I bought some Darlie toothpaste yesterday because they were giving a free mug.
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| I got to choose between the two designs on the package. |
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| the other side of the mug |
This means I can finally change my mug...because nothing else was able to replace my previous mug up till now.
Then I realized that my previous mug was also from Darlie.
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| Thank you Darlie! :D |
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| to show the other side of the old mug |
What do you see?
It's water...
On another water-related note, I have been using Anchor butter, but the other day I saw SCS butter being sold at only 40 sen more, so I wondered whether I should buy that instead.
I decided to take a look at the ingredients, and saw that while SCS butter lists only cream and salt as its ingredients, Anchor has water as well!
It's hard to tell whether the "water" there means that they are watering down the cream, or whether their cream was thicker to begin with...
Anyway, I bought one of each. Will put it to a taste test one day. :P
I tried a nasi arab that I have seen advertised on Facebook multiple times. They have a budget chicken/lamb set for just RM10, being sold at the roadside outside their restaurant. (the actual set costs RM24 in the restaurant)
The rice was very flavourful, and so was the soup (though I was afraid the soup might be laden with MSG, so I didn't dare to drink it). I took lamb, and the pieces on top don't look so nice...they were a bit drier than the smaller pieces below them. The small pieces were more tender, but the ones on top were not hard either (basically I think they just dried up a bit because they were pre-packed). For RM10, I'm pretty satisfied!
I'm expecting that if we order in the restaurant, the portion would be bigger and it would be freshly prepared. According to the menu, it also comes with salad.
On Chinese New Year's eve, I tried making a simple cookie.
Don't they look nice and golden?
However, the bottoms tell a totally different story...
This was a recipe that I saw on Facebook. The cookies were supposed to be round like lotus seeds (that was what I first thought of when I saw the photo)
The ingredients are only one egg yolk, 3 tablespoons of condensed milk, and 8 tablespoons of corn flour. The egg yolk and condensed milk are to be stirred together and then the corn flour kneaded in. I think I probably didn't put enough corn flour because my balls of dough melted down to become flat discs instead (even before baking in the pan). But the dough was already very hard and I could hardly knead it!
They say to cook it on low heat (on a non-stick pan) for 15-20 minutes, but I stopped it earlier because the bottoms were getting burnt. The biscuits turned out rather dry, so they were not really that good. I wonder how they are supposed to be... but I'm not sure I can manage to find out!
The Facebook post called it biskut telur lumer, which translates to melted egg biscuits (from Indonesian). Well, mine certainly melted...but I'm not sure why they named it that way, since theirs didn't melt!
Remember the okonomiyaki I made not too long ago?
I decided to give it another try, with more ingredients. This time I added in chicken, prawn, and even squid (I had a few pieces of squid flower left)
The result was an okonomiyaki laden with extra ingredients in each bite! (I cut up everything into small pieces) In the photo above, we can see the prawn (on the right) and chicken (on the left). I cut it with a spoon, so it doesn't look too clean. I didn't think of cutting it with a knife for the photo :P
For one of the pieces, I placed two slices of chicken on one side (like I did with the pork before). I sliced the chicken about a quarter-inch thick, so it didn't crisp up into nothing like the thinly-sliced pork the last time. But with all the small pieces of ingredients inside, those additional chicken slices didn't really make much difference. That side of the okonomiyaki looked as ugly as last time anyway, so it's not like it looked better with the chicken slices. However, I'm thinking of putting some pieces of meat onto the pan first, then putting the batter on it. Then maybe the okonomiyaki would look better, with big pieces of meat on the flat surface!
Anyway, that would be for next time if I remember...
Can you guess last week's theme from this?
It's shadows from the hot hot sun! The sun is shining into my porch these days, and the reflection off my car makes these shadows.
This week's photo theme was texture. It's lucky that I took a photo almost immediately after receiving the theme, because with the Chinese New Year break, I had sort of forgotten that it was Friday!
This bak kua comes in a very textured packet! The other side of the packet was smooth. The photo theme came on the day I received the bak kua, so I immediately thought of this.
To continue from my previous post, I bought some silicone cupcake moulds recently. I wasn't really planning to bake any cakes, but since I wanted to try out the moulds, I decided to save two bananas to make banana cake. (It was a difficult decision because the bananas were very yummy :P )
I bought the moulds at RM9.90 for 12 pieces. They came in 6 colours, which looks very nice. :D
I tried baking with and without cupcake liners. The silicone cups are slightly smaller and shorter than the liners. So there was more batter in the paper cups. But I baked them all together for the same amount of time, so the ones in the silicone cups are darker.
It was easy to take the cakes out of the silicone cups, and they were also nicely browned on the sides. I am satisfied!
The only weird thing that happened was that my cupcakes became slightly oval (it's not clear in the photo), because the silicone cups are softer than the aluminium cups that I used before. My baking pan has an uneven surface, and when the silicone cups were placed on that uneven surface, the bottom of the cups were no longer flat, leading to oval-shaped tops. But I don't care so much about a slightly uneven shape, so it's fine for me.
Yesterday I tried out a couple of things.
First was okonomiyaki. I have tried making it before, but I think the batter was too watery or something, and it didn't turn out like okonomiyaki at all. This time I was more careful, and made the batter thicker so that it would hold together.
