Rant 890 / And That's How Rainbows Appear

And this is how parents will explain rainbows to their kids in the very near future.

Not sure if want...

 This is the next random item. What's it trying to tell me?

Why does it keeping doing this?












It should be quite apparent that my mood is lighter than before. Mainly it has to do with the fact that she's deteriorating at a slower rate than I expected.

Her memory is still clearly bad but her behaviour hasn't changed and her appetite has not decreased.

I think it's the fact that I can still talk to her tomorrow that keeps my mood up.

Which leads to the implication that I'm still unable to get over the finality of death.



Been cooking plenty of bad dishes due to the sweet oyster sauce. Don't really want to add too much salt just because.

My bro also brought back 3 large packets of beef and pork, all sliced up and meant to be eaten in a shabu-shabu, a Japanese-style hotpot.

He was eating at his gf's place with her family and they couldn't finish the red meats.

So for the first packet, I simply gave the meat a quick toss in some boiling oyster-sauce-water and added a dash of light soy sauce to the sieved beef slices.

The second packet of beef was used to stir-fry in ginger and onion (no spring onion that day and I forgot to buy more when I used it up previously). It was pretty successful.

Those were the successes.

The failures include the Chinese cabbage dish which was too sweet. I stir-fried it in oyster sauce, light soy sauce, garlic and sliced fish cake.

Another was the broccoli which I overcooked and the gravy was sweet due to the oyster sauce and partly due to the sliced carrots too.

The broccoli dish was especially bad.

Today I made beef bolognese linguini. It was successful of course. It's hard to fail at cooking decent bolognese and pasta (in terms of Asian standards, not Italian). The only trick is that I have to remember to add a little sugar because the jars of pasta sauces that we buy are usually too sour for our tastes.

I'm also getting the hang of cooking chicken breasts because I've been using it so much.

I just have to marinate a large batch (and buy in large batches) of diced chicken breasts in cooking wine (花雕酒 in my case), sesame oil, light soy sauce, oyster sauce and some starch for at least 10mins.

I don't always expect to finish all of it in one day and marinating it for 24 hours in the fridge is usually not a bad idea.

After marinating, I fry them till they're barely cooked. Slightly undercooked is fine too because they're going to be re-cooked again with random vegetables.

In my experience this fried chicken goes well with a lot of vegetables, so it's pretty versatile.

By the way I almost never use dark soy sauce because in Singapore, it's always a thick sweet liquid. For some reason Singaporeans just like sweet dishes or something.

I'm also starting to raise the difficulty level by cooking salmon.

Salmon, though expensive, is safe because I'm perfectly ok with eating it raw.

Frying it after marinating in garlic and starch merely provides me with some variety so that I don't always eat sashimi as the sole dish under the Seafood category in my diet in general.

The other day I did that with a piece of salmon belly with a large chunk from the back.

This is a similar piece I bought a few days ago to make a encore performance because it was so good.

The belly part was crispy but the back part was cooked only half a centimetre in on all sides.

And I made sure the skin was fried more to make it very crispy (and to make any undetected scales edible).

Costs $5, so I'll see if I can get it from the wet market next time for a lower price (and a larger piece).

Maybe this time, instead of frying it whole, I should slice up the back portion and make everything crispy.

Hmm...

Nevertheless this is far cheaper than any salmon dish of similar proportions I can get outside. How much would a bit of garlic, some salt, some starch, some oil, the gas, the water and detergent, and time cost?











Found apps that automatically change profile (to Silent and back) but only one is free: Situations. Not sure if it's going to work since I don't have an actual data plan, only the cheapest data plan that charges exorbitant rates per kb but doesn't have a monthly charge.

Not sure if GPS works without an internet connection.











And something kinda good and really confusing just happened.

I found a remittance form that was used to send a large sum of money to a factory in China earlier this year.

This means I don't owe them any money.

I thought I owed them some money, according to the remittance forms I've found, and the bank's pass book did not say to whom the money was remitted to.

The factory boss has been asking for his money because apparently, he doesn't keep records of our payments (yea yea I call bullshit on that too but it's not like I can do anything about it).

Now with this scanned and emailed to him, I can prove that he has been grossly overpaid. Hence I expect him to stop bugging me about money for quite some time.

Feels so good not to owe anyone any money.

Can't blame my mum, who was the one handling everything. She's disorganized but normally she could remember where everything was, or at least the general areas.

Good thing I have yet to send him the second half of what I supposedly owed him due to mistakes on his part. I wonder if the bank is able to cancel the remittance though.