Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Leaning Tower of Kimchi Fried Rice, Great Balls of Potatoes and Brownies (the pastry, not the magical folks)

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I was supposed to post this last week but somehow never around to it. I drafted, edited but somehow the entry was never to my liking. So I just let it stewed in the dark halls where incomplete stories lay in repose.

Anyway, I added more content to the original draft.

But first, we need to backtrack to last week.

In my previous post, I wrote about last Monday dessert, last Wednesday breakfast and dinner.

This will be about last Thursday’s and last Friday’s dinner.

I’ve always like fried rice and it’s a comfort food for me. Making fried rice is easy as the dish is very versatile. Just throw in any leftovers, add some oil and fry everything.

For such a simple dish, it’s also very easy to get it wrong.

The most important thing is leftovers.

Fresh ingredients are not completely banned. You can use fresh veggies and eggs (I hope your eggs are fresh) and any kind of meat (but I prefer to use Spam). But your rice strictly needs to be leftover.

I cannot stress that part. Your. Rice. Need. To. Be. Leftover. The first time I made fried rice, I made the rookie’s mistake of using freshly steamed rice.

I spent the next one hour suffocating on sticky, hard-to-swallow fried rice.

When you eat fried rice, you can feel the individual grains on your tongue. This texture is achieved by using steamed rice that has been left overnight in the refrigerator. This helps the rice to become dry and making it easier to separate the grains. Rice left in the refrigerator for two to three days is the best, although you don’t want to leave the rice in there for too long or you’ll have tough, crunchy rice grains.

You’re not eating fried rice cereals.

There’s a fine balance to strike, too much moisture or too little moisture in the rice can sink your dish

Anyway, I love fried rice and I love Korean cuisine and one of my favourite Korean dish is kimchi: the spicy, fermented vegetable dish.

So I decided to combine the two and had this for yesterday’s dinner:

 


 

 

 


The Leaning Tower of Kimchi Fried Rice. The tilt was accidental.

The kimchi fried rice tasted great, although I wanted it to have a more “kimchi” kick. I went over to the wikipedia site and it stated that using over-ripened kimchi is better than using fresh kimchi. Hmph, didn’t know that. Probably that’s why my fried rice didn’t have that intense kick I was going after. The drink of the meal was plain water.

I had a surplus of mashed potatoes after last Wednesday’s dinner so I decided to do something special to them for last Friday’s dinner:

 


 

 

 


Deep-fried mashed potatoes with pan-fried pork sausages seasoned with sea salt and black pepper. Drink of the meal was Ribena.

I haven’t had sausages in a long while and they went nicely with the deep fried potato balls. I don’t have a griller so pan-frying was the way to go. However I didn’t expect so much smoke and even with the exhaust fan on and the balcony window open, the smell of fried sausages still lingered in my apartment for a good few hours. But other than the smoky atmosphere, the sausages were a success. They were a bit dry, but still juicy nonetheless.

The deep-fried mashed potatoes, on the other hand… was a near disaster. Well, they did come out edible but I almost screwed it up right from the start.

I made the mistakes of putting the mashed potato balls in a bowl before leaving them in the freezer for two hours so they could set. After two hours, they potato balls did set, but instead of the perfect balls that I wanted, they set into a mass of unrecognizable shape.

According to the law of gravity, the potato balls at the top compressed the potato balls at the bottom. So while I still had some spherical potato balls at the top, I had to remake the potatoes balls once I got to the bottom of the bowl.

That was the first mistake.

The second mistake was the size of the balls. I decided to ignore the recipe and made my potato balls palm sized when it called for the balls to be golf ball sized. A minor error that resulted in a grave consequence. The batter that covered the potato balls was too thin due to the large size of the balls.

The third mistake was the temperature of the oil. As I don’t have a deep fryer, I used a large wok with a liberal amount of canola oil in it. The first batch of potato balls took a long time to cook because the oil was not hot enough and even after I removed them from the wok, some were slightly undercook. The second batch was just perfect (they are featured in the pictures above) while the last batch was almost burned.

