What IS kari kurma?

I was cooking with a packet of Alagappa's kurma curry powder at lunchtime.

On the packet the ingredients are written:
Ramuan:
Rempah, jintan putih, jintan manis, lada, kayu manis, bunga lawang, buah pelaga

But in English, "rempah" is "coriander". Huh?
("lada" is translated as pepper)

Okay, never mind.

But in the instructions...the three last ingredients are in the "ingredients" too! (I mean the ingredients you need to cook the dish, besides the packet of curry powder) What's more, there's a whole list of other ingredients "to grind" (untuk ditumbuk), and also more stuff (there's a list, then another list for "mixture A (to grind)", then another list for "mixture B (whole)") I don't understand this...then the whole point of this curry powder is to be able to cook the dish without using jintan putih and jintan manis??

But if I wanted to go and look for all those ingredients, I might as well look for jintan putih and jintan manis at the same time...

Another thing that puzzles me is...why is there no "kari" and no "kurma" in the ingredients of the packet...nor in the ingredients "to add"? Then why is it called "kari kurma"?

Please enlighten me....

PS: I only used the packet and added milk. No other spices. The dish was okay, I guess. Though I had to use the whole packet for half the amount of chicken stated in the recipe...probably because I didn't add spices. What on earth...?!

I am perplexed.

Exceptional candy from Poland

I just ate the most wonderful caramel candy. You see, last weekend at the fêtes consulaires, I took a candy from Poland's booth. Someone told me it was a caramel candy. I just took one, not expecting anything special...but since it was quite big (about 3×1×1 cm³), I decided not to eat it right away, but leave it for a time when I wouldn't be rushed to finish it. You know what caramel candies are like...they last!

So today I finally tried it. And not only could I bite it into two (instead of popping the whole big thing into my mouth), it wasn't even sticky! It was a type of "falling apart" candy with a slightly liquid caramel filling. Oh, yummy...

I searched online to see whether this was some Polish speciality, and apparently it is...on a forum I found a pretty good description if it:

My husband works with a woman from Poland who goes back there occasionally. Whenever she goes, she brings back the MOST AMAZING caramel candies. Instead of being hard to chew and sticking to the teeth, they are a little grainy and dissolve in the mouth. They are SO FABULOUS. She gave us a few the other day and now I'm on the hunt for them over here in the U.S. I saved the wrappers (Wytwornia Cukierkow "Ciagutka Mleczna" and Gopland "Krowki") and have been searching on Google for retailers over here.

Someone let me know where I can find it...

(And since it isn't like "normal" caramel candies, it did not last...and it's finished too soon! :/ )

Edit: Seems that they are called krowki, which translates as little cows...and I even found a recipe:

Krowki (Little Cows)

1 1/4 cups plus 1 teaspoon milk
4 cups sugar
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 1/2 sticks (12 tablespoons) butter
6 tablespoons powdered milk

Cook the milk, sugar and condensed milk over very low heat for 1 hour. Remove from heat. Add the butter and powdered milk and mix well. Lay out on a cooking sheet at a thickess of 1/2 inch. Cut into squares, let cool and harden and roll into papers, if you want.

Note: Krowki is similar to a soft praline, use directions for pralines to get to the right cooking stage.

Hmm...don't know whether it'll work if I try it...

About tall guys...again

Really, being short really has its disadvantages sometimes. Today it happened again...while going downstairs for lunch and while going back upstairs after lunch, I bumped each time into someone from the lab. While going down, it was fine...but while going up, this guy came down, I saw someone but didn't see who he was (that would have necessitated lifting up my head...at an angle well above the horizontal plane, shall we say?) And he said "bonjour".

And I looked up and saw that it was one of the guys I had worked with. Whew, at least there wasn't much hesitation on my part.

This can get pretty embarrassing sometimes. I should get myself a type of rear-view mirror...except that it should be a "high-view" mirror. Hmm...do you think there'll be demand for it on the market? Should I patent it? lol

(Again, I shall make the link later. This time I'm sure it exists. lol)

Sale!

It says:

Sale
Hand-made oriental carpets
Buy 1 get 3 free

Wanna buy?

And check this out:


The Part Dieu commercial centre in Lyon just got connected to the newly built Oxygen Tower (Tour Oxygène). In the passage (not really a passage, just a shop lot that got scraped to make way to the new tower) between the two, they put up video-projectors to project moving images onto the floor. Some of them look really nice, like water bubbles, or some fish swimming in water, making the projected rectangle look like there really was a pond there. (until the floor got dirty -_- )

But I guess things can go wrong sometimes! :P

(Psst...I didn't notice that I also caught the shadow of my hand holding the phone to take the photo...)

Everything's gonna be A-OK

After eight weeks!!

Have a cup of JAVA

I used a Matlab function called gridfit that I found online (Matlab file sharing). I just modified my program to use the 'tilesize' argument, which is supposed to speed up lengthy calculations, and guess what? Gridfit gave me a pop-up message that said "Relax and have a cup of JAVA. Its my treat."


