My apple crumble too

Lunch was fried rice, but the photos I took turned out too blur. I was inspired by Obachan so I made my own apple crumble too. I think I'd like mine with a scoop of vanila ice-cream, so called hubby to get one tub home. Seems like everywhere's out. :( Nevermind, there are still some left. :)

Everybody loved it! :) Mom and dad, and dear hubby too when he got home. And baby too. haha.

Wanted to invite PM over too to have some since it's her birthday today. I won't say I specially made for her, but I did make it in mind of her. Unfortunately she couldn't make it, and told me in no uncertain terms to practise first before she'll try some. Humf. Well, after I told her it was my first apple crumble I've ever made in my entire life.

It turned out well anyway. :) I still have some, how am I going to keep it? And I have some crumble left too, can make another small one!

So who's coming for dessert? :)

Pain pain go away

So I am still recovering from a bad case of runny nose which got so bad that I got sinus infection and am now on antibiotics. The pain was like a toothache and a headache, which just didn't go away, so a visit to the dentist to make sure that it wasn't a tooth decay. Thank goodness. Dear hubby is right after all, but he's not sympathetic, still. :P

Baby ripped out another page of my book while I was not looking, or rather, while hubby was not looking, and he (hubby) gleefully brought the torn page to me, like a trophy which baby won. Duh. Not to mention baby ripped out the plastic cover of another book I had. Think baby wants to start reading soon. He's just not very interested in his own books though. He wants things which are similar to what we have. Why cloth books or thick pages books which are unrippable?

Baby dearest is now at my feet happily shredding the tissue paper he managed to pull out before I caught him. I wonder if he would spoil the printer one day by pulling and tugging at it everytime he sits on the floor!

Dear hubby remarked that now as a parent he understands a few things about how other parents have been behaving. Previously he always get annoyed when kids make noise or pulls things off tables or grab the newspapers like his brother's kids. Now, when baby does that, we look at him proudly and say ... ohh, baby is learning to talk! How precious. Ohh, baby knows how to grab things! How smart! etc etc. Haha. I bet if someone with another perspective would view it just as irritating as hubby once had. Smack his little hands!

I guess we just have to be faster than him and pick up his toys behind him.

Damn tired, and baby has been waking up after eleven at night and didn't want to sleep after that.

It's no wonder I can't recover at all.

Hell hath no fury

I am angry because ...

That day hubby hiam that the food I cooked wasn't enough, so I fried him an egg on his mom's $3 Ikea telfon frying pan, and of course the fried egg tasted horrible. Haha.

I told him I don't use such frying pan. Every cent adds to the quality. I already had a nice expensive frying pan which is not telfon. And it cooks eggs very nicely. As in the other day I fried onion omelette and cod fish in it.

Well, anyway, I used the telfon frying pan to make my point, two points actually. :P

But that wasn't the end, or the story. I was starved for two days while having dinner at his mom's place. The first night dinner consisted of rice which was too wet to be rice, but too dry to be porriage. Read: Slimy starchy wet soggy rice. Plus canned beans (which I didn't like) and pumpkin (which tasted like ... err, overcooked, not sweet, no taste) and cold soup (I hate soup when it's cold!) which was tasteless too, tasted like some leftover soup which she just added extra water init, with some wierd herbs.

The second dinner, well ... rice was all right, and there was one HUGE bowl of stewed cold bittergourd, a little bit is fine ... but one HUGE bowl? And cold. Canned sardines, more canned beans (probably left over from the above), lukewarm soup with very expensive mushrooms she said which had no taste after being boiled like forever in the soup? Some left over two tablespoons of soggy egg with raw onions and some tough pork with cold tofu. Can't quite remember. And everything was cold. It was absolutely yucky. I guessed I stuffed myself with the cold sardines. They were the only pretty okay stuffs. You dumped lots of the sardine gravy and stuffed your face with the gravy and rice and snatched whatever sardines from hubby.

If you think that's the worst ... no it's not. The worst is having her looming at the table WATCHING you eat. And critising when you took very little rice when you saw the food at the table. And trying to FORCE you to eat all those horrible stuffs. And putting all those horrible stuffs onto your plate. One has to be quick, when her back is turned, quickly transfer to hubby, who protested loudly. Huh. And I was forced to eat some kind of BARK, you know those herbal stuffs you put in the soup to make it tasty and norishing, but you DON'T EAT IT!!!?!?!!!

