Zany dd

Me: Who wants noodles for dinner?
Dd: I do.
Older son: I do.
Dd to her brother: We love noodles so much we want to marry it.

10 things about toddler

My baby son has turned two so I can't call him my baby anymore. *sob*
Here are some interesting facts about him.

1. He weighed slightly more than 4.5kg , just an ounce less than 10 lbs at birth.
2. He still needs to breast feed , well at least before he goes for naps.
3. He likes to eat cooked prawns or whatever food is in his siblings' hands.
4. In the morning, whenever everyone is getting ready for work /school , he volunteers to take off his PJs and showers with his siblings.
5. Whenever he sees his dad clutching car keys, he hurries to find his shoes to wear and follow dad (coz mama is so boring doing housework all day). Twice, he had his shoes on and was ready to go, only thing is he was stark naked.
6. He likes cats and almost bashed a black cat blue in kl.
7. He likes to play feline with his brother. Older brother being the cat and he stroking his pretend cat's head.
8. He likes toy cars.
9. He really likes toy cars.
10. He really, really likes toy cars.

Eid Mishaps

I thought I'll blog about some mishaps on Eid for a change.

1. The queue at the women's section for the rice and curry after Eid prayers... what can I say... we queued unsystematically left , right and centre. The plates was placed on the left. We queued on the right. queue on the right.. no plates... people not queuing grabbing plates and cutting the queue. And one poor lil girl got poured with curry on her head! At that point, I left the queue and relied on dh's ability to get us a plate at the men's queue. Incidentally, there was an eid celebration at my kid's school today and I was amazed that the kids can queue in a straight line to get the sweets, cakes and stuff (as compared to us adults).
2. Went to the chemist to get some stuff. A thin young African security guard looked like he was sort of following me. It was probably my fault as I have this bad habit of spending too much time reading the ingredients on the label of the skincare products to see if it is compatible with my sensitive skin, so they probably thought I am a suspect to shoplift. (Actually, I gather, it is okay to touch and read stuff in Oz or KL, but people expect you to grab and go pay in UK). I told dh about the security guard later and he said that the guy might have thought I'm from some African tribe . It was Eid and I had just a tad too many shiny beads on my pashmina and clothes...
3. Asked dh to take some eid photos of me near the swimming pool before I changed into my mundane clothes. Dear 5yo son had just changed into a new spiderman shirt and pants that I bought him for eid when he was walking and... while he was looking at me in my black jilbab with toddler son doing our photo shoot, he tripped and he fell in the pool in his best clothes.......

Eid Gathering

I cooked for a lil Eid gathering on Sunday. Dh's M'sian friends and their family wanted to come over for the obligatory ziarah/visiting. So lazy me had to cook some food for them. It was all a last minute affair. Dh had to go out in the morning as I've decided to make barbecue seafood as we could not get any meat from the muslim butchers as they weren't open on Eid weekend. Dh took the whole morning getting the stuff so when he came back , we had only a couple of hours to stick the seafood on the skewers . Initially , I wanted to marinade the prawns but dh bought cooked prawns instead of uncooked , as per my instruction. So I made a last ditch attempt dill sauce (which didn't have any dill in it) and a sweet chilli sauce to go with the bbq . I also made some prawn salad and salad nicoise to accompany it. Plus there was some beef rendang which I made a day earlier (it took 4 hours to make) and ketupat nasi and lemang courtesy of Nona/flora food co.
The guests came at the alloted time and were ready to eat while we were still figuring out where to put the electric bbq thingy. They soon ate to their hearts content and were really bowled over with the bbq seafood and beef rendang. One lady guest actually came over to me when I was busy in the kitchen to extract the dill sauce recipe from me. She took me by surprise and I only repeated the general ingredients of the sauce that I could retrieve from my memory. There was about 90% butter in the sauce so I think it is more appropriate to call it butter sauce and I used coriander leaves instead of dill.
My friends ie the postgrad and her single housemates also came by later and they also liked the spread (or what was left of it). They also wanted the recipe for the dill /butter sauce which I gave willingly from a cookbook, and the beef rendang recipe. I can't really remember recipe for the latter as it sort of evaporated like the coconut milk (which is one of the main ingredient required), just as soon as I finished cooking it. Each year I have to phone my mum to jog my memory a bit of the specialised Eid cuisine and some of the ingredients are not easily obtainable like fresh galangal and tumeric leaves so I have to improvise the recipe according to what is available.
All in all, the gathering was sort of a success . Dh was very pleased that his friends went back home contented. I'm sorry I can't cook for his friends more often though. I'm naturally born lazy lol.

