" There is nothing better than spending a morning having breakfast with the people you love ... "

My dinner will never be complete without this wonderful apple cider :)



Bf and LQ ordered their usual pork trotter.



LQ's super adorable handphone casing which he bought in Shen Zheng, China.



Nothing says 'diet' like a very oily covered soup. Hahaha!



Here is mine - rosti with baked salmon. I know rosti is just shaved potatoes but still, I enjoy potatoes more when they are being cut to strips or cubes.



Waffle covered with melons and chocolate sauce. It was really good!



LQ ordered his strawberry fruitcake - possibly the first thing he laid eyes on the moment he stepped into the restaurant.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!

Hi all, I'm back after going MIA for so long :P My right hand still hurts quite a lot but I can feel it recovering bit by bit :) I only wish that it would recover faster as I am seriously missing out on a lot of trainings and slowly I feel myself getting fatter due to the lack of exercise :S But anyways, my darling bf just knows how to cheer me up whenever I am feeling down. So I went down to his office and he brought me to this little Chinese restaurant which served my most favourite food: man tou! Seriously, it is hard to find delicious man tous around in Singapore since most of them are just too dry. So anyways, this restaurant is located just opposite my bf's office and it was a short walk from there.





The restaurant did not serve this, but bf bought this from another shop and it was amazing! I know everybody is up and about the dou hua craze thanks to lao ban dou hua, but I tell you that this particular dou hua is just out of this world! The flavour is coconut and the meat inside is just so tender and soft :)



Just see how smooth their texture is!



Back in China, this was one of my most favourite food! It looks like satay, but it is definitely not satay. They normally serve different kinds of meat ranging from pork to beef to lamb to chicken etc. And the meat itself too has a wide varieties like livers, ligaments etc. Of course I will always stick to the most natural path which is just plain chicken meat :) Haha





The dish I was looking forward to! :) Fried golden brown man tous. Omgosh. I do not kid when I say this is really damn finger-licking good. Even the butter-milk sauce is to die for! Crispy golden skin on the outside, fleshy white goodness inside, dipped in such tangible sauce. You can seriously go nuts eating this.



This was bf's most favourite dish: of course, he and his craze for seafood :P





Another dish to look forward to whenever you're in China would be their xiao long bao. Unfortunately, I felt like after I ate one of the best xiao long bao in China, it has killed all anticipation for xiao long bao in Singapore. Even the ones in din tai feng can't match to those in China. The really good ones would have this really amazing tasting soup inside which really builds up one's appetite for more. Le bf taught me how to eat the 'authentic' xiao long bao, in which you have to chew off a small opening on one end of the bao and blow to cool down the steaming hot soup inside. Once it is warmed, you drink the soup and then proceed on to eating the whole bao. How I wish I could return to China soon and eat their xiao long baos there. Ahhhh.



But I digress :P This Chinese restaurant serves quite a nice range of food which mostly can be found in China and some of the dishes like their golden brown man tou, steamed vegetables with prawns, their bbq sticks etc are really worth trying out! However, bf told me that that particular shop was not the best in the area, there was one more just right beside it which was considered one of the better ones. Well, bf did not want to queue up and wait eons for dinner to be served so he decided on this restaurant. Haha a hungry man is an 'angry' man! :P Nevertheless, I had quite a nice dinner that evening and I will have to find out their shop name because I don't have the slightest clue as to what they are called :S

That's all for now! Toodles!

" Christmas is all about sharing the love around family members and friends; indulging in this festive season and bonding over good food. Such warmth is what I truly look forward to every Christmas season. "

I have always looked forward to celebrating Christmas with my loved ones: my beloved family members, my dearest cousins and of course my darling bf. Well my Christmas last year was spent in China in a bar - not exactly a conventional Christmas for me though, but I still had fun because I got to play bar games with my bf and his close friends. Anyway, this year, I had to consistently pestered my mother to plan a Christmas party for both my cousin's and our family. My mother was quite hesitant at first because our maid was going back to her hometown for the holidays and it would be quite a hassle to clean up after the party. However, thanks to me being rather persuasive, my mother agreed! :)

My mother planned this party a few days before Christmas because she wanted a few days to rest up before going back to work, and the rest of us had other plans around the time of Christmas. My mother started the tradition of having a turkey when I was a child, and she had been keeping it true ever since. Trust me when I say it is not easy to prepare a turkey: you have to start preparing it a few days before it is cooked. As for the steps on how to prepare it, I am not sure about the details itself, so I shall not go into that :S

Well, I was unable to help my mother out at home because I had trainings, but my mother is a superwoman herself. And she managed everything perfectly :) Amazing right! Another amazing thing was that one of my bf's students, Kunqi returned to Singapore just in time to attend the party. He was actually quite excited to attend the party and so was I! It had been eons since I last saw him :P So, on that day, my bf went to the airport to fetch him and brought him to visit the secondary school he was posted to after his PSLE. While le bf was spending the whole day outside with his kid, I had to stay in to help my mother :)



Say hi to le bf playing games with his kid :)





Turkey still baking in the oven~



My mother single-handedly put up this Christmas tree; just love the decorations and lightings so much :) Pretty ttm.



