A Breakfast Bento and a Benstrosity

Over the weekend, I attempted to bento all of DN's meals. WA-HAHAHA. Yeah, I too don't know who slipped the hallucinatory drugs into my system. Sneaky bugger must have done it on Friday night. 

Anyway, I woke up all charged and ready to bento on Saturday morning. And this is DN's bento that morning. 

Besides the slice of raisin bread, DN's got sweet potato flowers (with a carrot centre that I punched out with a straw), 2 dried apricots, 4 chewy multi-vits and erm, quartered fishballs on a pick. I've decided to call it "What-a-strange-combination Bento". Hmm, at least it's colourful. 

He didn't touch the sweet potatoes. I should have figured that out already. If it causes me grief, heartache, pain and takes too much TIME, he probably won't eat it. My son is such a grateful child. Bah.

Okay, for the next part of this blog post, please make sure there are no little children around you. What you're going to see next will probably cause some of them to burst into tears or start shaking with fear. Because this is one scary looking bento lunch! When PF first saw it, he went, "Aiyoh!" Yes, I also have a very grateful husband. -___-

This is so embarrassing. I almost didn't blog about this, but I thought, what the heck, every bento has its (off) day right? I'm still amazed that DN's retina didn't spontaneously combust and is still working fine despite looking at this benstrosity (geddit?! ah, my wit kills me). I was almost embarrassed to give it to him.

 

The first thing DN did was eat the seaweed eyebrows and mouth. I quickly ate the carrot eyes because I swear, them eyes were following me around the kitchen! Brrr... spooky. After we collectively demolished the frightening face, DN proceeded to eat all the fried rice underneath. 

I haven't bento-ed since Saturday. Go figure.

Early Bird Breakfast Show

I much prefer going to the zoo than the bird park. In fact, I've brought DN to the zoo about 8 times in all, and to the bird park only once. Hmm... I don't know, feathered friends don't really do it for me. But if birds had fur, ah! I might change my mind. ;)

That said, I have to admit that there's a new thing at the Bird Park that has made me feel a little more affectionate towards birds. It's the Early Bird Breakfast Show at the Bongo Burgers Cafe. It's quite a novel treat! As long as you buy breakfast from the cafe, you're entitled to a shady seat outdoors, next to a little pond with ducks and swans. So you have breakfast as the bird show goes on and the best thing is, it's free! The cafe is located outside the Bird Park, so technically, you can just go there for breakfast and not pay $18 to enter the park.

The show is not bad really. No vultures swooping over your heads or penguins diving into the pond of course, but we did get to take pictures with a parrot and DN and Jovann both got to feed the ducks. It's a half hour show and we got to see some parrots up close too. The trainer actually brought the parrots up close to every table so we could see the bird perform little tricks. Like sticking out its tongue at us. Er, yes, thank you.

Except for the breakfast selection which could do with a MAJOR upgrade in terms of variety, and the cut-throat prices for beverages ($5 for ice milo??! *£$&"@~), it's a pretty enjoyable morning out. Guess who's bringing her own ice milo in a thermos next time?

Bonkers over Bento!

For the past few months, I've been avidly following some bento blogs (my fav ones are listed below) when I should really be writing my essays, planning my workshops or taking care of my child and not let him rummage in the fridge, find the bottle of chilli flakes, take out my pots and pans and start sprinkling chilli flakes like snow into all the pots and pans. Er... ooops.

Anyway, I couldn't stand it any longer and finally dragged the 2.5 year old to Daiso with me yesterday. It was such a fruitful, well-planned and well-executed 2.5 hour trip! Excuse me while I inflate my ego and pat myself on the shoulder. *PAT!*

We reached Plaza Singapura at about 11am, which meant 2 things - one, no ERP (awright!) and two, we could hit Daiso before the lunch crowd swarmed the place. And hit it I did. I'm a mature individual with more than 3 decades of life experience and yet, I still get into this oooh-everything-is-only-$2-it's-like-it's-almost-free trance whenever I'm in Daiso. I just dump stuff into my basket with reckless abandon. I don't get it! That's $18 worth of stuff you see down there!


