Angel In Blue Jeans

In case you didn't realise (okay, you probably didn't), most of my posts this year have been titled after RPM tracks. It's a bore having to think of titles, having decided that I would do it for ease of linking, and the songs are usually playing in my head at some point anyway. Train's Angel In Blue Jeans is the first track from RPM 66, which I quite like. But the song is totally unrelated to this post, which is about ideals. Would you have read it if I had titled it "Ideals"? (I wouldn't, if I were you. Thought Catalog much.)

As I was saying.

In an ideal world, I would blog regularly, especially about all the cooking I've been doing. Which, for the record, is the most cooking I've done since I took that four month break after leaving practice. I must say that I think I have improved tremendously since then (self praise is no praise, but someone's gotta do it). 

In an ideal world, I would have enough energy and inspiration every week night to cook delicious, healthy meals for Jon and myself, at a fraction of what they would cost at Cedele or some other "healthier choice" eatery. Every single meal I cooked, whether or not I had gone through the cooking method and seasonings in my mind before I started cooking it, would turn out well. It wouldn't have to look pretty, as we've already established from previous posts that I'm not too concerned about that aspect, but it would taste good.

Alas, Tuesday's dinner, which I cobbled together at the last minute because Jon and I simply couldn't face the dinner of baked karaage chicken (Not Quite Nigella's excellent recipe) I had originally planned, was a Major and Epic Fail. I have not had such a kitchen disaster since we first got married (potato chips which refused to crisp in the oven, saba wrapped bacon etc. On that note, saba is evidently not the same as the mackerel used in mackerel-wrapped bacon. Saba wrapped bacon equals a terrible salty aftertaste on your tongue which even the fact that you ate bacon cannot cure).  

I blame Tuesday's dinner fail on one HST, who insisted we order Hansang's latest fried chicken offering* at dinner on Monday, which meant that as the two most greedy people at dinner, Jon and I had to finish said chicken because everyone else was stuffed. When we got home I looked at the chicken I had planned on marinating and decided to defrost some salmon belly instead - which was the only fish we had in the freezer. 

*It's not half bad, you should try it.

I'd originally planned to use said salmon belly in a salmon belly miso soup reprise, which would have been perfect in yesterday's thunderstorm, but as I couldn't muster the willpower to hot foot it to NTUC to purchase salmon bones and white radish - yes, I know it's not strictly necessary to make a fish stock first, seeing as the miso and sake provide more than enough flavour, but I just felt like staying true to the spirit of the dish, you know? Since I have time (as if) - I decided to bake the salmon belly instead. So I cut it into strips the length of my finger and used some kitchen paper to soak up the excess moisture - I left the strips covered in kitchen paper for about 2 hours in the fridge - and then laid them skin side up on a baking tray lined with baking paper.

So far so good. 

The time then came to season the salmon belly. Now, right before doing so, I'd been watching The Kitchen on Food Network. I know that kosher salt is usually used on these shows, and the hosts season everything they cook very liberally - all that salt whooshing down on the food makes for pretty television, and there's something so professional about picking up salt with one's thumb and forefinger and sprinkling it over food. 

Anyhow, inspired by said TV show and against my better judgment - I use kosher salt in my cooking, and truth be told I've never found that I needed much of it to season a dish, although it's supposed to be less salty - I proceeded to have a good time raining salt down on the salmon belly strips, feeling professional in my very own kitchen.

I'm sharing my cooking process because it actually cooked up really well. I gave the salmon belly a further sprinkling of lemon pepper, drizzled three scant teaspoons of olive oil over the lot, and stuck it in a 140C oven for about 10 minutes. I then cranked the broiler up really high - about 220C on my oven, and broiled the salmon belly until the skin turned brown and blistered. I took them out a bit earlier than I would've liked, but if you don't have a fidgety seven and a half month old you're trying to feed at the same time, you'll probably get a better finish because you can watch the oven more closely.

