Stress Management 101 - My Style

This is the time of the year where I get stressed a lot. There's my thesis, my experiments, my team project, a competition, Dutch lessons... and then sometimes stress comes just from handling relationships with certain people. Or from the bipolar Dutch weather. Stress can annoying, and it's even more annoying when you can't do anything about it or talk to someone about it. But hey, at the very least, you can try to reduce it by doing something you like.

Here are my top 10 list of stress relieving methods:

1. Eat instant noodle

Oh dang, it's unhealthy, loaded with salt, MSG and fats. Are you suicidal!? Well, no, basically I run for my comfort food. Instant noodle gets ready in 3 minutes, yummy and warm. There's never any moment of "I don't have an appetite" when it comes to instant noodles. Unless I just went for a binge eating session at some buffet restaurant. That being said...


2. Binge eating

source: blog.timesunion.com

At times I would splurge anything available in my fridge or cabinet. That's why sometimes it's good for me not to keep too much food in stock. But nevertheless, keeping food stock at home has already become a habit. Prepare an umbrella before it rains, so an Indonesian idiom says. Luckily, I rarely go binge eating these days. And by the way, sometimes the unhealthier it is, the greater the 'healing' effect is. And I don't know why.


3. Cook

Cooking is a great distraction because I typically don't think when I cook. Just put ingredients and seasonings together according to instinct and see if anything good comes out of it. Luckily, I only have to feed myself. If it doesn't turn out well, it's a good reminder to stop doing stupid things and move on. If it turns out good... my tongue is happy, my tummy is happy. In the end, it's a win-win situation.

And I especially like to decorate my food. Pretty food makes me happier, even if it's just omelette, sausages, broccoli and ketchup (yep, I made that omelette 'flower' in the picture).


4. Post something on my blog

source: cakechooser.com

One of the greatest reason why I'm keeping my blog is because I write something not relevant to my problems. In a sense, it's a type of avoidance. It doesn't really solve the problem, but writing helps to let out my thoughts and sort them out nicely. Like what I'm doing right now.


5. Write a song

source: haru-otaku.blogspot.com

When things get extremely annoying, I tend to channel all my negative thoughts into a song. I mean, why bother getting wrinkles when you can produce something productive that also entertains other people? I love it when YouTubers leave comments like "this is so me!", because... hey, I know I'm not the only one in the world who feels that way. For sure.

This is a song I made to dedicate my love for Wikipedia. Every academic researcher knows that all professors don't allow you to cite Wikipedia, but nevertheless, I still find it very useful and informative. Sorry it's in Indonesian, no English translation.

WIKIPEDIA, I LOVE YOU!!


6. Karaoke

source: madlyjuicy.com

One of the things I most from Asia is a karaoke box where I can sing alone as loudly and as off-tunely (is there such a word?) as possible. Let it go out loud. Especially when I was in Japan, where I could book a room like the one in the picture above just for myself. All for around 600 yen (~US$6).

When I was in the US, I did a karaoke session in my apartment once, and I got a warning note from my neighbor. I guess the walls were too thin, or... I just don't sing that well (sorry!).


7. Drawing/sketching

Sometimes all I need is to vent up some excess energy that is not supposed to be there. I'm not particularly good at drawing or sketching things, but it gets my brain away from the problem. Again, it doesn't solve the problem, but it helps me to calm down and think clearly.


8. Surfing the Internet

Images of cute animals just make my heart goes... full of love <3

And sometimes you just find something so stupid it makes you laugh so much because it doesn't make sense at all. Watch this morning exercise song:

And you'll think "Thank God I'm not the stupidest person in the world".


9. Rolling on the bed
My bed isn't large enough, but at least it's enough to lie down and roll back and forth. And then I imagine myself as this:

source: paintingsbygretsky.blogspot.com

source: www.knaria.com

source: kidztrainer.com

And then I go back being happy again :)

10. Playing games

One thing that you cannot take out of my life is gaming. I'm not as hardcore as I used to be, but I always like the challenges I get from playing a game. I'm typically not satisfied with low-standard results, and when I can't perform so in real life, it helps to know that I have good acuity and motor skills. And problem solving skills, too, because I can - most of the time - handle games that have no instructions.

