Looking for a particular post or topic? Search here!

Where My Readers Are From

Flag Counter

Who's Reading HFM Life

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Whittaker's Almond Gold Chocolate Bar

Years ago, Whittaker's chocolate were only available in New Zealand and at international airports in our country. The MIL used to bring back bars of our favorite Whittaker's Almond Gold whenever she returned from New Zealand.  Those were precious bars and we would hide our stash of Gold Bars, lest the kids found them and gobbled them all.

Now Whittaker's are available at local supermarkets.  I was excited when I saw my favorite Almond Gold bars on display at a shelf at Jaya Grocer last Sunday. The hubs who is a chocolate fan was just as excited and he bought a large Gold bar at only RM20.90 :D

whittaker choc

This Gold bar is now stashed in the fridge. It's my best stress-buster and I know some rats have also been secretly nibbling on it bit by bit everyday, judging by the size of the bar now!

Who's also a die-hard fan of Whittaker's Almond Gold bar?

Monday, October 28, 2013

Our Sunday - 28 October 2013

It was the last Sunday School class for the girls for this year. 

In Cass' class for pre-schoolers, the dedicated volunteer teachers did a photo collage with the hand print of all the Sunday pre-schoolers.  The kids were also given farewell gifts by the teachers.

Sund Scn 27 Oct - 1 

Cass' photo was taken by the teacher and printed on the spot yesterday.  See how IT-savvy these teachers are!

 Sund Scn 27 Oct - 2


After  church, we went to the newly opened Ramen Ten Japanese restaurant @ Jaya 33 PJ for a sumptuous lunch and then went to Jaya Grocer to do our weekly grocery-shopping.  We will definitely be back at Ramen Ten to try other items on their menu.  We loved the food at Ramen Ten!

Next, we went to KFC to take-away fried chicken for dinner. I promised Alycia that after her exam, I would buy her KFC. 

Yesterday was our part-time maid's off day.  As I was busy doing house chores, I assigned Sherilyn to do revision with Cass. Cass will be sitting for her final exam in pre-school today.  Though Alycia has finished her final exam, she is still required to sit for the Math and Science test papers in English today and tomorrow, for formality purposes.  Marks are not included in the calculation of position though.



Sher revises with Cass 27 Oct

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Bukit Bintang Wet Market

Last Saturday, we went to the Imbi wet market (also known as Bukit Bintang wet market) to have breakfast. It has been yonks since I last had breakfast at a wet market. I think probably about 20 years? Gawd, it's this been this long! As my parents are in KL, the hubs has been bringing us around to look for street food as well as to try new restaurant food.  My dad is a sucker for street food that is "pang, lang, chang" (which literally means cheap, nice and delish in Cantonese).

A stall selling deep friend 'yong liu' (deep fried fish paste stuffed with veggie and tofu)...

















My dad and mum 'tarn char' (enjoying their tea and coffee)



Dry curry chicken noodles.



Claypot yee mein for Alycia and a bowl of fish paste, meat balls and fish balls for everyone.



Porridge with deep fried piggy's spare parts. Not my kind of food but someone loves it.


Popiah and curry noddles...
BB Mkt 7


We ordered Hainan coffee from the well-known Keng Swee Cafe inside the Imbi Market. Next to Keng Swee Cafe is another stall (Ah Weng Hainan Tea) that also sells Hainan coffee and Hainan tea. Both are just as crowded and noisy. Most patrons will order  Hainan coffee and Hainan tea along with soft-boiled eggs and traditional toast with kaya and butter.

BB Mkt 1

Below are Keng Swee Cafe's traditional white toasted bread with kaya, toasted bun with kaya and chunks of butter, soft-boiled eggs in a stainless steel mug and Hainan coffee. It's been ages since I last indulged in such glorious sinful carbs!


BB Mkt 3

















Dry chicken curry noodles which was yummeh too!

BB Mkt 2

Daddy seems to love showering his princesses with flowers. See how happy Cass is here!





Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Vomiting, High Fever and Hallucination... Continuation From Previous Post

Continuation from this post.

In the midst of all the puking, retching and burning fever, Sherilyn was very weak as she could not hold down any food or water. She appeared to be in a daze and had hallucination!  After I forced her out from her sleep in the afternoon, I asked her if she felt like vomiting. She stared at me in a daze. I pulled her up from the couch and wanted to bring her to the kitchen to get a few sips of plain water.  But she held on to my hand, played with the bracelet on my hand and kept saying "it's final" while smiling like a lunatic.  I was shocked to hear that but knew that it was hallucination caused by the high fever and incessant vomiting. Alycia has had hallucinations when she was a 3YO toddler with high fever.   For about 3 minutes, I tried to 'pull'  Sherilyn out from the hallucination by asking her questions.  I asked her what her name was and asked her where we went to for lunch in the afternoon. She stared at me deliriously. I kept repeating the questions. After a while, she finally told me her name, phew!

To have a vomiting child with high fever who could not hold any food or water in her stomach can be a frightening experience. I thank God that the one and single dose of anti-vomiting medicine managed to stop her from vomiting further. She did not want to take the second dose as she said that the anti-vomiting syrup made her feel worse. For 2 days, Sherilyn only survived on a few slices of cream crackers, plain water and lots of sleep. When her body became too hot, I dragged her to the bathroom and get her to shower from head to toe.

It was the nasi lemak with just an egg and 2 pieces of potatoes that I bought from a road-side stall that caused the food poisoning. I was very reluctant to get  Sherilyn nasi lemak for her to bring it to the enrichment centre on that Saturday morning but this stubborn rascal ran down the road to the last stall and ordered the nasi lemak. I could not catch up with her as I was holding Cass with one hand and holding on to food on the other hand. At the stall managed by some Indons, I saw flies on the dishes. I felt really uneasy but I was thinking that the rice should be A-OK since it was kept in a warmer. The egg was kept in a container.  Though I did not see any fly on the potatoes, that dish could have been already pooed or peed on by those darn flies. Or maybe it was the unhygienic handling and preparation of the food by the cook.  I should have listened to my instinct and ignored Sherilyn's pleas, whines and fretting.  The girl wanted only nasi lemak and nothing else that morning. That will be the last time I succumb to her whines, period!

In the car, on our way to the enrichment centre, I had warned Sherilyn several times to eat the packed nasi lemak immediately upon reaching the enrichment centre as I was worried that the rice would turn bad if she ate it later.  I told her about the recent food poisoning case where a few guests died after eating in a kampung-style feast.  My fears came true. That night, she complained of stomach ache and a few hours later, she threw up like a volcano spewing up lava.  Her long hair was dipping into the toilet bowl with vomit all over... at 12 midnight!  History had indeed repeated itself.  This girl used to have midnight vomiting spells when she was about 3 years old, just before Cass was born. After Cass was born, the 'spell' seemed to have been broken.  But the evil witch then cast the spell on Cass. That's another story and I am still praying that the spell will soon be broken.  But nope, I ain't having baby no. 4!

This incident managed to serve the kids, especially Sherilyn a lesson.... that by disobeying mummy, they will have to face serious consequences.  Hmmm, perhaps it's a blessing in disguise. Till today, I still pick this incident to remind her of what disobedience can do to her. Hopefully this rascal will remember this incident forever and will listen to mummy's advice always.


Monday, October 21, 2013

Purple Carrot Soup

The other day in Facebook, I saw one of my friends in Australia posting pictures of purple carrots. I was intrigued and then looked around at supermarkets here in the hope of finding purple carrots too.  Last week, I finally spotted the purple carrots in a mini mart near my where I stay.  At about RM3.50 for 2 pieces, it is pretty costly but I was eager to get them to try.

Did you know that purple foods are bursting with goodness? Let's see what they can do for your health...

