Eat to live

I'll admit it. I'm very fussy about food. For as long as I can remember, eating has always been a necessity. There wasn't much joy about it. When I see people enjoying food, I feel so envious. I'm a terrible cook so it's not like I could cook myself something delicious to eat everyday. Occasionally I find something I enjoy eating a lot and you know what I do right? I eat it to death until I get sick of it. That's really because there aren't many kinds of food I like to eat. Okay, mostly I lack self-control.

Last year, as if I purposely wanted to make my life even worse, me and hubs decided to stop eating 4-legged animals and poultry. Yeah, sure we carried on eating seafood but even then, our mealtimes were very, very sad affairs. We eat out a lot and as we discovered, having a restricted diet is hell. Our options became very limited. Still we stuck it out. And we would have carried sticking it out. But end of last year, I became a little depressed and when I was struggling to get myself out of the darkness, I decided to go back to eating meat. I thought that having one less struggle in my life would be a wise thing. I'm still not eating red meat as I don't like them. But chicken, here I come! I thought hubs would soldier on bravely but he decided to "join me" in my meat route. Bastard!

Quite honestly, I feel a little ashamed and sad even, to go back to meat. I really thought we could eventually go vegetarian.

This year I wanted to try a little harder to find different kinds of food to eat. For starters, I've stopped buying Thai rice. Most of you probably know I'm Chinese. And it's true what they say about Chinese. We can't live without rice. Yes, we eat rice every day. For as long as I can remember, my mother has always bought a certain kind of rice from Thailand. She is quite particular about the kind of rice she buys. For many years, I would buy the same kind of rice and it never gave me any problems. But for the past decade, I had switched to a blend of white and brown rice and the only kinds sold where I live are a NTUC in-house brand. It's not expensive and we ate these rice for so long without issues. Late last year, I discovered MILLIONS of weevils in my bag of rice. I had only bought it for 2 weeks and used only two cups of rice. So not too old right? The MILLIONS of weevils sent all my hair standing on ends and I couldn't buy or eat rice for a while. So what to do? I looked at the other rice available for sale and discovered a new kind of rice.

 

This brown rice from Australia is amazing - not too hard and not too soft. Just perfect. It's very different from Thai rice in texture. It's also not expensive so this family can carry on cooking and eating rice at home. I just hope it doesn't sprout weevils.

This is another amazing rice I have discovered - short grained Japanese rice from Yonehachi restaurant. This is inspiring me to cook my own Japanese rice!!!

This is Thai rice from Nara Thai restaurant. I wonder how the colouring is done. I find it interesting how adding a little cashew nut enhances the taste of the rice.

This year is going to be the year I lose weight. Ha ha. Seriously, I am on a "less carbo" diet. And do you know how much I LOVE, LOVE carbo? I absolutely have to eat bread. Every. Single. Day. Plus the Chinese thing of eating rice. Every. Single. Day. How to cut carbo, right? Well, firstly, I will eat half a tiny bowl of rice instead of one bowl. I will eat one slice of bread instead of two. I will not eat cake. Man.... I'm already starving just typing this down. I will also cut down on my intake of instant noodles. These delicious ramen (tom yam flavour) is seriously my downfall. To counter my craving for noodles, I have switched to buckwheat noodles. Are they less fattening? I don't really know. But I know I won't eat buckets of buckwheat noodles.

The first time I bought buckwheat noodles, I paid a fortune for them as the mountain tortoise that I am, I bought from Isetan supermarket. I probably overpaid 1000%. Anyway, I have since found a shop at Central Mall which sells nothing but imported Japanese foodstuff and the buckwheat noodles are really cheap.

This is soba sauce which goes with the buckwheat noodles. You add water to the soba sauce otherwise it's too salty. Honestly, it's just soy sauce. And I bought it from Isetan supermarket as well, overpaying by 1000%. The shop at Central Mall also sells soba sauce, at a fraction of the Isetan price.

This is how you eat it. Just pour the cooked noodles in the soba sauce. I have discovered that cold buckwheat noodles is the bomb.

Late last year, I discovered that I really like salsa sauce. I've never paid attention to such sauce which hubs buys for eating with chips and his carrot slices. One day, I added the chunky salsa hot sauce to my pasta and BAM! I got hooked.

Another sauce I discovered late last year as well is Jamie Oliver's chilli and garlic pesto. I have never tasted pesto before. It has never occurred to me to try pesto. Let's just say pesto is not in my vocabulary. One day we were at Cold Storage supermarket and the pesto sauce looked so inviting that I bought it to try thinking it'll be one of those meh moments. I was so wrong! Pesto has opened up my taste buds. Suddenly I'm tasting flavours and bingbangboom stuff. How on earth did I go through life never tasting pesto? Pesto is the besto!

I think 2015 is going to be such an exciting year for me, foodwise. Already I've been eating and tasting different stuff. Why, today I even ate Hainanese chicken rice for lunch! It's steamed chicken which I would previously never eat even if you paid me and I enjoyed it so much my brains screamed!

And what's your food diet for 2015?

The food was delicious

Folks,

We're having our 1 week school break this week before the final term. As always, my girl had a lot of homework which required a lot of nagging from us. When I am president, holiday homework will be outlawed!

My son, on the other hand had no homework. He spent every waking moment (well, almost) playing games. I have told him that from Monday, he has to study for his coming GCE 'O' levels which start in October. I can't believe it. He's 16!

This week we tried to do stuff with the kids since during school term, it's quite impossible. Being the kind of shopping mall parents we are, we ended up just going to different places to eat!

 At Capricciosa

At good ole' Fish n Co

At Watami

At Charlie & Co

I'm afraid to inform you I have grown rather fat. Next week I shall exercise and eat porridge every day. Pinkie promise.

We did stop eating once to go see a movie. You've probably never heard of it. It's Detective Conan - Private Eye of the Distant Sea. See, I told you. There were a total of 8 people in the cinema including the 4 of us. I suspect one of the 8, a lone guy went just to enjoy the cold air and take a nap. The movie was ridiculously expensive. We did get 4 "free" plastic folders. See the photo above? That's the folder. I'll be sure to put them to good use. Oh, did I mention the movie is in Japanese? Luckily, there were English subtitles. The movie was quite enjoyable. There were moments when I laughed until I cried. Oh, did I also mention the movie is a CARTOON? Er, I mean, animation.

Despite being joined at the hips to my family this week, I managed to put in a fair amount of work in my pattern. Yes, it's still not finished. I'm already at the photo editing stage which is a good stage to be at, I can tell you that. I have just 100 more photos to take so it's looking good. I will have to get this pattern done by this month by hook or by crook because from October, I need to sew my head off again for my craft market.

One last thing. If you've bought my Easy Sling Bag Pattern, I have uploaded another version to Etsy and Craftsy. You need not download the new version because all I did was adjust the angle of an image. I have not made any changes to the instructions. It was really bugging me and I apologise for the unnecessary notification by Craftsy (which is beyond my control). Thank you for your patience.

See you in my next post. I'll show you my loot.