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I was so bad with sleep last night, that my mother pushing me awake was unheard for the first forty minutes . Then, when the voice was audible, I took a leave from dream world, and sat up, to look at the clock. It was staring at me: eight twenty . Pretty late. No ways was I reaching my office by nine. Relax So, I pressed rewind, and went back to sleep again. Ten minutes of blissful sleep. On-demand, dream TV. So, here’s how the matter stood, now, I was not going to be a little late for today, I shall be totally late. The new revised time, I told myself, shall be 10:15 PST . Again, I allowed myself to take a deep breath. Relax. I texted my immediate boss, and left for a long, hot bath “I had a slight headache. I shall reach office by 10:15 am . -Arif Samoon” My immediate boss sympathised with my poor health. He said, take care of your health. You can avail your leave if you want. (Such a nice guy. He’s just a few years older than me.) Now, I am a man of principles. I have

Tonnes of stuff to share. A million things to do, and an unending mental checklist, with online a few ticks. Thinking, thinking, and dreaming. Time’s short Now’s the time to start the show. Time to show the world your magic. Tell them what you are made of (cadmium, mercury, arsenic). The lions been dreaming for way too long, but that does not make him any less Lion. The moment he flips on to his four feet, its Game Over! for all other kids. So, the story goes: Once upon a time, there was a young boy, who was always late. Once upon a time. He wanted to change. He wanted time to be under his control, yet, whatever he did was done well, but not on time. So, the story goes. I am late to office today. Ten-twenty a.m. reads the clock. Pretty late. Salute the telephone operator-cum- receptionist, cum lead advisor, “Assalam-u-alalikum”. Then, push my days lunch into the refrigerator. Good morning wishes to the office clerk. Fetch some water, and into the Engineers Hall. Junior! Who

Guess Kea and I are both back in grad school and have bread on the brain! Last spring I started a new masters program in Public Health that took up all my non-work time, thus the lack of postings on this blog. Having taken the summer off from school, I've been happily filling all my free time with seeing friends that I ignored, picking up knitting projects I'd set down, and using cooking equipment that had been gathering dust. One of my goals for this summer is to create a nice, healthy starter so that I can take that next step into breadmaking and tackle sourdoughs again. A few years ago I tried making a sourdough starter by following instructions from the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. The starter went through all the textbook phases and was fine, but I was never happy with the bread that I made with it. Looking back, I was still too new to breadmaking, terrified of making any small mistake, and probably set my expectations too high (for myself and my bread). That,

Greetings from London, everyone. I haven't posted here in almost a year. I don't know if any of you still check this site, but I figured I'd come and say hi to anyone who might be listening. I'm most of the way through my master's degree, exams and term papers are over, Boyfriend's been "kidnapped" for a family vacation, I've got the house to myself for a week, and for the first time in months I have free time on my hands. And I need an excuse not to start working on my dissertation right away. Since this is a food/craft blog, let me start by saying that bread in England is bland. Well of course bread is bland, you might say. It is bread. But the grocery store bread you get here does not even taste like bread. It tastes like...nothing. The white bread tastes like styrofoam. The brown bread tastes like cardboard. I gave up on grocery store bread and went to the local bakery. It was marginally better, but still tasted like a puffy matzo cracker. Co

Well, hello there. It's been a while. All the Bees have been busy. Kea and I are both back in school, while Lana has started a new job. It doesn't mean we haven't been cooking, knitting, sewing, and so on...we just haven't had time to blog it, which is a shame. I made some mean batches of sour cherry jam and blood orange marmalade this year for example...maybe I'll post about it later. After my finals. Yeah. If I do, Lana should post about her kiwi-lemon marmalade too. Anyways, I'm back now, and for a reason - I joined the scores of other cooks who dish it up every Friday on French Fridays with Dorie!! I had purchased the book -Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours- back in December to enjoy during our one-week staycation, after eying it longingly since before it was published (didn't think there was much point in buying another cookbook when I was working crazy hours and going to school). Since then I've

My boss is fond of telling me that I am an introvert, and it's true. I enjoy spending quality time with just a few people versus large groups, but because I also enjoy my "quiet time," it means that I am usually slow to make new friends. I am delighted to be able to say then, that I have two new friends - Liz and Kim - with whom to share my love for cooking and eating. It all started when Liz decided to pop in a DVD of Julie and Julia on a transatlantic flight. Liz hadn't been too enthusiastic about the movie but figured it would do for some mindless entertainment. Ironically, she loved it so much that as soon as Liz got off the plane she wasted no time and started a blog, cast an open call for partners, and picked out a cookbook. And so, that was how my DH and I found ourselves at Liz's house with her husband Tri, Kim (Liz's cousin), and Kim's BF on Sunday evening, faced with a mountain of red chili peppers, several pounds of ground sirloin, a packa