1) Purple foods are high in antioxidant and anti-aging benefits
2) Purple foods may be able to fight cancer cells
3) Purple foods are ulcer-fighters
4) Purple foods are good for your liver
5) Purple foods are good for the heart
6) Purple foods prevent urinary tract infections



purple carrot 1

At a look, the raw purple carrots looked like some rotten roots, caused by the dull blackish color of the skin.  When the skin is peeled, the flesh of the carrot is in bright purple. What attractive and pretty color!  .

I used the purple carrots to whip up a quick vegetables soup for the kids. With the soup, I blanched some yee mein and added tiger prawns and some meatballs.  With natural sweetness coming from the purple carrots, orange carrots, chicken ribs and cabbage, the pot of soup was very sweet and delish!

purple carrot 2

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Homemade Beet Root And Pumpkin Ang Koo Kuih

This is what I had for breakfast today - homemade ang koo kuih which my mum made.  She had made them in Ipoh, froze them and then brought them to KL in a chiller box. 

Her homemade ang koo were made with all natural ingredients. The skin of the red ones were made from beet root and the yellow ones from pumpkin.  She also made purple sweet potatoes ones but they are not in the picture.  For the filling, she used green beans/mung beans, which she cooked and blended.

Love these homemade ang koos to bits! They are not oily and the skin is not thick and rubbery. I can chomp down all these for breakfast if I can just throw my trim-and-fit plan out of the window haha!

ang koo

Removing Stains From Clothes

For parents with school-going kids, I am sure you will definitely not miss out on having to deal with removing black stains from the collar of your kids' white shirt. I face this problem everyday and it is indeed a chore having to scrub the stains off the shirt collar everyday. But thanks to my most trusted spot stain remover, all I need to do is to spray the solution on the collar, let it rest for a few minutes before dumping the dirty laundry into the washing machine for a 50-minute wash and spin. For bad stains, I need to use undiluted stain remover and brush off the stains with a clothes brush.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Beating Exam Blues

When it comes to revising for exams, Alycia can act like a small kid who needs loads of sweet talks, loads of rewards, loads of praises and tons of laughter to get her going. Yesterday, after Alycia and Sherilyn wasted half a day doing nothing, I managed to warm them up into doing revision by first having a quiz in BM and English. The winner shall share a Magnum almond ice cream with me. I knew that Alycia would win the quiz, so here she is, enjoying her Magnum ice-cream while working on her English workbook.



After the ice cream, this girl obediently finished off all that the work that I had set for her. Before I attempted to ask her to do more workbooks, I goofed around with the girls to crack them up. One incident got us all rolling on the floor laughing. I got Alycia to try on one of my super tight bra spaghetti strap tops. The bra top fitted her so well and she looked like a teenager with 'boops' and all LOL!! I joked that if any of her friends or relatives saw her in the bra top, their eye balls would pop out from their eye sockets seeing her morphed into a teenager overnight. All of us rolled on the floor laughing till our tummies ached.

It is not easy to get my girls to obediently do revision for their exam on their own.They do not have the zeal and drive to do it on their own yet. Well, I can't blame them as their daddy and mummy were not overzealous scorers in school either ;:P


Thursday, October 10, 2013

Crispy Baked Egg And Cheese Sandwich

I whipped this up for the girls' lunch some time back. It has been a great success and thus, I am posting the pix here. When I say success, it simply means that I have gotten the thumbs up from my persnickety foodie-in-the-making girls :)  Only HFM Angels'-approved- food will be posted here :D

First I boiled some hard-boiled eggs and heated up some snap frozen sweet corn kernels from Wattie's.  Then mashed the eggs up, added some Kewpie mayo, pepper and sprinkled some chia seeds.

Toast 2 

I used 3 slices of white bread for the girls and 2 slices of wholemeal bread for myself. As you can see from the picture below, I spread the egg mixture on the first slice, inserted a slice of cheese on the next 2 layers followed by another layer of egg mixture and finally on the top layer of bread, I spread it with butter before sprinkling some mixed herbs. Then in went the tray into the oven  for 15 minutes.

