Thursday, November 26, 2009

Turkey Day!

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody!!(eventhough we don't celebrate it in Malaysia..lol..)

Friday, November 20, 2009

Six Million dollar night!

you're probabbly cracking your heads wondering what the heck does the title mean, ryte? well, for starters, that's the name given for my church's and the St.Francis of Assisi's Parish fund-raising dinner which me and my family attended yesterday.It was pretty fantastic actually. It as held at the Sunway Resort Hotel and my, was the place impressive! The dinner was held at one of the ballrooms and there was quite a big turnout, even people who weren;t of the same faith as us came to support the event..which was pretty cool considering that you have to spend a lot of money that nite since it was a fund-raising dinner





The architecture of the ballroom was beautiful and so was the unique lighting throughout the dinner. The dinner started off with a very special presentation of the food being delivered to the main VVIP table. Four servers came in carrying a decorated chair which sat a woman carrying the main dish. they were all dressed in Egyptian costumes and so was the woman. They stopped at the VVIP table and the woman got down . She then proceeded to place the food on the table accompanied withw music. All of us started clapping once it was over because it was pretty unusual. Some even took pictures but my dad forgot to on his camera so i couldn't get any pics.





The food started being served and we all started eating. Throughout the dinner, there was plenty of entertainment. The emcee's were pretty good and did a good job of entertaining us. there were a few rounds of auctioning valuable stuff since this was a fund-rasing dinner. Those poeple who bidded sure brought pretty fat checkbooks as the prices really got very high. There was even a man who bidded RM 28000 for an extremly expensive necklace. I wonder who is the lucky gal he's going to give it to?She would be swooning at such a gift.LOL.





There was even performances by both the parish priests of each parish. My parish priest, Fr. Simon sang a song by Keith Richard and to our surprise his voice really sounded good (so even if I didn't noe a thing bout the song or the singer..lol..i still enjoyed his singing ). Later there were also lucky draws but sadly I didn't win anything:(. My little 7 year- old brother was so excited over the lucky draws that he took my mum & dad's tickets(since they weren't really interested) so he had a total of three tickets. Although he didn't win anything but it was still amusing to watch him frown seriosly at the tickets each time the emcee announced a number.



the real highlight of the night was when this talented group of singers called "The Idea of North"

went up on stage. Now, I've never really heard of them before so I was rather curious about what I was going tyo expect. To my amazement, they were really fantastic as they were different from anything I've heard before. How? you might ask. Well, first, they performed without any instruments! Secondly, they sang a variety of songs by mixing songs which were well known with songs that were less well-known like folklore songs. They were only 4 people in the group yet they managed to sing so well without any instruments bcos they were really talented. One or two of them would alternately produced sounds while the others sang.



Finally, I had to go home as it was getting late. But all the same I really had a good time at the dinner.Now, my mission is to look up about "The Idea of North " in the Internet. Ciao!!

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Making Pasta!

Weird title,ryte? I knowlah but who cares ..it's what happened that counts.On Monday was Yi ping's birthday..Happy Birthday YI PING!! Ashwinee and I had baked cookies for her as her birthday present and from the look of delight and surprise on her face, we could see that we've done a pretty good job. Anyway back to the main issue here, on the exact same day me and a group of friends joined a school trip to Cilantro. What surprised me was te fact that it was located just opposite Giant Supermarket. Too think I've lived so long here in USj but never noticed it before!Anyway, Cilantro was actually a culinary academy which looked pretty impressive based on the presentation we had before our tour.After a pretty quick tour, we were lead to two of the kitchens and was told to divide into two groups. Naturally, I decided to stick with my friends so we ended up choosing the first group and we were lead to the first kitchen. Oh I forgot to mention! Most of the students inthis academy were mostly guys which took us by surprise.we were later told that guys usually were the ones who can stand the heat in the kitchen compared to girls (half-true!)





So back where I stopped..in the first kitchen we were told that we would be making pasta from the start..reali making it from the flour itself!! I so wasn't expecting it. Well, me, Suyi and Ash decided to assign ourselves to this task while Yi Ping and Pei Shen started chopping vegetables for the sauce.It was kinda messy but we suceeded (well,mostly Ash did..since she was the one who did 90% the kneading and making the flour into a proper dough..).It was 'scary' to see Pei shen chopping up the chicken as she was doing it with so much energy and vigorously until the rest of us thought the knife would really fly of her hand and hit one of us..haha...Anyway she did do a pretty good job of chopping the chicken.



Later,we were taught how make the dough into pasta using some kind of machine ( i don't know what's it called). Anyway, I really did help out a lot here. I was turning the machine non-stop to make the dough thinner and thinner while Ash guided the dough through the machine. I gotta tell you, it wasn't easy as it seemed.It was kind of tricky especially when at times the dough was too thick to pass through the rollers in that machine .After a while, Suyi and pei shen came and took over my task asthey too wanted too try it out



I proceededto help yi ping with cooking the sauce for our pasta.After cooking for some time, a delicious smell came wafting up to our noses.We did it! the pasta was divide into five portions and was dipped into the boiling water one portion by one portion with equal time each( i can't remember the exact timing for each..)As each portion came out of the boiling water and was placed on plates, I quickly ladled out the sauce onto the pasta of each plate. Finally, our work was done and we could proceed into eating the pasta we had made and cooked.Yay! It was pretty good for beginners like us but as expected, all of us couldn't finish our pasta as it was too much and eventually,we had to throw the rest away.Aww!Luckily for us, we didn't had t do the washing up because there was a dishwasher there.



The other group in the second kitchen baked buns and me as well as my friends were fortunate enough to sample some as there were plenty of leftovers.Mmm, they tasted good until I wished i had done buns instead of pasta. Oh,well, the pasta experince was fun too.anyway, I really enjoyed myself that day and I sure ended up very full when I got back home.