The Irresistable Urge

Life's getting a little bit mundane... And my greatest respite from it seems to lie in the kitchen... Cooking. I simply dig it. The real challenge is, how to do it without any of the following: (1) Having a whole freezer full of leftovers (2) Gaining weight in leaps and bounds (3) Causing the one around me to gain weight leaps and bounds....

Today I cooked Klang-style buck coot tay (pork rib soup... tea... broth... whatever you want to call it, and I insist on spelling it MY way) for dinner. It was easy. The secret is: oyster sauce and pressure cook.

And after dinner, I harvested some rosemary from the garden. The rosemary plant is robustly growing. Just simply pruning off some stray branches yielded a whole colander of fresh herb. Trimmings are now washed and drying on some kitchen towels on the dining table. Once dry, into a glass bottle with some light olive oil they will go, to steep for a few weeks. And hopefully I get some nice oil for my salads. Yet undecided is whether I should add a sprinkling of salt as a preservative. This is my first attempt at homemade herb oil.

I fed Tortoise some left over Romaine lettuce. And she loved it! Finished every scrap. I've never given her fresh food before. She'd always had specially formulated terrapin pellets. Somehow, the storybooks I've read in the past have always associated Romaine lettuce with two things... Caesar salad and tortoises.

Now I'm going to contradict myself.... there's simply too much to do in my mundane life, and not enough time to do it all.

My French lessons for instance. After learning for almost 2 years, I am but a disgrace with my moth-eaten memory of verbs and conjugations. Then there are the oil painting lessons... and of course, gym. Very essential. Each time I bump into some long lost acquaintances, they'd exclaimed how I've shrunk. But its part of aging gracefully. Even tomatoes in the fridge shrink after sometime, but they do get more flavorful.... And I'd like to think of myself as getting more flavorful by the day... Now if only someone would care to take a bite.... ;-)