok, the cake was made last year, actually, when I had a sudden craving for soft, spongy cake that looked a bit more than ordinary. I think it is all the anime with their pretty cake drawings that always always look so perfect. I wondered where my money went during that period.. Then Paula made me realise all the baking stuff (flour, self-raising flour, cake flour, brown sugar, DARK brown sugar (-_-), baking powder, bicarb, cream of tartat...) cost a fair amount. So I made the spongecake, which both recipes PROMISED would turn out light and fluffy, and it turned out with a rubbery texture. It was edible, at least, like egg cake/wah koh kueh but the texture was closer to... rubber tyres than they were to cake. Obviously I wasn't going to finish it all... But Xiaomeng was very encouraging and kept assuring me that she liked the very eggy taste. Still, WE weren't going to finish it all. So the smart plan was to disguise the cake to make it look branded, like a made-in-China bear in a Paddington Bear's clothes, although the Paddington Bear and his clothes would most probably have been made it China too. Ah, tiredness makes me ramble. Anyway, that was the end result, and the cake was gone really quickly! Yay! Under the disguise of all the fruits and agar agar and custard and icing no one could really taste anything else anyway...

The sio bah was the nostalgic craving for Mira's mix mix since... last year. But I was never motivated enough to research the true technique of making the sio bah skin crispy and randomly tried frying it, baking it, and not doing anything to it. I have bought belly pork 5 or 6 times now and this is the 1st time I have actually made the effort to do it properly from start to finish. Well not exactly start to finish because I didn't have ginger for my mix mix and so it tasted different anyway. Ha.. Imagine my mixture of dui-ness (at how such a simple procedure took me 6 months to take the trouble to do it properly) and delight as my beautiful belly pork materialised... I realised that when the recipe said 'charred', it REALLY meant chao da. Coz I burnt mine by accident. Vinegar really does make the skin bubble and turn crispy alot faster too. Only when it is chao da den it means the entire thickness of the skin is crispy, not hard. It was surprisingly easy using a serrated knife to scrape of the chao da skin (literally the entire surface of my precious belly pork was black) and I could see the crispyness extend till the inside. So. Hahahahahaha... TGO does it again!

Procrastination

Every evening when I get home from the hospital feeling like this

I tell myself that tonight is the night I will start afresh, have a (maximum) 1h-long dinner, make notes for the day, and have an early night so that I will wake up rejuvenated and ready to tackle the new challenges of tomorrow. Yet every night, a vicious cycle repeats itself, like the song that never ends

and I end up like this for the rest of my hospital-free night. Needless to say, I end up being an owl, and wake up later in the morning looking like one. So, I admit that I have been exhausting myself and having insufficient sleep, without the satisfaction of having something substantial accomplished, therefore explaining why I have been looking more and more like this over the past 7 weeks.

The truth is, it is really almost impossible to get out of this cycle. After having the whole morning and afternoon taken away, one would feel that one warrants a long hot shower, followed by a long hot dinner (+dessert +snacks) in front of the laptop watching random shows, with the heater blowing in your face. The thing is, shows are made to be addictive. Also, when you are curled into a ball (albeit on an old and squeaky swivel chair) in front of your fantastic Argos heater after a satisfying shower and meal and feel all comfortable and snuggly your brain naturally quickly grabs the chance to go into screensaver mode and it is just so hard to wiggle the mouse to get it running again. Even if, say, I could tear myself away from the computer and roll myself to the desk, I cannot really imagine my brain being able to effectively process any information at that point.

Another excuse I have come to realise is my need for sunlight. This is because these past few days when (Spring is here!) the days have become really long and warm and sunny ^-^ I have also started feeling my seasonal happy-for-no-reason moods. Feeling happy does do wonders to the soul and I believe it to be a self-regenerating cycle. Somehow good things happen when you are happy and that makes you happier which somehow makes more good things happen, which makes you even happier. So, after orthopaedics ended and the sun began to shine I have actually been feeling much more perky and motivated and do manage to function well during the day. Unfortunately all things come to an end and so my unexplained energy levels, erm, set with the sun. And I spend my nights looking and feeling like shit again.

Ah.. We should have lessons and/or social gatherings at night so that I can reserve my sunlight for doing WORK. Now all I do at night is tell myself that the next day will be different as I click episode after episode on my laptop. But as we all know, 'The Plan" never works.

Anyway. I made a random decision to go to Morissons yesterday and felt very unsatisfied with my purchase of half a cucumber so after some good thinking, I decided to buy... butter! Its versatility, durability and low price won me over. Besides, when I thought of all the baking stuff that I got last year during my bout of enthusiasm in baking just sitting all over my kitchen unused, my cheap side told me not to let them expire like their many other buddies in my kitchen and so I got the butter with renewed motivation to bake.. anything. So I went home and googled around for an idiot-proof chocolate chip cookie recipe (no more fancy famous amos and joyofbaking.com coz I now realise that the level of the recipe must match the level of the baker) coz that was what I felt like eating and made the spontaneous decision to bake them there and then as a post-ortho/rheum reward. Thank goodness my theory proved right and the humble recipe reproduced tubfuls of kick-ass cookies. They even have a hint of famous amosness in them. In all modesty, I modified the recipe alot just because I felt like it. It seemed a fantastic idea to add in oats, random coffee powder (inherited from Michelle) and melted chocolate bars at the time, so I did. Ah, sod the modesty. It was pure genius.

Gonna make sio bah next! Stay tuned for more trumpet-blowing~