Rat's Way to Say Happy Lunar Year

Enjoy the slice show!!

春节愉快,万事如意!

GONG XI FA CAI!!

An Edible Cinnamon Raisin Loaf

Usually hubby and I will have a glass of milk with cereal for breakfast before we leave to work. This week as we ran out of milk, I decided to bake a loaf of bread with the remaining ingredient I had on hand. Cinnamon Raisin Swirl loaf has been one of my favorite bread of all time. I usually just love it eat it plain. After some googling online, I found a recipe with quite a bit positive reviews and raving about how soft the bread and flavorful the loaf is and the recipe are quite simple and straight forward. So right after I reach home from work around 6pm, I quietly prepare and load all the ingredient into the breadmachine to make sure the bread is done before my time to bed. This time I experiment my loaf with ½ all purpose flour and ½ gluten flour because I want to see what’s the end result of using all purpose flour.

3 hours later, voila.. The bread is ready. It looks ok.. the loaf is soft and raised well when fresh out from the machine. Hubby and I take a few small bites to taste the loaf and we both think that the texture of the loaf was a bit dense and does not smell as good as the milk loaf I baked few days ago. Well I do not expect the loaf to smell as good as the milk loaf as this loaf as much less ingredient compare to the one. But overall, it was ok. At least edible haa.. No recipe post for this loaf as I am not planning to keep this recipe but continue my bread baking experiment with other recipes.

Next week, I will have my GCT (Glucose Challenge Test) for to check for gestational diabetes. My friend told me to avoid taking any sweets 10 days before the test, so I can pass the test. ( I failed the 1 hour test but passed the 3 hours test on my first pregnancy). I really home I can pass the 1 hours test and skip the 3 hours test this time.. it was really a pain to stay in the lap for 4 hours and have the technician drew my blood every hour. Do you think taking less breads and cakes this week will helps? I wanted to try the sponge cup cake recipe and a panda sponge cake recipes so badly in the past few weeks and I just can’t make time to do it. Thinking of trying it this weekend, or should I wait until I pass my test?

Year End Potluck Gathering

It's the end of the year and we hosted a small party at our house last weekend and invited a few of our close friend to join us for lunch. Hubby was able to capture some pictures of the food everyone contributed in the gathering.

Mini Spring Roll

Stir fry Vegetables

Cream Cheese Dip

Curry Chicken

Fry Bee Hoon and Devil Egg at the Backgroup

Orange Kiwi Seed Agar-Agar in the mold

Mix Fruit Konnyaku Jelly

Happy New Year 2008!

Wish you all have a wonderful New Year.

No Food but Flu

Flu season is here.. sometime you definitely not looking forward especially with kids at home.
I started not feeling well last Friday evening and have been sick since then and hubby started to pick up my stomach flu yesterday.. so no cooking, no eating for the whole weekend but depends on milk and oatmeal to survive in the last couple days.

Thanksgiving is almost here, some of you might be start preparing the family feast to celebrate the holidays, for us who don't celebrate, usually looking forward the holiday break to catch up some rest and sleep and shopping especially the day after thanksgiving.

This year.. we are heading home for the holidays.. home I mean Malaysia.. leaving on 21st, mean not much cooking and baking for this coming week but shopping, packing and house cleaning before we leave.

I am so looking forward to this trip especially all the comfort food. First time traveling with toddler, hope I pack enough food and toys to entertain him and at the same time i could some rest.

So see ya in 3 week with more food and trip info.

One Saturday Morning

This past Saturday was our 4th wedding anniversary and hubby prepared this wonderful stuff scallop, croissants and scrambled egg breakfast to start the day. It was delicious and healthy breakfast. Love it and thanks hon for the wonderful meal. Wish I can have it every week :)

According to the anniversary gift suggestion, the traditional gift for 4th anniversary is Fruit or Flowers. So in returned, I "prepared" this fruit basket for hubby. Oh wait.. actually I order it from Edible Arrangement. It is called the Perfect Pear. The fruit basket consist of strawberries, pineapple daisy, grapes and my favorite chocolate dipper pear. The basket looks kinda different from the picture showed on their website but overall I am happy with the this order. I wish I can spend some time to make my own though.. maybe one day..

