Tightening Grip on Casinos

Similar to Macau & other world renounced destinations with casinos, the local governments have attracted many foreign investments which in turn have created many jobs openings for their local residents & also higher growth in their tourism industries; Singapore is also following suit aiming to share a slice of that big pie.

Without doubt, countries revenues surely will rocket. Everyone welcomes the benefits generated in term of economic growth but definitely I am sure, many will foresee the vices it will also bring about. Gambling addictions, prostitutions, cheatings, thefts & bulgaries, kidnappings & embezzlement cases, just to name a few here.

I applaud the news that Macau, the former Portuguese enclave is considering rules, to be drafted in two to three months, that might impose limits on table numbers and raise age limits for casinos.

According to Macau state-run Chinese media and grass-roots organizations,breakneck expansion has fostered social ills from corruption to prostitution. Beijing, worried about addiction, periodically tries to limit the flow of its tourists. It had imposed rules last year limiting citizens travelling from Guangdong province to Macau to two trips a year.

While China has opened doors to the world, I am glad they are still mindful of the values they have so endeared & preserved.

So I hope while Singapore is pursuing her dream of becoming a world-class nation, must at the same time not forget how to balance her social & economic scale.

Cell Gathering on Anglican Diocese of Singapore Centenary

Praise the Lord! On 21 Sept 2009 we celebrated 100th years of God's goodness & glory at St Andrew's Cathedral.

It was a day of fun in the name of our loving God. Members came together to set up food & game stores. St James' Church set up a Dunking game store & also a food store selling fried tom yam beehoon, lots of cakes & cookies.

Annie Court's youngest sister & her husband have graciously invited our cell group members to their house for dinner on that day to celebrate Hari Raya Puasa. The spread of home cooked nasi bryani & spicy dishes accompanied with pickled vegetables were yummy. Hmmm... simply appetizing. The various homemade desserts were also heavenly... The durian cake, kaya kueh, kueh lapis, apple pies & open-faced pineapple tarts were 1st class. How I wish I can have such gift of culinary skill.

Online Trading

Lately, I have not been writing. Not that I have nothing to say. In fact, I have many things on my mind but just that I am quite reluctant to pen them before I am able to sort them out properly.

The recent volatility in the stock market has been something for me. It has kept me rather busy away from my blogging. Of course, the good thing is I am making money. The time I have spent to study the market, reading up more widely, keeping in touch with trading friends & monitoring my portfolio has been fruitful.

These days, online trading is becoming an in-thing. I guess it is due to the increase convenience of IT & that more people are either out of their jobs because of company restructurings or because they are able to make more income from trading than keeping a full-time day job & thus decide to give up their salaried job.

Anyway, the point I want to make here is if you choose to trade it will be advisable to adopt a trading strategy. You can pick it up either by attending a course or learn it online by yourself or read up from books. Never trade by merely following instinct or just because some people tell you to buy or sell a certain stock.

Remember, at the end of the day, you are investing your hard earned money or savings so you are the one solely responsible for your own decision. Whether be it a right or wrong decision.

Dried Shrimp & Olive Fried Rice

Want to be a little creative but do not want to spend too much time doing up a plate of yummy fried rice? Well, give this one a try. It's very simple!

Ingredients:

1. two eggs (beaten, add a tablespoon of water, a dash of white ground pepper & sprinkle of table salt )
   
2. three tablespoons of dried shrimps (waste & grind)
   
3. three tablespoons of preserved olive with oil
   
4. two gloves of garlic (chopped)
   
5. light soya sauce (one tablespoon or according to taste)
   
6. two tablespoon of cooking oil
   
7. four rice bowls of boiled white rice (preferably cooked & cooled a few hours before use)

Method:

1. Heat up frying pan before putting in cooking oil
2. When oil is heated, add chopped garlic for light browning
   
3. Lower heat, add in grinded dried shrimps & continue to stir fry till fragrant
   
4. Push ingredients to a side of the frying pan leaving just the oil in the centre
5. Increase heat & pour the beaten eggs into the oil & stir fry
6. Push back the ingredients from the side of the pan to mix with the eggs when cooked
7. Add boiled rice together with ingredients, increase heat & continue to stir fry for five minutes
8. Add light soya sauce while stir frying
   
9. Add preserved olive & oil and continue to stir fry for another five minutes
10. Scoop the fried rice into a plate & serve it hot

Highlights:

• Do not soak the dried shrimps because it will remove the sweetness of the shrimps.
• Adding a tablespoon of water to the beaten eggs will smoothen the texture of the eggs when cooked.
  