I love programmers who have a sense of humour. :D Remember "sanity checks"? :P

(I'll link the "sanity checks" article later...when I remember!)

Edit: Oops...I just realized that I didn't post "sanity checks". -_- It was in one of my saved items...

Anyway, here's the story: In a program I was going through, there was a block of code that was commented as

// sanity checks

That's where they perform all the checks necessary to make sure that the user didn't give any bad inputs that will "kill" the program! lol

You call that a weekend?

On Monday, when I woke up I felt awfully tired. Like I hadn't had a weekend to rest. Which is kinda true, actually...since my weekend was packed with activities.

On Saturday I went to Paris (and came back to Lyon the same day) for the graduation ceremony organised by MASAF. We got a sijil penghargaan from JPA (and MASAF. Or is it MASAF and JPA?)

The grad ceremony was organised on a boat that cruised along the Seine...though I don't quite get the idea of renting a boat. (they rented it and decorated it, prepared Malaysian food, etc) I mean, why not a hall? It isn't even the first time they're organising it, and they already mentioned that they were looking for some other location (than a boat)...is it so hard to find a multipurpose hall in Paris? (this is not a rhetorical question, I am wondering) Or maybe Paris is so packed that the only place left is on (or in :P ) the river...

Then on Sunday I went to the fêtes consulaires (consular festival?) in Lyon...it's an event with different embassies setting up stands to promote their countries. (It was on Saturday and Sunday, but I couldn't go on Saturday since I was in Paris...) I met a bunch of Malaysians, some who came from Paris for Tourism Malaysia, and some living in Lyon. I spent the whole afternoon there...first going around to see all the booths, and the rest of the time at the Malaysian booth, explaining a hundred times the kuih ketayap that they prepared :P (I didn't even know that was called kuih ketayap...) The kuih was very popular...though a lot of people asked whether it was pâte d'amandes (marzipan) I guess it did look like marzipan... There was muruku right beside the kuih, but somehow most people didn't even look at it... Erm, maybe it doesn't look so much like food? lol

Oh well, I guess when I start writing, I can't stop? I wanted to write this post before today, but somehow left it till it was "bumped" by the previous post of more recent events :P

By the way, there will be photos of the grad ceremony...though as usual, it'll have to wait till my friends send me theirs! (I don't have much...practically none, actually!)

News rojak

Hmm. I have a few things to write about. I guess I'll squash them all into the same post, making a day's events one big happy family :P

First off: My kitchen's alive again! After seven weeks of being unable to cook (for the simple reason that I don't want to leave stacks of dirty dishes lying in the sink), I have started again... I'm still a bit limited to not-so-complicated stuff...and I have to wear a glove when I wash the dishes, but hey, it's better than not daring to squeeze your hand into a glove (more about that later on)

So today, I made a simple salted egg porridge. The porridge in itself wasn't that special...but I thought I'd share a photo of a (my!) raw salted egg cracked open.

I think that mine wasn't salted long enough...or else the yolk would be completely firm.

The last time I used salted egg in a porridge, it was leftover cooked salted egg. I was going to do the same thing, but then my lazy side said, "Hey, why boil the egg and cook the porridge separately? Just do both together!" :P

Second news item: A fellow intern at the lab asked me today, "You're working here, aren't you? You're not a student!"

Huh?? Maybe it's because I don't play games on the computer or online when I'm at work (not often, at any rate) But hey, I've got my spam to entertain me :P

Oh yeah, I went to buy gloves especially for the occasion (above, top of the post), so that I can start washing dishes (and therefore cook) and washing clothes by hand again. Instead of lamenting my incapacity every day and waiting impatiently for the bandage to come off. (though I am waiting impatiently -_- )

Third: I found out thanks to Chang Yang that if you type "world cup" into a Google search now, at the bottom of the page you will find Gooooooooooal! instead of the usual Goooooooooogle.
(I think I'm crazy. Why on earth did I go to the trouble of colouring those words?)
(You'd better appreciate the aesthetic value. lol )

Here's a screenshot, for posterity's sake:

What can come from your ears?

They say it can come from your ears
it can also generate fear
some people love to do it
indirectly some chew it
it’s not welcome in a house
it’s quiet as a mouse
What, pray tell, can it be?

Answer below.
















ANSWER: Smoke

Now that's what I call spam

Not long ago (last weekend, actually) were the MASAF elections. And a week before that was nomination (self-nomination) time. Which gave MASAF a good excuse to send us a whole lot of e-mails.

Here's how my inbox looked like after the election:


But you know what? There is no way INSA's going to lose to some petty student's association :P

This morning I got to work and opened my INSA e-mail.


THIRTY-ONE e-mails...compared to the measly fourteen from MASAF.

You got walloped, MASAF. lol

Okay, more seriously. Some of the MASAF spam was really useless. As for the INSA one, from my coursemates...it was even more useless. But we kinda signed up for it. Helps while some time away at work... :P

* MASAF = Malaysian Students' Association in France