Butter Chook-shortcut method

last thursday i made some butter chicken. stace asked me how it was made, so i decided to blog about the dish. it was real easy and quick. reason being.. i used the maggi packet rather than made the materials from scratch. (i know i am cheating but it saves all the extra time)
the things needed for the butter chicken:

1 onion
1 bottle of cream
1kg chicken
2 packets of maggi packet
1 table spoon of butter

1. melt the butter and add in the onions. sautee the onion until it's soft.
2. throw in the chicken and start mixing them well.
3. add the content of maggi packet and blend well with chicken.
4. after about 5 minutes, pour in the cream.
5. let simmer until chicken is cooked. occasionally, mix the chicken and the cream.

*finished product

my new craze -dahlia

meet my new tuberous friend.
the dahlias.
i fell in love with these plants on my visit to the christchurch botanical gardens.
they will be my next project ..

Around Auckland City - Lantern Festival 2006

since i have relis around, we also brought them to Lantern Festival..it's an annual festival held at Albert Park in Auckland City. There are lanterns around the park and also food stalls. There are also Corporate stalls like HKSB and Lee Kum Kee selling their products. the various martial arts bodies also come to demonstrate their art and ppl also sing and play instruments at the Albert Park rotunda..

Around Auckland City - mt eden crater

i have been real busy during the CNY festival. gone back to work *GREAT .. and relis visiting.
we brought uncle richard to mt eden crater on the eve of chap goh meh. btw, Auckland has one of the highest number of dormant crater in the world... mt eden is just one of them.

when we were there, there were so many tour buses there..we managed to take pics at the spots we like...

here are the views of the crater ...there are cows grazing inside the crater also. that patch of gooey thing is the souvenir the cows left around the area...

happy chinese new year

dear all,

i am finally back in auckland and slowly the routines are coming back. i went back to work on thursday (*Yikes)

today is the first day of CNY for the year of the dog (can't remember what dog it was this year, whether it's wooden or gold or??)

anyways, for sure, i am red as lobster today. my family at over in auckland for CNY and me and jake brought them to pick mussels at coromandel and went tramping at karangkahe gorge.
it wasn't even scorching hot today and yet, i am already red as a lobster...grrr.

i am in the process of scanning my studio pics. please be patient. i know some of you are waiting to see it.

alrighty, just a short post.

in Sydney airport

hey everyone,
one step closer to home. i have spent the last 3 days with pinkcocoa& shinchan. haven't seen pinkcocoa in 5 years. last meet was during Olympic 2000. it was good meeting them.
we pig so much, i seriously need to diet for jan 20!!!!!

i miss everyone. can't wait to meet you guys up ...

just short post.

eileen, man, what a long silence from you. finally saw you in ccie's blog. ;) hehe.
yeah good idea man, let's meet up. i still haven't found the fg and rb's stuffs.
where are you now?

okay my plane is flying off in 1 hr ...arriving in NZ at 2300..

*big hugs and kisses to all..

greetings from calgary

dear all,

been traveling around US and Canada in the last month. it has been awesome and tiring too.
met many interesting people and also met families.

just want to let everyone know i am still very much alive and kicking.
am in calgary and will be flying to LA for new year.

will update my blog with more pics and stories once i am settled back in nz.

take care...

merry christmas (belated) and happy new year.
let 2005 be a good year and 2006 be an even better one :)

p/s: stace, happy birthday to you. probably be internetless until i see you in Jan.

friday

my colleague organised a morning tea for me and gave me a wedding card. *Gosh i am touched.
there's lots of quiche, pies, sandwiches..and jocelyn she baked some chocolate eclair and strawberry pastry pie thingie.

in the afternoon, work was frantic. temp was still here and today she got to prepare the cash flow, while i prepare some other stuffs. of course i get bugged half the time by everyone. and my boss was giving this really tight deadline.

anyways glad i finished everything.

when i got home, i remembered i need to drop my baby phallie (My orchid plant) with glen and manee. Rang them and manee said it was okay to drop by( it was 8 30pm then). my plant was practically growing outside the pot..all the roots are dangling outside. glen reckons i am trying to grow it like an air plant;P he immediately took out the plant and gave it a 'root' cut. cutting off dry roots and repot it..baby phallie instantly look 10x better. so one thing less to worry. iknow my plant is in good hands. as for the rest of my troops, they are outside the house at a 'shady' place i hope. i appointed an official person to water my plants. *Jake's bro.. hopefully he remembers.

my packing-gosh i hate packing. it was easy when i pack for jake coz i just dump everything into his bag, fold and tuck them away. i didn't have to think at all. he's already determined what he wants. but for me, gosh i have 100 'what if' questions in my head, so i am still packing and it's 1 05am. Great. talk about being organised.

better get back to packing. grrrr...

oh, everyone please pray for me. pray i have smooth journey.
love you all...*hugs and kisses

ps: i just pig on pork chop with brocolli/cauliflower and rice coz my tummy's practically having a drum concert.

