woohoo! - sort of

Blogger just keeps getting better and better these days. They've teamed up with a company which created a software for photoblogging through its own instant messenger. I was very excited when I heard that the company (Picasa) hosts your pictures for free and downloaded its photo-messenger immediately. On closer examination however, it's not as flexible as having your own ftp space with no strings attached. The messenger (which plugs Picasa's photo organizer software) posts your picture with a caption as one blog post, and you have to go back and edit it if you want a longer post. You do not get a url for the picture until you actually publish it in a post. So to put a picture in my profile, for example, I had to first post it, get the url off of the post, then delete the post and put the url in my profile. A bit of a hassle, but I guess it's a different sort of cost.

chicken madras

I made chicken madras yesterday using a recipe from Recipes for the Nation's Favourite Food, a British cookbook put out by the BBC (also a TV series). It came out really, really good, nearly restaurant quality (if I do say so myself). My dad didn't even use chilli sauce on it because it was spicy enough, which is kind of a compliment (usually when I cook non-Chinese food he puts that on). It was a relatively simple dish, too. The dish consisted of chicken, diced onions, can of diced tomatoes, shredded coconut, and spices. The garam masala took some doing since I had to find the spices that went into it and mix them together myself (some of them were whole spices which I had to grind up). Luckily I remembered we had a small coffee grinder in the house, so I used that to grind up the spices and the coconut as well. I took a couple of pictures, which will be forthcoming.

One thing slightly pissed me off yesterday. The recipe called for a small handful of fresh coriander to be mixed into the curry, which I thought to leave off since I have never been able to find fresh coriander in supermarkets here. So I went grocery shopping for spices in the Mexican spices section, which had all the spices I needed at a third or a fourth of the price. They do come in plastic bags instead of fancy jars, but they do the trick just fine. Anyway, the packet for coriander seeds had the Spanish name "cilantro" underneath the English, so I was like, huh. Then I went home, did a search, and found that coriander and cilantro are one and the same. Gaaahhh!! Well, it's good because I have access to fresh "coriander", and bad because I didn't know I did :(. Actually, I remember smelling the coriander in a British supermarket and thought it smelled awfully like cilantro, but it didn't occur to me they were the same thing. Reminds me of the time I found out garbanzo beans and chickpeas were the same thing.

dreamfall

Funcom, developer of The Longest Journey, is making a sequel called Dreamfall. The official website just came out at www.dreamfall.com, whichc has some screenshots and character profiles for the three playable characters. The main character is a new girl named Zoe, and April Ryan, the main character from the first game, now looks like a sexy goth chick with short black hair and dark makeup. I can't wait for it to come out!

new look

As you may have noticed, I've changed my blog template to one of the new ones offered by Blogger. Blogger has its own comment system now, too. Unfortunately, that means the comments made previously on Haloscan won't show up anymore. Oh well.

double whammy

Yes, I have more fuel for my British/Indian food cravings, and all without leaving town -- that's right, I got them at the Ralphs closest to my house while shopping for Mother's Day groceries this evening. I didn't know they were there either -- just sorta wandered around and ran into them. Ever since I saw hummus on sale at the salad section in Ralphs, I had a feeling Indian food was going to catch on sooner or later, just as Mediterranean food has (the two are pretty prominent in British supermarkets already). And I was right. Woohoo! Granted, the curry sauces are given names like "Creamy Coconut Curry" instead of "Korma" and "Hot Curry Paste" instead of "Madras Curry Paste" (at least I hope it's madras), but hey, I'm not complaining (too much). I didn't get the korma because I had it recently with the other jar I got from Taiwan. Truth be told, I got sick of Patak's Tikka Masala and Balti while in England. They really don't taste good after you've had it several times, and they're not as good as real Indian curry to begin with. The paste I got will come in handy when I make chicken madras from my British cookbook (hence my hoping that it's madras paste I got).

As for chocolate, I spotted them while browsing the candy section and squeezing a bag of marshmellows (they were above the marshmellows). I was a happy camper during Easter because they carried Cadbury eggs, but this is even better. Apparently Hershey's decided they might make some money selling Cadbury outside of Easter (they've got the rights to distribute Cadbury chocolate in the U.S.). Aside from the almond one I got, there were also Dairymilk and Fruit n' Nut. No hazelnut ones, but like I said, I'm not complaining (much). Ralphs is expensive as hell, but I love them for carrying good stuff.

doing it the hard way

I mentioned googling for a (English) baked beans recipe in the last post. Well, I did find one. It's pretty complicated but definitely doable, since I have most of the spices required. I'm not surprised that in my short search I haven't found a British site that carried a baked beans recipe -- aside from more time and effort, you'd definitely spend more money making baked beans yourself than buying a 20- or 30-pence can of beans from the store. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I ate them all time while in Brighton. Beans on toast is one of the cheapest and easiest meals around, considering how cheap their bread is, too. I liked to get the higher-end bread with a crispy, golden crust -- for under a pound. Compare that to a loaf of nice bread here for what, $3.00? Dude, we're getting gypped (gipped?) somehow.

mmm...food

I came across this French girl's food blog while looking for a baked beans recipe, and she inspired me to blog about my own cooking experiences (There was a link to Alton Brown's blog/site. Will check it out later). Wish I had a digital camera so I can take pictures of my food, but I guess that'll have to wait until my brother moves home for the summer. Last Saturday I had Marianne over for dinner (as hinted two posts ago) because I had a jar of Tesco korma sauce that had to be used. There are two stories in there -- I got the korma (a mild coconutty curry, if you didn't know) from Taiwan, where a Tesco had opened near my grandmother's place. Since it's a British chain, the supermarket carried Tesco brand food, like curries, pasta, baked beans, digestives, dried soup, etc -- many of which Chinese people do not eat (much of the store carries Chinese groceries, of course). As a Chinese person who misses British food, I was like "THANK YOU GOD!!" On the other hand, I was really torn because I also wanted to eat a lot of Taiwanese food, which you either can't find or can't find it made correctly in the U.S. (Boba tea made properly tasted SO much better.) So I ended up getting a jar of curry, some packets of instant custard, and a few Kinder Buenos, not as much as I otherwise would've bought (my low supply of Taiwanese currency and the weight of jars and such had to do with it too). And then, the night I got home, my dad opened my curry, thinking it was peanut butter. I was like, Oh, my precious curry! Now I have to eat it instead of watch it sit on my beside table. (Well, actually it was more like, dude, can you READ?) It wasn't very funny at the time, but that was why I had to use it up when I did.

