Chinese New Year's Eve at Aberdeen Mall

Happy Chinese New Year!!! Hope the rabbit year brings you lots of wealth, happiness and success!!

I went to Aberdeen Mall cos a good friend was visiting. It was good to see this friend, as I don't see her as often as I should. I was sick but I'm guess hanging out with good friends improve health cos both times I saw her, I was quite sick but next day felt better. Now I understand that it's good for your health to keep good people by you!!!

Anyways, I thought I'd share some sights of Chinese New Year (CNY).

Here is are some pictures of the market. This stall was selling Lions. If I had a bigger house, I would buy to decorate my house, as I love lion dance.




Signs of good fortunes and lucky sayings to hang around the house.

Bread making

I'm so into making bread nowadays. I make it once every one or two weeks. I find it very relaxing and rewarding. As I said in a previous post, I don't buy bread anymore. Usually I have to freeze bread and take out as needed.

Bread
So here is my Chinese baked bread dough that I learned from Mrs. Chiu at VSB. She introduced me to bread flour and Chinese wheat flour. I had some red bean paste and made red bean paste flower bun and regular bread. This is a nice rich bread, as it uses milk, butter AND egg.

Test

So I just got BlogPress and thot to see if it works. For those who see this msg, it's only temp. I'll delete this as there is nthg here that I'm writing is of value, only testing.



This is quite easy to use.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Currently my most favourite baking book

I have a tendency to check out books when I'm shopping at Costco. The thing is, I don't really buy bestsellers because I usually read them and don't keep them since they're interesting to read but not worthwhile keeping. So usually, I'm checking and buying recipe books.

Well prior to my 2011 New Year's resolution, I bought a book called "The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book".

How to roll cinnamon rolls or sticky rolls

I was very impressed with this book as a fairly beginner baking recipe book. Most of the ingrediants are something that I can be easily purchased at Safeway or any local grocery store. It also gives fairly good instructions and has nice how to pictures.

Past bakings

So, I've decided to go through some pics and add them here. In this post, I'll be showing pics of past baking.

Fruit tart

So this is a French fruit tart. It was actually very good, though I'm still working on my pastry skills. It seems like my pastry is rather still and not as flakey as I would like it to be. However the custard was excellent. I will try to make it again but maybe a small one. I'm going to have to keep working on my pastry because I've made it a couple of times and they are hard. Any suggestions to make it flakey?

Cool!

FYI. There's an app for street food in Vancouver.

I love Arnott's Tim Tam

One of my favourite cookies is Arnott's Tim Tams. My parents got a couple packs while they went to a wedding in Australia. Apparently there are different flavours. Well they just gave me the regular one and man, was I happy.

Here's a picture of the package:

Like I tweeted, one cup of tea and one Tim Tam makes a perfect way to end the day.

Whoa! I'm pretty cool!!

Hahaha....while I'm trying to contemplate the easiest way to blog without having to plug in my camera to my computer to show my pics, I went to see how much money I made.....I made $0.87 for one click. I'm pretty happy since I haven't seriously blogged, only saying that I would seriously blog soon.

Well, then I decided to check out the traffic and found that 17 people from looked read this blog is from USA!!! That means it's not me who's reading my own blog, it's other people. Woo hoo. I'm quite proud of my lack of doing anything but still having people looking.

I guess when I overcome my laziness (which I found out is a family trait), I will plug in my camera to do some serious blogging. Until then....hopefully my text interest you enough!

Blogging by phone

Well, I can blog by phone which us great cos I take a lot of pics with my phone for Facebook so now I can regularly blog.

I made this cornbread this evening. It was a special request. I used a new recipe and new cornmeal. It asked for whole wheat pastry flour. Of course I didnt use it!! Number 1, whole wheat pastry flour is hard to gind and 2) what am I going to use the rest? It's rare i hear a need for whole wheat pastry flour. Besides, I already have four types of flour at home right now.

I didn't really like this recipe so I won't be making it again.

Back to blogging...how can I load a pic that's in my phone.

It's 2011

Wow! I stopped blogging 1 year ago. Why you ask? Well, that's when I got my iPhone and used my iPhone more than my laptop. I keep saying that I'm going to write more but I guess my biggest thing is commitment and effort. I do find that downloading pics to be time consuming but a blog without pics isn't very interesting and no one really wants to read it, right?

So, here's my 2011 plan. I'm going to try to blog more often. It will be random blogs, nothing specific but just what's on the mind of this Parasite. I guess what's on this Parasite's mind most time is baking and traveling, so I hope it'll be blogs on that. It's won't be about my stress or work or anything serious like that!

BUT THAT'S NOT MY 2011 RESOLUTION PLAN!!! My New Year resolution plan is to not, I repeat NOT, buy another recipe book until I try all the recipes in a book I currently own. Each book I complete, I will get to buy a new book. What this means, my fellow followers, is you get to see what I cook and my thoughts on the food and recipe.

So here's to 2011 and here's to my 2011 plans. Let's hope I can finally keep it and it won't be another year before I blog again!

Ciao,

Parasite