Confessions of a City Slicker

My old friend J gave birth two days ago to a healthy little baby boy. Tentatively, they have named him Willgrant, but because he was two weeks early, they might have to recalculate his “kat see” (auspicious date) and pick another name for him.

Sigh…the customs to naming a kid :p

BB is absolutely adorable.

No, I’m not backing out on my word earlier about having kids. Remember, I said kids are cute as long as they are not mine :p

This was J’s first BB and it was a surprisingly easy birth. Labor time was a little over two hours and all it took were three pushes to get him out.

Well, I got somewhat of a shock when J told me that if I wanna see BB, the nurse has to bring him in. The hospital set up doesn’t have that kind of nursery where proud adoring parents and relatives press their noses against a glass window to peek at Junior.

Her hubby came in as I was holding BB in my arms and remarked at the privilege I got. Apparently even he hasn’t had the chance to hold his son yet.

I’d love to share some pics of BB here but thought better of it because his mom is so leery about the whole social networking concept. Ai yoh why lah?????

My exposure to Arabian cuisine is limited to kebabs and dates. Well, it’s not like there are a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants in this tiny island, are there?

But I think the food will certainly be as colorful and variant as their culture. The best part is most definitely the many spices that they use.

Coach introduced me to Dorma the other day. It’s basically minced beef marinated with some sort of spice she brought back from Baghdad (very authentic, eh?) and mixed with rice, onion and I think I smell coriander in there as well. The whole concoction is then wrapped in a leaf like a pohpiah and stewed in a pot for a few hours. The rice goes in uncooked, by the way.

Being a canivore, I can’t identify the leaf she used and she doesn’t know how to tell me either.

She added promoganate juice to the stew to give it a sourish flavor.

Although I never liked coriander because the smell is too strong, I can definitely detect a hint of that mysterious spice she used for the meat. She marinated the beef overnight so the spices have seeped into the meat well.

Oh well, when I have the time, I’ll go search around for the recipes. After all, that’s what the Net is for, no? Meanwhile, I’ll just be content with kebabs. I saw an Arabic food stall at the hawker center near her apartment but haven’t had the time to check it out yet.

Next appointment, maybe…

Gee, you’ve asked me that a lot lately. When is THE date when we will do it? Hmm…I can’t tell you that. It’s something like the date when DSAI will eventually take over. Evan Da Man can’t give you that.

But then, why the rush, darling? To tell the truth, I’m kinda enjoying myself at the moment. I find our little journey oh so stimulating

Although I can’t tell you when the deal gonna go down, it will go down. This much I promise. When the stars are in alignment, some day, somewhere, it’s gonna go down.

The unexpected is always the best.

I’m not a planner. I don’t waste my time to discuss and plan and make sure that things unfold “as discussed”. That does nothing but kill my mood :p

So be patient, my dear. When it happens, it happens. Enjoy our scenic route and be surprised along the way.

And when it does happen, I promise to rock your world

Mom was caught by the organic bug recently and started fermenting a drum of enzymes using fruit skins.

Of course, in the initial fermenting stages, you don’t wanna open up the drum because the stench will kill you

After that, there is the pleasant smell of alcohol.

There have been a few articles published about the uses of these organic enzymes, the most obvious being fertilizers. They can also be used to wash dishes, for hair care and skin care.

OK, I’m all for going organic and all that but I draw the line on the last few. There’s just something unthinkable about using garbage for hygiene purposes.

People have said that the enzymes can be used to cure age spots on the arms, so Mom can be found dipping her arms into the brown liquid once in a while.

Ewwww….

Mom saw this plant in the market and couldn’t resist adding it to her “garden”.

Isn’t it unusual?

I love the spiral leaves.

The people who sold it used some sort of leafy thing as soil, so hopefully, this is one pot where I don’t have to encounter any w***s. Ugh!

That’s Happy Deepavali in Tamil. If it’s not accurate let me know ya, because I Google that up

It’s Deepavali again. Time for muruku!

The neighbors invited us for their open house lunch. Their nasi tomato with curry chicken and mutton and fried chicken with onion were sitting heavily in my stomach when I went for belly dance practice after that.

No pictures of all that delicous food to share. I really wanted to snap a few pics but Mom wouldn’t let me, saying that it’s rude.So you guys are just gonna have to trust me that they were nothing short of spectacular.

I asked my neighbor how she always got her curry so thick. Coconut milk?

More than that! In addition, she’s also got condensed milk, blended almonds and hazel nuts and other spices all blended in it, thus giving it that thick consistency.

Sigh…so much work for the perfect curry.

These are what’s left of the cookies that they gave us. The containers were very much fuller when we got them. Most of them are now in my tummy

I just can’t get enough of their murukus. The smell of spices are not as overwhelming as the store bought ones and I just love the lovely aroma of butter.

