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.

Waterfall monster

I'm finally done with my picture! It was such an old sketch - feels good to tie up some loose ends and see an idea through to completion. I tried to keep the shapes quite simple, with some hand drawn elements so it doesn't look too clinical/clean. I most liked making the expressions on the local flora :D Yay for environmentally minded monsters!

Vic Falls Overlander Trip Part 3

For day 2's mission, we decided to join Daniel (one of the friends we made on the trip!) to walk to Zambia and look at Vic Falls from that side. I was super paranoid upon discovering how close we were to Zambia that I made us get yellow fever vaccines before we left, even though its not mandatory for Zimbabwe. Anywho, this just meant we were safe to go to Zambia, so away we went!

 This is no man's land...It was quite a walk, but not without rewards!

Click through for a bigger picture!

On the other side of the bridge they did bungee, gorge swing, zip line stuff - amazing view!

Going forth bravely in the footsteps of Livingstone!

 We are getting closer!

Rainbow...

It was amazing how close you could get to the falls.

We also caught a taxi to Livingstone town, to try out the famous Mosi beer at Jolly Boys backpackers.

This was very tasty. Though my judgement may have been affected by the heat.

How cool is this? I'm totally going to have this in my house, possibly with a lot more cushions, so I could just jump into it and roll around ^_^ Jolly boys seemed like a really nice place, it was clean, and people were lounging by the pool using wi fi and relaxing.

On new year's eve (our 3rd and last day before we start journeying back), we went to a music festival - the Vic Falls Carnival!

Yay Jeremy Loops! He was in the truck convoy with us, Alex actually heard about this whole trip through his facebook...

Rocking out raaaaw!

Hello 2013! We had a great holiday and wonderful life experience!

Vic Falls Overlander Trip Part 2

We were really active this holiday (compared to our other holidays that mainly consisted of drinking and fishing - which is synonymous with drinking anyways). We booked to go river rafting on the Zambezi the very next day of our arrival. Starting at 7am! Yep we were late night partying, drinking and extreme activity maniacs! (Here follows my snort of derision : pffft!) Now for many pictures of us fooling about in boats... 

 It was so beautiful!

The stoic (but positive) face of determination...

Look at us going into a rapid backwards! Weee!

This wasn't us... We didn't flip and I never fell off unintentionally. I'm kind of bummed about that, it looks like fun :D I think its because we were quite light, there was only 7 in our raft. These guys had 10 people so they were in the water a lot of the time... We were the rescue boat! We paddled about after the rapids picking people up :)

It was so much fun! We paddled for about 2 hours! So it was well worth the money. The views were spectacular, and in some quiet patches our guide let us jump out to swim in the river :D The only thing is that you have to be quite fit to climb back up out of the gorge at the end of your journey. I almost died! It was so hot and a very steep climb (for maybe 30mins?) It felt like an eternity! A guide even asked if I was having an asthma attack I was so unfit :p That aside, I highly recommend river rafting, its awesome!

Here's a map of the Zambezi (click for larger view). We paddled from "Overland truck eater" to "The oblivion" in the bottom left corner.

That afternoon, we were taken by train to a party in the bush. Alex and I were so pooped that by about 9pm we were glumly trying to sleep on the train carriage floor. But here's a pretty picture...

Final part (3) to follow!

Vic Falls Overlander Trip Part 1 & some musings...

Aha! Tis the new year! I must say I have seriously fallen by the wayside with this blogging business. I guess I burned out a bit, felt a little unsure of what this blog should be. The pressure of making regular posts had become quite stressful (urh, not that I posted all that regularly), but in the new year, I hope to gain better perspective with this blog thingy (which means I still haven't really figured it out yet), and make well thought out, meaningful artwork and occasional ramblings!

Right ho! as you may have gathered from the title, we (Alex & I) went to Victoria Falls for 7 days over new years. We went in this-

An Overlander truck called "Nina"

Pretty hardcore right? This is Africa we're talking about! We drove in a convoy of trucks for 4 days there and back, it was quite a journey... most of which I slept through...

This was our route...

 Let's go!

Aah the open road (behind us...)

We passed swarms of these, so pretty...

We finally got to the Botswana border in the afternoon, it was blazingly hot, I felt like I was being slowly roasted...

 Look at this massive queue! Impending heat stroke queue of doom!

Eventually, everyone got through and it was only another hour or so to our camp for the night, which only means one thing...

Drink time!

We set up tents in the gathering gloom, and proceeded to cover ourselves with tabard... Camp Itumela (where we stayed in Botswana) was a bug haven to mainly 3 kinds of creepy crawlies - mopane worms (thicker than my finger), these small worms that dangle from the trees at an annoying face/head height and red romans - a very creepy spider that runs towards light. I don't know if it was bug season or it's normal for that place, but the trees were full of mopane worms - eeek! That's too much nature for me...

Hmm, but what do I care? I was clearly drunk by then... yes, that's not entirely sprite in that sprite bottle...

The next morning, on the road again! At 6am!

Heehee~

The never ending African savanna...

As we got closer to the Zimbabwean border, we passed herds of elephants grazing on the side of the road!

This one was quite unperturbed by our truck stopping quite close to him/her. What a wonderful creature ^_^ He's scratching his leg with his other foot :D

We have arrived at our destination! Its to be our home for the next 3 days. Aah camping on grass, what luxury! Our shenanigans to follow in part 2 :)