This is my first time deep frying food and I’ve always thought it was easy since my grandma makes it look easy. But I’ve forgotten that she has years and years of experience. Controlling the heat, the amount of oil in the wok and the amount of time deep frying the oil is no easy task.

But overall, the potato balls tasted okay and at least it was not inedible. So my leftover mashed potatoes did not go to waste.

So that concludes last week entry.

 


I went to a Christmas Eve party last night at a friend’s place. It was a gathering of friends with food, drinks and presents (I mean, what’s Christmas without the gifts?). For the party, most of us brought food along to share. I brought my mashed potatoes, with some slight changes. I added a lot more Italian Parsley, five gloves of garlic and two large handful of Parmesan cheese. It gave the mashed potatoes some kick.

And being the chocoholic, I baked brownies from scratch, which means, instead of using those box brownies, I measured out every ingredients, hand mixed and baked them.

 


 


Unfortunately, that’s the only picture I took. The frosting didn’t really turn out what I wanted it to be, but I managed to spread it across most of the brownie.

It got rave reviews and I was asked for the recipe. I wanted to say it was just some age-old secret recipe handed from generation to generation but I decided to tell the truth. I got it off from the Internet. The brownies were really easy to bake and taste much, much better than store bought brownies.

All in all, last night dinner party was very enjoyable and although it was the first time spending Christmas Eve alone without my family, I still had fun.

After the dinner, the host gave out the presents from the secret Santas. I got the coolest present from my Secret Santa:

 


An old book with parts of the front cover torn off

 


But wait for it…

 


 


That’s right, people, Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage II. But the best thing about the book? It’s the 1987, first edition book. My very first Isaac Asimov book and I get a hardcover first edition. I mean, how fucking awesome is that?

This is the note from my Secret Santa:

 


 


It says:

Hey Zareth,

Since you knew that scifi about the names of god (referring to the Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke. I told this story to a couple of friends, so I kind of figured out my Secret Santa), I figured you’re a fan of old scifi. I hope you like this.

Guess who?

I do enjoy classic science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke but most of the stories I read were either from books I’ve borrowed from the libraries or from websites. So the fact that my very first science fiction book is this hardcover first edition makes it more awesome.

Thanks mate.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Dessert, Breakfast and Dinner.

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Before my housemates left for Singapore, they delegated me three tasks:

  1. Pay rent on time
  2. Pay bills on time
  3. Clear out the refrigerator

The first two are pretty much commonsense. I don’t want to get kicked out nor do I want to live in an apartment without any electricity or water.

As for clearing out the refrigerator, it was a simple request. They didn’t want their food to go rotten so they gave me the enviable task of finishing it up.

And I did, within three days. But my choices were pretty limited since one was vegetarian and the other was a semi-vegetarian. For some reasons, they both had one large jar of Neapolitan sauce each, so I spent three days eating pasta for lunch and dinner. I did try to spice it up by adding herbs but when you have pasta overflowing from every orifice, you feel like puking at the sight of any kind of pasta.

I supplemented my pasta mania with a breakfast of chips. The vegetarian housemate, for some reasons, had three large bags of different chips: chilli-flavoured chips (my favourite), natural spinach chips (the only healthy chips) and honey-flavoured chips (some Korean snack). Of course, I was tasked to finish them up.

I tried to spread out my pasta and chips ration by cooking up a batch of egg fried rice. That lasted me one breakfast, two lunches and one dinner.

When the pasta, fried rice and chips ran out, I started hunting around the kitchen but only managed to find one packet of ramen. Now I was left with a nearly depleted refrigerator and kitchen. The only food left was vegetables, but those were for my rats. I couldn’t be bothered to stock up the refrigerator, so I walked to the MacDonald’s opposite my building and bought a large Big Mac value meal (with Sprite).

Sometimes, I couldn’t be bothered to even walk to MacDonald’s that I would just head to the convenience stores below my building and buy more chips.