This is one HUGE Rilakkuma doll which kunqi gave me for my Christmas present! I squealed the moment I saw him lugging through the door. Omgosh :P



The turkey seemed pretty baked, if you know what I mean ^^



My mother got this recipe for bread pudding from her friend and in my opinon, this pudding was the BOMB! It tasted WONDERFUL! Everybody had nothing but praises for this dessert and I had two servings of this after my dinner even though I was quite full :O





Me playing Xbox 360 which I had not touch for one year plus! Oh, and just pardon my HUGE ass.







My elder brother specially prepared this plate of prawns with his own recipe. It was really good, which actually put me to shame because my own brother is a better cook than me, a girl! *SHOCK* -.-''







My elder cuzzy prepared this bowl of spaghetti with my aunty, and I have to tell you that this tasted better than the ones you eat at Pasta Mania etc.



And my mother popped open two bottles of white wine for this special occasion: a good reason for me to start training my alcohol levels :P



See! I told you my grandfather had a stunning smile :)





Oysters le bf ordered because he wanted a free knife from their collection o.o haha!



The man of the family slicing the ham for the family! :) At first he tried to slice thin slices, but the more he sliced, the thicker the slices got. And in the end, he just gave up and just went for thick slices. Hahaha it was quite funny actually :P





Here's the full spread! It really does look amazing, doesn't it? :D





Family portrait 01.



Family portrait 02.



Family portrait 03.



Family portrait 04.



Family portrait 05.









Everybody digging into the good food!

Dinner was meant to start around 7pm, but the turkey and prawns took longer than expected to get ready, so dinner was dragged until 8plus. In addition, my elder brother and I were snapping numerous pictures of the food so we kind of dragged the time to 9pm. Hahaha it was just too hilarious, my dad was like at a breaking point and he was trying to stop us from taking any more pictures of the food. In addition of having a scrumptious meal amongst dynamic company, we also enjoyed two tremendous movies: What To Expect When You Are Expecting and Taken 2. I love watching movies with my family and cousins. Why? Because they will always come up with something absolutely hilarious which just makes you want to laugh your head off. Seriously! It's like watching an impromptu drama.

Even though the celebration seemed pretty simple, I really enjoyed myself entirely. It was great catching up with my cousins whom I hardly see because of our busy schedules, and having dinner together with them was really a true joy. Thank you all for the awesome Christmas celebration, and I sincerely love you all so much. Have a Merry Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! The year 2013 will be even more awesome than 2012, and I will definitely make 2013 a worthwhile year :)

Once again, I present you guys another one of my long overdue post. Enjoy! :)

PS: I baked these like a one week before Christmas and I finally got the time to post it up :P

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when I say 'Christmas'? Of course, many people will say 'presents', 'snow' etc etc ... But for me, the word 'Christmas' sparks 'COOKIES' for me!!! :) With such a festive holiday season, I found myself really craving to get into baking, and finally after arranging my schedule, I found enough time to crank out the oven. My mother, too, was really getting into the holiday spirit and we decided to bake cookies for the family :)





My mother's baking materials since she started many many years ago! There are so many tips and techniques inside that are considered family-secrets. Hahaha :)











With my love for chocolate chips, you can actually see how much of those I actually spammed into the cookie dough :)



Pre-baked batch: my mum and I had to use our hands to roll the dough into circle-ish shapes before pressing it down onto the pan.







First batch done! :)



After finishing baking all our batches of chocolate chip cookies, my mother and I realized we still had quite a lot of time before dinner started, so while we were pondering on what to do next, we decided to bake peanut butter chocolate chip cookies! My mother was really on a roll here. Haha so we started to bake again :) My mother literally took out all her other baking books and ran through the pages for her favourite recipe of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I was just swept along with her flow :)



My mother preparing the cookies base. This recipe requires no flour, no butter whatsoever! It is a really simple and fast recipe to follow, even a baking-idiot like me can follow through without any difficulties faced.



Chocolate chips time~!



My mother used a fork to press down the dough to make those tic-tac-toe designs on the cookies so that we are able to differentiate the peanut butter cookies from the chocolate chip cookies :)



Literally crispy golden brown :)







All done! Multiple batches of cookies all baked to sheer perfection in just one afternoon. Really, it didn't even take up my whole afternoon! It was just about 3 hours of mixing and baking: all in time for dinner :) I had never felt so efficient and happy in baking/cooking before. All the other time, I would take literally forever to bake one batch of pastry, but this time, there were literally MULTIPLE batches! Simply amazing~ Of course I could not have done all these without my mother's constant help and supervision. I was also really happy that I could spend some quality time with my mother and we bonded quite a lot during such times. Thank you mummy!