The Art of Baking

These past weeks , I've been attempting to bake cakes. I have this recipe book I bought from Angus and Robertson bookstore called "Cooking, A Commonsense Guide" which is quite good for newbies at baking like me. Baking cakes isn't really my family's tradition. I never can recall my mum baking a cake for us! So naturally, I never felt the urge for baking. We were very much a savoury sort of family anyhow, so the main course was more important for us. Fresh fruits like slices of mangoes and oranges would do fine for dessert. To my mum's credit though, she is a great cook when she cooks for us and dh thinks she is the best cook in the world.
Mum used to make the most outstanding traditional Malay kuih (sweet cakes/desserts/snacks) like kuih talam, seri muka, apam, lompang, currypuff (the pusing/circle type), rosles & kuih cara etc when we were little in London. I 've never tasted anyone's who could make kuih as good as hers from any traders, except from La Cucur where you have to pay a premium price. Unfortunately , mum didn't make much kuih when we came back to KL. I don't think she likes cooking desserts much. She later told us that she had to make the kuih in London for the M'sian VVIP /head of state's and their entourage who came to visit London (probably more so for the LIP( lesser important people) in the entourage).
I digress. Coming back to my baking attempts, I felt compelled to bake something for dd. She sometimes bake cookies etc at her school and she would often inquire or ask me if I could bake her something. I started out baking muffins for her as they were the easiest to make whereas most cookies and cakes I assume would require electric mixers. Yes, I don't own a electric mixer as yet!
Last week , I thought it was high time I tried to bake a chocolate cake. There was a recipe for a chocolate mud cake in the book and it didn't require an electric beater. I had all the ingredients in the pantry so I mixed them up accordingly and pop the cake mix in the oven. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out well. It was on the dry side coz the oven temperature was too high. I had earlier baked a tea cake and 12 mini pizzas at 220 degrees, hence, the oven did not cool down to the required 160 degrees. (So I guess I better made sure I do not bake any pizzas in the oven beforehand next time hmm).
My second attempt yesterday was okay and actually looked and taste fine despite that I put extra chocolate in the mix as half the bar had melt in the midday heat so I could not estimate properly, lol. I am feeling confident that perhaps I could maybe bake a cake for my MIL family when we are back in KL. ( Just perhaps)
My in law's family are totally the opposite of mine. Whereas mum would order tasty kuih raya (eid cookies) from a relative or someone else, MIL and her four daughters used to put in a lot of effort baking for eid celebration and make heaps of cookies and fry heaps of kerepek, (traditional malay flour based crisps equivalent to junk food ) weeks prior. My SILs often attempt to bake different type of cakes which sometimes turn out great or not so great depending on the season, lol. Not only do they make cookies and all, they actually enjoy finishing them off as I noticed that there wasn't any left when I visited them 1 and 2 weeks after Eid, whereas at my mum's place would still have plenty of leftover cookies that could be carried forward to Eid ul Adha.
My friend's used to send me Eid cards and the usual question would be "Dah buat kuih raya?" ("Have you made any Eid cookies yet?) and then the question would later evolve into "Dah beli kuih raya?" ("Have you bought any Eid cookies yet?) or to that effect. Whatever it is, bought or baked, I hope you have a Happy Eid everyone!