After Daiso, both of us headed to Ichiban Boshi for lunch. Again, the timing worked out perfectly. *PAT!* We got there just before 12pm and got a great booth seat by the conveyor belt which meant 2 things - one, the food rolling past will be a constant source of entertainment for DN and he wouldn't get bored so easily and two, the food rolling past will be a constant source of trouble for me because I have to stop him from piling our table with sushi, or lifting the covers to "wahhh!" at the sushi.

DN just lurves sushi. He finished a plate of vegetable sushi - 2 pieces (fillings included julienne carrots, sea kelp, avocado, cucumber, mayo) and had 3 pieces of california roll with his BARE HANDS. So yes, our table and my son were both covered in orange roe. If I hadn't had that last piece of california roll, he'd probably have eaten it too. I figured he had had enough carbo, so I ordered a teriyaki salmon steak to share. He ate about half of the steak, so *PAT!* I congratulated myself on making the right choice there!

We finished lunch just before 1pm, and we RAN to the car, hoping that we wouldn't cross the hour and have to pay an hour's parking for 2 minutes of lateness. Guess what? We got out within 2 hours and parking was only $1.05 because the first hour is free if you're there from 10am-6pm. Oooooh... *PAT*PAT*PAT*!

While DN was napping at home, I set about making my first bento. After unwrapping all my bento gear, I wiped up the drool on the table and set about happily washing all my paraphernalia. Then I dug out my cookie cutters and made apple stars and flowers. (I dipped the apples in diluted lemon juice to slow down the browning.) Grapes went into a soft little cup and I added 2 picks and 2 dividers of smiling vegetables for colour. Ta-da! The bottom layer of DN's snack bento. :)

The upper layer was the dry layer. Here we have baby ball cookies, banana chips and some dried fruits (apricot, cranberries, blueberries and raisins). Another pick and 2 more dividers for colour.

When DN woke up, I couldn't wait for him to see his afternoon snack bento. When he first saw it, he said "wahhh!" very loudly as his mother beamed from the corner. *PAT!* (Okay okay... I made him show me the 'good' sign here.)

This is what he ate - he finished all the grapes and the baby ball cookies. He ate half of the banana chips and later finished all the dried fruits. He only ate ONE piece of apple. ARGH! And those were the ones that caused me the most grief! Inside I was shouting, "EAT MY LABOUR OF LOVE! EAT!" but of course I didn't. I ate my labour of love instead.

I'm going to try another bento tomorrow. This time, a lunch one. ;)

Milk-Free Orange Honey Muffins

DN's milk allergy is really strange. Sometimes, he can take cakes or biscuits with traces of milk in them and be perfectly fine. Sometimes, he eats a chocolate wafer biscuit and bursts into rashes. Up until now, we still don't know how much he milk he can actually take and we're not going to feed it to him bit by bit until he reaches the tipping point either. But thankfully, his allergy is really not that serious. At least he can take traces of milk, and even a little bit of butter.

Until he gets over this allergy (when he was 7 months old, his PD said some babies outgrow it by the time they're 1... I guess DN is not one of them!), this means no ice-cream, no yoghurt, no milk chocolate, no cheese and not too much butter. This also means we have to be careful with food when we eat out : no pizza, no creamy pasta, no cheese baked rice, no cream-based soups, no mashed potatoes, no scrambled eggs , no milky fish soup noodles. As you can probably guess, we never go Italian.

So before we baked muffins on Sunday, I surfed around for a milk-free muffin recipe. I rejected many recipes because they called for way too many ingredients. Gluten free soy compound? Err, I don't think my NTUC will have that. Rice milk? Who's going to drink the rest?! Apple cider vinegar? Eeep!

Finally I found this easy recipe that called for 'normal' things like honey, orange juice, sugar and flour, whoopee! The only thing I did differently was add 2 eggs instead of the egg substitute, used real butter instead of soy margarine and added banana chunks into each muffin. DN had a ball mixing all the ingredients together...

... adding (or flinging, at one point -_-) the banana chunks...

... and staring at the muffins as they baked in the oven.