So from last Wednesday afternoon till Sunday, I subsisted on a diet of chips, fried rice and pasta.

On Sunday morning, I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t want to put my health at risk, I needed to start having proper meals again. The other reason for changing my meal plan was that with so much free time on my hands (damned job hunting is not working out as well as I thought it would be), I decided to start cooking again. So on Sunday afternoon, I went out and loaded up on groceries.

The same night, I started prepping for my dessert.

Lemon cheesecake with a dusting of nutmeg.

It was from a recipe that I got from my mother. The thing about this lemon cheesecake (if we could even call it a cake) is that it requires no baking. All you need to do is to prepare the ingredients, combine them, pour everything into a pie plate and let it set overnight in the refrigerator. The result is this:

 


 

 

 


I tried my lemon cheesecake on Monday night after my hike from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach with a couple of friends. The cake tasted okay, although I felt that there was not enough lemon zest to complement the sweet cheese cream (Mental note: add more lemon juice). The nutmeg dusting was great though; it did added a little “oomph” to the cake.

This was my third time making the cake and it was much easier than before. Not because the cake is hard to make (anyone can make it), but because my two housemates are such baking fanatics that they have almost every baking equipment. When I found an electric mixer, I was overjoyed because I no longer had to use muscle power to beat the mixture with a fork. The result was obvious; the lemon cheesecake mixture came out much, much smoother.

I gave some cake to Pan and Bentley and it seems that they really like it.

 


Pan testing out the cheesecake.

 


Bentley testing out the cheesecake

 


Bentley rushing for the last piece

 

 


 


Sustaining an injury for the cheesecake was well worth it:

 


I accidentally grated my thumb while grating the lemon rinds

 


On Tuesday, I had cheesecake and goat milk for breakfast. I had no meals for lunch and dinner because I was feeling a bit sick.

After almost 24 hours on starvation mode and feeling sufficiently better, I was feeling decidedly famished, so I cooked up a meal of scrambled eggs (garnished with chives) and toasts with olive oil spread. Drink of the meal was a glass of full cream cow milk.

 


 

 


The scrambled eggs didn’t come out to my liking. It was slightly too salty and the milky taste was a bit overpowering. It was still delicious but it wasn’t the creamy scrambled eggs that I was after. Perhaps next time I’ll add cream instead of full cream milk.

Unfortunately, I forgot to buy bacon.

It was a very fulfilling breakfast though, much better than potato chips.

I skipped lunch since breakfast was quite a large meal and I was able to hold off until dinner, which consisted of mashed potatoes (garnished with Italian parsley), medium rare rump steak seasoned with black peppercorn and salt, and fried veggies. Drink of the meal was James Squire Amber Ale.

 


 

 

 


The steak turned out okay. It was juicy but a bit tough. Should have tenderized the steak before pan-frying it. The mashed potatoes, however, came out fantastic. I was actually expecting lumpy, starchy mashed potatoes since I didn’t have any potato masher or rice miller (a lot of recipes call for either one). I just mashed the potatoes using a wooden pallet (again, I have no idea why my housemates have one) and they turned out surprisingly creamy. Of course, adding warm butter and hot milk certainly helped with the texture.

I had to struggle to finish dinner as I overestimated the portion. At least it was better than struggling to finish a plain Neapolitan pasta.

Mice on a Mission.

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This appeared on my blog’s dashboard yesterday. That person who was searching for Making Live Mice Explosives For Dummies must be severely disappointed upon finding that my blog does not contain any manual for explosives.

When I saw that search term, this image came to mind:

 


How I Learned to Hate the Bomb Again.

 


They are fast, small, and able to reproduce rapidly. Millions of mice would make a deadly explosive force.

We’re screwed.

 

DISCLAIMER: I do not condone any attempts to turn any animals into suicide bombers. The fact that humans are doing this to our own species is already fucked up.

 

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Heard this song about a year ago. It was my first time listening to Korean underground punk rock.

