Ack, it's happening AGAIN!!!

I'm not officially holding a full-time job at the moment, but with my hands full the way they are right now with assorted tasks expected of a major readjustment, in between dinners with long-lost friends (and a week-long visit from one I hadn't lost sight of that long ago), I dread to think how little "me" time I'd get once I start leafing through the classifieds!

I'd been meaning to and will eventually write about my enchanting encounter with the lovely Lyrical Lemongrass way back in late February when I made a short trek to Kuala Lumpur, so forgive me, gal, if you're reading this. :)

Thanks to my "clan" back in France, who I had yet to thank publicly for their generous farewell gift of a Lumix digital camera, the pictures in the last post were made possible, and permitted me to take many more fabulous ones since. In fact, I'd been taking so many, choosing just a handful for each post becomes a challenge! ;-)

So I'll sign off for now with this one I took from inside my capsule when I went up the Singapore Flyer 2 weeks ago. I am now pretty certain that I do not suffer from acrophobia! ;-)

Tussles with mussels

Island life has its privileges!

Right, right, so I'm probably stretching it by associating the image of an idyllic hammock and coconut-sipping existence with the teeming concrete jungle more Singaporeans are familiar with, but no matter where you are on this island, you're never more than 30km from the sea. With some imagination and some very useful friends, remembering that we're living on an island is rather easy! :)

A childhood friend of my mom's, formerly a sailor and living less than a 100 metres away from us now, recently retired, and thus indulges regularly in one of his favourite hobbies - fishing. Upon interrogation when I saw him yesterday, I'd found out that he wasn't dabbling in some wimpy tentative fishing from a jetty, but actual braving of waves on a flimsy canoe with real nets and all! Impressive! On top of that, he catches enough for his own family and even has lots to spare for ours (there are 4 of us now - my mom, her mom, her caretaker and myself)!

And so it was 2 weeks ago when he came knocking on our door with his catch of the day - severely barnacle-crusted mussels. The last time I'd seen him prior to the mussel delivery must've been when I was 12, so we of course did not recognise each other, and I was particularly wary about opening the gate to some strange guy foisting free mussels on us (what's the catch? mwahaha, sorry for the lousy pun!). It almost took a comical turn when I was about to look for my wallet and pay him for them until T, my grandmother's caretaker came by and told me that he's safe, heh heh! ;-)

My, my, he had practically a whole BUCKET of fresh lovely mussels to give, and I gladly accepted what looked like 2 1/2 kilos of them, which T said could be split with our next-door neighbour if necessary. Of course, if I'd known then that I had to assume the consumption of more than a kilo of mussels on my own, I would have given more to my neighbour... (eye roll)

my share of the mussels, after removing the barnacles

T and I immediately got down to splitting our share and chiselling off the barnacles with knives of various sizes and it got kinda fun when my mom also joined in the chiselling. Mussels were practically a staple where I'd lived in France, and I took them for granted without ever having bought any to cook at home, having as a result only theoretical knowledge of how to clean and prepare them. When it got down to actually handling them, ulp, I fumbled more than anything.

After having gotten rid of the barnacles, T asked me how I intended to cook them, and I realised, ugh, these poor mussels were still alive and that I'd be personally responsible for their slow steamy death. Maybe due to the fact that they don't have eyes that would stare back at me accusingly, I was able to go on with the "deed", but after seeing all the work involved, I doubt I'd accept live mussels again anytime soon!

I remembered seeing a chapter on mussels when reading one of my cookbooks by Joel Robuchon, so went and dug it out from my boxes which had just arrived two days earlier. Nice. I immediately went out to get ingredients for these herby breadcrumbed baked mussels:

I had more mussels than this trayful!

How to: (for about 1kg of mussels) Heat mussels until the shells are ajar, remove upper shell (do not overcook).
Fry 5-6 chopped cloves of garlic in butter and olive oil, add 150g of breadcrumbs until golden brown, set aside to cool. Add salt and pepper to taste, 3 tbsp of grated parmesan, and 2tbps each of several chopped fresh herbs (I used thyme, parsley and chives). Top each mussel with a spoonful of breadcrumb mixture, bake for about 20 mins at 180°C. Serve with a wedge of lemon.