I was told once that playing games is apparently quite... an antisocial behavior. But I think I just have to be in the right pool of people when I play games, because sometimes conversations can start from talking about games. Like when my brother sent me a screenshot of his Flappy Bird score.

How do you vent your stress?

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Ireland - Lebanese Pumpkin Cantellini Soup

After 1 month staying in Ireland, I finally figured out where the Saturday market is: almost right in front of our housing.

There were only about 10 shops at the Saturday market. Most of the sell food and fresh fruits and vegetables. I didn't see any shop selling meat.

There was a shop that sells Lebanese pumpkin and cantellini soup with 7 spices, which she doesn't remember all of them when I asked the lady who sold this soup.



I Googled "Lebanese 7 spices" and according to this website they are: nutmeg, ginger, allspice, fenugree, cloves, cinnamon and black pepper. Really, I just love Google. You can get all sorts of useful information you wouldn't be able to get 10 years ago.

I'm not sure if I'm fond of the texture - it's a little to thick of a soup for me.

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Ireland - Wheat Germ

It is probably nothing special for a lot of Westerners, but it is something really new to me.

If you are not familiar with the structure of wheat in English, you'd probably think of "germ" as microorganism, as my friend did when I told her "I got wheat germ today."

The germ is actually part of the kernel of the wheat that is responsible for germination, which is to say that it contains a lot of protein and vitamins necessary for its growth.

My Suppy Chain Management professor was telling us about wheat germs in class the other day, and based on the class's response, wheat germ would be classified as something an overly healthy person or a granny would buy. And that made me curious. Does it taste that bad? And does it really help with bowel regulation? I need to test it on myself, because if this thing is more effective than eating a dozen of prebiotic yogurt and the taste is acceptable, I would definitely buy this instead of some soluble fiber sold in pharmacies whenever I have some bowel problems.

I found wheat germs in the breakfast cereal section in TESCO, next to the oatmeals. According to the instruction, you can add it to soups, breakfast cereals or even beverages. I tried mixing a tablespoon of it into a mug of hot chocolate, and it tastes perfect. However, thanks to my curious question at myself "What happens if I add a lot of these into my hot chocolate?" after drinking half a mug of my wheat-germ fortified hot chocolate, I found myself stuck in a rather uncomfortable situation.

At high dosage, I'd say about 3 tablespoons of wheat germ into half a mug of hot chocolate, I could taste bitter compounds from the beverage. Not to mention the consistency changed a lot. I felt like drinking extremely diluted oatmeal with grainy particles and a hint of chocolate. Terrible. Absolutely terrible.

My Thai housemate, also a curious individual (but much less extreme than me), tried to mix it with warm milk and she said it was delicious.

I think I'll try mixing it in soups next. Or maybe in rice!

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Ireland - Bright Colored Houses

If you don't take a time to really think about it, you probably just think "oh, what a nice color" when you look at the buildings in Ireland. Or you might not even bother noticing that these buildings are of different colors because you are dying to reach your target destination when you walk in the rain. Or when you're rushing to school.

Why are the buildings colored brightly? It's because everything around those buildings are grey. I'm not sure if these make any differences to colorblind people, but they do make a difference in my mood.

By the way, I didn't photoshop this picture. The surroundings of those buildings are naturally grey.

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Ireland - 10 Surprising Things that I Noticed

I thought I would see continual grey sky during my stay in Ireland but for the past 2 weeks I have been enjoying the radiating light of the sun. Maybe I'm just lucky.

