Food of the end of December 2010

Hey all,

First and foremost,

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!!

Hope you guys had a good one spent with family and friends, all the best on your endeavours in 2011!

This is a combination of a much delayed post and something I thought of writing yesterday.

Winter solstice
First of all is whilst I was here in Nottingham, Shin and I made "tang yuan" on the 22nd of December as it was the winter solstice festival I think? Basically these are glutinous rice balls boiled and eaten with a sweet pandan soup base thingie.

I woke up to find Shin had already made the red ones which she filled with red bean paste. And I realised there weren't any white ones and Shin didn't notice there weren't either lol (must've been too tired from waking up early to make the red ones) so we made the white ones.

We boiled water and put the balls in. Then I had a zap of creativity and tried to play around with them and got this. It looked like a face to me and so I modified it a bit.

This looked more like it, yes? Can you see what it is?

....well it's supposed to be the Yin and Yang symbol. I think I did it pretty well and luckily took this photo too. A few seconds later the balls started to cook and were floating.

Then we tasted it and I realised we were supposed to boil the tang yuan in the sweet base itself, not water cos they didn't have the pandan sweet taste :S. So we dumped the rest of the balls into the base.

Like so and sure enough, it tasted sweeter the next time we had it :D

New Year's Eve
On New Year's Eve me, Shin and 2 other friends (Zheng and Chiao Hong) spent a somewhat quiet evening dinner. Shin and I made a chicken-based dinner of:

Steamed chicken with garlic-soy sauce...sauce for

Chicken rice with scallop and shallot!

and chicken soup!

Rocky road cheesecake for desert!

Me and Zheng went to get groceries and I got a bottle of Pimm's cos I was curious to the taste!

We mixed 1 part Pimm's with 3 parts lemonade Schweppes, and apple, orange, strawberry and mint leaves. It did indeed taste refreshing ;D

After dinner we drank and watched Zoolander and Fantastic Mr. Fox while eating chips. Definitely a good way to welcome the new year (b ^.')

Hope you guys had a blast too! With a countdown and all :P

~Fox