I'd initially intended to prepare all the mussels in this way, but after realising they wouldn't fit onto a single tray, I was too tired with heating them and struggling to pry them open and wiping up all the drool (despite T being such great help, without whom I might've ended up eating at midnight), so chopped up some mange-tout, asparagus and garlic chives and stir-fried the remaining mussels with them and some garlic and oyster sauce.

Pardesi no more

The degree of Pardesi-ness is really arguable... :) I am finally back in the place where I was born, but does that really make me feel finally at home?

After having lived for more than 6 years in Lille, in Northern France, my most common sentiment was that of being misunderstood or plain anonymous. But in the fashion typical of the way true happiness often escapes me (the Sonu Nigam concert is a perfect example), towards the end of my stay in Lille, I found new reasons to appreciate France and was showered with so much love, attention and affection from the people I least expected to that it broke my heart to leave them behind. Sigh.

Nonetheless, I have a whole life ahead of me and aspire to make the best of it... right now, I am only planning on taking it easy (take it easy, Urvasi, as I used to say to another friend... ;-) ) for a while until I get my cards in order...

New Year, old habits

What a year it has been for me and my blog, which turns 1 today!

When I exclaim "Times flies!" I usually mean it with a healthy dose of incredulity, but in looking through some of my older posts yesterday, I was compelled to reflect upon the milestones (and millstones) that have dotted the past year of my life, and for once, it seemed to me realistic that a whole year had gone by, and indeed, for so much to have taken place, unreal that only a year had gone by!

Many a lesson I have learnt in such a short time, for which I am thankful, and short of being brainwashed, my mindset has undergone several transformations, for the better, at least to me. I have emerged from the chrysalis that was my youthful lack of confidence, I have strove to denounce negativity, I have learned that no matter how cheesy or clichéd the adage, there is much truth and wisdom to be milked from it. Most of all, I have resolved to live life on my terms. Of course, few things happen overnight and there are still teething problems, but as this new year unfurls, I am filled with an inexorable sense of hope and optimism, and I hope the same goes for you, too.

I'm tempted to expand on my inner growth and all but it's hard to do so without mentioning names, so I'll save it.. in a nutshell, a new "me" is in the making, but at the same time, my comfort foods remain constant:

Match the word to the ingredient:
Sale, pepe, aglio, olio

Where's the salt? you may wonder. OK, that was a tricky one, but it was the green mound of powder, matcha salt to be exact, by Mariage Frères. I'd bought it some time back for its snob appeal but never quite knew what to do with it until I'd equated green tea with a herb.


How to: Coarsely crush or mill mixed peppercorns, crush several cloves of garlic, stir in a few generous pinches of matcha salt and cover with good quality olive oil. Let steep for about an hour. Good as a variation of the typical aglio-olio pasta dressing, or simply mopped up with fresh soft warm bread, the only way I know how to enjoy it.

Just look at that gorgeous deep green!

The best things in life are so cheap, abuse is inevitable

The things a woman would do for vanity's sake... Three weeks ago, I took a leap of faith and went for a laser operation that essentially stripped my cheeks of their skin. Yowch! I shan't go into detail about the dead skin flakes I saw floating in the air during the op or how they clung on to the laser gun and threatened to invade my nostrils and lungs each time I inhaled, or the SMELL of burnt flesh! And the searing PAIN (which I think I took like a man)! Oh, the horror! Not that that's enough to deter me from doing it again! :)

Whetted your appetite yet? ;-)

Because I knew it'd be unethical for me to be outdoors while my skin grew back (I didn't want to be held responsible for others' nightmares, haha) my company allowed me to work from home for 2 weeks. Aww.. For the first whole week, I was cooped up at home and forced to rely on the provisions at hand and had to make my cooking as low-risk and splashless as possible (ie, no frying, stir-frying, deep-frying, shallow-frying - you get the drift). The recovery of my skin was speedier than I'd feared, to such an extent that a few times I'd wondered if I'd be able to watch it heal in real time if I looked hard enough!

The hideous post-op face obviously distorted my perception of the "after" face in that I felt much more attractive than I must have been to the unknowing eye. ;-) On the first day I finally felt presentable enough to go out for groceries (without makeup at that!), to my utter delight and dismay, I saw one of my favourite actors Jean Réno in the flesh! No way! What are the odds?!?! On the one hand, I wish I had a camera on me, but at the same time, I'd caught a glimpse of my own reflection and realised that I certainly wasn't photogenic as yet, ack!!! Fortunately, I was at a bookshop and had access to ample writing material and was able to get an autograph! Wheeee!! :)

Anyhow, grocery shopping after a week of home imprisonment was so liberating it got ridiculous, and on perhaps the fourth day in a row I felt the "need" (yeah, right) to shop, all I had in my bag when checking out were chips and Cherry Coke, which I ordinarily don't even drink much of. :) Deprivation can be such a powerful thing!