Beautiful morning scene right in front of my current housing

This is my first visit to Ireland, and none of my direct family member had been in Ireland before. Well, here are 10 things that I find surprising because of the expectations I held about Ireland before I came here:

1. Crossing the road anytime, anywhere is a common thing
By anytime, I mean as long as you think it is safe to cross the road. Most people cross at designated areas (i.e. the zebra cross or where there are traffic lights) but you can see people crossing the road randomly as long as the street is clear of passing cars.

2. It's 5 degrees C outside and ladies wear short skirts and high heels
I'm wearing a pair of jeans and I still crave for a cup of warm hot chocolate. Those ladies deserve a lot of praise. At least from me, who still complain about the cold weather despite wearing a pair of boots instead of heels.

3. Class starts 5 minutes after the scheduled time
Unlike in the Netherlands where classes start on time, you actually have to wait for another 5 minutes before the professor starts the lecture in Ireland.

4. Irish coffee is hard to find
When I was in the Netherlands, Irish coffee (coffee mixed with whiskey and sugar) was served in almost every restaurant. In Ireland, you're lucky if you can find Irish coffee in a coffee shop. Well, not the Dutch "coffee shop". A shop that sells coffee, yes.

5. Hollandaise sauce is everywhere
I assume that the name Hollandaise is associated to Holland, which is associated to the Netherlands. I found no dish with Hollandaise sauce when I was in the Netherlands. How ironic, Irish coffee is hard to find, yet Hollandaise sauce is commonly used in Ireland. And the reverse is true.

6. They celebrate 18th, 21st and 30th birthday
I found this flyer posted on a toilet door in a restaurant close to my housing. I still have no idea what the significance of 18th and 30th birthdays, but the 21st birthday is most likely associated with minimum drinking age.

Yes, I know taking pictures in the toilet is dumb but I still did it anyways.

6. North American food is almost everywhere
Philly cheesesteak, melts, hamburgers, chili fries, subs, burritos... you name it. I walked through the city center and found that there is at least one restaurant on the street that sells these kind of food. There is even one diner in town that has a retro American diner setting:

7. British accent... but maybe not really
It's a little hard to catch the accent of Irish people, but I think I'm getting used to it. I can understand what people say, but I can't reply them with the same accent. God knows what kind of accent I have. It's not Indonesian, not American, not Singaporean (a.k.a. Singlish). My accent is just... my accent.

8. Guinness tastes like some horrible Chinese medicinal herbal drink a traditional Chinese grandma would feed you when you're not feeling well... plus some carbonation.
When you're in Ireland, drink Guinness. Well, I did. I do not like it, and most probably I will not come to like it.

9. Almost all Irish people are extremely nice
But I was warned to be a little cautious about Irish men who are overly friendly to Asian girls in the bar. Otherwise, I think they have wonderful, pleasant, helpful personalities. You can read my previous posts about Ireland about how the I was saved by the Irish multiple times.

10. Horse meat mixed into beef is a very serious issue
We have a similar issue with beef balls mixed with rat meat in Indonesia, and I still think horse meat is better than rat meat even though I don't know how they taste. This issue was raised recently due to the rise in beef price. You'd see signs on restaurants serving beef products saying "using 100% Irish beef". At first I thought there is something special about Irish beef (like Kobe beef, perhaps), but I learned that they put these signs because of the possibility of horse meat being used to replace the expensive beef.

I promised to write a post about my trip to Cliffs of Moher, but I have a handful load of things to do right now and I have to manually upload the photos to Google+ instead of uploading them directly to Blogger because I ran out of space. Let's pray I can remember everything about the trip after 2 weeks.

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Random - Chibi Maker

The reason why I keep being active on Facebook is not because I like stalking people, but because you never know what kind of information you can find on the newsfeed.

Cute, dont' you think? Well, this doesn't really portray me except for my favorite red winter coat and my hairstyle, but you're always free to make up whatever character and style as you wish.

Try the program here: http://gen8.deviantart.com/art/Chibi-Maker-1-1-346025144

You can customize the hairstyle, clothes, accessories, and facial expression. And of course, you can choose the color of the item from the color selection.