 
Toast1

The baked sandwich, hot from the oven... Toast3


Cut the sandwich into half to make triangles.  This was Cass' lunch, with her favorite Envy apples and some cool cucumbers.



toast4
The baked sandwich was really crispy, even after an hour later when Alycia ate her portion. I am going to bake this again today to finish up the left over bread in the fridge :)

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Bad Week!

This week has been a bad week for Cass and Sherilyn, which means it is even worst for me. When the girls are unwell, it is always the mom who suffers the most.

Cass has been unwell for almost the whole of this week. She has been suffering from a phlegmy throat and had fever for two days earlier this week.  As she is getting better today, the virulent sick virus has now attacked Sherilyn.

Last night at exactly 12 midnight, she ran from her bedroom to the bathroom and puked into the toilet bowl. I was jolted up from my sleep. I saw the vomit pouring out into the bowl and her long hair was dipping into the bowl with vomit!!!  I thought it was a nightmare but the nightmare turned into a reality! At 12 midnight, I had to wash her hair and scrub the toilet bowl and  floor as stinky vomit was splattered everywhere.

I used to post in my blogs years ago when Sherilyn was about 3 years old that I thought it was a jinx that she would puke at 12 midnight very often. The jinx stopped short after Cass was born. Now I know that it ain't any jinx. The culprit is again MILK! 

Then at 3am, Sherilyn woke up and ran to my room. I thought she wanted to puke but she told me that she wanted to drink water and that she felt very sick.

Today has been bad. She has vomited more than 5 times and the hubs brought her to the doctor in the morning.

We had lunch at Nihon Kai Japanese restaurant today. While all of us ate, Sherilyn sat there in a daze. She only drank a few sips of hot matcha and a few slurps of soba.

In the car, she puked again.



vomit day 6 Oct

Back home, I gave her 2 slices of cream crackers before feeding her with anti-vomiting medicine.

She has been napping the whole afternoon and she seems really unwell. At one point, she had hallucination when I woke her up from her nap. She really scared the shit out of me when she blabbered out words that did not make sense and acted strangely!

To be continued...




Friday, October 4, 2013

Meltdown

This morning Cass and I had a big meltdown.  For the past 1 week, Cass has been uber cantankerous, so much that she has gotten on my rawest nerves and getting me really pissed off. I think one of the reasons why she has been acting this way is that she has not been feeling well.  But I have feelings too. I am also not in my top form (feeling under the weather and darn the PMS!) and getting nonsense from this girl all the time has really worn out my patience totally. You know, things like I give her an orange but she wants an apple instead, refusing to follow me out though there is no one at home, refusing to pee, refusing to eat, refusing to drink and  refusing to follow every single instruction from me. Everyone of them!! This morning was the final straw that broke my back.  I had woken her up to get her ready for school but she just laid down on the couch with a cup of water in her hand, almost spilling it. After being reprimanded from me, she sat at the dining table but she was not drinking. She was staring outside in a daze. No sweet talk nor threats from me would make her move and  get ready for school.  She had already skipped school for 3 days this week as she was down with a bad throat. She has to take part in her school concert next week and she needs to practise her concert dance everyday.  Exam is around the corner too. Finally, she was too late to go to school. She ponteng school!

With  pent-up anger from yesterday when she refused to eat the porridge that I cooked and refused to follow me out to the mini mart when there was no one at home to watch over her, I could no longer stomach her nonsense anymore. I barked at her with lava spewing out from me. But she was emotionless! That made me even more enraged. That was it. I told her that I was not going to care about her anymore. And I just burst out sobbing myself.  I did not fix her breakfast. I ignored her the whole morning. She came to me and asked me why my eyes were wet. She smelled my arm and touched me but I was and still am super pissed off with this brat! 

