Some of my relatives are coming over to my place next week and I’m thinking of preparing some desserts/snacks for them. What is a simple dessert/snack that I can make that doesn’t require me to use the oven?
P.S. My oven is spoilt.
After two glorious weeks of vacation in lovely Sydney, I’m finally back in Singapore! It’s definitely a long overdue and well-deserved vacation for me, a vacation that had given me plenty of time to relax, to reflect through many things, and to enjoy my last vacation as a student.
Three Sisters, Blue Mountain
Anna Bay, Port Stephens
I miss Sydney, especially the beaches there and the ever-friendly and helpful Australians who will always lend a helping hand when in need. I gotta admit the guys are really good-looking over there. The Blue Mountains is overrated, while Port Stephen is a must-go place while in New South Wales. However, I hate the transport in Sydney because it’s so expensive and (I’ll hate to say this) inefficient. As for Sydney food, I’ll say on the whole it’s pretty decent. There’ll be some reviews on Sydney food coming up, including BBQ King at Chinatown, Bills at Darlinghurst, and Sydney Fish Market. (I gotta sort out my photos first.)
I haven’t been a good girl lately. That’s because I’ve been…..skipping my breakfast.
Yes, I can begin to hear nagging right now, about breakfast being the most important meal of the day, or important facts about having to feast like a king for breakfast.
But the fact is, I hate breakfast, or rather, what I usually have for breakfast. I’m sorry to say, I hate the humble loaf of white bread which my breakfast is made up of for most days.
Why I hate the white bread can be traced back to my childhood. I grew up at my grandparents’ place in the Tiong Bahru area when I was young, and basically, that equates to glorious and delicious food. That’s the days before many of those delicious food stalls in the markets went missing. Breakfast to me means having delicious meals of Lor Mee, Fishball Noodles etc.
Thus when I back at my own home and have to eat the humble white bread with butter for breakfast, I simply refuse to do so because it tastes so relatively bland. So much that I told my grandfather that I had refused to eat my white bread because it’ll cause me to become a mute if I eat too much of it (….ok that’s a lame excuse that I’d coined up at age 4, and it’s still the “joke” during family occasions).
Come to think about it, there are many “very-Singaporean” food that I hate. I hate the durians and I try to avoid kaya if I can.
Then again, I love bread when it’s added with its “frills”. For instance, toasting and then savouring it with a thick layer of arteries-clogging butter (instead of margarine), adding tuna and lettuce to the bread etc. However, they require additional effort so I don’t have them often. Therefore, I’ll rather go without breakfast and have an early lunch instead. Otherwise, I’ll just grab a piece of bread for sustenance if I know that I’m going to have a busy day ahead.
It’s 11 am now and I have been up since 7.55am (yes…to watch the simultaneous US telecast of “The Amazing Race”…just to add with no spoilers, my current favourite team is last today but I’m really supportive and amazed by the team who has arrived first in this leg of the race). I haven’t had any food yet. So I better go get some now.
P.S. Sorry, there will be no food porn for the time being again. I had this major “nuclear explosion” yesterday when I had another computer failure. Erhm..that’s the case when the computers decide to turn against a lady who is having her exams while also suffering from PMS and a bad flu bug.
Happy Chinese New Year and a warm welcome to the Year of Dog! Woof woof!
There is always a lot of food to prepare before CNY. There are chilli, jiao zi, ngoh hiong to be made, cashew nuts to be roasted and food for the next few days to be prepared, especially when fresh food products will be scarce for the next few days as the markets will still be closed.
Based on the Chinese tradition, all family members are supposed to come home no matter where they are to enjoy reunion dinner together on Chinese New Year Eve. And Chinese always tend to spurge and enjoy all the best food during this special occasion.
There is a tradition of eating steamboats during the New Year. This is so that the entire family can huddle together to enjoy steaming bowls of soup and warmly cooked food during the cold winter.
Personally, I don’t understand the rationale of eating steamboat in tropical Singapore, especially when our weather is so warm and humid, but my parents always insist on having steamboat every year. Furthermore, I’m not really a person who likes delicacies, thus I can never really enjoy a meal that is made up of prawns, abalones, sea cucumber, fish maw and such.
Well, I know there’re more food to look forward to for the next few days of the Chinese New Year, which I think is going to be the nice “simpler” fare of fried qiao zi with salad sauce, fried ngoh hiong, curry, fish, and a few other dishes which I can’t remember. Oh yah, and the whole lot of CNY goodies to savour.
There’s always a jinx that hanged around the BBQ that were organised by my friends.
Some years back, I had a BBQ gathering with my secondary four class at a friend’s condominium. In the end, despite having a really perfect spread of food and an equally perfect weather, somehow we couldn’t start the fire for the BBQ the whole night, even though there are plenty of girl guides and NCC gals among us (hee..I’m from a girls’ sec school). Thus, the BBQ turned out to be a really big failure.