Just for fun :)

More variations of mine:

Thank you gen8 for making such a cool program! ^^

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The Netherlands - Brain Tonic Mushroom Soup

I forgot to include this interesting story about finding a brain tonic herbal soup mix in Den Haag's China Town. 

I can't read Chinese characters, especially when they are too fancy. I can only read a word that means "monkey head mushroom" and "brain". The rest looked like some encrypted ancient language to me. Lucky enough, I was there with a friend from China. She translated almost everything on the package, and it says that it can improve your brain and also make you smarter. Ha!

The only ingredient I recognize was monkey head mushroom and golden mushroom. And it's actually pretty weird they didn't include goji berry in the ingredients list even though I clearly saw goji berries (on the first picture, the red seed-like dried fruits at the bottom of the package). The rest of ingredients can actually be found in Google and Wikipedia (and I'm actually quite surprised I was able to find good information about those ingredients).

All of the ingredients for Chinese herbal soups are normally preserved by drying. In this case, I have to rehydrate the monkey head mushroom (above) separately in a bowl of water for 10 minutes, then squeeze out the water from the mushroom. They call it monkey head mushroom because when it is at its original or rehydrated state, if you rub the caps, you feel like rubbing a monkey's hairy head :)

The ingredients were nicely and individually packaged. It made me think that this herbal soup premix is actually of high quality. The goji berries also look fresh (they are bright red; some poor quality goji berries look pale orange and are shrunk too much).

In the English instruction, they only said "add lean pork meat" into the soup but when my Chinese friend read the instruction written in Chinese, it actually said "add lean pork or chicken meat" into the soup. Why would they change the instructions? Is pork meat better for English speaking communities? LOL. Lost in translation.

I simmered the soup in low heat for 3 hours. It's very delicious (to me, who is used to drinking herbal soup since young). It's slightly earthy but also sweet because of the goji berries.

Do I feel smarter? Well, you tell me. I left my favorite gloves in an iceskating rink 1.5 hours away by car from Wageningen during an iceskating rink event organized by Thymos, a sports association in my university, a week after I drank this soup. It definitely doesn't improve my short term memory. But hey, it tastes great. I don't mind eating this soup again :D

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The Netherlands - Interesting LIDL Goods

Groceries shops are my best friends. The Netherlands is the fourth country I've ever settled for at least 3 months, and based on my personal experience and interest, groceries shops are the core of a country's food culture.

There are 5 supermarkets / groceries store chains that I know around Wageningen and Ede: Albert Heijn, C1000, LIDL, Aldi and Hoogvliet. Albert Heijn generally has more food varieties, and sometimes with a Bonuskaart (a card that lets you accumulate points and get discounts on certain products) you can get really cheap meats (before the 'best before' date, of course). Both LIDL and Aldi are German, but somehow from the information I gathered from people who have been living in the Netherlands for quite some time, these German stores sell the cheapest goods.

LIDL is particularly interesting to me even though it is quite far from where I live right now. Well, by far, I mean 15 minutes cycling. By location, C1000 is much closer (3 minutes cycling including waiting for traffic lights). While C1000 offers a great variety of alcoholic drinks, which are of many university students' interest, the prices tend to be a little high. By far, LIDL sells the cheapest goods with acceptable qualities. And sometimes you get unique stuffs too. Like these decorating sauces:

There are three kinds of sauces: a combination of three types of mustards, white truffle and wasabi soy sauce. Each bottle is sold for 1.45 euros. As a person who cares a lot about food presentation (unless someone cooks it for me - then I won't complain how bad the food looks like as long as they taste nice), these look very interesting to me. I've been decorating my plates with tomato ketchup whenever I have spare time preparing breakfast ever since I moved to Wageningen to live because my campus is only 3 minutes by bike. 

