T_T

WARNING: Emo post ahead

Ok. I know this is very very late and this is my first time watching the movie.

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Moulin Rouge is such a sad show!!!!! T_T

Of Pots and Cooking Utensils

Been spending the last week cooking and baking. Well, basically in the kitchen most of the time. We bought two books. Recipe cook books to be precise. It was on sale, GBP15 reduced to GBP5! How not to resist a deal like that?!

Ok forget the low-fat, no-fat scam. Most recipes asks us to remove the fat layers in the meat but of course, we being Chinese, we love fat! So fat stays on the meat. Without fat, the meat just wouldn’t come out as nice as it should be!

So we started off with a relatively simple recipe for starters. Pork sausages with cider and apple. We’re supposed to use venison sausages and add celeriac but we didn’t have any venison sausages and celeriac is the vegetable of the devil so that’s out too. This is how it turned out.

It was very sour as the sauce was about 80% cider plus the apples but it turned out very appetizing! It looked a lot but it wasn’t enough! Yum! 1st success.

2nd attempt of cooking good food was stoved chicken. Ei Leen made this.

Totally exquisite! All the juices from the chicken is absorbed by the potatoes and the potatoes tastes like chicken! Success #2!

Next we attempted to make some desserts. We made, bread & butter pudding and toffee apples.

Quite simple actually, the bread is buttered, soaked in custard and put in the oven. Toffee apples on the other hand was even easier but more work. It actually small apple pieces, dipped in batter, baked and then coated with caramelized sugar - toffee.

The finished products. For dinner, I tried pork with mushrooms and orange. Easy stir-fry recipe with sherry! Mmmm. Absolutely love sherry in Chinese food.

There was also pork char siew in the book. Being a Chinese, we can never resist a mouth watering dish of deliciously roasted char siew. And surprisingly, the taste came out very very close to the original taste of char siew! Well done Ei Leen!

Aside from char siew, there was another dish that caught my eye. Chicken teriyaki. Japanese food was all the hype back in Malaysia the past few years and here is a super simple recipe to make chicken teriyaki, might as well right?

It’s probably the simplest recipe of all the recipes we tried and to our surprise the taste of the teriyaki didn’t stray too far from the original taste!

The final product. Was supposed to de-bone the chicken and slice to thin slices but was too lazy to do that, so I just threw the whole piece in meat and bones together.

Last was a dish by Ei Leen - braised chicken with smoky bacon and sauce. There’s supposed to be apple juice added into the sauce but we didn’t have any so we resorted to orange juice and it still came out brilliant! Cooked for 4 hours to perfection. Yummm!

In other news, design project is really taking its toll on me. It’s not difficult to do it but the problem is finding information for the chemicals used. Other than that, it would be a breeze. Anyway, what’s a research project if everything was already there, right?

Anyway, hopefully my supervisor can help me even further. *crosses fingers*

Till the next post we shall meet!

New Years & Leeds

Woohoo! Back from Leeds and ’twas a great one indeed! Took lots of great shots too! (shots I meant photos, not alcohol :P)

Well, lots of photos coming up! I chose some of the best, there are just too many to post up here.

Somehow, this anchor caught out attention so we decided to pose next to it. It’s a bar/pub at the back named Drydock.

We also saw this graffiti drawing on a wall while walking along the road side in the city centre. Looks like it’s No Face from Spirited Away, the Forest Beings from Princess Mononoke and that weird in-my-opinion-a-soya-bean-with-an-afro-hair and whoever this Jesta is must be the artist??

Of course Leeds is a shopping haven for everyone and it’s a must for all Leeds-goers like us. Here’s a shot of one of their popular shopping street Briggate in the Victoria Quarter.

There were also countless other shopping centres around Briggate that satisfies everyone’s personal shopping needs. From budget shops like Primark to High Street fashion like Topman and H&M to departmental stores like Debenhams and House of Fraser and to high end poshy stores like Harvey Nichols and Louis Vuitton.

LOL. That’s Karen being overly excited. Sadly my hands were shaking due to the coldness at night but you get the picture!

Finally, this is a picture of ME and Karen in an Indian cuisine restaurant we were brought to in the city centre. Wonderful dishes they had. I had Vindaloo curry. ‘Twas top notch!

This a prettily lit building somewhere in the suburbs of Leeds called Parkinson’s Building.

This is actually the first time I noticed this sign in Starbucks. Rather interesting and personalised way to say two words i.e. NO SMOKING!.

The Leeds City Council also organized a new year’s fireworks event. It took place at 5.30pm so that it wouldn’t be too cold and also the whole family including little children can come along and witness that spectacular event. Here are several of my best fireworks shots. I took these pictures with my bare hands (no tripod :(), so they might appear a little weird.

Here’s just a random picture of the “four-of-us”.

And the final two photos will be me in front of the Leeds City Hall and Leeds City Museum respectively after countless failed attempts to self-portraiting.

All in all, I would say that the experience was great. And may thanks to Kaaj our wonderful host. Without her, we would be lost.

Happy New Year everyone!