9 lamp posts

i finally went out for a walk this evening. i even tried to ran the distance of 3 lamp posts at a time.
after 7 lamp posts, i felt like my heart was going to burst.
so i walked after that. only the final 2 lamp posts i ran..

temp arrived

today jake's auntie left ...according to jake's mom, she had trouble checking in her luggage. she was overweight by 3 kg ? ie 29kg. they asked her to repack many times. even at 26kg, they still refuse to let her check her luggage. anyhow, she had to carry some stuffs as hand carry. i hope all the cheeses manage to go through. if not waste my 'sum kei' and my $$$ buying them.

the temp arrived today. she is a mature lady and is kiwi who had been living in Uk in the last 6 years? was showing her the ropes of my routines for the day. i got so damn thirsty and i felt like my energy just disappeared even though most of the time i was trying to show and explain to her stuffs. i tried to let her go on the 'driver' seat while i sat by her side.

i am going to start packing tonight. ie really putting in things into my luggage:P sharon, i promised in that email i will do it on monday nite? but i was so slack.

my invite still unsettled.i am sick of it. *Grr. completely no mood.

i am going out for a much needed walk. i haven't walked since Sunday.

p/s: my last assignment before flying off will be to put slug poison on my plants. i have to get baysols...apparently they stay in the pot forever, unlike cheapie brands. but so much work. have to drag my arse to the hardware shop to get them.

5 more sleeps

this week will be hectic for me.
i went to work early today. was trying to buy the materials for my invite but the shop was terrible. wouldn't let me see the content but they put up a sign saying check with them for samples.
when i check, they said no samples. NOT SATISFIED with that Shop.
btw if you are curious, i am talking about Warehouse Stationery (Manukau store)

i am trying to go to bed early these days. really hard *sigh
and i haven't even dry my hair.

alright folks, nothing exciting today. well it's MONDAY.
linked sharon on my blog today ;) KKEKEKE..

natural perfume

these are roses from marnee's garden. as i mentioned in previous post, they are sitting in a small vase and giving out this nice scent in my living room.

morning at glen & marnee's

i spent my morning at glen & marnee's place. brought them some cheese as a bit of 'buah tangan'. i took down the directions to their house from the online street directory. however i had forgotten to take down their house number. my instict was to look for a house full of orchids. i was wrong. their front house was filled with a full garden of roses ..fortunately i recognised their car.

glen had all his phalaenopsis (phallies for short) all near the kitchen. he has a 3 tier tray that house at least 30 phallies. it was a nice breakfast nook actually..with sunshine pouring in. marnee also had anthrium lillies etc everywhere in the house.

the morning proceeded with glen checking out the condition of my plant. we have a similar plant from one of the meeting. his plants was way smaller than mine when we first received the plants. of course under his 'expert' TLC, the plant flourished. it has gone double in size and the new growth was so huge. in fact his new growth was the size of my actual original plant and my baby was smaller than your winky finger. anyways i am doing it the correct way but i don't have the right location. so he asked me where my windows and everything are.. keke..that proves a bit of a challenge; i don't know the direction of my house. i think it is north facing but i couldn't be sure. he then asked me where do i see my sun set etc and then he got mixed up all mixed up coz i kept changing the location of sun set. all along, marnee sat knitting away and laugh coz she understood my place but glen couldn't ..we finally had it on paper...and he then told me where are the places to house my orchids.

we then went on a tour to see his shadehouses. he's got probably 1000 plants. he has 3 shadehouse and each of them is filled up with seedlings and grown orchids and each has their own sick bay. he also keeps each species in one house. i wonder how they keep up with so many plants. they also plant other sort of plants like bromeliads, roses etc. glen was going to give me this orchid plant to take home but i told him i will be going away so it will stay at their place until i come to collect them. hehe.

then we went back to the house and marnee's made some fanstastic cheese scone to go with green tea..she even had cucumber pickle on it. it was very nice. the pickle tastes a bit like achar we have back home.

anyways all these while, i thought marnee's a malaysian :P then finally discovered she's THAI.
we sat and have interesting conversation about anything..she also made chicken puffs and fish puffs. *yum....

before i went home, they even offer to baby sit my phallies when i go away coz phallies are a bit tricky to look after. marnee also gave me some roses from her gardens. they smell so nice, when i got home, my car was filled with the scent of roses...i put them in a small vase and they made my living room smells like rose garden now....*ekeke

shameless me also asked for a bit of the succulent which is growing in her garden :P she gave me a handful too..

looks like this evening, i will plant the succulent and also repot a few of my cymbidiums. some of the barks are falling out, i think they need to be repotted.

optical illusion

i have completed majority of my to do list.
anita thinks my jammed pack itinerary is workable ;) *phew
she will meet me on the last day of the trip ..kekek. real looking forward to that.

at work, they are getting a temp in to fill in my place when i am away. *rubbing my chin. are they trying to get rid of me?oh well.

tommorrow i am going to visit a couple's place ;) looking forward to that. i am checking out their orchids and shadehouse.



just being really 'mou liew', i thought i would include this 'mysterious' pic here.

at some angle, i thought it looked like a pizza cutter cutting through a pizza :P i wasn't even drinking.

anybody wants to guess what this is?

imsoniac again :S

i was imsoniac again last nite. i think the culprit is the chinese tea i was drinking when i was at the chinese restaurant.
*Darn...
i have a huge to do list to complete before i leave.
i still haven't finished all of them.
so far i came up with an itinerary for the south island trip.
5 days and jammed pack with activities. *keke.
haven't finished with my invites. more like i haven't even started.
i am sooooo slack!!!!!!

countdown...