 


One Rat. One Guy. One Syringe with Medicine. One Fucking Messy Result..

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I have two pet rats. I got them about two months ago from a pet shop.

Why rats?

That was my Dad’s question when I told him I was going to get rats.

I got rats for a couple of reasons:

  1. I live in an apartment. Dogs and cats are out of the questions. Besides, I dislike cats.
  2. Dogs and cats are expensive.
  3. I hate hamsters. Some of these tiny fuckers are aggressive.
  4. Chinchilla are expensive pets. They are expensive to maintain since they come from the Andes and require a cool room (i.e. 24 hours air-conditioned room).
  5. One of my housemate dislikes guinea pigs.
  6. The squirrels at the parks are rather hard to capture.
  7. Mice are too small. I’m afraid of crushing them in my big hands and they are constantly jumpy and uptight.

Going through my list of requirements, rats were perfect. They’re clean (they’re compulsive groomers), intelligent, don’t make too much noise, can be kept in a cage, big enough to be handled and best of all, easy to feed. Rats are omnivores like humans and eat damn near almost everything and anything, including chocolates. That’s right, chocolates. Kryptonite to dogs, solar power to rats (but not too much, best in small doses).

Most people know that rats eat anything or how else would rats be such fantastic chefs? Like this guy:



It’s not advisable to piss off the chef. (Taken from Cookie In Hand).



But rats are nasty, dirty little critters! Remy might be an exception because he was a genius (being a rat makes him much more incredible), a supertaster and spent 10,000 hours slaving away at the stove to create haute French cuisine. But other rats? No way.

Well, yes way. Rats are naturally neat creatures.

But Zareth, rats live in sewers, underground train tunnels and cargo ships and sometimes they come out from toilet bowls!

True that, but those are wild rats. They live in the wild and therefore, are subjected to the environment.

But rats carry fleas and have rabies!

Erm… dogs can get fleas and rabies too.

The point is, pet rats live in the house. Your house is clean, right? You do clean it, right? Unless you’re a pack rat, then… you need to see a psychiatrist.

Furthermore, rats are fucking adorable:



Two lazy rats.



Look at those two big fluffballs. Women love them. Seriously, most of my housemates’ friends find them cute though there are some that are afraid of rats. But they do attract a lot of female attention.

Meet Bentley and Pan (short for Pantalaimon). They are litter brothers and are about seven to eight months old. Rats are social animals and live in groups so it’s best to get two rats minimum. If you get one rat, you’re just torturing the poor fellow. So don’t get one rat, get two, minimum. Two rats will not be any more expensive and two rats provide much more fun.

The downside about rats is that their maximum lifespan is 3 years although there are some rats that lived up to six years. But all animals do get sick and rats are no exception.

You see, Bentley have been suffering from respiratory infection since I got him. At first, I thought it was something minor (first-time rat owner) and attributed it to the stress of moving into a new place. Besides, Pan was sneezing slightly too.

Two weeks passed. Pan was doing great but Bentley sneezing got worse. Due to rat’s high metabolism rate, it was easy for rats to develop secondary infections rapidly, so at the advice of my housemate, I booked an appointment with the vet. I was busy with exams and essays at that time, so my housemate, being free, brought my rats to the vet and since the rats were under my name, she decided to pretend to be me.

I asked her why couldn’t she give her real name.

“It’ll be too confusing and complicated.”

“Complicated? But you just have to say that you’re my housemate. They’re going to be more confused the next time I go back there!”

“I didn’t want to. Besides, I know enough about you to pretend to be you.”

And scarily enough, she does. Now the vet sends me mails to my address under Miss Zareth Lim.

Fuck.

That aside, the vet put both Bentley and Pan on a two weeks antibiotic course. Feeding them was pretty easy, all I did was to mix the antibiotics with strawberry yogurt on a spoon and give it to them. They both lick it like it’s the last strawberry yogurt in the universe.

Their infections cleared up and both seem well. In fact, Pan gained weight.