To his credit, Jon finished his portion and kept assuring me that it tasted all right... But he then made us go for ice cream even though it was a cold and rainy night and I NEVER eat ice cream when it's cold and rainy because what's the point?! Desperate times call for desperate measures though, and we both had headaches and felt funny in the tummy despite having drunk copious amounts of water. A cup of strong tea without sugar at 11pm finally did the trick for me. FYI, in case you ever have a too much salt mishap.  

***

I feel better now after telling you about last night's dinner in too many words. I suppose I could have just said that last night's dinner was a Fail because I over salted the baked salmon belly, but the point of a blog is that you can go on and on and even if no one reads it it doesn't matter.

I hear FBC stirring from his pre-dinner nap and I would like to feed him before he gets too hangry to eat his dinner properly, so I can't share in too much detail about a recipe which I felt was a win. 

Here is a picture of a curry I made about a week and a half ago:

I think it's probably some variation on a shakshuka, sans eggs, and it was so good! I also had no choice but to make a curry because my mother foisted a small bag of curry leaves from her garden on me.

Chicken Curry

From my imagination. No link to that, sorry.

Although my mother said otherwise, I decided to do an oven braise because the chicken was not at a fall off the bone tender stage when I realised that the bottom of the curry was starting to burn. Maybe my stove top skills are lacking; if yours aren't, go ahead and finish it on the stove top.

Ingredients

• Four chicken legs about 200g each (i.e. thighs with drumsticks attached. You can use a mix of drumsticks and thighs)
• One 410g can of tomato puree (Leggo's had an offer)
• About half a cup of minced onion
• About two tbsp minced garlic
• About three heaping tbsps of curry powder - I made my own blend, as follows: 2 tbsp ground coriander, 1 tbsp ground tumeric, 1 tbsp yellow mustard powder, 1 tbsp ground chili, 2 tsp cayenne pepper, 2 tsp ground cumin, 1/4 tsp cardamom powder, 1/2 tsp ground ginger and 2 tsp ground black pepper. You could of course Google and find another blend, most recipes I found included cinnamon, cloves and fenugreek but I wasn't keen on those flavours - especially fenugreek. Ugh. And I still have an almost full bottle of fenugreek capsules. 
• A large handful of curry leaves (optional)
• Oil for frying
• Touch of salt (to your taste!)
• About three large potatoes, cubed into large cubes (if there was a more elegant way of saying that, let me know). I used Russets.

Method

1. Make sure your child, if you have one, is sleeping soundly. This is necessary if you would like to sear your meat and like me cannot abide having an oily stove and work-top from the resulting oil spatter. 
2. Decide if you would like to sear your meat. If you would, and your child if you have one is sleeping, heat up the oil in a large Dutch oven until it shimmers. Sear your meat, and remove from pan. If you decide not to sear your meat, just start the recipe from the step which follows.
3. Fry the onions and garlic in the remaining oil and drippings until fragrant and brown. Add three heaping tablespoons curry powder, stir around until toasty. Add curry leaves and give them a fry around too. 
4. Add the can of tomato puree. Bring mixture to a boil, then add the chicken. You may have to add about a can of water (use the tomato puree can to measure) so that about two-thirds of the chicken is covered.
5. Let it all cook for about 20 minutes or so on the stove top (I let mine go for about 40 minutes, whereupon a slight burny smell emanated from the kitchen and told me that my initial oven braise instincts were right), then transfer to a 170C oven and let it cook for an hour to an hour and a half, adding the potatoes only when there's about 30-40 minutes of cooking time left. The chicken should fall off the bones when you're done.

Edited to add: If you seared the chicken, wipe up the oil spatter carefully after sticking your Dutch oven in the oven.

*** 

I've done this yoga video twice now, and although I can't do ALL of it, the interval training parts and the sheer number of vinyasas you have to do make for a good workout on the days one is disinclined to leave the house but needs to exercise due to having eaten too much fried chicken. 