These were rolled omelet with cut cocktail sausage and blanched broccoli. This is probably not a typical Dutch breakfast. I'm not sure if this is a breakfast menu in any parts of the world. To me, there is no distinction between breakfast food or lunch food or dinner food or snack food. As long as my stomach can handle it and I'm in the mood for the food, I'll eat it. The whole prep time was about 15 minutes. I felt sad destroying my art as I ate it, but at the same time, I felt happier eating food that is presented nicely. It's weird, but it's my hobby.

Final product of using the decoration sauces I just used? This:

Smoked salmon on cottage cheese with 3 sauces and garnish. I got the smoked salmon and the cottage cheese from LIDL as well, and they were actually in a package, together with the black toothpicks.

The sauces actually taste pretty good. The mustard sauce was kind of sweet and mild. It's those type of mustard sauce you'd find on hotdogs. Definitely not the kind of high grade mustards you'd get from specialty cheese shops, but it's color and texture is perfect for decorating your plate.

The white truffle sauce is rich in truffle aroma, and if you compare it with real truffles of course this would be low in comparison, but you can definitely taste and smell the truffle flavor in this sauce. I'm not too familiar with truffle flavors because truffles are generally very expensive, and I treat truffle as an ultra fancy food. Actually, to be honest, truffle sauces has this offensive ammonia-like smell that I don't really like the first time I tried it. However, that smell is actually quite addicting and pleasant at low amount. I've grown to like the smell of truffle :)

The wasabi soy sauce is actually my least favorite because I grow up consuming soy sauce and I have a strong preference on soy sauce. The soy sauce used here is actually sweet soy sauce, and surprisingly this sweet soy sauce is the closest to the authentic Indonesian sweet soy sauce. I never like any sweet soy sauce produced in the Netherlands. They taste funny, and somehow I think they are overcaramelized. I don't really taste the wasabi in this sauce, it's really mild. But this is actually a pretty well-balanced sauce, and I think this goes well with many appetizers.

The sauces are very easy to squeeze, and the viscosity is just perfect for decoration. It doesn't break off easily in the middle, and controlling the volume squeezed out doesn't take a lot of time to learn.

I tried eating the salmon and cheese with three sauces at the same time, and it actually tasted pretty good. Kind of sweet, tangy, sour, earthy, salty, savory, astringent... it's a good balance, I'd say. I'm still thinking of ways to use these decorative sauces, but sometimes it's hard to decorate Asian food with these sauces (I cook better Asian food than Western food, except for omelets, if you count that as Western food). There is usually not a lot of free space on the plate, and we don't really use neither mustards nor truffle.

I'll see what I can do about them :P

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Cooking Collections during Bachelor's Degree

If you study food science major in the United States, you'd most probably end up in a somehow rural settings where entertainment is somewhat limited. After I came to Wageningen, I feel that there were actually more entertainment in Urbana-Champaign. Basically, Walmart is my haven. I remember spending 2 hours in food section of Walmart with my foodie friends after having a large dinner together. Yep, this was how I spent my bachelor degree without getting too bored.

I actually made recipe cards for the stuffs that I cooked. Printing photos in Walmart was quite cheap and easy, so I just did a simple editing by adding text into the pictures, and print them. Then I wrote the recipe at the back. Almost all of the food that I cook have no recipes - they were just something that I thought of when I was bored. Now my mum keeps this recipe-in-photo collection of mine.

It is actually easier to get ingredients in the States than in the Netherlands, although the freshness of the items, especially fruits and vegetables, might not be as good as those in the Netherlands. Farmers markets sell them at expensive price, and those found in large groceries stores like Walmart are normally picked before they were ripe, and ripening occurs during storage (because of increased ethylene concentration). Tomatoes taste less sweet, French beans last shorter... oh, and a lot of fruits are pre-packed. Cut pineapples in modified atmosphere packaging taste really sweet, and sometimes I don't know if they spray liquid sugar to keep its freshness (and also to reduce browning from oxidation).

Well, these were some of the things I cooked in the past. Somehow I feel that I was way more creative back then. Like substituting roasted seaweed with egg white as sushi wrap? Yeah, it's insane, but it's possible.

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