Love is...

...waking up at 5am to make cookies for Alex. I was too gatvol last night to make them, plus we were meant to have a scheduled power outage sometime after 10 pm so the possibility of  the oven dying with half baked cookies inside just stressed me out (the power ended up staying on for all the hours I was awake though, curse you! I procrastinated for no reason!)

I found the recipe for these cookies here. They are indeed easy to make! Just take them out after 10 mins (unlike me) even if they feel spongy in the middle - they will harden as they cool. They hold their shape quite well, just don't make any indented patterns on them (hearts in my case) because those will disappear. But the raised little hearts I made with left over pastry came out really nicely :) Next time I would make it with less sugar, especially if you are going to use icing as well. You could probably add all sorts of awesome things to the basic chocolate cookie dough - almond flakes, coconut, orange rind?! Nonetheless, these cookies are much better than the ones I made last year, heehee I'm improving!

Happy love day :) I totally ate 4 "reject" ones for breakfast, and showering everything with colourful sprinkles made me very happy :) bake these cookies! They make everything better!

Year of the Snake

Happy Chinese new year! Because this festival (like all other Chinese festivals) is very food centric, I thought I'd do a small doodle about food symbolism during Chinese new years. The main meal happens on new year's eve, where the whole family gets together and watch the Spring festival concert/party - I swear the whole of China watches this, it's become a part of our new year's tradition. We ate so much food! For new year's eve supper there is usually an excess of 10 dishes served (normally everyday meals have about 3 dishes). We also got tons of fruit and a giant cake as presents from my parents' friends (Chinese people like giving fruit as house presents, fruit is quite expensive in China so greatly valued -how awesome!) So I've been totally stuffing my face, starting out quite healthy in the mornings with giant bowls of fruit salad, but ending up shoveling mouthfuls of cream laden cake late at night - heehee!

Ooh I did forget to list the traditional year cake (nian gao) that we eat too - wikipedia will help me here. Its for success and good luck with achieving your goals (especially important for young people and students to eat this!) We slice ours up and fry it like haloumi, so it's crunchy on the outside and gooey and sticky sweet in the middle. But this year my parents got the cake as a present and when my Mom tried to fry it it melted! It was grey too, instead of the usual red beany maroon colour we are used to - it was so sticky and stuck to the roof of my mouth and it looked like gloopy snot wahahahaha! So turns out there another type of nain gao that you are not meant to fry :) I prefer the haloumi one, it tastes better - beware the grey snot cake!

I'll have the salad please

Urh, well I originally wrote this whole blab about struggling to understand social perceptions of vegetarianism and veganism and my personal experience (somewhat horrible) of unseen pitfalls once I tried labeling myself as vegetarian when I first started having kind of an identity crisis about what I eat. Anyways, I guess it was a clumsy distressed ramble that went nowhere and I'm not ready to discuss it with friends who may have read this post, because I don't know what the heck I'm doing yet. So I've deleted it. Suffice to say that I  discovered this blog (http://aliensdayout.com/), that really opened my eyes to a different lifestyle which appeals to me, so I've been dabbling in it.

Now look at some food I've been stuffing my face with :)

My new found love of oats :) I like making it with soy milk, I'm not a big fan of that warm milky taste. Sprinkled with toasted flax seeds, sesame and wheatgerm (new nutritious things I learnt about recently)

A super huge tasty sandwich I had for lunch a few weeks back :) Its filled with: Chinese greens, tomatoes, garlic mushrooms, olives, brinjal, tofu and Greek yogurt. I really get too excited and pack too much so my sandwich can hardly close (its even worse with wraps)

I found these nommy glutinous rice balls at the Chinese supermarket. They are really tasty! It has a little chocolate filling with peanuts in the center :) I will definitely buy them again.

 

I made dahl the one night, but I got impatient and didn't cook it for long enough for the split peas to break down, Gawd it takes forever! It tasted alright though, I had it with some pumpkin and a simple cucumber tomato and olive salad with a wrap. I like how colourful my bowl is :)

Potato pumpkin gnocchi with mushroom parsley sauce. I bought ready made gnocchi - the best gnocchi I've had so far. I always find gnocchi to doughy and it sticks to the roof of my mouth. This was alright, it's got a really strong potato taste which bothered me though. The sauce was tasty.

So far I've been enjoying myself, I have this thing about having colourful food, its pretty awesome.