Dear friends

Moo-ra days

Thank you for being there for me. For perking me up every time I feel down. For listening so patiently when I am ruminating. For sticking up for me. For drawing the extrovert out of the introvert. For giving the introvert some space to herself. For forgiving my lack of presence of MSN. For helping me without ever asking if I need help. For putting up with all my bitching and nasty habits. And most of all, for loving me for who I am.

I feel truly blessed. What will I do without you guys?

Ain't so kangtastic

Kangaroo fillet with in-season bokchoy and button mushrooms
(haha..'in season' and 'button' really just as adjectives
to make my dish sound a little more enticing ^^")

A few days ago I cooked, for the first time, kangaroo meat! Being the first time, I was quiet lost as to how to approach cooking it. The meat is extremely low in fat , which means it's really easy to end up with dried-jerky type sort of meat. This is the reason why many roo dishes, to my understanding anyway, are served at the medium-rare stage. However, this state of half cooked meat does not sit very well with me. Even with my traditional steak, I like it well-done. So what to do, what to do? I had such a hard time working with this meat!

But hey, I'm digressing here. Let me introduced what I cooked first. This dish that I cooked was based on the Sesame Kangaroo with Asian Greens recipe from Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia (KIAA). I decided to modify it a little because it was only when I got home that I realised that I don't have half the ingredients listed.

So here's my version:
Ingredients (don't ask me about quantities, I always cook by feeling, not by recipes):

• Kangaroo fillet
• Oyster sauce, soy sauce, finey diced ginger & garlic, honey
• bokchoy
  
• mushrooms
• oil, salt, sugar, pepper
  

Instructions:

1. Slice fillet into strips
2. Combine oyster sauce, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, honey into a sauce. Marinate the meat in it for 15-30 minutes
3. Chop up bokchoy and mushrooms
4. Heat the stirfry pan and oil
5. Cook the marinated meat along with all the sauce. Add salt/pepper/sugar to taste.
   
6. Clean the pan then cook the vegies. Add salt/pepper/sugar to taste.
7. Present!
   

The essential ingredients

I have to say, despite all my worries, my kangaroo meat actually turned out to be surprisingly tender. Very tender in fact. It was more tender than chicken breast! This makes me wonder whether it is because it's undercooked, or simply the manifestation of the great chef inside me. The former seems unlikely because the meat was not red in the middle and certainly not burnt. (So it must be the latter then!! lol). My only problem with it is that it tasted too proteiny..like sheep's liver. *shudders* So, I'll have to investigate ways of masking that taste.

The first pic of this post was the 'poster' image. Something you would see in pretty cookbooks. The above image is really what my family had to eat that night. ^^" As evident from the pic, it's not a particularly aesthetically pleasing dish. That's mainly due to my fault of using mushrooms which gives out water and is brown from being overcooked, so essentially there's only two colours.

Edit: Just a side note, I realised that there's only around 1200 days till I finish uni! Argh! Crazy! I'm not ready yet!

-_-"

The rest of those webcam pics:



Music: My Girl OST - Song Bo Ram - Happy Happy

T2 Tea House

I'm not a sucker for hype, but I am a sucker for beautiful designs. No matter how useless the product is, I will let myself succumb to the evils of marketing if the designs are quirky and/or aesthetically pleasing. T2 Tea House at Macquarie Shopping Centre is one of those places where I will surrender to the evils of marketing and sleek interior design. The place is beautiful. Full stop. They have quirky names for teas such as Gorgeous Geisha, Bright Night and most intriguing one, Speed. Peel back the wrapping and all one gets is a tea shop. It’s tea for goodness sake! Not vintage red wine. But because of the old school nostalgia (Shanghai, 1930s), I'll let myself go.

And so...

