instinct

it was a terrifying night of rats scurrying around the false ceiling.

wonderful journey

i'm in a gleeful 80s mood now, but there's a rat in the room.

last sunday was the send-off for kenneth. (i weighed 61.9kg, but that was after dinner.) taking over his students just before the national examinations might be the craziest thing to do, but right now i can definitely use the surge in income.

when you stay in a place too long, you develop feelings for it. it's a romantic topophilia. sometimes it's a mistaken feeling though, like two people walking towards each other - but eventually passing - and continuing on their path to walk apart. (no number of backward glances can decrease their momentum of walking forward, let alone reverse it.)

the half-moon last night was so pretty. it was really like a silver boat floating on the absent milky way. today, PS melvin came back to visit. indeed, a year is going to pass now; my FAD handphone pouch has begun to fray and tear.

i was asked a question this week: why do we go through so much pain to get there aesthetically?

pucker

the second tart. tartest lemon tart. in truth, it wasn't quite as tart as the lemon curd pie i made.
i really have a problem working with dorie greenspan's tart dough. the foil just rips the dough apart when i remove it after the blind bake. am i supposed to bake it longer? i don't think it's my oven's temperature. luckily there was much spare dough left; you can see all the patching up work on the half-baked dough.
the lemon filling uses the entire lemon, skin and all. but there's also a lot of sugar that counters the sourness completely. compared to lemon curd, there's only one additional ingredient: cornstarch.
the filling boils vigorously after a while, and then it begins to set with a light sugary crust on top, which doesn't last long out of the oven because of our humidity.
i devised my own cute method to unmold the tart. (it has a removable bottom.) i centred the tart on a bowl, and then slowly slipped the tart ring down. it came out almost perfect, except for one sector, where the edges stuck to the pan completely, and broke away from the tart.
i love this shot. i think the crust has been over-browned though. but i love the macro setting on the camera.
i think my life has come to the point where i'm just sitting around, waiting for the next big thing to happen. not referring to anything in particular. in fact, i don't even know what's coming next.

kitch kitsch

my virgin macaroons, made with weiyang and boonping! some of them look so nice, but it's quite difficult to get the right texture and look at the same time.
the macaroon batter is quick to make. it's just the preparation that is a bit troublesome; have to measure icing sugar by cup, and then process it with cocoa and ground almonds to pulverise more. initially, it didn't look like the dry ingredients were going to blend into the meringue, but just we just kept folding, and soon everything became sticky and chocolatey.
after piping out the batter (i hate piping things), we left them to rest in an air-conditioned room. i was trying to create a real room-temperature and dry room for the batter to sit in. this supposedly helps it form a skin.
and they baked up really pretty. (or actually only two of the six trays did.) but only one tray wasn't brick-hard or burnt.
if you looked at the assembled macaroons, you might think they were filled with some caramel or espresso-hazelnut buttercream. however, there is some incriminating evidence in the photos: we used peanut butter, because the chocolate ganache failed to set up.

tart of the night

i made my virgin tart today. it's tarte noire - black tart - from dorie greenspan. i think it would have been perfect if the crust was not that fragile.

so, the crust:
butter the tartlet pans, and take out the chocolate shortbread tart dough. i broke the portions into clumps and pressed them into the pans. the dough became quite wet and sticky after a while, and then a freeze got it to firm up again. they looked very promising.
i was supposed to cover them with foil for the blind bake, but when removing the foil, a lot of the dough pulled out as well, and the crusts all got ruined. and removing them from the pans proved impossible because they would just crumble up.
the ganache component. this cream-chocolate-butter mixture is very liquid, so you can pour/ladle it into the tart shell.
the ganache forms a shiny layer - as long as you don't work it too much initially. put into the refrigerator to firm up, then keep it at room temperature.
the ganache is not as firm as i imagined it should be. i thought of something more sliceable. still, even though the tartlet had to be eaten out of the pan, and the ganache was more flowy than firm, it was undeniably rich and delicious.

last time, my jackjack toy would make some sounds when i pressed a button. nowadays, the battery is dead, and there's no way to change it. even the soft toys stopped replying; now i can only hug them.

je suis désolée.

cojones

today was an awful day of realisation. i was eating a mega mac meal, and opposite me, a few tables away, was an obese guy eating the same thing. i thought that i looked a lot slimmer, collar-bone-protruding, and a lot less like a sinner. virtuous, even. but when i saw him opening his mouth to bite into the burger, i realised i must have done exactly the same thing, and looked equally ugly. i am probably - or definitely - just as ugly and fat inside.

and of course, i'm running out of time.

the (collar) bone collector

i just came back from running with weiyang. it has, in fact, been quite a long time since i last ran with him. on the other hand, i found out that there was an udders outlet at west mall.

this saturday was supposed to be a picnic, but oddball gets no visitors.

pastry and pudding

i made some doughs to freeze, after buying a hell lot of butter on sale. i also substituted part of the white flour with whole-wheat.
i discovered that frozen butter can be a dream to cut up into cubes. a lot easier than trying to cut up refrigerated butter. the pieces don't glue back that easily, and they don't stick to the bench scraper i use to cut the butter up.
this is one of the pie doughs i made. this time all my doughs were made in a food processor. it's fast and easy, but i hate the cleaning up after. i hope a semi-whole-wheat pie dough will taste just as good as a white one.
this is, in fact, my first tart dough. all this time, i've been making pie dough, but not tart. the recipe comes from dorie greenspan. and it's a simple pulsing of flour, icing sugar, butter, salt, and egg yolk. (the raw dough tastes quite nice.)
so yes, i have like nine discs of pie/tart doughs in the freezer now, along with many excess egg whites, which means it's about time for some soufflés or macaroons. i'm also thinking of cherry pie, lemon tarts, tarte noire, quiche...

but before that, bread pudding to finish up some old whole-wheat challah.
i think cubes of bread look cute in ramekins. i need to up the sugar next time though.

exactly what

this weekend i've been rewatching some ugly betty. and i finally found the iron giant again. i realised that watching s03e07 of desperate housewives in french illicits the same emotional response as when you watch it in english.

who cares, who cares?! we all have pain. everyone in here has pain. but we deal with; we swallow it; get going with our lives. what we don't do is go around shooting strangers!

and,

snow is a magical blanket. it hides what's ugly and makes everything beautiful.

drag you to hell

just came back from a wonderful dinner at 莆田, courtesy of kenneth. i'm on a roll, getting old movies now.

intermittent rains

i just woke up from a very exhaustingly painful dream. it's like my heart cannot breathe now; it's physically a very caged and oppressive feeling.

yesterdy's combat shoot stretched impossibly late into the night, but i met shanghui, seekiat, yensiang and yihong again. i think i'm impossibly luckier than them to have gotten into armour.

my handphone's rubber on/off button is degenerating, like weijie's did last time. but just as well, because it's going to be ORD soon. ATEC was 8th to 11th september last year, no?

云在半空中 被微风剪碎
回忆也许美 可是正在飞走 对不对?

the one question

is there anything i can do to make it better?

chocolate chip-oat cookies

after a while, cookie-making can become routine, and mundane.