Friday, March 19, 2010

Lux Baby

I haven't been blogging for almost a year. That goes to show how lazy I am and am not making any excuses for that. Anyway, I would just like to post some photos of my new found love, introducing Lux my bun, aka Baby!! My sis bought it for me as a gift back in October. Thanks Kim, we love Lux very much.

That's Lux about 2 weeks with us (approximately about 2-3 months old), back in October last year. The bowl is too big for me...

I wanna help make the mosquito net too :)

Am tired now, let me have a rest first...

More pictures and some stories in later postings...

Monday, April 27, 2009

Deep Fried Cuttlefish Rings

As promised the next recipe. After the nice dinner on Good Friday, we decided to try another recipe the following day. This recipe is quite easy to follow, only that you have to be more generous with the corn flour to get a nicer looking end results :) Based on the 1st recipe attempt on the pork ribs where we practically emptied the whole bottle of corn flour, I was more cautious this time on the usage of flour to prevent wastage.

Ingredients
500g fresh cuttlefish, cut into rings (here we got 2 large cuttlefish from Jusco)
500 ml oil for deep-frying
300g corn flour (that's a lot, about 1 box of corn flour, nah, i used much less than that)

To marinade - 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp pepper, 1 egg white, 1 tbsp curry powder, a dahs of 5 spice powder and 1 tbsp plain flour

Steps:
1. Marinade the cuttle fish with the marinade ingredients. Recipe says 3o minutes, but I had it for about 2 hours and left it in the fridge.
2. Coat with corn flour (this is the part you have to be more generous on the corn flour) and deep fry in hot oil until golden brown.
3. Dish up.

End results...

Next 2 recipes

3 weeks of inactivity in the blog. Had been busy meeting up with the contractor - planning on the house renovation, doing some survey on the stuff we will need to get for the new home and also treasure hunting.

CH and I tried out these 2 recipes about 2 weeks back. It was Good Friday, CH had the day off and he decided to try out the Prawn Fritters recipe. I was not at home to see how it was done but was home in time to eat. hahahah...

Prawn Fritters recipe
Ingredients:
500g medium size prawns (actually we only had 4 prawns each, tak cukup makan la, not kenyang)
Marinade it with - 1 egg white, 1/2 tbsp sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sesame oil and 1 tbsp corn flour

To make the batter:
1 egg, 1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp oil, 3 tbsp plain flour
1 tbsp corn flour
1/2 tsp salt, 150 ml water

Steps:
1. Shell prawns and keep the tails. Remove vein.
2. Mix prawns with the marinade ingredients
3. Dip prawn in batter and deep fry in hot oil until golden brown.
4. Dish up

End results - Taa Daa...

It was a lovely dinner prepared by CH including the lovely chinese sausage bought by Kim from Penang and stir fried kai lan. And notice the picture, CH even took the trouble to decorate the prawns with cucumbers :) Audrey and I ate in a hurry and rushed off for Good Friday Mass.

Next recipe will be in the next article

Monday, April 6, 2009

Happy Birthday Daddy

We were back last weekend to celebrate Dad's 70th birthday. All of us came home. We had a nice lunch on Sunday as Kim and KZ had to leave for Penang in the afternoon. We had lunch at Man Chong to celebrate dad's birthday and at the same time to try out the food there prior to Kim's wedding lunch in September.

The food was quite good. We had pork leg, mixed vege with dumpling, nestum prawn and steamed silver pomfret. After that, we had cake at home. Specially baked by Kim, nice chocolate cake. Hey Kim, your cake is 1st class quality, yum love it, had some again for breakfast this morning. We'll start looking out for your Kenwood machine. Sorry no photos to show for now as i left my camera back in TI, how forgetful. Will only be able to post some of the photos when I go back again next month. We took quite a number of funny ones, especially posing with the wine God Bro bought for dad's birthday :)

Got myself a new knife from dad, it looks like those knives used by the pork seller in the market. It would be good to remove the fatty parts of the meat. And God Bro, I brought back your knife as well, it's a nice looking knive with a sheath. Would need to meet up with you one of these day. Dad got his new supply of timber from Uncle Wai yesterday night and was again busy at his workshop. All those timber making him excited. hahaha...

We left TI this morning and it's back to work tomorrow...

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Our first attempt

It has been really a long time since I wrote anything here. Almost a year. Had been too tight up with work for the past 10 months with the same old project. This project is almost at its end stage but would still need at least 1-2 months before we can really wrap it up. Anyway, at the end of the day, it all depends on the client whether they are satisfied with what they are getting.

