About Christmas

Merry Christmas everybody!  There’s nothing like some delicious pumpkin cupcakes to bring in the Yule-tide spirit, so I baked them, yeah.

The recipe looked simple enough.  Just prepare mashed pumpkin, brown sugar, eggs, butter, self-rising flour, ginger powder and chopped pistachio nuts, mix them up together, put into cupcake cups, bake for 30 minutes and voila! Pumpkin cupcakes!  Now, if only reality was THAT simple…

Most of the ingredients can be bought without much difficulty.  However, the things that used up most of my time were the pumpkin and the pistachio nuts.  I needed to steam the pumpkin prior to mashing it into a pulp, so I whipped out the pan and the “3-legged steaming stand”.  Not big enough to hold the pumpkin.  Changed to a shorter “3-legged steaming stand”.  Still not enough space to hold the pumpkin.  So, I had to set up my stainless steel steamer set, just to steam half a small pumpkin (the steamer is big enough to steam, like, 20 xiao long bao).  After steaming, the pumpkin did became easier to be scooped from its peel, but it also felt like moist earwax…

The next troublemaker was the pistachio nuts.  It was at the moment of purchasing the ingredients that I realised that pistachio nuts have nutshells.  Yeah, that sounded nuts, but I thought little about it at the time.  When it’s time to prepare the ingredients, it finally dawned on me that I, FBJ, would have to hand-peel/crack over 100 pistachio nuts and chopped them.  Man, my fingers have never moved so fast before (not even during exams or computer games).  For 20 minutes, it was just grab, crack, throw, grab, crack, throw, grab, crack, throw, ad infinitum.  That had to be the nuttiest moment in my life, ever!

After these two challenges, the rest of the baking process was pretty straight forward.  Until I had to use a piping to squeeze the batter into the cupcake cups, that is.  I scooped the batter into the piping bag, lifted up the bag, and then stared at the aluminium piping tip beside me.  My mind went, “OK, so this is gonna be like the opening treasure hunt sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I just need to snip the tip of the bag, then attach the piping tip to the bag before the batter flows out.  Piece of cake.”  On hindsight, ‘piece of cake’ was more like ‘piece of rolling boulder’.  In other words, it was TOUGH.

The moment I snipped the tip of the piping bag, the batter started flowing out immediately.  I hurriedly attached the piping tip to the bag, amid a flurry of flowing batter and shattered ego.  For a while, I thought I made it.  Time to make some cupcakes.  As soon as I tilt the piping bag downwards, the piping tip promptly dropped into the cupcake cup and was buried by the batter.  “OK, so I sucked at this just like Indiana Jones,” I thought.  I continued piping the batter into the remaining cups before I finally excavated the piping tip.  By the way, my first piping experience made me feel like shitting.  Seeing the batter ooze out in long, sticky forms just reminded me of what I see when I sit on the toilet bowl every day.  Oh well, at least this one is edible.

As a result of my stubborn perseverance, 23 delicious and adorable pumpkin cupcakes were born that day.  And somebody’s gonna pile on some fats after this.

About yummy wife-made beef noodles

Not just ANY beef noodles, but YUMMY wife-made beef noodles!  Get a load of this baby: chunky succulent beef cubes, juicy mushrooms, springy CQYD noodles, crispy Shanghai green, all swimming in a thick oyster sauce gravy.  Now that’s what I call heaven on earth!

This dish got a bit of history, too.  When I started dating my wife back in 2004 (Gosh, has it been that long?!), she used to brag about all the wonderful dishes she cooked while she was studying in Melbourne, Australia.  This was one of them.  Come to think of it, maybe she was making a sales pitch.  You know, like, “If you marry me next time, you will get to eat this dish and that dish…”  Ah well, I guess she knew I was a sucker for delicious food.

Anyway, that was 2004.  6 years later, after a wedding, a honeymoon, a baby son and countless sleepless nights, she has finally found the time to cook this glorious meal for me.  And for the record, it was definitely worth the wait!  Now I just need to wait for another 6 years for the next dish on her list….

About snails

I hate snails.

I really, really hate them.

It’s always the same story: the rain has just stopped, you strolled down the pedestrian path, enjoying the cool air, when suddenly, THEY appeared before you.  Like something that popped out of an alien film, they slither across the field, waiting for their unsuspecting victims.  And before they knew it, “CRRRRACK!”, their pitiful lives ended under some poor soul’s shoes.  Seriously, what kind of life form would choose this kind of life?  If you see them, they creep you out.  If you don’t see them, they end up dead under you.  Oh, how I hate snails so.

Snails have four eyes.  That’s just wrong.  Two eyes are normal.  Three eyes, I considered as OK, because Er Lang Shen from Journey to the West had three eyes.  Four eyes?  Damn, only if you’re wearing spectacles.  The children storybooks always try to make them look innocent by disguising them as creatures who have two eyes and two horns/moustache.   I tell you, snails are anything but innocent.  They are the devil reincarnated.  Damn you, snails!

Snail’s shell.  Now, that’s another abomination.  Curvaceous and hypnotic, it gives beautiful ladies a bad name.  Its earthly colour tone camouflages its occupant, allowing it to fulfil its destiny of sneaking under somebody’s shoes.  You starting to see how devious this little vermin is?

But what’s worse than the snails themselves?  The snail-eaters, of course.  Dudes, snails exist for only one reason: to be at the bottom of the food chain, so that other animals can feed on them.  Why, oh why, then, do you want to subject yourselves to eating earth scum?  Just because some French dude covered it with garlic and spices and gave it a fancy name like ‘escargot’?  A snail by any other name would taste as yucky, as Juliet would say to Romeo in a very odd alternate universe.  O common sense, where art thou?

I SO hate snails.