Glass bird

This week's theme is glass. I wanted to find a glass with some pattern on it, but did not come across any. So here is another glass item.

As the sun sets

As the sun sets, the streetlamps are switched on.

This week's theme was sunset. A few weeks ago, I had already taken a photo of the east sky when the theme was "sky". This time, I went out of the house to grab a photo of the west sky. It looks better, I feel... or maybe it was due to the timing.

I actually wasn't so happy with that photo when I first snapped it. It was the first photo I took, without opening the gate. Then I decided to go outside the gate to get rid of the shadows caused by the house porch.

This is the result:

The tree is just a house away. The other shadows are from the mountains in the background. When I was snapping the photo, I was thinking of moving after the tree so that it wouldn't be in the photo blocking the background, but surprisingly its shadow turned out pretty well. Then I took a second, similar photo without the sunset setting on my camera (the first two photos were both with the sunset setting). Without the sunset setting, the colours become less glowing, even less than what we see with our eyes. (whereas with the sunset setting it glows even redder than what we see)

In any case, I am rather pleased with how all three photos turned out. I initially planned to use the second photo as the Photo Friday pic, but I suddenly noticed the streetlamp in the first photo (after transferring it to my computer), and the photo suddenly looked a lot better! What's more, the angle of the porch pillar makes it look like the sun is really glowing out from a corner.

An attempt at ramen eggs

So, I gave ramen eggs a try. Supposedly these eggs have a slightly runny yolk, and they are marinated in a (basically) soy sauce marinade in the fridge for 1-2 days.

I cooked the eggs on top of my rice in the rice cooker, like I have written about before. The eggs that I cook this way always have a rather tender yolk. This time, I took the eggs out once the rice was done (instead of leaving them there like I usually do), and plunged them into ice water. The result:

I think I nailed the runny egg yolks, but the eggs tasted like they weren't marinated at all. I think it was due to my using the sauce from my braised chicken. It contains cornstarch, so the sauce set into jelly after I put it into the fridge, and I think the marinade wasn't working any more after that. The tips I found online said that I could use "chashu" (braised pork belly, aka "char siew", I guess) sauce for it, which is why I used that. But maybe "chashu" sauce doesn't have starch in it...

Anyway, I put my egg into the hokkien mee that I had bought home. Unfortunately it wasn't ramen... :P

Morning cloud

Last Thursday, I woke up to see a puffy cloud in the sky, glowing in the morning sun.

Just felt it looked nice, so I quickly snapped a photo.

The Hokkaido loaf

Yesterday I tried out a new bread recipe, the highly acclaimed Hokkaido milk bread. This is the recipe I used; I chose it because it is meant for a bread machine. There is also a recipe for a wholemeal loaf, which is said to be so soft the bread can do yoga.

So could my bread do yoga? I suppose so... take a look:

The bread was really very soft, probably the softest I have ever made. But... it was a bit disappointing because it wasn't as fluffy as I expected. It was more holey (can you see that from the photo?), probably because of the addition of cake flour to the bread flour. I used yoghurt instead of whipping cream (the recipe said we could use yoghurt); I'm not sure how much that changed things, but somehow the loaf didn't have the lovely milk taste that I expected. It was just like white bread. And I didn't even substitute any of the ingredients... I even used both fresh milk and milk powder like the recipe asked for (I won't do that again! If I try it again I'll just use milk powder).

Another difference in the recipe is that it used the "sweet" cycle of the bread machine (my normal recipe used the "quick" cycle. It took 3 hours and 45 minutes versus the 2 hours of the "quick" cycle! Not really worth the extra time, if you look at the results. It was softer than my usual bread, but not by so much.

Now I'm not really sure whether I can get softer bread with the quick cycle just by substituting some ingredients in my normal bread with the ingredients from this Hokkaido loaf. Maybe I'll just try a substitution at a time.

Another thing is, the bottom of this loaf is clearly denser than the top. I really need to try baking my bread in a shallow pan in the oven... then maybe the bottom won't be so dense!

Till my next experiment...

Movement against the heat

I'm early for this week's Photo Friday! Because I doubt I'll be getting anything better, and even if I do, I'm definitely posting this one too.

The theme is movement.

I actually had this idea a little after the theme "motion" expired. But it was too late for this photo. When I saw this week's theme, I actually didn't think of this immediately either... it's been too long. But while trying to think of something, this idea came back to me. I'm glad it did!

(You do see what it is, right? The title would give a clue, I guess. But if you really don't get it... it's a ceiling fan!)

Glutinous rice flour adventures (Episode 3)

After the first two episodes, here comes one that is not about mochi cake! And it's probably the last episode, because I've finished up my glutinous rice flour.

I had just a bit of glutinous rice flour left (37g, to be exact), so I made QQ glutinous flour bread with it. There are a few blogs sharing the same recipe. The recipe called for 50g of glutinous flour and 250g of bread flour, so I put a little less flour to match with the amount of glutinous flour that I had. However I heavy-handedly tossd in an extra 20g of bread flour (oops). But the final ratio should not be too different...instead of 1/6th of glutinous flour (16.67%), I ended up with more like 15% of glutinous flour.

As for the results, I didn't find it that much different from normal bread. It was slightly more bouncy (QQ), I guess? But just slightly... I don't even know if I felt it was bouncy just because I expected it to be so.

By the way, I had heard of QQ balls in dessert before... but it wasn't until I found this recipe that I figured out that "QQ" meant "bouncy" (as in food texture) in Chinese. Haha...if you know Chinese then you'll be able to figure it out too.

P.S.: I didn't make this by hand; just put all the ingredients into my breadmaker as usual. The ingredients are pretty much the same anyway... except for some glutinous rice flour to replace normal bread flour.

Creamy shrimp pasta

I wanted to make my garlic herb prawns which I hadn't made for a long time, and needed something to go with it. So I made creamy chicken pasta without the chicken, then mixed it with my prawns, turning it into creamy shrimp pasta.

It turned out pretty good!

I feel that the garlic which was fried with the prawns give a good flavour to the pasta. I might make carbonara with this method next time, using milk and cheese instead of cream cheese and eggs. Not sure whether I should use garlic as well... it might alter the flavour of the carbonara, but maybe that would make it taste better?

Of heroes and cute things in cars

Last night at badminton, I asked one of the guys his name. He has been playing there for ages, stopped a while then started coming again, and I never knew his name. I doubt he knows mine either. When I asked him, he immediately replied "Hero!" while raising his hands up into the air. lol

You gotta give the guy points for spontaneity, if nothing else... (By the way, he did tell me his name after that.)

And today I saw a Pikachu smiling at me from a car.

I saw it on my way back from buying breakfast, and stopped to take this photo when I was coming back from badminton.

I want one too! I've seen this Pikachu pillow before in a gift shop...maybe I should have bought it. :P

Portrait

The theme for this week is portrait. Well, I have this portrait of Pikachu here.

Nothing else to say, huh?