I am going to go ahead and make Not Quite Nigella's chicken for dinner tomorrow. Try it, it's easy and delicious and if you don't already have the ingredients (except the chicken wings) in your pantry, get thee to NTUC NOW! 

Stun Like Vegetable

I hope they didn't use Australian broccoli when they filmed that MV, the price has gone back up to 80 cents per 100g and that was a large head of broccoli. 

***

This article caught my attention today. TL; DR: If you want to spend more time with your family than the average working mum, it is unlikely that you will be able to maximise the earning capacity bestowed on you by your university degree, and when your kids finally start asserting their independence*, you will have fallen behind your peers who chiong-ed during your child's formative years when you either didn't work, chose to go part-time or take on a chill job with predictable hours. That's a price you have to pay, but hey, you can't have your chai tow kueh and eat it too. 

You get the drift. 

*From what I recall of my teenage years, this is a s**t period of time where you feel like your children are the most ungrateful brats to ever walk this earth and you wonder constantly WHY you decided to have them. But if it's any consolation, prayer and faith in God on my parents' part, especially my mother's, show that miracles do happen. 

These are issues which I have been going over and over and OVER again in my mind. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) for FBC, it does not appear that I am one of those mothers who can spend all his waking hours babbling away with him in Whale/ Seal and other such maternal doings. We did dance to the Unbelievable song together today though, FBC chuckling delightedly at my deranged imitation of Chen Tian Wen's dance moves. 

What really resonated with me, however, was the last paragraph of the article. It said that one of the mothers  featured (who, from the article, is working part-time, flexibly and from home, for a not-for-profit arts company) had a "new focus", viz., running marathons. 

That got me thinking about my own "focuses". Before I delivered, I toyed with the idea of doing a full marathon if I really took a year off (despite having agreed with Jon after the last one in 2011 that I wouldn't do them anymore). Of course now that I've taken the year off, I think I'll stick to training for a half - the thought of 42.195km at one shot, with hips which still feel a teensy bit off-kilter at times, is just too painful. Also, after I left private practice, working out and being fit became really important to me, and because there were some Issues at my new workplace, it got easier to just go to the gym during lunch so I could avoid people at lunchtime. Weird, I know. This changed once I got to know the lovely R (whom I then bullied into going to the gym with me at lunch so nothing really changed). 

The point I'm trying to make (and I may be making assumptions) is that once you take away something which one used to strive for, to work really hard at - in this case, one's career - something else needs to take its place, and it seems that that something comes in the form of endurance sports. I'd already started long-distance running in university, but later, in 2012, it definitely felt like the best outlet to channel all the energy I used to expend on trying to and hoping I bettered my peers at work, worrying about whether the correct draft of a letter had been sent out, whether I could meet (in retrospect, unreasonable) deadlines, whether I could meet my billing targets, etc. Okay, I'm weird. But we already established that in the preceding paragraph. 

Also, while this doesn't seem to be such a big thing in Singapore (or I may just not be reading the right blogs), when I was pregnant I came across quite a number of blogs by angmoh SAHMs documenting their pregnancy and post-partum running experiences. Runner's World did a great and encouraging feature on this as well, and there are even blogs dedicated to reviews of jogging strollers**. I think quite a number of them must have given up careers of some sort to stay at home with their children, but since I don't know them in real life and didn't click on their earlier blog entries to determine this, it's mostly conjecture on my part. But I don't think I would be that off the mark. 

**If you're interested, we use a BOB Revolution SE Stroller which I purchased secondhand from a Brazilian SAHM for S$350. She'd advertised on stexpats.com. Seeing as this was an amazing bargain (it retails for about US$450 on Amazon, and that's before you include the shipping cost), we couldn't be too picky about the colour and so FBC has to put up with a purple jogging stroller. Not that he cares. 

