Lanterns, Glasses, Home-made Food: January in Photos

Here's a new blog strategy--I haven't blogged for awhile, so I just look through the photos on my camera for the last couple of weeks, upload them, and explain them. Let's see how it goes, shall we?

My dad likes Japanese lanterns. Not the paper lanterns, the stone ones. For all of you saying "Huh? Stone lanterns?", see the following photos of the specimens that I've run into in Singapore in the last few days.

This one was in the lobby of my friend's condo.

This one is outside of an HDB (apartment) building right next to our church. I've seen it about a billion times and said "I should take a photo", but I just recently actually got around to it.

A cute mug that I bought the other day for my office because I'd been needing one and just stealing random ones from the pantry to drink the occasional cup of coffee, or tea, or Milo. Some students were having a sale of mugs that they had decorated themselves to raise money for some organization or another.  There were actually several really cute ones, but I eventually settled on this one because it's very pretty and I like the wraparound effect.

On the same day that I made the mug purchase, I also bought a bagel "with cream cheese" from a coffee shop. They put the cream cheese on themselves (wearing plastic gloves) because they don't have the individual cream cheese packets, and when I opened it up this is what I got. Talk about disappointing. This must be why Singaporeans are skinny.

Random Dr. Seuss-looking tree that I encountered on campus the other day. Dan didn't think it was as weird and awesome and I did. I'm just like "How in the world did that happen?"

Now get ready for: NEW GLASSES!

I didn't do my hair before these pictures, sorry for the frizziness. It doesn't always look like that. (Although I would be lying if I said that it doesn't often look like that...haha.) The ones on the left, the oval ones, are actually a very pretty dark blue, but it only comes out strongly in the sunlight. The ones on the right are a dark brown with a hint of green color, kind of similar to the shirt I'm wearing but a bit more brown. They look almost exactly like Dan's glasses actually...

Now for the cooking section: I'd been meaning to try my hand at some local Singaporean food for awhile, but I had never gotten around to it because it's kind of sad to make a big experimental dinner just for yourself. And I didn't want to try it for Dan's family in case it didn't turn out very good, which is likely when you try something completely new. So instead, I called up my new American friend Kathryn, who is a very good cook (much better than me), to see if she wanted to participate in the experiment. She did, and we tried our hand at Hokkien Mee, one of my favorites. It turned out really tasty, although it didn't really taste much like the real deal! Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of that experiment. However, I had leftover raw ingredients, and so I whipped some up a couple days later myself, making the adjustments that I'd learned about in the first batch, and it actually tasted a lot like the original this time! Here's a picture:

Hokkien mee is a mix of firm yellow egg noodles and thin rice noodles, cooked in pork stock with lime, shrimp, squid, sometimes some cabbage or other green veggie shavings, and of course your standard Asian seasonings--garlic, ginger, green onions, chili, soy sauce and oyster sauce. However, there's actually no seafood in this one (or cabbage or green onion) because I didn't have any of those things leftover. I made the pork stock with a bit of leftover bacon that I had frozen, but despite that and the missing ingredients, it still tasted pretty good.

So then I was in the cooking mood, and I decided to use some of my leftover linguine pasta from a previous Western food attempt, and attempt an original East-West fusion pasta dish. This sauce is made out of tomatoes, potatoes, mushrooms, onions, garlic, ginger, oyster sauce, soy sauce, and bean sprouts.  It was actually pretty good, but not liquidy enough, and also not flavorful enough. Because I was trying my own fusion, I was very hesitant with the spices/sauces because I was afraid of mixing up the balance, but it ended up a bit too bland. Still good though, and an interesting experiment! Now I know what to do better next time.

Of course, at this point I have a ton of leftover veggies and noodles, and I have to use the veggies ASAP because they're fresh, so I cooked up a couple other things in the next few days:

Dark soy sauce is an amazing condiment that automatically makes your noodles awesome and Asian-y tasting. This is just noodles, garlic, and onions (and my last tiny bit of leftover ginger), but it was awesome.

Back to Western food with a nice omelette. This one was potatoes, tomatoes, onions, avocado, and cream cheese. I also made a version of this with scrambled with tofu instead of the eggs and cream cheese--inspired by Julia, my vegan roommate from last year, who is one of my cooking icons. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture. Not a huge shame since I added too much dark soy sauce, so it didn't actually come out that well.

So there you go! Other things in the last couple of weeks: Dan's sisters have been in town for a week or two, so it was nice to see them. I bought my plane ticket back to the States and worked out my housing situation for when I'm gone and come back. I'm working on forms for my new job. I met up with a friend that I had known when I was in China--she's from Australia but she has relatives in Singapore and Malaysia and was in town for a wedding. And I had a hot pot/teppanyaki dinner at my friend Jocelyn's house with Dan and a few of course friends, and I brought Kathryn and a friend of hers who was in town for a weekend, so it was fun to have a bit of a party. Other than that, just working and hanging out with Dan. Nothing too crazy! ;)