Anyway, that curry was probably the easiest part of the whole meal. Cut some chicken, cook it in the pot, dump in the curry and cook some more. I made naan to go with it because I had time on my hands (found the recipe on allrecipes.com). I also made some curried spinach thing that tasted more spinach than curry. I think I'm most proud of the basmati bread, which was my own recipe inspired by online recipes, a basmati rice editorial on Amazon, and personal eating experience. I made it pilau-style by frying the rice with oil, butter, and spices (cumin seeds, whole cloves, and a bay leaf), then I dumped everything in the rice cooker and let it do its thing. It smelled better than I ever thought rice could smell and came out nice and fluffy too. I made apple crumble for dessert; it didn't look like it was supposed to but tasted okay. I made some of my instant custard to go with it, which tastes better made with milk than with water (understandably). I was going to make custard from scratch, too, if more people showed up. Oh well, some other time then.

I did a little baking between then and now. First some bisquits that didn't seem to rise enough and tasted doughy. Then on Wednesday I made French bread dinner rolls (recipe curtesy of allrecipes.com) for roommate dinner on Thursday, which turned out pretty well if a little deflated (from the rolls having to rise in the oven then waiting outside while I preheated it). I also ordered a kitchen scale, which will make it easier (i.e. possible) to make food from British/Taiwanese recipes. Yay.

gmail goodness

I had been waiting to sign up for Gmail ever since I heard about it earlier this month. I didn't really care what features it had, mostly I wanted to pick an email address that I really wanted (like one with my name in it), rather than one I had to think up because your previous ten choices were already taken. I went to the Gmail site, but you couldn't just register as it was still in beta stage.

Then I logged in to Blogger today, and what did I see? An offer to help test Gmail! Woo! Thank you Blogger. So I got a new email address (just my name. Kinda boring, but I didn't have any real neat ideas), and I have to say I was pretty impressed with Gmail's features. I'd heard about the 1 gig space and the 10 mb attachments, which I didn't particularly care about since my SBC/Yahoo DSL account gives me 75 megs in Yahoo, which is way more than I need. But what really impressed me were these two features: email conversations and labeling system. Email conversations group together the back-and-forth replies in one topic so that everything you and another person is under one "thread" instead of scattered all over. Kind of like an online forum thread. I remember one time wishing that email did this, so it was a pleasant surprise. The labeling system is a different way of organizing your mail. Instead of dropping messages into different folders, you group them by labels, and each message can have more than one label. [added later: When you delete a label, the messages with that label don't get deleted. Yahoo, on the other hand, requires folders to be emptied before deletion.] I guess the usefulness of this feature depends on how you sort your own mail, but all in all I like their innovations. Good job, Google.

homemade naan

I just finished making naan bread for the first time, and it was a success! Woo! Okay, it doesn't quite taste like real naan, but it has got chewy bready goodness. You'd better make it here this Saturday, Marianne, or I'm eating all of it.

Today I went and handed in my admissions application at Rio Hondo College. I'm taking Accounting 101 this summer -- as a result of reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad and its sequels. I'm too lazy to really sit down and write about the whys of it, but in short, Robert Kiyosaki inspired me to become financially literate, and taking this class will be the first step. I also turned in a volunteer application at my local Boys and Girls Club today, for a number of reasons. One, I wanted to help with a charity's fundraising to practice my sales skills. Two, it'll help me practice dealing with kids for when I have my own (not that I expect to any time soon, but I will eventually). And three, it beats sitting home and waiting for the Department of Insurance to tell me when I can pick a test date for my license. I have to admit, this move was also inspired by the Rich Dad books. Kiyosaki himself started out as a shy person who was a really bad salesman. He told this story several times throughout his books, but only in the last one I read did he say how he overcame that obstacle -- by doing fundraising phone calls for charity (and doing sales pitches at a much faster rate). I started out looking for any charity near me (Red Cross was the other close one), but chose the Boys and Girls Club because of the other challenge -- dealing with kids (if you didn't know this yet, I'm not real good with the kind that talks back). I say it's a challenge, but it's not like I'm nervous about it. Mostly I wonder about the right things to say and do when I have to resolve a conflict or something like that. Watching Dr. Phil has really been a lot of help, both in this regard and in general. I've watched him enough now that I can diagnose some problems in relationships around me (including my own), and that's pretty cool.

stuff

I know I haven't blogged in a while -- not that I don't have stuff to say, I've just been lazy (and jetlagged). I went to Taiwan for a week for my grandmother's funeral, and switching back and forth between two disparate cultures is incredibly taxing. The 14-hour plane ride didn't help, either. The first few days I was like, "god, I'm lonely and I don't want to be here away from my life." And then we settled in and my mom's friends took us sightseeing and eating lots of good food. Then we came back and I was like, "god, I'm lonely and I don't want to go back to real life." Well, I guess it's good I don't have school or a 9-to-5 j.o.b. to have to plunge back into.