As I was saying, it’s Friday. Time to take a minute or two from the madness of Black, Bieber, and whatever else constitutes our lives, to consider what you’d do this weekend. A trip to see the sea? A walk in the park on Easter Sunday? Maybe spend a morning tending to the garden?

Whatever it is, be sure to leave some time, if only a little, to get reacquainted with Mother Earth. Dig your toes into the dirt, feel the speckling of sunlight on your face, hug a tree, and say “Hi. It’s been a while. I’ve missed you.”

There are days in the year we would reserve to be with family and friends. Days we would use to reconnect, reunite, and re-engage our roots. Days when we say, “There’s no place like home.”

So why not have a day to go out and rediscover this planet we call Earth. It is, after all, our home – a home wherever we may be, a home for all our homes, a home for all of us, and the only home we’ve got.

Happy Earth Day.

I love reading. And I love reading books most of all. I love feeling the texture of paper on my fingers as my eyes glide across the ink.

These days though, I barely read books anymore. And it seems all I do read is from the internet – from local news, to gadget and design blogs, to facebook feeds and twitter updates. I tell myself that it’s because I’m finding less books that can capture my imagination, when in truth it’s more like life with the ever-present, always-on internet has very much swallowed me up and shortened my attention span.

It’s like I’m slowly becoming a stranger to the very books that had taught me the joy of reading.

So once in a while, I still enjoy turning away from the glare of the machine, curling up in a chair, and holding an organic tome in my hand as a story sprouts and blooms right before my eyes. And I lose myself to the tale. And I let the hours slip by. And I try not to think of the trees that died to provide me my little pleasure.

Original image from http://flic.kr/p/98ukHe

Another year comes, another chance to move onward. Another chance to expand our experience, to find new horizons, to seek new directions. And to make new memories, and share them.

Truly looking forward to the days of 2011. Happy new year, everyone!

*Originally posted in the chiselstone flickr page

So here’s what I did:

• 1 cup brown sugar (could do with less), 1 cup milk, 2 cups coconut milk – blend thoroughly.
• 4 cups cream (more or less), stirred in evenly
• Freeze n’ churn (I found that I didn’t really have to churn actually)
• 2 mangoes, pureed. Stir carefully into nearly solid ice cream. Ideally, it’d be ribbony and not blend in too much to keep the flavours distinctly separate

Unfortunately, mine was still too soft when I stirred in the mango, so the coconut ice cream became more mango-ey in both taste and color. Ah well, there’s always a next time.

And perhaps then, I’d throw in sago as well

P/s: Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s wishing 2011 will be sweet, spicy and all-round tasty

So I dove straight into it, and surprise, surprise, utterly failed at making the custard (did I say my first and only attempt prior to this was doing the non-custard version and never in my life had I made custard or even seen it being made?). Down the drain it went, along with all the ginger I had.

That left me in a conundrum – how does one recreate the taste of gingerbread without ginger? Technically, one can’t but then again, gingerbread tastes more of cinnamon than it does of ginger, doesn’t it?

Undaunted, I immediately whipped up a second batch of cream (non-custard this time) and the results were shabby but seemingly edible. Guess I’ll know tomorrow when I spring a taste-test on some unsuspecting guinea pigs.

Sloshy, the Gingerbread Snowman

Here follows not so much a recipe as it is some notes on what I did (hopefully to improve on next time).

1 Cinnamon, 10 cloves, 1/2 nutmeg, all ground. Mixed into 1 cup milk, 1/2 cup sugar, whiz. Stir in zest of 2 oranges, and 2 cups cream (35%). About one teaspoon orange liqueur. Freeze 2 hrs, mix. Freeze another hour, mix. Another hour, mix. Keep repeating until done or fallen asleep. Stir in crumbs of pepparkakor when it gets about solid. Freeze until really hard. Take it out for a minute before serving to soften then scoff it down fast before it completely melts.

Spa treatments are well and good, but a morning spent in the kitchen can be therapeutic as well.

Lemongrass Chicken One-Pot Rice
(ingredient quantities are rather approximate, as usual)

• 3 stalks lemongrass, finely sliced
• 1 pod bunga kantan (torch ginger flower), finely sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1/2 thumb garlic, sliced
• 1 leek, sliced
• fresh lime leaves
• 3 red chillies, seeds removed and chopped
• a handful of chinese celery leaves, chopped (I had actually wanted coriander leaves but couldn’t get it)
• 300g chicken, cut into bite-sized bits
• 3-4 cups rice, washed
• 3 tsps fish sauce
• 1 cup coconut milk

1. Fry the lemongrass, garlic, ginger, bunga kantan and onion in oil till fragrant.
2. Add the chicken, fry till about half-cooked.
3. Add the rice, leek, and lime leaves. Stir in the fish sauce.
4. Transfer to a rice cooker. Add coconut milk and top up with hot/boiling water till it covers everything. Sprinkle in some salt and sugar to taste.
5. Cook in the rice cooker till done. Stir everything together and leave for at least 5-10 minutes.
6. Before serving, stir in the chopped chilli and celery leaves.

Photos from the green, a photoset on flickr

And best of all, I was pleasantly surprised to find my kit lens coping rather well with the stage lighting – not that I got top-notch professional quality pics, but they did turn out better than expected (after much judicious cropping and editing, of course).

Looking forward to more live performance shooting in the future

Photos from ruVWenuff, a photoset on flickr