Imagining I was a popular songstress sitting alone in the tea house in the late afternoon before I am due to start work when the sun goes down. The tea house is dimly lit with lanterns and newly imported electrical lights from London which flickers constantly. On the walls are paper posters of new songstress' debuts. Not long ago, my face was up there. The place is infused with the smell of matured cedar wood furniture, and many blends of tea. It is slight hazy from opium smoke and the steam of boiling water. In the background, is the faint sound of an old record playing, and a woman's voice singing in high-pitched voice. She is singing about an old woman reflecting on lost love and the glamorous days of youth. There is sadness in her voice.

My tea is served. Green lotus seeds and lily-white jasmine flowers float a non-descript traditional white porcelain cup. Although clean, the cup is ringed with tea stains from decades of usage.

Outside, people bustle about along the cobble-stone streets. The narrow street is crammed with activity. There are poor children begging for money, tired women with worn hands and men in rags dragging a rickshaw. There are also Imperialist on horseback and Englishmen in black cars. In the alley nearby, a man lies dormant from opium overdose. In another, a ravished women slobs incessantly. There is tension on the streets. Lately, there's been rumours of war and enemy invasion. But in the tea house, the glass panes of the street-front windows shelter acts as a shelter against these harsh realities. It is the bitter season of winter but the tea house is warm. It's a refuge.


Reality. I am a uni student, currently sitting with a high school friend and her uni friends. The tea house is dimly lit on purpose to create a mysterious ambience. Most of the walls are black complete with red lights (mood lighting) to enhance this ambience. The walls closer to the front of the store is covered with Chinese newspapers to render the old-school look. I sit on contradictory mock-antique furnitures - a wooden table with those black vinyl coverings that look like timber, and grand European couches. In the background is new age music.

The tea is served in an equally well-designed tea pot. One can see the thought that went into its design. The general shape remembles the traditional pots but there is enough twists to make it modern. I take another careful sip.

I'm sitting in a shopping mall, the 21st century waterhole for Homo sapiens. Outside, I see mothers overloaded with Green EnviorBags, pushing prams and dragging their kids to the car, the 21st Century legs of homosapiens. I see school girls with long hair and mini-skirts, holding hands with pimply faced boys. They think they've found love. Honey, you don't know what love is. The harsh bright florescent lights offer a stark contrast to the dimness inside the tea house. I am enclosed and I am safe. But my encloseure and my safety does not derive from the tea house per se, but rather from the large edifice with no windows: the mall. I mix Marina’s tea with mine through titration (using a straw). I take a sip (and starts hiccupping because it went down the wrong hole).

The tea costs $4.50 per serving. Sit down mocha in the city costs $4.00. So, it's quite dear. But would I go back? Yes, if only to relive (or reimagine) those grand old days.

Tre Songz - Can't help but wait - Step Up 2

Mmm, I love this song right now. It makes me want to dance again.

Weapons of mass alterations

More fruits of procrastination from a few weeks back!

This semester was heavily design orientated. It's partly my fault for choose two urban design subjects in the one semester but hell, they were fun. Anyways, there were lots of drawings, tracings, and image manipulations. I couldn't have done it all without bluetac, double sided sticky tape, those black pens of varying thickness.

If this isn't love, tell me what is?

If Haruka (my laptop) could talk, it would say "Geez, it's taken you what?! 18 months to work out how to use my webcam!?!"

Alas, it's been a while but at least I finally know how to work it! Yay!!! Whoopee!!!
In my excitement I took 110 pictures and 4 videos of myself. -_-"

I will share one set with you. The theme is 'If this isn't love, tell me what is?'. That line randomly came to me when I was trying to write my Resource essay few weeks back. Yes, it has the reek of procrastination all over it.

The set is a little sombre. I think what I was trying to convey with these images was how love can be such a headache when it's not going right. You end up thinking and thinking and thinking about it. All your thoughts revolve around it. Even when you will yourself not to think about it, it always eventually drift back to it. And the most frustrating thing about it is, those thoughts never get anywhere. There's never a solution. It's like driving around in circles. (I think in psychology, the term for this kind of behaviour is called rumination). And then you start having self doubt; wondering if love existed at all in the first place..and hence, I guess, the question of if it isn't love, then what is it?