They finally came out, nice, brown and smelling delicious! And we all sat down with some cold barley tea (soya bean milk for DN), butter and jam.

Try the recipe if you like light, fluffy muffins. If you like your muffins dense like cakes, then this is not the recipe for you. It's very light and tastes really healthy because it's not oily or sugary sweet. And it works as a basic muffin recipe because I can see it working with fillings like raisins, cranberries, apple chunks or chocolate chips. This recipe is going to be a permanent fixture on my fridge for sure. :)

But all good things must come to an end... and we can never escape from the bothersome washing up. *sigh*

JLTs (Jet Lagged Toddlers)

Let's just say that if I were to curse someone now, I wouldn't wish for pimply boils on the nose or a hairy face. I'll just say very loudly, "I wish a jet lagged toddler upon your sorry behind! Wait. Make that TWO!"

Thank goodness we only have to deal with one JLT.

On Sunday night, our JLT slept at 2.30am and woke up at 9am. On Monday, he slept at 8.30pm and made his parents think the worst was over, then brought them tumbling back to earth when he woke at 12am and stayed up until 3am wanting to play and eat noodles. (Go figure!) Yesterday, his parents thought they'd be "clever" and bring him to the Night Safari to keep him up until 10ish or so, then put him to bed, hoping he'll sleep through the night. Unfortunately, the JLT had other conflicting plans which he didn't care to share with his parents.

The JLT started getting really cranky at about 830pm at the bat enclosure. Of course, his insipid parents forgot that that was about 12.30pm UK time, or nap time. Doh! So after about 20 minutes of incessant crying, DN finally fell asleep in PF's arms as we took the tram back. Just as we strapped him into the car seat, he woke up. From his nap. Ready to take on the world. And spend the next few hours wide awake.

JLT slept at 12.30am last night. It's still too late, but at least he slept through the night. If we try to push his bed time 1-2 hours earlier each night, we should be back on SG time by Saturday I think?

We're back!

Ha! I never thought the day would come when I would sweat in Changi Airport, but that's exactly what all three of us did last night. Especially DN. The poor guy's hair was literally plastered to his face as we had dinner at the food court.

According to PF, DN was good on the plane, i.e. no ostracising or booing from the other passengers because of a screaming child. (I was on another flight, just an hour after them. Long story, but I really wanted to take the 13 hour flight together with PF and DN. Ahem. Honest. Really.)

It was a 10pm flight out of Heathrow so that meant two things.

1. DN would sleep for a good part of the flight. He ended up sleeping for 9-10 hours. :)
2. When we get back to SG, he's not going to sleep for the next 9-10 hours. And we got back at 6pm. :(

So yeah, I have a jet-lagged toddler in the house. At 12am last night, he was still bouncing off the walls, so we went out to eat roti prata and maggi mee goreng. I bet people around us were wondering what on earth kind of parents we were to bring our toddler out at 1am to eat prata and drink teh-o-ice-limau.

It's going to be hellish switching DN back to SG time because I'm already on SG time! PF had a good idea though. We're going to bring him to the Night Safari tomorrow while he's still jet-lagged. Haha!

5 Things I Will Miss Abt The UK

• Snow in my hair (it's so pretty because my hair is black!)
• Charity shops (I bought the perfect retro tea set for only £5!)
• Exploiting the weak pound during the sales (ha!)
• Polite drivers (only in Hampshire though, not London!)
• DN's smell at the end of the day (there's none because he doesn't sweat!)

5 Things I Won't Miss Abt The UK

• The cold! Brr!
• Fish and Chips, Sausage and Chips, Chicken and Chips, Burger and Chips... you get the drift
• My crazy neighbour from downstairs who banged on his ceiling when DN jumped on the floor... gila, I tell you!
• The crazy prices at Chinese restaurants (we were paying £3 for a bowl of rice!)
• How everything shuts down at 5pm... I come from a country with Mohamad Mustafa, come on!

Snow

I really should be doing my work!

As I struggled to wake up yesterday morning, I could hear DN talking. "Me go out! Me play with snow! Me put on boots! Me go out!" Then PF said to me, "You'd better wake up and look at this."