Today both CH and I decided to try something from the recipe book which we had purchased quite some time back, but didn't really had the time to experiment on any of it. We had Tony Roma's beef ribs last weekend to celebrate our 3rd Anniversary together. And that gave me an idea maybe we should try cooking pork ribs this Sunday ourselves. We went through the list of ingredients required, headed for Carrefour to get the stuff that were required.

Came home, had lunch and started my task in seasoning the ribs. The following were the ingredients for marinating:
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sesame oil (didn't include that, the one we had, had expired)
2 tbsp plain flour (didn't have this)
1 tbsp custard powder (didn't have this)
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
200 ml water
200g corn flour, add in sauce

We lacked 3 ingredients and substituted it with black pepper and more corn flour. Funny, being amateurs, we didn't have any measuring equipment to measure 200ml of water and 200g of corn flour. So it was all just a wild guess on how much to put in. With all these I started the marinating process as CH was watching. Kept telling me, we added in too much water and needed to put in more corn flour. We practically emptied the whole bottle of corn flour we had and in the end, the marinating sauce looks thick :) We left it in the fridge until it was time to cook in the evening.

Time to cook, I started preparing the sauce. The following were the ingredients for the sauce:
2 tbsp tomato sauce
1 tbsp chilli sauce
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
1 tsp curry powder
1/2 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp light soya sauce
3 tbsp water

CH filled the pan with oil and started the fire. Took out the ribs and found that it was covered in thick flour. We were like complaining, added too much corn flour?? Oh dear, is this going to work out? Put in the ribs into the hot oil and deep-fry until it was golden brown. Took it out, and fried the sauce that was prepared and added in the ribs. The following is the end results :)



Makan time - the moment of truth :) All of us had our first bite, and hmm... it tasted quite good. Even my sis, who is a picky eater said it tasted nice. CH was pretty happy on our first attempt. Next attempt, crabs?? But where to get fresh good crabs....

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Speed typing

How fast is your typing? Here's my results after 2 attempts :) This is quite fun...



81 words


Sunday, December 9, 2007

Team No. 1 is No. 1...

From left: Chong, Ju, Sofia and Lee Quan .... GO GO GO



The long awaited DHL Hunt 2007 finally came. This time it was called the East Coast Treasure Hunt, from Cyberjaya to Cherating. This hunt was organized by Malaysia Hunt Club (COC: Baskaran) Registration was open in November. We had no idea we were the first team to register. So therefore we were Team No. 1 (GO x 3). Briefing and collection of goody bags was on Friday evening. Due to the lack of time to prepare for this hunt, wrong T-shirt sizes were distributed to most of the teams. Funny, they considered CH as female, giving him a baby-T shirt, which was too small. Thanks to Sofia, she managed to get a normal sized T-shirt for him. Briefing time, Sofia, Lee Quan and me were already excited for the next day. We were all ears and jotted down all his sample questions and answers hoping to get some "tips" for hunt day.
Hunt day, CH and I went to fetch Lee Quan at her place and headed to the office. Sure enough, we were late and were the last few cars to arrive. COC gave the final briefing and a group photo session and we were ready for flagged off. Chuan Yew was there to flag all the cars. When it was our turn, he criticised our team saying, you are team no. 1 but you are late, then CH sheepishly replied, ya we were a bit late today, hahaha... After flagging off, we stopped a while to solve the puzzle and to look through the route and treasure questions. We were practically the last car to leave the area.

Heading for Damansara Utama via LDP, we tried to start cracking the treasure questions (4 of them). I guess all of us were still not warmed-up. At that time we only managed to crack treasure 1 and 3 partially, the Cintan mi goreng and Lot100 Mango. We decided to make our first stop at Tesco Puchong to look for treasures but were disappointed as we did not manage to get anything out from there. At that time we were getting a bit worried, as we did not want to leave Klang Valley without securing all the treasures.