Anyhow, since we are talking about running - I haven't done a timed run for a fixed distance for a while, but I know that I'm definitely stronger and hopefully nearer my sub-2 goal for the GEWR 2015.  

Sometimes I don't know if I'm veering into Too Concerned About My Fitness and Appearance Territory, and making the excuse that I have nothing much else in my life to focus on. But that's another story for another day, perhaps. 

***

Since we had a huge box of Tie Guan Yin languishing in the kitchen cabinet, I decided to make tea-smoked chicken! As our laptop has just informed me that it cannot read my phone, meaning I cannot upload a picture of said chicken, you will just have to take my word that I tried the recipe. Here is a link to the same. I substituted 1/4 cup of Tie Guan Yin leaves for the black tea, and also added about a tablespoon of Szechuan peppercorns to the smoking mixture and omitted the coriander seeds. Because I was loathe to use so much aluminium foil, I only lined the bottom of my wok (where the smoking mixture was placed), and stoppered up the steam holes in the lid of my wok with little scrunched up bits of aluminium foil. The lid fit snugly, so no smoke was lost. Apologies, but you may have to use all that foil if you have doubts about your wok. 

You can take it from me that the recipe works, and the results are yummy. Although the chicken is cooked through and can be eaten once it's finished smoking (I used a mix of drumettes and mid-joints), it is a lot tastier (and better looking!) if you take the extra step of broiling it thereafter. I found I needed about 10-15 minutes of broiling with my oven to achieve that lovely brown colour and crispy skin, but if your broiler is more efficient than mine then good for you. 

People

Who need people

Are the luckiest people in the world

***

We went to Y and C's house for dinner last night, and encouraged FBC to "play" with Baby O on their grey chevron Parklon playmat (we have just placed an order for the alphabets one from Agape Babies. S$10 off!) by leaving them to stare goggle-eyed at one another on the said playmat until one or the other let out prolonged cries of distress in Whale (the official baby language, their Mother Tongue being Seal), or the arm swiping and/ or attempts to crawl looked like they may have resulted in an eye or two being taken out by accident. In which event whichever parent was not occupied with dinner and/ or alcohol rushed forward to admonish the culprit, and in my case, tell FBC that he should be ashamed of himself for letting a girl make him cry. 

In his defence, he cheered up after having his milk, so the tears were probably due to hunger. Or Liverpool's crushing defeat by Arsenal. 

Of course, as the night wore on and more exchanges were had in Whale and Seal and Manchester United demolished Aston Villa, FBC grew more and more excited and when we finally left Y and C's, only to have Jon miss the CTE exit which resulted in us going all the way to Changi to get back on the PIE, I figured it was going to be one of those nights we were going to Have a Hard Time putting FBC to bed. We got home at around midnight, went through the bath-bedtime routine (we still have not changed our derelict-parent ways), and an hour-long sleep battle promptly ensued.

The nth time I trudged into FBC's room and saw him sitting up again despite my having seen him close his eyes after I'd sung the choruses of some of his favourite hits (解脫, 忘记你我做不到), I heard him let out a small burp, after which he lay down and fell asleep without any further fuss. It reminded me very much of my own sleep time habits, especially when I'm sick - I have to keep sitting up to blow my nose - and when I was pregnant or had too much to eat - I have to keep sitting up to try and burp, and get comfortable before I can fall asleep.

It's nice when your baby is old enough for you to see that they're all just little people, really, with their own habits and personalities. They're people we've been given a whole lifetime to get to know, and we're people they've been given a whole lifetime to get to know. Isn't it funny to think, however, that we didn't choose them and they didn't choose us? You can ignore people in real life and mute WhatsApp group chats, but you have to try your darnedest to understand what your little person is saying in Whale. Or Seal. And respond accordingly, even if you don't know what you're saying either. 