9 more sleeps...and i am flying off.

p/s: this is my shortest post ever:P

orchid meeting

today i went to november orchid meeting. today's main topic was flower arrangement.
it was so inspiring. i think i wanna be a florist. the lady teaching us was very comical.
gave us examples how she gets all her 'equipment' from. sounds a bit like karang guni to me.
hehe. she goes nicking her neighbours bushes etc...(well the ones overhanging to her side of the fence :P) and she always goes around cutting off branches to use for floral arrangement.

anyways, i bought some raffles. and guess what? i won. just as i am going away, i won another plant, i don't know who's going to look after all my plants while i am away..*Worried..

i been rearranging all my plants. they didn't seem to like the corner i put them so i have moved them to a more strategic spot ..where i can easily water them :) but i really want a shade house!!!
am gonna ask dad to made me one when he comes over.

oh.. i found out some of my neglected plants were actually having new growths ...;) i am so happy!!!!! even though with all these neglect this winter, they manage to sprout out new babies. but some died too - see my previous posts:( i felt kinda guilty too. have i watered them more, fertilise more, they could be more growths, and no fatalities ..anyway, i am prepared for the worst when i return from my trip.

alrighty,i gtg now. csi is on...

mambo jambo

i am running out of idea what to put on the title.

anyways yesterday i was on the internet for almost the whole day..when jake's not around i get kinda out of control just surfing the net . seriously i donno what i am surfing either. so it's just purely wasting time. although in between that i got to chat with my bro, and with cc ..

the weather was really beautiful yesterday, so i washed my new sheets. I bought some embriodered polka dots sheets; ) gonna use it for the new year. which reminds me i need to get 2 european sized pillow. anyways the washing part is insignificant. it was the drying part i want to blog about. i put it out on the clothesline and by noon time, i discovered a splat of things on the duvet cover. *YIKES!!! I don't know if it's birds poo or birds puke or anything.
it has like lots of dried grass on it. or is that cats' puke. i had to spot clean it ...grrr

speaking of cats, my neighbours cat are treating my compound as their territory. seriously they prance around my drive way, sit on my fence and on my roof, on top of my car, on my door mat. AS IF my house is THEIRS!!!! not one of them but 3 of them. they all came at different time though. Does that make me their OWNERS as well?

i also went to the art supply shop in the afternoon. i checked on their website they had lots of product for sale and they also advertised their physical shop ..i went there to check out, they hadn't got much stock in the physical shop. in fact they don't have the ones i want to check out. disappointed... kinda waste of my time!! but i got to buy more melon ice cream when i went to the korean grocery next door. i love the korean grocery..
everything is in korean and i can only understand the price displayed :P apart from that, all the description they display is in korean.

dress fitting

my dress arrived yesterday by courier. the seller has packed it only to about the size of a really thick magazine. i opened it up and hm... tried it on...darn* :S the zip won't zip up..was trying and trying..so disappointed and frustrated.. cc was over the msn saying how is it, she wants to see the pic.
all i can tell her was i couldn't zip up the dress. was gloomy :( my 50s inspired dress didn't FIT me!!!!cc started to churn out ideas. to take out the sleeves etc ...to complain to seller...so on and so on...

pinkcocoa also came to the rescue. she was on MSN too ..so i poured out my agony to her.

i even tried to measure it and they seem to have tailor it to the measurement i have given. man i was frustrated ...

i rang jake to complain. he tried to cheer me up. he kept burst out laughing when i said i don't like the dress anymore.

anyways i waited until jake's sis come back from work that night. i asked her to pull up the zip.
she did..and Voila~the dress FITS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*Paiseh. the dress needs another's help in order to put on...

so i have had an evening of suspense, disappointment, frustration, and finally RELIEF ..

computer

today my home computer went beserk. i mean its appearance. someone must have used it and messed up with the settings. the icons were huge and everything is messy on the desktop. it looked so strange too.

luckily met hua hie and voon siong online. they gave me some hints etc. so i set it back to normal.
the conclusion i reached was i am such an inflexible person. my computer has to look exactly the same. i don't like the location of task bar to change, the icon to look big, and the file to be on different place on the desktop.

other than that, i borrowed a whole heap of book from the library. i must have 'sapu-ed' the cooking portion of the chinese literature section. borrowed books on making soup (like i am gonna make any)

i went with the intention of returning all my books but i have borrowed even more now.

i had chicken and abalone soup for dinner. i am not a luxury food person. find the abalone kinda taste funny. i think it's just me.

nothing much to report. just wanna go to bed early but it's already 10 30pm.