Calling all baking expert!

Hubby has been requesting me to bake egg tart since I started this blog. After N months finally I manage to get the tart mold and put myself together to work on this egg tart recipes I collected long long time ago.
So here are my first egg tarts..
what a total failure and disaster.

The pastry sink after baking and leave no room for the custard. I think I should make is as thin as possible but was wonder why it shrink :( As for the custard, do you think I over bake them. The egg mixture wasn't whisk well as you still can still the egg while in the custard.. What a disappointed egg tart!

I have been Lazy..

Have been abandoned for 2 weeks now. I am still patiently waiting on hubby to convert the all pictures from his camera we took from Aidan's birthday party and food we prepared for the party.
Lately, I have been very lazy to cook. Even though we have long labor day weekend, but i didn't actually prepared any food besides porridge for my son who prefer jar food over my cooking and we just bought Chipotle Fajitas for dinner. I guess i should call it a nice relax weekend as I spent most of my time catching up the Chinese drama series I have been missing and catching up my sleeping.

Godiva Dessert

Hubby gave me this box while I was having my early dinner yesterday. I was told that this will be my dessert tonight. hmm.. What's in the box?

A box that fill with Godiva goodness - Chocolate Cover Berries. Yum.. yum...Chocolate cover Strawberries, my favorite. Chocolate cup with raspberries and blueberries, wonderful. Chocolate cup with blackberries, hmm.. hmm..hmm. Needless to say, I love them all. Thanks hon.

Don’t know when Godiva start selling the chocolate frozen drink in their store, I think they taste ok nothing really outstanding besides they use Godiva Chocolate.

Comfort Food

What food can make you feel comfort when you are not? This is my version of comfort food for my family especially my dearly son.Aidan has been having diarrhea since Monday. Not exactly sure what’s wrong. He doesn’t have any fever nor did he act any different in the past few days. We didn’t bring him to his doctor because we think that we are not going to get anything out of the doctor’s visit like we did in the pass besides to make sure he eats well and sleep well which he does. Since we ran out of food to eat yesterday (can you believed it !!) I decided to cook some porridge from some fish fillet, dried scallop and some ginger.

A pot of comfort food for the whole family, what a great idea and easy solution for dinner. Aidan ate quite a bit yesterday, I hope he feel better today. But one thing for sure, he did not poop this morning.

My First Tropical Fruit Agar-Agar

While I was researching party food for my son's up coming birthday party, agar-agar was the first thing pop into my mind. It has be a while since I had my last taste of agar-agar and I don't quite remember how to make this simple dessert. I decided to do a little experiment before the event. Picked up the agar-agar strip from the oriental and didn't even realized that nowadays people actually using agar-agar powder instead. Hunting for the recipe online but most of the recipe used agar-agar powder. At last, I followed the instruction provided at the back of the package except the fruits and this is what I come up with. what do you think?

Hubby thought they taste ok but I wasn't really happy with the result. I think the agar-agar were little too hard and wasn't impress with flavor. Feel kinda silly that I don't even know how make a simple dessert like this. hmmm...

Can you tell what agar-agar mold I use?

Misc Cupcakes

Another Friday afternoon, spending most of my time researching and planning for Aidan's birthday party, i just don't see myself can have any break this weekend. Still no clue what food project this weekend but I am sure it's not going to be something complex. Want to take a break from food recipes but just want to share with you some left over cupcakes photo taken from my hubby last week.

Happy Papa's Day

This is hubby first Father's day as papa. We didn't not have any special plan but stay home and spend some fun time with Aidan.
The celebration started with cupcakes baking and peek-a-boo card making. I found this cute cupcakes decoration and this handmade card from a magazine (Thanks to my weekly allergy shot. I was able to check out some cute idea from magazine while waiting in my doctor's office), and decided to give it a try.
The card was made from a cutout Aidan's hand print and his cute dinner picture I took last week. Since Aidan love peek-a-boo game so much, I thought this was the perfect card for happy papa's day.
As for the cake, to make sure I won't screw up the cake, I decided to go with a cake mix route. I baked 24 cupcakes from Pillsbury pineapple cake mix and decorated with homemade cream cheese frosting. The cake was light and soft and the frosting is super sweet, in my opinion.
Overall, it was a relax and easy Sunday( except for my car broke down in the 2nd half of the day).