For lunch, I have reheated the porridge that she refused to eat yesterday for her to eat. She ate it all. She was starved from having no breakfast.  For dinner, I am on a strike. I ain't going to cook but will just take-away dinner. The brat has spoiled my mood entirely.  She is corroded with guilt now. She helped me to change the bedsheet just now and asked me if I wanted a massage.  But I am just in no mood for any of these but to run away from her!!

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Deep Freezing Uncooked Dishes For Future Meals In A Jiffy!

My girls and I love steamed pork.  Recently, I have figured a way to prepare delish steamed pork dishes in a jiffy. All I have to do is to spend some time on a day when I have free time to prepare the ingredients in the kitchen, store the raw steamed pork nicely and deep freeze them. On days when I ain't in a mood to cook but the girls want yummy and hot dishes to go with rice, I can easily remove this from the freezer, defrost it and steam it.


Here's what I now do...

1) Buy minced pork from the butcher. You can buy half-lean-half- fat meat and chop them yourself. I don't have the time, so I buy readily minced pork.

2) Here, I have minced pork with watercress veggie and prawns. Just chop up the watercress and prawns and mix them well with the pork. Add sesame seed oil, pepper and a little sea salt.

3) Then distribute the pork mixture into several stainless steel plates and bowls.  These will be ready to be steamed when I want to cook it.  I oiled the plates with some sesame seed oil too, so that the meat won't stick to the plate.




4) Next, I will place the plate of raw minced pork into an airtight container and store it in the freezer.

5) On the day when I plan to steam the minced pork, I will defrost a container in the morning. When the kids are almost back from school, I will then steam the minced pork.  In the pot where I steam this, I will put a couple of eggs so that the eggs can 'tumpang' to be cooked.  Thus, my girls will have a complete and well-balanced meal consisting of meat, veggie and eggs :D





How many of you do this? I am always trying to figure out how to dish out delish and hot meals for my girls, thus I came up with this idea.   Maybe you have already been doing this for aeons. But if you have not, do try this out. Your kids and family can have freshly steamed dishes on days when you are too busy to cook or just feel like doing nothing but warm your butt on the couch :D

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Bored Baby

My poor baby has been feeling pretty bored these days. Her second oddball che che used to be her playmate in the afternoons but ever since Sherilyn started attending half-day tutoring at a tuition centre, Cass has been finding things to do on her own.  On most days, she will be drawing, scribbling and playing with her pretend cook set.  For the past few days, the iPad has been her best buddy.  Today, she's watching how cakes are being baked on You Tube! LOL!  Besides the iPad, Cass has also been helping me fold and keep the clean laundry. She also gave me a good 20-minute massage yesterday!  When she's in her goody two shoes self, she is totally lovable but when she steps out from her goody shoes and decides to play villain by protesting every single instruction from me disregarding every single threat from me, she can really drive me to strangle her!!




Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Udon With Awase Miso

Here's another post on food.  Lately, this blog has morphed into a food blog with almost every posting and picture on food LOL!  For those who visit to read updates on my girls or for stories on parenting, pardon me. I have been very busy lately with my online store and with cooking, thus, the lack of  write-up on the girls and on parenting.

Last week, I prepared a new dish for the girls.

I cooked Udon noodles with Awase miso paste as the soup base.   There was also a stir-fried cabbage with minced pork dish to go along with the Udon.

 


I bought this pack of Awase Miso paste from one of those stores that sell Japanese food stuff in Tokyo Street @ Pavillion KL.

I find Miso paste a versatile condiment to use.  It can be used to prepare soup and to flavor meat, fish, veggie and to stir-fry noodles.   The soup with Miso paste can be prepared into a 1-pot dish when you add tofu, seaweed, chicken fillet, veggie, crab meat sticks, eggs and whatever you fancy into the soup.

Miso paste can be very salty if you use too much.  Just go easy on the serving and test the taste before serving.  You can add more water to dilute the saltiness.