But a week or so, Bentley began sneezing again. At first, I attributed it to the weather since Sydney was going through a crazy phrase. Sunny one moment, thunderstorm the next.

But then I realized it was the weather because Pan was doing fine. Bentley was sneezing with increasing frequency and his breathing sounded congested, not a very good sign.

So I brought Bentley to the vet, along with Pan since I was concerned that Bentley might have infected him.

True enough, the vet looked confused.

“Did you come the other time?”

“Well, that was actually my housemate.”

“Ah, okay.”

Fuck, now he thinks my housemate is the owner.

Anyway, Pan was fine. Bentley had to go back onto antibiotics again. This time, the vet upped the dosage and increased the duration to three weeks.

So I left the vet, feeling relieved (that Pan was fine and Bentley wasn’t going to die anytime soon). Oh, and I forgot to pay the vet and collect the antibiotics but that’s another story.

I did the same method as before. Mixed the antibiotics with strawberry yogurt and fed it to Bentley.

But this time, he didn’t want it. He did take a few licks before running away. This was normal, sometimes he get distracted by a smell or sound and would go off exploring. All I had to do was to put the spoon in his face and he would go right back to licking the yogurt.

But not this time. He took another sniff, then turned tail, as if he was offended by what I was feeding him.

I didn’t think much about it and just thought it was one of those days where he had no appetite.

But the same thing happened over next few days and I knew it wasn’t his appetite because he was still gobbling up his dinner and when I gave with strawberry yogurt without the medicine, he ate it.

So the medicine was the culprit or more specifically, one medicine: Baytril.

You see, Bentley has two antibiotics: Baytril and Doxycycline. Baytril is the primary antibiotic used to treat his respiratory infection while Doxy is the secondary one used to treat and prevent secondary infections.

This is Baytril:



The bane of Bentley’s and my existence. (Taken from World Chelonian Trust).

 


Baytril is a clear, sticky liquid. It’s also one of the most bitter-tasting medicines ever. I know, I tried it and almost gagged. Imagine the fruit bitter gourd (or bitter melon). In Chinese culture, this bitter fruit is used in herbal medicine to improve health and stimulate digestion. My mom used to make me bitter gourd soup and forced me to drink it. Now imagine that bitter soup, but distilled to extract every drop of bitterness. That’s how Baytril taste like.

If you don’t know what bitter gourd is, then imagine a horrible, piss-tasting beer. Now multiple the bitterness by a million. There you go. Guess which one the vet upped the dosage. That’s right, Baytril.

One drop of Baytril was enough to send me gagging. Imagine how bitter this is for the rat.

On the other hand, Doxy is a sticky brown paste and it tastes fine. To some people, it tastes like raspberries. For me, it tastes like chocolate cream with a hint of hazelnut. Why does Doxy tastes okay? Because it’s used to treat humans. So it sure as hell better taste fine.

No I’m serious, here’s the wiki showing the uses of Doxy.

Now that I identified the problem, I decided to use strawberry jam instead of yogurt. It worked at first, but a day or two later, Bentley caught onto my trick and outright refused to have anything to do with the jam.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

So I did this:

 


 


  1. Use spoon to extract a tiny dollop of jam.
  2. Use empty syringe to extract 0.1ml of Baytril from bottle.
  3. Squeeze Baytril onto spoon with jam.
  4. Squeeze 0.01ml of Doxy onto spoon with jam and Baytril.

You’ll get this:



It’s a spoon, not a sperm with four tails.

 


  1. Now, using the empty syringe from before, mix everything up on the spoon.
  2. Extract mixture from spoon using syringe.

 


Syringe with the mixture

 


That’s right, I’m going to force feed Bentley. I did it a few times to Pan and Bentley when they first started out on antibiotics. But it was a highly distressing time for both rats and I. The rats hated having something being forced down their mouths and I kept getting my arms shredded by their claws during their attempts to escape. So I stuck to spoon-feeding them their meds.