Mother's Day Menu

The day started with home cook comfort food Abalone Chicken Porridge serve with some pickle mustard green for lunch.
Follow by Chinese herbal soup consist of Dong Quai aka female ginseng, goji, red dates and chicken. This soup is a special treat for myself.
It was a hot sunny day, spending all day out site working on the fence were not fun. So I made hubby a glass of icy cold limeade with preserved plum. This is my favorite drink. Adding the preserved plum and honey balanced the sourness from the lime.
For dinner, we cooked the dish we prepared from the meal center- Southwest Chicken Wrap. All I need to do is place everything in my multiple purpose rice cookers and set the timer to 5 hours.


The sauce is a little salty taste, so I added some lettuce and cheese on top to kick it up a notch.


Viola.. Dinner is ready.

Let's Dish!

My mother's day celebration started on Saturday May 12. In stead of the usual celebration meal at some restaurant, my husband suggested to try the meal assembly centers found in town and maybe pack for a whole weeks of meals, so I can have a weekend off from preparing and cooking lunches and dinners. Loves this idea as I can take a break from spinning my head trying to figure out what's for dinner. Besides, we also started our summer home maintenance project - re-staining the fence and windows fixing, we may not have any time to cook this weekend as my hubby will be spending most of the time outdoor washing and painting.

Before the weekend, hubby has been doing some research for menu and details about the meal assembly center information. There are plenty of centers near by our house: Social Suppers, Let's Dish!, Meal Makers and Super Suppers. Since we are new this thing, we didn't know that we have to sign up for a certain session to prepare the meal. After all the last minutes of scrambling due to the fact that the center that we planed to attend was closed for the whole month of May, we managed to find an open spot at Let's Dish!.
Wasted no time, we hopped into to car and headed to the center. My son Aidan fell asleep in the car while we trying to figure the location of the center. Made a couple phone calls and finally we arrived in the center. We registered the 4 meals menu. According to them, each full size meal can serve up to 6 individual and we can split them into half if we like. We decided to take the split version and start dishing.

The process begin by selecting a recipe we would like to dish then go to the station with the recipe displayed on the counter.

All the ingredient were cut and clean (I assume) and all I have to do was pack them according to the instruction listed on the recipe.
Once all the ingredients are mixed, pack them into a freezer bag or aluminum bowl depends on the dish you order. Label them with you name and the cooking instruction and put them into the designated fridge and continue to the next menu.
It took me about 1 hour to finish 4 dishes + 1 free dish with an online coupon. Total cost $90 + tax. Overall, it was a pleasant experience and I was having fun packaging the food as you can see below.

Mommy's day Gifts

My first mother's day gifts from my family.A lovely pictures card that showcase all my son's picture from birth to 8th month, a hand print we did together at his school (day care) and a birthstone bracelet from my son's birthstone - Peridot. Roman call this stone as Peridot mean "Evening Emerald" because it's green color did not darken at night but was still visible by the lamplight. Some people believe that wearing this stone will bring success, peace and good luck to the wearer.

Coming up next... the series of my first mother's day celebration.

Farewell Potluck

A friend of mine is moving to Colorado this month and we decided to through a potluck farewell gathering for her. She and her husband was originally from Colorado, moving back to Colorado is like returning home to her plus she is planning stay home with her 9 months old son for a while.How envy is it..I wish I have the options, staying close with my family and stay home with my son so can have more time to blog.
Anyway, Today I would like to share some of the foods we prepared for the gathering.

My creation #1: Chipotle Shrimp Kabob

Before grilling

Ready to eat

My creation #2: Mayonnaise Grill Salmon

Bryan's signature potluck dish: Devil Eggs

Karin's Assorted Pepperidge Farm cookies (I love it!)

Veggie Platter from Karin

A colorful yet refreshing dish Eric and Josephine: Mix Fruit salad

Last but not least, the grilling in progress pictures

It was a great get together before they leave and i wish them all the best and i am sure they will enjoy the nice city and accompany from all the family remember.. and hope we can visit them sometime in the future.