This weekend, we are planning to celebrate the naughty little boy’s 10 year old birthday. He’s a grown boy now, so he has many wishes he would like to fulfill this time. Some of these wishes are the same as previous years – soccer jerseys, soccer balls, toy cars etc. Till date, I think he has got most of his wishes. But he is still very naughty so he needs to wait for other things to come.
The end of this week saw another round of flash flood. It kept raining for two days straight, since Thursday, and continued into Friday. I took time off from work to bring the boy out during his March holidays. It rained so much on Thursday, but fortunately, I took him to the SEA Aquarium, so it was sheltered through and the rain didn’t bother us much. We both managed to do some sketches at the big ocean tank and were both happy at our hard work. On Friday, I brought him to the Rainforest Wild Asia Park, and the rain miraculously held on while we were there! Except for the half an hour downpour or so, after we stepped into the Vitality Bounce and jumped around for 5min, and then got chased out of it because of the heavy rain. But we got back in 15min later, and got another full stretch of 20min in the bouncing net. So the rain got us a much better deal out of our tickets than if there wasn’t any rain at all.
I recently went to Paris for a work trip and ate so much while I was there. The portions of serving were huge, so I tried my best to order mainly dishes with vegetables to get enough fibre throughout the day. We had crepe-like galettes, filled with spinach and cheese, vegetarian momos at a rather authentic Tibetan eatery, grilled octopus in curry sauce (the octopus was really delectable!), French sweet desserts, grilled vegetables tomato pasta, an atas lunch which served great risotto etc. On my last night there, a huge plate of eight slices of foccacia with avocado, ham, rocket leaves and shaved cheese toppings was served to me, alone. I had thought that most antipasti dishes were small dishes – appetisers. I was so wrong. I only finished the toppings and one slice of foccacia anyway. And brought the rest of them home since I was going to fly out the next morning. What a gastronomic adventure! It wouldn’t have been possible, really, without the great company I had during the trip.
This dish is my to-go-to whenever I visit Chinese restaurants or eateries which serves up large plates and bowls of dishes. I love eating dumplings, especially those served with nice chilli oil to dip them with. My current favourite so far is the Spicy Sichuan Chilli Oil Wanton, which are served with a nice vinegar based dressing to dip them in. This one here uses a similar type of dressing – for more information on how to combine the sauces, you can visit the link given here. If you are lazy to prepare another dip, just use lao gan ma chilli oil.
This dish of pasta with eggplant and tomato sauce is for all eggplant lovers out there. It adds a lovely texture and bite to the pasta, and makes the dish a lot healthier, of course. If you are in a hurry to whip up dinner, just dice up all of the eggplant and cook them in the tomato sauce itself. That will save you a whole lot of time.