We arrived DU , the area looks familiar, I was there for Sun Hunt. The first question was pretty straight forward
Q: First question for you to try,
If there is cure for everybody, then we can go in to buy
A: ALLin Pharmacy

We sort of breeze through the first 13 Questions in Klang Valley, after that we decided we had to seriously get the treasures or else we are in deep trouble. We went to a few 7 Eleven, searching for Lot100 Mango only to find the gummy and sweet type. Nothing of like a hose or cylinder as mentioned in the question. We decided to try our luck again in 7 Eleven, both Lee Quan and I will run out of the car to go get treasures. And this time she spotted the Lot100 Mango tube which matches with the treasure question description. She was excited when she saw it, but had to hold her excitement as there were other teams in the 7 Eleven as well, both of us waited patiently until they left, bought the treasure and ran back to the car happily. This boosted our team's confidence a bit. Still no sign of the Cintan mi goreng 80g.

Next destination, Karak. While driving Lee Quan and I were trying to crack treasure 2 and 4. First line of treasure 2 goes like this:
Find the nyonya who will not have questions,
we were trying to find another name for nyonya then out of the blue the word nona came out, then sure enough it did match the description, nyonya without questions is without the y y = nona.
Next line was: Totally mixed and doubled within the mission
nona = nano, doubled = nano nano.
Following line: Look for the celebrity crop, as it's our passion
celebrity = star
crop = fruit
Star Fruit flavor.

After buying the Nano Nano Star Fruit, both Lee Quan and I ran back to the car, while CH and Sofia were trying to crack treasure 4. The first line goes something like that, "Perhaps a flipping male together for the item, as I hear it better". CH was wondering male = man, flipping = toss, so sounds like mentos. Yes it's mentos. Mentos variant with less than 10 in net. Then both of us ran back in to the Petronas station to look for Mentos, we found the Mentos Power Gum, net 9g. Secured 3 treasures and leaving Klang Valley. We are still wondering, where to get the Cintan Mi Goreng 80g?? The team decided, it's just going to be a waste of time to continue stopping at petrol kiosk or 7 eleven as this item cannot be found there. We tried to be positive, hoping we will find it at our next stop, Karak.



We continued with the hunt in Karak, there were a few shops in Karak, this time, Lee Quan and I got down from the car and decided to split in finding our last treasure. I went into this dingy looking shop to look for the last treasure. I was so happy, at last we found the last treasure that has costs us so much time. I double checked the label to ensure it was 80g. Quickly paid for the item and ran back to the car. The team was delighted we had secured all treasures as each treasure carried a weightage of 6 points compared to the route questions which only carries 2 points.

Cintan Mi Goreng Ala Indonesia 80g



By then, weather began to change and through out the journey approaching cherating was mostly rain. We were quite fortunate in a sense, that when it was time to solve route questions, there is no rain or just slight drizzle. Heavy rain and some traffic did slow us down after reaching Kuantan. Chong was constantly keeping a close watch over time not wanting us to be behind time. The journey from Kuantan to Cherating was quite a funny one. We were all constantly looking at the time and calculating the remaining mileage left to cover. There were quite a number of lorries which has slowing us down. There was this lorry, carrying sawn timber and moving rather slow. Chong was having difficulty overtaking this lorry because the road was narrow and there was on coming cars. Then at one stretch, there was this herd of cows resting by the road side, and suddenly 2 of them started fighting. Seeing this, the lorry ahead of us slowed down and this gave us the opportunity to overtake it. Ah... see even the cows had helped us in our journey as we laughed in the car. We arrived at the finish point 5 minutes before the 9 hours duration. Sofia our navigator ran down to submit the answer sheets and treasures.



Parked the car and checked in. The organizers made a mistake by labelling Chong as a female and assigned him to share a room with Lee Quan. How funny. That must be the reason why, during briefing day, he was given the female sized T-shirt. Chong and I had a rest, it was indeed a very long journey, but filled with fun, excitement and laughter.



Dinner was ready at 8 pm, but the food was lousy. They went through the Answer presentation. We made 3 mistakes, but then I was confused on the last question, couldn't really remember whether I wrote the answer in full. So I told the team, I think i did not write it in full, so we made 4 mistakes. I was feeling awfully guilty at that time while they were announcing the winners starting from 25th position. We knew this hunt would be very competitive with 2 teams from the recent Sun Hunt open category finishing at 4th and 5th placing respectively. At last it was the top two positions. The COC mentioned that one team scored 92 points and the another team scored 94 points. We kept thinking we scored 92 points but in actual fact it was 94 points. When the results were announced we went up the stage but I was wondering did we finish 1st or 2nd. I looked at the enveloped that was handed to me, it was blank in the front, then I looked behind, it was indeed 1st. Ah... I really couldn't believe this. We were all so happy and stunned at the same time. Thank you team, for a job well done. It was all good team work.