I wore my newly bought pants from Taiwan today. The pair that cost NT$200. That's approximately S$8.90. Isn't that a steal? It isn't incredibly well made, but considering blogs in Singapore mark it up to S$30 before selling it, I bought it anyway.
Anyway, I wore it today, and when I met my mom at NTUC to get groceries, I remarked, "It doesn't fit very well, does it? Makes me look fat." And my mom answered, "No, it looks completely fine from the back! I think it looks nice. Don't blame it on the pants when you have gained weight." SUCH A BURN! +1 to Mommy. As someone whom has just eaten a slice of blackforest cake - but chose to delicately skip the cream bits, which is something I would never understand, though I myself committed said action, because hell lady, if you be eating cake at 1:30am in the mornin', you might as well be eatin' the whole dang slice. Or the whole dang cake - I cannot feel any sense of animosity toward my dearest mommy because I really do deserve that remark. Two slices of cake have been consumed today!
Speaking of cake, when I had just awakened this morning and made my way down to the dining table to partake in breaking of my night's fast, my mom had kindly let me know that there was cake in the fridge. But holding on to my plain bread, with my throbbing swollen right eye hurting, I had decided to be ungracious and to be unkind, and I muttered "I don't like blackforest cake."
Well I really don't particularly have any fondness for this cake flavour, I needn't have been unkind. Especially not to my own mother, who is the most selfless person on Earth. Immediately my inner self recoiled from the ugliness that my outer self had displayed, yet I did not apologise. ... You always remember the times you were unkind. The times that you hurt people. Snide remarks to snub and to chill. I always remember these times the most vividly. I don't really think the times that you're kind make up for it. Try to always be kind, I suppose. They don't get tipped on a balancing scale.
Moving past that, I made dinner today!
appetiser: pumpkin soup
main course: mushroom risotto
ummm accompanying protein (because the Ng brothers would complain at a carb-laden dinner without any muscle-building protein?!?!): ginger&honey chicken drumsticks with vegetables
My pumpkin soup recipe was loosely based on the
one done by the Sorted Food crew, while the mushroom risotto was also adapted from both
Sorted Food's and
Gennaro Contaldo's, and lastly, the Ginger & Honey chicken drumsticks was an adaptation from both
Jamie Oliver's Best BBQ Sauce with chicken drumsticks recipe along with
Kerryann Dunlop's Healthy Tray-baked Chicken Thighs. All measurements were haphazardly counted in my mind - to be honest, I eyeballed most everything... Usually such daring ventures play out quite well, but with a sore lack of practice and my temporarily displaced sense of smell, I got too much garlic in the pumpkin soup, the first batch of risotto turned out a tad too salty, and the glaze for the chicken was too sweet. Too much honey!
I really am going to utilise my blender more to make broccoli soups and such.
I quite liked the second batch of risotto thou! The first batch was for my brothers, both of whom have a stronger palate anyway. For the second batch, I diluted the vegetable stock with more water, and did not salt the mushrooms. I also used replaced a bit of the salted butter with an unsalted one!
Making risotto is quite a tedious task. Swirl and swirl you do, just to massage the starch out of the arborio grains to make the dish creamy. I think I bit off more than I could chew today, by the time my brothers had to eat and leave for their respective activities, I was hopping around the kitchen like a crazed woman in the finals of Masterchef Australia. For the pumpkin had to first be roasted for 90 min before being fried off in a pan with garlic and onion, then blended. The other two dishes had separate components to them as well; the risotto needed vegetable stock brought to a boil and the chicken needed the glaze to become sticky and thick. That's quite a lot of prep time.
Well it was fun cooking these three dishes nevertheless! Plus the Ng family shows such support and enthuasiasm about my cooking that even when I am critical of my own dishes, they disagree. Haha. Such a supportive family I have. Maybe they do it in hopes that I will cook dinner tomorrow. Hehehe.
Labels: being kind, cooking, dinner, gennaro contaldo, Italian cuisine, jamie oliver, sorted food, the ng family