Of course, I never seemed to buy everything I "needed" on each shopping trip during my convalescence, so on my first day back in the office, after lunch with my pals, I was itching to enter a different supermarket again. A colleague who had to be back at her desk on time asked me what I needed, and when I told her I needed to scarf down some crêpe dentelle, she gasped. Not only at the absurdity of the need, but the lucky coincidence - her guy's mother happens to work in a factory that manufactures them, and told me if I didn't mind broken ones, she'd have a whole bag of crumbs to give me the next day if I could wait. :) It suited me fine since I usually crush them before eating anyway, so gleefully accepted the bag of crumbs she gave me, which came up to more than a kilo:

Hardcore indulgence, if you ask me

Initially, I ate the crumbs by the cupful, but by Saturday, I was craving a more intense caramel flavour and to make nougatine with crêpe dentelle flakes instead of the usual almond bits. I didn't succeed since I've never made nougatine before and was in experimenting mode, but was pretty pleased to end up with this:


Basically, I just dumped some sugar (possibly 300g) in a saucepan and made it melt and darken into a golden brown caramel, then removed the saucepan from the stove and dumped in a generous cube of butter (50g? 75g? no idea) and sprang back in haste while it sizzled. Proceeded to stir until the butter blended evenly into the sugar and drizzled discs and grid patterns on wax paper.

The grid patterns were a joy to eat, but the discs, well.. keeping in mind my dental travails, I didn't want to risk any unnecessary chipping and new fillings, and since they were so rock solid and too big to fit into my mouth without being broken or bitten, I ultimately had to dump them back into the saucepan and add crème fraîche (an instinctive move, really) to bring them back to a molten state, taking special care not to burn the caramel. Not surprisingly, they didn't set an hour after I'd made new discs on wax paper, so ended up with these roses des sables, really just a fancy name for cornflakes coated in caramel:

Not the ideal daily way to consume cereal!

They were too darned good I already feel them creeping onto my hips! But now that they've all been downed, I realise all the stuff that went into making them hardly cost a Euro dollar! I'm not complaining but they're definitely coming back in my kitchen! Yikes

Main hoon kaun? main hoon con...

I was lamenting last week to a friend my flagging will and inspiration with regards to blogging due to my current preoccupations, and he kindly and rightly pointed out that blogging was supposed to be fun and should not become a "chore or service to others". Without wanting it to, I did let it become a chore, losing sight of my real reason for starting a blog in the first place (err, venting! Just kidding!) and most of all, tried too hard. Idiot.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise, really. My blog is hardly a year old and I didn't want it to die in its infancy, but by dint of flaunting it left and right to everyone I knew who would take a look, I didn't want them to come by for nothing. What happened as a result were insane behind-the-scene efforts to impress that ended up in me not posting about my time-consuming disasters at all. Dummy.

A few pals aware of my fidgetiness in the professional arena right now have suggested that I made my cooking profitable, to which I often responded with my usual "if it became a chore, I'd no longer enjoy it" (there's also my inability to stick to a theme in my cooking!). Now, why didn't I see that I was doing precisely that with my blog? :)

In less than a week from now, my wedded status is slated to undergo a major change, and in a few months (weeks?), so will my location. When my location changes, that will mean I will no longer have my own kitchen to get sloppy in, and along with that, no more digital camera and a more basic computer. To make up for it, I will be so surrounded by cheap and good food in my "new" location, in all likelihood it will be ages before I cook or even buy groceries again!

The impact of all that on what I initially intended to be a food blog is that it will impair my ability to blog about stuff I made myself, and worse, will limit the possibility of me uploading pictures since a new camera will not be in my list of priorities (a trip to Bombay is!).

Bottomline - it will no longer be just about food... By the way, "con" in French isn't what it is in English (the last word of the first two paragraphs provides an idea), but both apply to my former approach to blogging. :)

This said, I recently managed to get my hands on the 1978 version of Don, and have been whiling away lots of time on the music videos.. :) maybe it's time I got myself some Banaraswala paan! :)