Yesterday was the perfect baking day. It started raining at 12am and didn't stop all night. By late morning, the rain had turned into big, wet snowflakes. It was cold and messy outside, so I stayed home and made a stew and dessert. The plan had been to start making candies for my holiday care packages, but it was too humid so it had to be cake instead. Well actually, a tart. An Austrian Linzertorte, to be exact. I love Linzertortes. I love to make them, because the results are a lot more impressive-looking than the actual effort - they are as beautiful as making a perfect lattice-top pie, but much quicker and easier. I love the way they taste, and I love that if I have any extra dough, I can make Linzer cookies with them. I could also do away with the entire tart and go straight for the cookies, which are just as gorgeous, and travel well in holiday cookie tins. I used this recipe from epicurious.com because it called for almond flour, which I had on hand. http://www

Last week was finals week so grocery shopping was kinda low on my priorities list until after I had handed in my papers and completed my Infectious Disease Epidemiology exam on Wednesday. Then it took me a day to recover my wits so I didn't even look at the recipe until 10pm on Thursday. As a result, I started this on Friday, but didn't bake it til Saturday. That still counts as a French Friday, non? Well, it's done, and here are the results. My mise en-place, taken before I went out back and clipped some rosemary from the garden. Yes, this is just a mix of oil and water. I was using Fermipan Instant Yeast, so that had already been added to the dry ingredients. Dough after ~5 minutes of mixing.  Dorie was not kidding. This was a really, really, really soft and sticky dough. I kneaded that thing for 10 minutes and it still looked pretty much like the photo. As she had said that it should pull away from the bowl but still be soft enough to pool at the bottom

   This week's French Friday recipe was Almond Flounder Meuniere, which Dorie described as an adaptation she made from the classic sole meuniere because flounder is easier for her to find at the market. I didn't feel too bad then with the decision I made when faced with a choice of sad-looking, pre-frozen, and badly thawed flounder versus plump, fresh tilapia at the fish counter today. Above is a photo of the finished product, served with a side of Spanish rice and green beans.   See what I mean by plump and fresh?    The almond-flour coating was a breeze to make. I threw all the ingredients into my immersion blender mini food processor attachment and was good to go with a few whirs. Brushing on the egg with a brush instead of dragging the fish through a container filled with egg saved both extra eggs and cleanup. We chose a deep-sided saute pan, which was helpful in reducing grease spatter The butter-browning process is like toasting nuts. It can go from no

This summer we put in two planter boxes at the end of our landing strip of a back yard and filled them with jalapeno plants, tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, basil, oregano, and green beans. This week the cucumbers have finally started to reach their full size. Vegetable planters at the end of our patio "runway" So what to do with a glut of cucumbers? The fork is there for scale. Please ignore the one on the far right that I obviously picked too early. It was the first one I picked and I was over-eager. That is, until I saw the two monsters in the middle. Dorie's tzatziki recipe came at exactly the right moment. We were going to have some friends over for dinner, and with our overabundance of basil, we came up with a "summer bounty" themed meal, with tzatziki and hummus for appetizers, a garlicky classic pesto as the main course, and an open-face fresh blueberry tart (from Rose Levy Berenbaum's incomparable recipe available here) with meyer lem

The last time I posted about making sour cherry jam was also the first time I'd ever made any jam. That was also the time I set the oven on fire due to an overabundance of caution regarding maintaining sterility of all my equipment. I've come a long way since then, thank goodness.   In the years since that first attempt, I have also acquired my dream piece of kitchen equipment - this beautiful, gleaming French copper jam pot, a.k.a. une bassine à confiture. Even its name is glorious. Just look at it! (Thanks Mei Yee and Kaka for my birthday gift!) It's so beautiful it merited a second close-up shot. :) Aside from being good looking, this pot really made the process a LOT quicker. This is due to two reasons. One, copper is a superior conductor compared to what you usually get in cooking pots (aluminum, steel). Second, the wide basin allows for quicker evaporation. These two features together mean that the jam was ready in about 1/3 l

So the hubs got a new job almost a year ago now, and his company headquarters is in Washington State - about as far away from Washington, D.C., as you can possibly get without crossing water or Canada. About twice a month is he flies out and leaves me and the cat to fend for ourselves. I could be sad about it, but that's not productive. Don't get me wrong, both the cat and I miss him. But he'll be back. And while he's gone we take advantage and eat stuff that he won't eat. Like thousand year eggs in congee. Or soft-boiled eggs and asparagus. Or braised duck tongue. Or sushi. You get the idea. I could eat this stuff while he's around too, but that would mean cooking two separate meals, and while I love to cook, I love my free time too. While he was gone this week then, with the FFwD recipe, my single girl meal treat was duck breast. I've always wanted to know how to cook duck breast but never got around to it, so I was happy to see this recipe come up. We a

' American photographer Berenice Abbott: "Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” To me, photography helps me remember little things from my past, long after I've forgotten everything. Allow me to share with you some of the images from my past, moments that could never be revisited. These images were captured during my trips abroad; Luxembourgh, India, Sudan, Australia. Some were made during the family's outings in Malaysia. All the images were captured using inexpensive cameras; either point-and-shoot ones or single-lens-reflex equipment. My point here is that decent images could be captured with cheap cameras but the more expensive ones, hi-tech equipment with great glasses or lenses offer room for manipulation. More importantly, good cameras combined with great glasses enable you to be creative. Such an equipment would enable you to make good exposures. Just what constitutes a g