My friends and I had been planning for a BBQ since December and we finally managed to arrange a BBQ last Friday.
On Thursday, my friend Val checked the weather forecast and told me the gloomy news, “Heyz, the weather forecast says the weather is going to be stormy tomorrow. BBQ how?”
“Well…try our luck and see how things go.”
**************
On Friday afternoon, the weather is just right, not much sunlight, but it wasn’t cloudy either. Thus we carried out our plan of shopping for our BBQ food. After we left the supermarket and were carrying our food back, foreboding dark clouds were beginning to form in the sky.
Sadly, the moment we reached my friend’s place, rain started pouring.
We could only pray that the weather will turn for the better as we played our card games.
Amazingly, after half an hour of rain, it was clear sky again! Thus we began our frenzy of preparing the food (as in the course of rain, we were thinking that we might execute the backup plan of calling pizza instead).
The most embarrassing thing is, among us four gals who were there first, neither of us enters the kitchen often, thus in the end there were plenty of SOS calls to boyfriends and guy friends on how to marinate a certain food, and double confirming the way to start the fire for BBQ. Yes…erhm guy friends…looks like there’s really a role reversal these days. =P
Happily, after cutting up, marinating, and clearing the place up, JH, MS and I began carrying the food down, as three others were downstairs starting the fire. The moment we reached the lobby with the food, rain started pouring.
Yes..so it’s back to my friend’s place again, plus having the emergency to send umbrellas to the few who were stuck at the BBQ pit.
In the end, we had to microwave all the food that we had prepared.
Photo courtesy of Dopey. I was too hungry by then to take a decent photo. LOL
We were intending to have baked potatoes for BBQ, but in the end, we mashed the potatoes up. The mash potatoes prepared by MS and the salad prepared by Dopey were the best that night.
As for the sotong (squid) that I have marinated, I guess I had been over-enthusiastic in putting the pepper in them thus it came out kind of pepperish. =P
It was JH’s birthday in November, but we had delayed giving her the presents until Friday. *sheepish* As she had numerous food allergy (I think she can’t have dairy products, wheat products, meat products and yeast), some of my friends decided to give her a food hamper for her present. DT and MS had especially shopped for hours to prepare this food hamper.
12 items exactly. Exactly enough for her to have a new item each month!
It’s also my birthday in a few more days. Thanks to my friends for the presents that I have received so far. Dopey, I like the bear a lot! And to Val, Sh, JH, MS, and DT, I love the colours on the lipstick palette too! Thanks! 
Favourite food blogs of mine:
The first food blog I read: Aromacookery.
My friend recommended me this blog when I first had an idea to start a food blog of my own sometime in May. I had never read a food blog before, and never knew the power of food blog to make one so hungry til then. According to him, Aromacookery reminded him of home every time he reads it, especially since he has been overseas for so long. True enough.
My favourite food blog (Singapore): ChubbyHubby
I just love the way he writes, and those lovely photos that he always has on his blog!
My all-time favourite food blog: HK Foodie
The food blog that never fails to make me hungry every time I visit it. Oh yes, and that strong desire to fly to Hong Kong asap to try out those places that she talks about in the blog!
I know this is a food blog, but do bear with my totally unrelated to food entry.
“三个好人” is the latest Jack Neo’s movie which is officially released this week. It’s the first movie in Singapore to be shot in an actual prison. It chronicles the life of three guys who committed the crimes and were sentenced to jail. However, they do not only serve their jail term. They were sentenced to a lifetime jail by the society and the people around them.
This movie is released in tandem with the Yellow Ribbon Project, a project to create awareness of giving second chances to ex-offenders, generate acceptance of ex offenders and their families into the community, and inspire community action to support the rehabilitation and reintegration of ex-offenders.
I personally like this movie pretty much. It’s a humourous show with many touching moments, especially towards the end of the movie. Overall, the show has clearly portrayed the difficulties ex-offenders faced after they’re released from jail and also effectively spread the message of giving a second chance to ex-offenders. It’s a pretty good local movie to catch on the whole.
Somehow, being in an Asian society, we tend to be very unforgiving towards mistakes. A lot of people have given me very negative view towards ex-offenders, and also questioned me about how do we differentiate who are the ex-offenders who are really sincere towards changing their ways, and who are those who do not deserve a second chance at all. I don’t know the answers for these questions. Personally, I just feel that it’s always better to gain another productive member in the society than to perpetuate another societal problem. Merely throwing people into prison for committing a crime may not be the best solution sometimes, but rather it’s more on how we can prevent crimes and to stop ex-offenders from committing a crime again.
If I knew earlier that there was going to be a “Sakae sushi” reception at the movie premiere, I won’t have eaten such a full dinner before it. Haha, but I enjoyed the movie premiere that day. =P
