Explore the possibilities.

Never be afraid to choose a road that nobody chooses.

Challenge new boundaries

Nobody knows what lies beyond.

There is always something new every day.

Pay attention to little details in your life and appreciate them.

Share the knowledge.

It is always fun to talk to someone who knows the subject as well as you do.

Be excited, and remember the excitement.

Never say you're too old to do something.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Me, the picky eater and the bad essay writer

The reason why I hate baking is that it's not as flexible as cooking savory foods. Let's say, I hate sugar. But I can't bake without sugar because sugar affects the texture of the cake. I feel like I'm underestimating bakers, but I feel that cakes are just combination of sugar, fats, flour and some flavor. Of course, you add things to cakes such as baking soda, egg whites, egg yolks and all others which I may not know. One wrong move and your cake is destroyed.

I guess the biggest deciding factor why I'm not into baking is that I rarely ever say "WOW!" to any cakes I've eaten so far. They don't excite me. I mean, yeah, I like the madeleine they sell at Starbucks. I eat birthday cakes and they're fine. But they don't excite me.

The best baked things that could ever made me say "OMG I WANT MORE OF THIS!!" was a really soft and fluffy honey bread that has thin, golden, crispy layer on the outside that I ate 1 years ago. It was the most brilliant baked goods I've ever had in my life. When I ate it, my heart cried "this is what heavenly means!!".

To a certain degree, I am a picky eater. But I've lived long enough in a dorm with the kind of foods that were far from exciting. The money I had was my parents', and I don't deserve to eat out at fancy restaurant every day just because dorm food was so-so. Occasionally, I did try to find some good foods around the area, but they're never fancy foods. My parents allowed me to spend them on foods, but I felt really bad if I spent too much on them.

But then I realized how much food gets wasted every day. Picky people throw away foods they don't really like. It's not even poisonous or inedible. They just throw food away.

So many people are hungry, why are we throwing food away?

I have now become a picky eater who will only praise the really good stuffs but eats everything that I can eat. This makes me sound like a greedy cat that sweeps everything away from the table, but I just can't stand food getting wasted. Why. Why wouldn't people take leftovers home?

I think altruism can start from taking leftovers home and save them for the next meals. Like, I somehow can't stand people who talk about altruism and waste food at the same time. Sounds a little too hypocritical to me :(

See, this post is getting nowhere. But here's the message:

DON'T WASTE FOOD.


Finally, the message got across. Even though you're a picky eater, try to eat the food and don't throw away the food, you got me?


And uhh... sorry to all bakers out there. I know there are awesome bakers out there because I've had a really awesome bread before. Keep baking, and maybe someday when I eat your baked goods my heart will finally accepts them with love ♥

Sunday, November 7, 2010

HELP!



Not meant to be gory!

The initial concept was a person who gets shocked after looking at his friend getting stressed out from studying. After it's been done, the concept changed to a person who witnessed a crime scene (LOL).

I don't have any bento ideas nowadays. I've been channeling my ideas through the songs I composed. Thanks to my friend, I became familiar with VOCALOID and I finally got the software. It's surprisingly rather easy to use. I guess the hard part is to make the voice sounds like a human, and not some synthetically produced voices >.<

And it's also partially because I have gotten really busy with school work! So many things to do, and so many things I want to do!!

I think my next bento will be Noctis bento. I hope it's not that hard to make.. ♫

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Spicy Attack

I don't know why but somehow I wanted to eat something really spicy.

It's hard to find cabe rawit here, so I used dried chili peppers they normally use in kungpao chicken. I boiled about 40-50 of them, fry them in a little bit of oil and crushed garlic, and just a little bit of lemon grass. And then I added a piece of chicken thigh, cut into 3 parts.



Yum!

Oh, by the way, good news: I can take French 101 next semester! \(^ v ^)/

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Shokuyoku no Fuyu

Shokuyoku no aki - a season of hearty appetites in fall season. Well I can't say it's fall right now. It's entering winter. So I'll call my phenomenon "shokuyoku no fuyu" since I'm becoming a real glutton in the cold winter.

It's midnight and I was hungry. I ate all the freebie cereal bars at home, so I had no choice but to cook something. I made shrimp alfredo linguine for lunch, and I guess I made too much sauce. So I decided to make a gratin.

At first I didn't know what gratin was. Thanks to the power of Google, I found out that it's a dish with some grated crust on it.

So I boiled tri-color rotini, put them on a pyrex pan, poured out the left over white sauce, sprinkled the dish with TONS of grated parmesan, and baked it using a toaster oven.




I call this this les crevettes au gratin. You know what? I'm not sure if I got them right but I Google (again!!) translated shrimp and les crevettes came out. And of course, au gratin  must have mean "with gratin" or something similar to that since I saw it on many restaurant menus. I mean, there's au jus as well, so I figure that au must have similar meaning to ala. No?

In any case I'm sorry if I got the French phrase wrong. But I really think putting a French name for your Western-style dish just sounds cooler somehow. After all, we love something that sounds complicated, don't we? *wink wink*

Bon apetit!