There was also a few pieces of moist chocolate cakes and pineapple tarts. Haven’t tried the honeycomb biscuits yet, though. Never been a fan of them.

So again, Happy Deepavali, peeps!

My big performance is the next weekend and I’ve finally put the last stitch on my bra.

Phew! It took, what? Two months?

Almost, I think, sewing up till 2 am in the morning, 3 or 4 am during the weekends and skipping gym, locking myself in my room with my beads, sequins, needle and thread.

Here’s the result of my hard work:

I’ve avoided doing the tassle thingies because well, everybody else is doing it. Why blend in, right?

The girls in class all raved about my “fine craftsmanship” because I had worked with the small sequins as opposed to the big ones that most of them use. Eh I didn’t know they come in big sizes worr…(blush)

So when the guy at the shop showed me the 100 gm pack, I hentam lah!

“Eh how did you get all the sequins so close together arr? And so straight some more.”

Heheheheh….I can feel my ego expanding a notch here

Finally, the hardest part is out of the way. I can breath a sigh of relief. Haven’t touched the skirt yet, but I got ready assembled materials for it. All I have to do is put them together and I’m done!

Only question is how much time I’ve got to glam up the thing. Needless to say, I could be sewing until show time.

Gonna make an appointment for a pampering session for me peepers some time this week. They deserve it after all that hard work.

Conny told us that belly dance students nowadays are a savvier bunch compared to when we first started learning the art. They have been exposed through classes at different gyms and especially YouTube.

They can usually tell someone’s standards just by watching them, so she has to work very hard to maintain her standards. Most of them will also come to class with some sort of costume, unlike us, who look like we were going to a gym. At most, we might put on a skirt or harem pants :p

We spied a few girls from another class last week, wearing more bling on their costumes than you can shake a stick at.

Not to be outdone, we made a pact to bring our own costumes to class this week so that we can show off to them. We are their seniors, after all. There’s no way we’d let them upstage us like that :p

So this week, we loitered around the reception area showing off our own blings hahaha…..

It’s a week and two lessons until our big performance. Conny has completed our choreography but we’re still a little blur. We’ll pull together in time. We always do.

Our performance is gonna be more elaborate this time with lots of position changes and formations. We’re doing a beledi, probably belly dancing in it’s most authentic form. It’s soft and flowing unlike a drum solo.

Can’t wait for the hafla, and Nath’s workshop the day after that.

When I first joined my present company, my new colleagues told me that if I have to eat my lunch here at eGate every day, I’ll hate my life.

They are right. The food here suck for some reason.

It didn’t matter that the outlets here are franchises and have a certain standard to uphold. While some of their other branches on the island have really good food, once they open shop here, the quality seemed to go down.

Case in point, Secret Recipe with their really “cacat” looking cakes :p

Or Old Town with their lousy nasi lemak that seemed to pack an oomph when served at their branch in New World Park.

Even KFC here can’t live up to the standards of their branches in Midlands or Island Plaza. The KFC here is really salty and the smell of their spices is too overpowering.

I think the only acceptable place here is Subway but not when some fresh faced newbie is preparing my sandwich. I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t take vegetables with my sandwich. It can be quite a mess when a newbie is preparing a sandwich with bits of vegetables and sauces spilling out from the edge of the bread.

I heard El Mundo pizza just opened a new outlet here over the weekend. Personally, I have never eaten al El Mundo’s before so I don’t know what their standards are like. I just hope their standards don’t drop like the rest of their neighbors.

So tell me, is it the feng shui here, or is it just bad QC? Why does the food here suck so much compared to other places on the island?

It certainly boggles the mind…

Boss had a seminar last night and anticipating that I might only reach home after 10 pm, I decided to pay a visit to my favorite economy rice stall at Bali-Bali for lunch. I had predicted that Hock Jiu chicken will be in the menu and I was right.

Check out how red the chicken is:

Compare that to Mom’s version:

Call me biased, but compared to Mom’s version, the one from the economy rice stall is sorely lacking in “heat” maybe because there wasn’t enough ginger. Still, I really wanna know how he got his meat to become so red.

Heard from E that the coffee shop where the stall selling the mee suah version of this dish had closed down, so to all the Floggers out there, keep your eyes peeled and let us know, ya if you find out where they relocated to.

But according to G, it wasn’t as good as what the reviews say.

Oh well, like what I told E, if their business is that good, they will definitely relocate somewhere else. It wouldn’t make sense for them to retire just because they don’t have a place to sell at any more.

But if I need my fix of the dish, I’ll just pester Mom to cook it again or go to Bali-Bali. It seems the guy makes the dish on alternate days.