Waaaaaaah! I feel very sick when I think of the torture I had to endure during those mealtimes. Good think I escaped this afternoon. It was cold tofu in semi-slimy-and-wet-rice with .... MORE BAKED BEANS!!!

WAAAAAH.

I went without lunch today.

It's no wonder I'm losing weight yeah? And everytime after dinner there, there's not enough food for baby.

Arrrrrrgh!

And what did hubby say? Nostagic.

So don't ever complain that I don't cook enough food!!!!!! I think it was two dishes that day. Cannot remember, too long. hahaha.

That's it ... never going to have my dinner there. Will practise polite decline.

As always, as ever ...

My one week break has come and gone. I didn't quite have a good break, but it wasn't overly stressful in a way.

Baby darling had diarrhea for the whole week. Still having diarrhea and now he's coughing and throwing up his milk after coughing too much! First he had rashes on his tummy and back and hands and feet, and for a while I was rather worried about HFMD. But it was more of an allergy because the poor mummy had very bad headaches and shoulder, neck and backache, and she stuck lots of koryok on herself, which probably leads to baby dear absorbing all those methyl-salicylate. So now the poor mummy still has very bad headaches and shoulder, neck and backache, and she's resorting to popping paracetamol like sweets. Perhaps the diarrhea is also a result of that? But it shouldn't be for that was one week after the rashes. *sigh*

Mom said baby dearest looks very pale. Of course he would be. It's been nine days and he's still having diarrhea. :(

But the good news is that baby dear is ever so active, and irrepressible, and so cheerful, except when we force the medicine down his throat. :P

He's coming to nine months now, and he has grown *gasp* six centimetres taller! My big baby boy! :)

So over the week, I spent some time at work, and the rest of the time at home taking care and playing with baby dear.

On Wednesday, I did this: :)

It took me 4 rounds of baking, for my oven was too small and could only bake 8 each time. I didn't have unsalted butter though, so I used the normal butter thingy and cut down on the amount of salt. I got my recipe from my bake book here, but I guess chocolate chip cookies are all the same everywhere. :) I put in walnuts and lots of Hersheys chocolate chips. (They melted in the open and I dumped them in the fridge, most of them now don't resemble chips!)

I scaled down everything by half, or as close as I could, and I realised why I could never be good at baking, for I couldn't be bothered to be exact in all my measurements. Darn, I need a proper mixing bowl! For one. When I stirred in my flour, one turn of the spoon sent the flour flying onto me. And I need a proper stirring spoon! Using a metal spoon to stir hurts the palm. If not, I guess I should get a hand-mixer if I'm to do such stuffs again!

Impromptu mixing bowl.

After that I made sorta-tom-yum udon noodle soup for dinner.

It was sort of rushed, for dear hubby was getting home soon. So I guess ... need more improvement on that one! I didn't have lime, and I didn't really want to put in the Thai fish sauce. :P And I didn't have enough lemongrass. And I put in tomatos too. Hmm ... tasted kinda ... strange. Heh. Maybe I should just stick to my normal style.

On a side-note, I wonder why my cookies became quite hard after a day. Is it because there was too little butter? They were nice and crunchy when hot though.

****
The other day, I turned a corner, and was lost for words when I saw ... instead of the familiar old red-brick building, it was simply one huge gaping hole. Damn, so depressing! I didn't know so much had changed. Well, I knew they were going to pull down the library, but I didn't know it made everything looked so horrible. Gone was the nice warm cosy comforting place. Gone! Gone! And it really was a huge gaping hole there! Some sort of underpass? Souless now.

I worked there once. I loved the tress and walking up to the building from the bus-stop. I loved going there in the evening, where the wind would blow the leaves on my feet and tease the top of the tress. I loved the crooked stairs with old bricks on the side, going up to the main building. Damn, should have gone to take photos there.

****
I was actually thinking of making pizza the next day after the cookies, but I guess that's enough baking and cooking (from recipe books) for now. Till the next holidays! :)