I looked up a few recipes, and mainly followed this one (but only the basics). My main purpose was to finish up my cabbage, so I chopped up the cabbage first, added an egg, then added flour and water bit by bit until the cabbage was coated and the batter looked thick enough to hold up in a pan. (flour was the thing that I kept adding...I only added a bit of water at the beginning)
I followed the method of putting batter in the pan and then the meat slices on top, then leaving it covered for 5 minutes. Then flipped it and cook covered for another 5 minutes, and then another flip, cook uncovered for 2 minutes. (It was hard to figure out whether the inside was fully cooked, so I didn't dare to mess with the times)
I made two pieces, and here's how they looked:
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| (you can see a tiny bit of meat in the batter, near the edge) |
The first piece has the first side up, the second has the meat side up. I used thinly-sliced pork (the ones used for steamboat), and I think they might have been too thin, because they were browned and hard after the 5 minutes.
For the second piece, I shredded some of the pork and mixed it into the batter. The final conclusion is still: Not enough meat. In future I shall add in plenty of other ingredients in the batter...then it will be a lot better!
For both pieces, the second side couldn't be browned on the edges. It was because the first side had already hardened, and I couldn't even push the batter towards the centre after flipping it. But it was still cooked through, so I guess it's fine.
The second thing I tried out was some silicone cupcake moulds...but since this post is quite long already, I shall keep that for another post.
This week's photo theme was black and white, which is exactly the same theme that I started Photo Friday with.
This time, I really didn't have a good idea... in the end, I decided to play with the tilt-shift camera option again, and ended up with this.
I actually put the focus on the words, and the parts above and below it are supposed to be blurry. They are blurry if you look carefully, but I guess blurry black looks almost the same as clear black.
In case you're wondering what I'm taking a photo of, you can see the other side here!
My previous post was about Go Fighting!, and this one will be too. Or about Pikachu.
Deng Lun is a new member in Season 6, and I find him a lot more likable now that I've discovered that he likes Pikachu!
In episode 6, they were in a museum that has items from a few decades ago, including toys. He came across these dough figurines, and he picked a Pikachu!
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| (the Pikachu was further on the right...though it seems like there's one here too?) |
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| holding his Pikachu |
Then in episode 7, they were digging for balls. Some balls have numbers on them and can be exchanged for items for their game. But some are "duds", and the contents don't matter. But he found a ball that contained several Pikachu! (I wouldn't call this ball a dud...it's a treasure! :P )
When he cracked it open, he exclaimed, "Wah! I like this!"
Then he picked up the other pieces, and goes on to exclaim again, "Wah! This is so cute!"
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| holding several Pikachu figurines |
I want these too! (the dough figurine didn't look that good)
I looked up his age, and he's the same age as WW...so I guess they would be good friends :P
I can't help wondering whether they set up the Pikachu scene in this second episode...it doesn't seem likely that they would choose to put Pikachu in the ball for no reason! Plus the other duds seemed to have different kind of wormy creatures (real or fake, I'm not sure) inside. Maybe the comments from the previous episode showed that fans were happy to see him like Pikachu, so they decided to bring in Pikachu again...
I don't think I mentioned it before, but Lei JiaYin was the Chinese voice actor for Detective Pikachu, and when he joined the show in Season 5, there were some scenes where they put Pikachu ears on him and played the sound "Pika Pika!" (that made me happy too :P ) Pity Deng Lun wasn't around at that time..it would have been a good match!
Note: The Pikachu discovery is about 22 minutes into the episode.
I have mentioned before that I watch Go Fighting!. The cast has changed quite a bit, but the new members are all awesome in their roles!
Recently I have been catching up on Season 6, which was aired in 2020. When I first found the videos, they didn't have subtitles yet, or were not available in Malaysia yet, I'm not sure which. Anyway, I have been watching them after finding out that subtitled versions are now available!
Go Fighting! likes to hold concerts for charity, usually at the end of the season (also mentioned in the previous post linked above). This time I was surprised to see a mini-performance in episode 5.
The
embedded video
starts at the performance. The whole episode is a parody of a TV show that
trains idol groups, with silly challenges. None of the members are singers or
dancers, so they learn singing, and they start learning the dance two hours
before the live performance.
There is
another clip
that contains only the performance (it's cut from the episode, so the end of
the song still has scenes from the episode). It doesn't have English
subtitles, so I still wanted to share the video of the subbed episode (they
sub the lyrics too). But if you don't need English subs, this shorter clip
would probably suit you better.
They are performing boy-band style, and as expected, it looks slightly comedic with middle-aged men in the mix. Deng Lun and Jia NaiLiang are the only ones who can passably look like boy-band members, but I am impressed at how Guo JingFei managed to look pretty cool with his gestures. Wang Xun looks affable as always (instead of cool :P ), and Lei JiaYin looks old and tired (why does he always look like that? It's so hard to believe that he is only two years older than me...at first I thought he was past forty). Yue YunPeng is the funniest because he can still hardly follow the dance. When he did his solo singing, he looked like he was trying not to laugh, and behind him, Jia NaiLiang looked like he was actually laughing... I also found it funny that when everyone was doing the cool arms-slicing-the-air movement, Yue YunPeng seemed to just give up and just waved his hands instead.
Oh and those one-sided coats... they look so ridiculous! Would have been
better to just let them wear normal coats.
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