But with the increased dosage of Baytril, spoon-feeding was not working anymore. Furthermore, Bentley was still sneezing and I needed to get the meds into him at all course. This was the only option left.

So yesterday morning, I prepared the meds, went to the cage and woke Bentley up. Now I had a grumpy rat to deal with.

I sat down on the coffee table in the living room, syringe in my right hand and Bentley in my left.

“Good boy. Are you a good boy, Bentley?” I spoke to him in a soothing voice as I stroke his head. Bentley was on my lap grooming.

I shifted, making myself comfortable. By now, Bentley was scampering off my lap and sniffing around the coffee table.

I scooped my Bentley with my left index finger hooked gently behind his neck. Bending forward so that Bentley’s back was against my chest, I trapped him in a warm cocoon of human flesh and synthetic cloth.

Bentley wasn’t happy and began struggling. With my face inches from his, I stuck the syringe into the corner of his mouth and squirted a small amount. The mixture didn’t go in completely, some of it was stuck to the corner of his mouth.

Bentley managed to free his front paws and pushed the syringe away. At the same time, he wiggled out from my hand and jumped down to the coffee table.

Fuck, there was still a lot of mixture in the syringe. I needed to stick the syringe deeper into his mouth.

Picking Bentley up, I repeated the procedure again, but this time, I tried to move the syringe deeper into this mouth. It didn’t work. He refused to open his mouth and another small amount was stuck to his nose. Bentley was clawing my left arm so brutally that red welts rose.

Damn, people will be thinking I’m a depressed person with suicidal tendencies.

I watched Bentley as he stood on the coffee table, licking the jam off his face. When he was done, I scooped him up again while talking to him in a soothing voice.

I stuck the syringe further in. This time, it worked. Bentley opened his mouth and swallowed as I released the mixture down his throat. All was going well, Bentley was eating his meds and the mixture was diminishing slowly.

Then the smell hit me.

I looked up and sniffed around. It smelled like someone ate broccoli for one week before releasing a massive dump in the toilet bowl. But I was alone. Both my housemates were back in Singapore. Maybe there was a ghost taking a dump in my toilet.

But the smell got stronger and it seemed to be coming from my lap. What the… did I somehow unconsciously relax my sphincter muscles?

I took out the syringe from Bentley’s mouth and moved my arms. Bentley scampered out of my hand and landed on my lap.

My shit-filled lap to be exact.

I didn’t move for ten seconds. I just stared at my lap as Bentley proceeded to have an explosive diarrhea all over me. Shit was on my t-shirt, my shorts, my legs, my arms and even on Bentley as he ran around trying to look for an escape.

More shit came out as Bentley ran around. Great, now there’s shit on the coffee table.

In hindsight, Bentley was probably so stressed out by having a syringe stuck in his mouth that he lost control of his bowels. You would too if a Godzilla picked you up and stuck a syringe down your throat.

But at that time, I was pissed off. Really, really pissed off. I had scratches on my arm and there was shit everywhere. There was still some mixture left in the syringe, so I grabbed Bentley, shoved the syringe in his mouth and squirted the rest of the mixture down his throat.

“Finish your medicine, you little shit!”

It was not my finest moment.

After it was done, I left Bentley on the coffee table while I waddled over to the toilet to clean up. The stench was overwhelming. Once I managed to get rid of the shit on me, I went over to clean the coffee table before giving Bentley a quick bath. Bentley hated baths and I got more scratches on my arms again but thankfully he didn’t shit. I guess he must have completely emptied his bowels on me while having his medicine.

The day passed and I gave Bentley the next round of antibiotics at night. He did struggle but it was a marked improvement from the morning routine.

I did feel a bit guilty about the morning incident, so I treated him and Pan to some chocolates and hand wrestled with them on the couch.

And how did Bentley thank me for the chocolates?

By sticking his snout into my nostrils.

P.S. Rats can swim up toilet bowls. But only under certain conditions.



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This video came out a few weeks back. I have to admit, it’s way better than the original.