Threebute

12 March 2013

Our trip to Hong Kong for our first wedding anniversary brought back memories of my first few times there, which had been for business. My long walk with M through the streets of central Hong Kong, for instance, which took us to the world's longest escalator and part of the Peak. To this day, a part of me still cannot believe that I walked the streets of central Hong Kong with a partner from one of the Big Four, carrying on a normal conversation as though she was a relative, perhaps an older cousin I didn't meet very often but nonetheless got along well with. Gawking at the lobby of the Four Seasons Hong Kong, wheedling my way to eating at a cha chaan teng with another partner, who gamely slurped up a bowl of beef brisket noodles at the main Tsui Wah branch. Looking back, he'd wanted to bring ON and me to an atas Japanese restaurant - maybe I should have agreed, but the stress and lack of sleep made me feel that it would be amusing to see whether he would rise to the challenge of eating such plebian fare.

How different the circumstances when I returned almost two years later. Riding the Peak tram with someone, like you're supposed to, actually walking around the Peak, instead of fitting a visit there alone in the hours between the time one woke up and the time one had to catch a flight back to Singapore (to continue working ...) Almost getting lost in the forest whilst on the Bride's Pool walk, spending the night in said forest with only a Snickers bar, four fingers of dark chocolate Kit Kat and a bottle of Watson's water a real possibility (until we met a group of hikers who got us out just as the sun set). The two of us in the middle of nowhere, some way off the Dragon's Back Trail, sitting on a rock, our only intruder an empty can of San Miguel beer left behind by another hiker, feeling the breeze from the South China Sea, able to pretend, almost, that we were the only two people in the world.

What are you thinking of, I'd asked, in that perfect, romance-movie worthy moment. Because I'm thinking I need to pee.

My NS call-up, Jon replied.

And later, sitting on the sand in our jeans, taking off our socks and shoes and paddling in the cold, cold water.

I didn't realise before our trip that it would take a while for me to get used to spending an extended period of time with Jon again, although it shouldn't have been surprising seeing as we usually went almost all 5 weekdays without having more than an hour's conversation, usually about due diligence reports being due, clients who didn't know what they wanted, and other standard junior associate topics.

It was after our hike at the Dragon's Back Trail, when we were walking around Lan Kwai Fung, that the topic of some better left unrehashed in a public forum university happenings cropped up. And in that instant, as we laughed at how young and silly (Jon, not me!) had been, it felt like we were on the holiday we'd never taken when we were still in university, before people started hitting the +852 or the +wherever for the weekend, just to eat and shop and get away from the humidity. I said so to Jon, and he said yes, he was even carrying a backpack (my red Eastpak one, used circa 2001), but the difference was that we had more money now. We subsequently ate what the menu at Tsui Wah called "chilled organic kale", which was really just blanched kai lan on a bed of ice, Jon complaining after every mouthful that some foods weren't meant to be eaten cold.

I remember knowing that something had clicked during our shared laugh about the unmentionable topic - it was the resurfacing of an almost forgotten feeling of oneness, borne of our shared past and what we had gone through together, reminding me at what was on hindsight a fragile time in our relationship, of one of the many reasons we had gotten married.

***

I have said before that for various reasons, chief among them being work, I don't think Jon and I had a very typical or ideal first year of marriage. That's when you're supposed to learn about the hitherto unknown idiosyncrasies of your partner which can be revealed only by a period of living together; it's when you're supposed to be the craziest about each other, when you fight then kiss and make-up with reckless abandon (you know what I mean, this is a PG blog).

Not very much of that happened for us, and so it is only now, on the occasion of our third wedding anniversary and after a trying 2014 and the arrival of FBC, that it finally feels right to share my thoughts from our first. I would have shared them earlier, except that it didn't seem appropriate in light of LKY's passing.

***

The Z-monster and I have finally won Naptime War 10348378 (time to cook tonight's dinner!), and as I haven't been taking many pictures of my cooking of late, I'll leave it to next time to share anything interesting I've made.