• If you like the grain of your fried rice to look shining & not broken looking, it is advisable to use OLD CROP grain instead of NEW CROP grain. The texture of the rice is harder when cooked if you choose to use old crop grain.
  
• Leaving the boiled rice to cool for a few hours before using it to fry will not give your fried rice the sticky or pasty look.
• For garnishing ideas, you can top it with some fresh chinese parsley & red stripes chilli, or with some stripe cucumber (without the seeds), I'll leave it to your preference.
  

Dinner Ideas

Do you dread hearing family members asking ... What's for dinner?

Quite sick of eating out sometimes but you have no idea what to prepare to let your loved ones tuck in to have an enjoyable time eating together?

This is one of my many impromptu dinner ideas I have to share with you. Besides, speed of preparation, nutritional value is not forgotten. Enjoy ...


A plate of fried rice of your choice. I only used dried shrimp, beaten eggs & preserved olive. (I will share with you the recipe in my next post)


Scoop a mouthful of fried rice onto a leaf of lettuce.


Wrap the lettuce with the fried rice inside into the shape of a cup & eat it as a mouthful each time.


Make a bowl of simple vegetable salad. To blend in the taste of my fried rice dish, I get the idea of my salad dish from one of the Korean vegetable salad recipes. (I will share with you my re-created Korean vegetable salad dish in another post)


Don't forget about fruits


Yummy chicken pies from Dino. Highly recommended.


If you are at Dino, must not give their Apple Crumbles a miss! That's their hot selling item.


My hubby & I ate lunch at Upper Thomson area this afternoon & since Dino was just opposite of where we were eating, so we decided to add the chicken pies & apple crumbles in our dinner menu. The additional items have made our dinner more fun.

Dining Out on a Stormy Evening

After our unsuccessful attempt shopping for a set of headphone for my boy's ipod touch, we decided to go for our dinner.

I started asking my children what they wish to have for dinner tonight. They had no suggestions. The only idea my boy gave was to have something piping hot & spicy. I asked them again. This time I said, "Rice? Noodle? Non-rice? Non-noodle?" They said, "Let's have rice & non-rice. But my boy added, " It must be spicy, ok" "So, what do all of you want???" We laughed.

We got into our car. Papa asked, "So, mummy, where are we heading now?" I thought for a little while & told him to drive along Beach Road. I remember there are many interesting eating places out there. My boy reminded his dad to drive slowly along Beach Road so that we could take the time to choose which restaurant we would like to stopped for.

Finding nothing we liked, so Pa made a left turn into one of the lanes, still nothing enticing, then he made another turn. Finally, we landed somewhere near Haji Lane. Looking for spicy food in that area surely will not be a problem. They always have many Muslim, India-Muslim, India & Turkish restaurants around there. We parked the car along the side of the lane & walked into Haji Lane. Before we could get into the next lane to start our search for a restaurant, we felt rain drops & more rain drops. Without a second thought, we agreed that we had to quickly get back into our car & go look for another place to eat. The moment we got into the car, rain poured. Gosh! we were fast. We laughed again.

So, we started driving somewhere again. The rain poured more heavily. The criteria then for our eating place must be somewhere with a sheltered carpark. It would be too wet even if we would to get out of our car with our umbrellas. We headed to the eastern side of the island & still could not settle for anything there. We passed by Mountbatten Road Food Centre. We knew there were many good stores we would like to patronize but the rain was too heavy for us to make it there. Still raining heavily, in fact more heavily. My boy said we must have been driving into the eye of the storm. He suggested we should drive away from that area. Papa suggested why not drive to The Swissotel the Stamford & eat at Kopi Tiam. "Yes! we all agreed. Why didn't we thought of it just now so we didn't have to drive away from that zone." We like their roti prata fried hokkien mee & beef hor fun.

We headed back to the central. True enough, the rain got lesser. But instead of heading straight to the second floor of the hotel, we passed by Market Place & detoured. Looked at my watch, it's 9pm & still walking around looking for somewhere that would stop us from searching on. Thai Express? Shimbashi Soba? Sapporo Ramen? Out of the Pan? The Soup Spoon? Ben & Jerry's? Finally, we stood at the entrance of Aerin's. The waiter was about to bring us to the seats & we apologized because we changed our mind. We knew that was not what we wanted although we always love the food there. We walked further & saw some people queueing outside Din Tai Fung 鼎泰丰 . Arh... that's the place & all finally agreed to settle for that restaurant. We would have rice & non-rice; and spicy food as well.