My immediate reply was, "EVERYONE GO BACK TO BED! NOW!" Unfortunately, DN continued talking and PF continued bugging me to wake up. Dang, I must have forgotten to say that out loud.

So I opened my eyes, looked out of the window and saw this. O_o

So this was causing all that fuss! And what a fuss it was. When I first came here, I learned from friends that they haven't seen snow in 15 years. "Alright! I can deal with that!" I said, and I think I must have pumped my fist in the air a bit too enthusiastically. Then this happens. -__-

According to the news, it hasn't snowed this hard in the south of England for 18 years. Grrr-reat. Trust my luck to be here when England decides to have a severe winter. Trains were stopped, airports were shut and exams were cancelled. My school wasn't shut, but I pontang school anyway, haha!

So, after a good breakfast of Fishball Kway Teow Soup and a good poo, we finally released the little bundle of excitement into the snow.

Here he is making a snow angel...

... that ended up looking more like an elephant's foot print. Bah.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Thank goodness our CNY dinner (on day one) was so much better than the one we had the night before. It actually tasted like chinese food. Phew. We had Double Boiled Fish Maw Soup, Roast Duck, Steamed Soya Sauce Chicken, Fried Calamari with Garlic and Chilli, Braised Pork in Claypot, Braised Tofu, Sweet and Sour Pork and Kai Lan. 8 dishes for prosperity! Good food and good company - it was a nice night out.

We ended up staying there real late (almost 10pm), just eating, talking and laughing. Of course, Mr DN is not really one for sitting at the table and indulging in conversation for 3 hours, so he was running around the restaurant, waving at other diners and terrorising the staff. They were so nice by the way. When the manager invited him to follow her and help her make our drinks, she said, "I'll let you press the button!", we ALL went "WAHHH!" right on cue. Press the button! Even I want to do that!

Halfway through dinner, DN came running back looking like this.

I have NO idea how it actually got on his head. I think he probably found it lurking behind some counter and the wait staff put it on his head for a laugh.

DN just LOVES being the centre of attention.

Oh dear.

Reunion Dinner
If we had to make new year resolutions for CNY, then I'd resolve to blog more frequently in the year of the ox. I'm so sorry for neglecting this blog for the past few weeks. I've just been inundated with school work! :(

Chinese New Year without all the guilty feasting, sea of red and cheenah songs in shopping centres is definitely not Chinese New Year. (Although I don't miss giving out ang pows, heh heh... or the spring cleaning!) It feels very flat, like Coke without the gas. You still try to get into the mood by wearing red and new clothes, but it's not the same. No bak kwa! No pineapple tarts! No kueh lapis! *SOB!* We did talk about baking some cookies, but that's as far as we got. Operative word being "talked" here. Hmm.

On CNY eve, we decided to have dinner at an Asian restaurant. We had Thai Tamarind Duck, Pad Thai, Gyoza, Beancurd with Seaweed and some stir-fried vegetables. It wasn't that fantastic but it helped us to get into the mood because there was a lion dance! DN was a bit too grumpy to appreciate the lion dance because he was tired of waiting. They only arrived at 9.20pm. We left right after the entire rigmarole and ended up leaving with the lion dance troupe.

I don't know why (must be the cold that impairs judgement!), but PF and I actually expected to see a lorry decked with luminescent flags waiting outside with drums and cymbols clashing. No lorry. Only a Mercedes M-class, a Mercedes C-class and a Chrysler Grand Voyager. Haha! Everyone (lion and all) crawled into the vehicles as PF and I laughed about how lion dancing in the UK can actually be quite profitable.

DN, erm, brandishing his cutlery proudly.

The Pad Thai that was way too sweet and NOT SPICY at all. We asked the kitchen to send some cut fresh chilli over but they tasted like capsicum. Bah. I felt so cheated! We ended up packing half of it back which we refried the next day with some garlic chilli paste.

The restaurant got a magician-cum-balloon artist to come in and entertain guests during dinner and DN got a koala!

The balloon is still with us. Only now the tree trunk is horribly limp and lumpy because DN twisted and twisted and twisted it and then proudly showed it to us and said, "Sausages!". LOL!