I tiny little problem with blogger. Moving to tumblr for the time being.

A little not in the mood for writing.

Check back later

Nothing Short of a $50 Meal

Did I tell you about the dinner we had duck and salmon souffle with mango and mushroom sauce and a whole pot of pumpkin seafood risotto? 

My brother can be amazing sometimes. Espcially when it come to cooking something out of nothing. Then again, I must give myself credit for giving him my collection of Top Chef seasons collection where he was inspired and decided to cook us another round of western atas food.

It really was very good. Food that needs to be cooked with pure technique. My bro even specially bought a temperature gauge to watch the temperature of cooking the duck and salmon in ziplock bags in a huge pot of boiling water.

Plus served with the best mango sauce (with salmon) impromptu-ly made with in season mango from NTUC and mushroom sauce (with duck) that goes marvelously with that half bleeding through duck breast.

I wish I could cook like that. And you know what is best? This is the first time I bro took these recipes to the kitchen and his textbook was freeking youtube. I think I need to start studying cooking on youtube.

Playing Darts

I totally love my job, my office, my colleagues. Plus I totally love today in the office. I was so super productive throughout the day, spending the whole morning out on site in the hot torrid sun talking to people and showing people around and then spend the whole afternoon clearing work in the office. And yet I could have so much fun in a simple 10 hours of the day.

Spend a good 10 minutes during an afternoon tea break playing with the office's latest toy. Ad started out with a simple cross made from post it slips on the window. Then we realized its not very good for sticking, so we drew out a bullseye on Mard's whiteboard and started target practice (Mard is not going to be very please with what we done to her board when she comes back from leave next week). We can be rather destructive.

10 for bullseye, 8 for 'you-are-quite-there', 6 for 'cough', tortoise for... well tortoise.

We had a run of turns between GX, Rid and myself and I have to stress that we only spent 10mins on this. After this was back to the computer.

I love how work has created so many crazy bantering in the office the whole afternoon, even SL is joining in the light hearted atmosphere with her comments. We had so many work issues we were throwing out in the office and everyone was contributing heartily.

I love my team.

And I stress again that I LOVE my job

Another Day Off

I love a day off in the middle of the week (well almost middle). Take the day to run some small errands and visit some cool places and do some cool things.

Morning was a planned trip down to the Pet Walk at Serangoon North. It is two whole block at Serangoon with more than 15 pet shops selling things from birdware, to aquarium stuff to small pets to random stuff, the only thing they dint sell was dogs and cats. They even have countless old men sitting at the office shop looking at birds. I dont know why I dint find out about this place earlier. Plus is relatively near home.

What was interesting was the many many bird shops along the entire 400m of void deck shops. They even sold toucans and some seriously exotic looking birds. Seriously... toucans, I barely even see toucans at the bird park and they sell captive bred ones at local bird shops. Looking on the list of birds of one of the larger bird shops, they even have hornbills and Curassows and spoonbills. Birds I never know you could keep as pets in Singapore. Would have taken a photo if i could but they said no photography.

Cool. Really make me wanna have a parrot.

Spent a good hour there transiting from shop to shop, before heading down to town to use my groupon voucher. 90 mins to aroma full body massage at a spa in town.

Registration form they asked a question 'what is your preferred pressure' and they had options 'soft, medium, firm, hard'. I immediately ticked 'hard' without giving a two cents thought into it. The reception lady actually asked if I was sure before heading off to call the masseuse, which was a little butch who packs a heavy, but damn shiok punch (what is the use of a massage that doesnt hit the spot?)

lol

Is Korean Food Healthy

I used to totally hate eating Korean food because the meat was sometimes too fat, underseasoned and sides just tastes too bland. Sometimes it just chilli powder mixed into seafood broth or chicken stock. But recently, I've been visiting a place or two to have a bowl of soup or a BBQ. Plus I realised that I really love kimchi so much, I might be interested to attend a class and learn how to make them.

The taste of kimchi can beat any other side dish on the table by a mile.

Then today, after gym, I was hit with kimchi craving again and decided to drop by for a huge bowl of spicy seafood tofu soup. Although Korean food is relatively expensive (I mean $20 for a bowl of soup), but the fact that you get at least a couple dishes of sides is good. Plus that heap of kimchi and spinach.

Sunday after gym, sitting more than an hour with a huge bowl of soup that can feed 2, a cup of buckwheat tea and left over 150 pages of my book.

Guess what is for lunch? Tauhu Goreng. More protein for the day. Think I totally overdosing tofu.

Anyway. I do wonder how healthy is Korean food exactly. I know Kimchi is healthy coz it's fermented, plus korean have plenty of side dishes from a wide variety of vegetables. But what about their ginseng chickecn or stew soup?

Traveling Jackpot

And idea crossed my mind last night while reading the latest issue of Nat Geo Traveler. If I could save $100 every month from now till I'm 35. I would have enough money to have at least a month worth of travel funds when I turn 35.

Wouldn't it be nice and super exciting if you have $10k set aside for traveling that one trip at one point of your life. Imagine this, you have $10k in a bank account and you will travel to which ever place that was featured on the front cover of the issue of Nat Geo traveler on your 35th birthday.

The moment the very issue comes out, you call your travel agent to book a one way airticket to which ever place featured on the magazine's front cover. Then pack a back pack and spend the spring/summer there living until each cent of the $10k set aside has disappeared and then buy an airticket home.

Its like a jackpot, you will never know which tourist destination would be appearing in that yellow box. It could be some landscape destination in India, historical site in South East Asia, or a cruise in the Americas, or a beach resort in the Bahamas, safari in Africa, pilgrimage route.

How I wish. I could write an article and have my experience published in Nat Geo. I guess you can only have this piece of excitement in your life when you are still single and have no kids to look after. But really wont it really be fun and exciting?

Couple of weeks ago

My random day off and the only person i could get around was Lynette.
Result in high tea at Regent Hotel.

The T-Rex Stikes Again

There has been a lunch time conversation that has totally overrun-ed the week. Last week's little pizza hut lunch had a small discussion over the T-rex, future of Singapore's transportation and ERP systems and random other stuff.

But one topic that kept coming back the whole week was the poor old T-rex and how millions of years ago, it was the laughing stock of the dinosaur world. We learnt that the poor T-rex is actually pretty poor thing, even wondered if it ever was that great predator it really was.

Plus I learnt today that the T-rex's head is way to heavy for its body to balance. The poor T-rex may have toppled head down many times a day. I think the brontosaurs or the triceratops had a better deal.