We ordered two clear soup chicken with noodle (non-rice)(recommended), one pork chop soup with noodle (non-rice), fried prawn pancake (non-rice)(recommended), 2 large trays of xiao long bao (non-rice)(recommended) & fried rice with prawns & eggs (rice)(recommended). Wanted to order the sour & spicy soup to complete one of the many items of request my boy listed for our dinner earlier but we found no more space in our stomachs. We laughed again.

While walking back to the carpark, my girl stopped us to buy her her favourite donuts at the Donut Factory. She picked her favourite Oreo, Double Chocolate & Hazelnut. My boy picked his Blueberry. Papa picked his Mocca.

We got into the car, tuned in the radio for our music, started talking again, drove on; still raining but raining lesser & lesser as we got nearer towards home. Along Holland Road, there was no sign of any rainfall at all. The stretch of road was dry, the signages along the road were dry & our carpark was dry.

Korean BBQ at Home

Nothing comes better than eating together as a family. Eating slowly & chit chatting about anything under the sun while enjoying our dinner. Steam boat & Korean bbq are two of our favourite dinner settings. In fact, both ways are good for me because everyone gets to cook by themselves. For this evening, the children choose to have the grill.

Cold Storage is just within walking distance from our home. My boy accompanied me there to pick up all the necessary ingredients such as sliced pork, porcini mushroom, Japanese fish cakes & difference types of lettuce & fruits. For this round, we shall skip the beef & instead have more sliced pork & mushroom. My girl likes lots of porcini mushroom. It is very meaty & is very good to be used for grills.

A Rewarding Shopping Day at Great Singapore Sale (GSS)

Last week, I dated both my children for a day of GSS shopping. With them growing so rapidly & seeing them always busy with their school works & friends, it is really not a easy task to find a day when both of them are free. Finally, a weekday was reserved & there we went on our shopping spree for the whole day.

It was a day well spent with them not just merely getting to buy the things we had wanted for ourselves. It was fun helping each other to make up our minds on the colour selections & many other final details before deciding on the purchases. In between our shopping, we stopped to rest our tired legs & to enjoy our coffee break at Toast Box.

There were so much to see & buy just along the stretch of shopping centres in Orchard Road alone. After a day of tired but happy shopping, the three of us landed ourselves for a good Chinese dinner at Crystal Jade in Ngee Ann City. Hmmm . . . the pan-fried black pepper beef cubes with wine, steam cod & their spinach with three types of eggs in superior stock were all very yummy. My boy highly recommended the dish of beef. The texture & fragrance was done just right to be accompanied with rice.

Too bad, their dad was too busy with his work & couldn't join us for dinner that evening. After dinner, we continued our last stop of shopping at Heeren before their dad came to fetch us home. After dropping off the children to go home with all our shopping stuffs, I accompanied their dad for his dinner. Just giving him my companionship was also a delight although I couldn't join him to eat.

New Cell Group Bonding

In the mist of our busy schedule, our cell members have found time during the start of June school holidays for relaxation & bonding at National Service Resort & Country Club . We had a bbq dinner on the last night of our stay. A sumptuous spread of food were prepared by various members of our group. We had satays, marinated stingrays, marinated pork chops, 2 types of marinated chicken wings (mustard, honey & herb and also teriyaki), beautiful mixed vegetables & fruits salads, chicken curry, sausages, cuttlefish balls, ice-creams, agar agar, fruits & wine.

So, as best said, let that picture speak a thousand words . . . . . .






More chefs at work. Hahaha ... Hurry, hurry, many are getting hungry.


Child labour? Why not? Under daddy's supervision is perfectly acceptable.




























Hey, who cooked it?


Byran, look here! you're on candid camera.


Thanks David, you've brightened our day! We love your shirt.






Tempting, right?'










"Two's a company, three's a crowd." Wrong, who said that? It should be "Two's a company, three's a party"


four's a celebration; and five's . . . .


Yum, yum, not bluffing you, the satay tastes reeeeal good ... hmmm ...







Want to know how we handle the leftovers? Oh well! losers eat them all. Poor Joel, must have gotten to eat most of them . . . .



Taking a break from eating.