Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Main masak masak pt2

Ayam pongteh. Chicken in preserved soybean paste (?) with potatoes and mushrooms.


Spare ribs in tauchew and preserved salted plum. Got this recipe from mom but she used preserved sour plum. Yes, I bought the wrong preserved plum. But it still tastes delicious (hubby can vouch for that). Plus the addition of kaffir lime leaves give this dish a distinct aroma. A good replacement for the spare ribs would be indian mackerel (ikan kembong).

Mixed veggie. Another mixed veggie combination consisting of broccoli, carrots and prawns.

Two-beans cili belacan. The beans used here are ladies' fingers and french beans.

Ayam buah keras. Candlenut chicken. Got this recipe from Karen. Yummy yumm yumm.

Fish in tom yum soup

Another one of my self-modified recipe. The original recipe 'fish in tamarind soup' was taken from an issue of the malaysian women's weekly magazine. When I first tried this recipe, I thought to myself that it tasted a little like tomyum, minus the spiciness and the aroma of kaffir lime leaves. That gave me an idea.

2-4 slices spanish mackerel *ikan tenggiri*
1 Tbsp tamarind pulp paste *assam jawa*
2 tomatoes (cut into wedges)
2 stalks lemongrass *serai* (crushed and use only the white parts)
kaffir lime leaves *daun limau purut*
some bird's eye cili *cili padi* (depending on how spicy you want it)
1 Knorr tomyum cube
salt and sugar to taste


1. In a pot, mix the tamarind pulp paste with a large bowl of water and drop in the Knorr tomyum cube. Bring to a boil.
2. Add the tomatoes, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves and cili padi, and cook over medium fire for 2-3 minutes.
3. Put in the fish and continue cooking for another 5 minutes.
4. Season with salt and sugar according to taste.
5. This sour-spicy blend of soup is ready to be served. A good dish to whet your appetite.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Curried sambal chicken

Decided to 'concoct' my own recipe, hence this curried sambal chicken dish (or is it curried chicken sambal?). Decided to document the recipe here in case my memory fails me later. So here it goes.


~ 5 chicken drumsticks (chop into half) - marinate overnight with light soy sauce and curry powder
~ 2 heaped Tbsp sambal paste
~ 1 Tbsp coriander powder (mix with 1/2-1 glass of water)
~ 1/2-1 big onion
~ 2 tamarind slices
~ kaffir lime leaves

~ sugar and salt to taste

1. Heat oil in pan. Put in the paste and kaffir lime leaves. Fry fry fry till fragrant.
2. Add in the marinated chicken. Continue frying and stirring till chicken are well-coated with the paste.
3. Pour in the coriander powder mix. Add in the tamarind slices. Simmer till the chicken is cooked.
4. Throw in the onions when it's almost done. Add sugar and salt according to taste.
5. Enjoy!

Sunday, March 21, 2010

The decade's top twenty

The 20 best books of the decade
by Michael Prodger (published: 5:31pm GMT, 21 Jan 2010) telegraph.co.uk


Dreams from My Father by Barrack Obama

CANONGATE, 2007
When the enterprising publisher bought this memoir, President Obama was merely Senator Obama and there were few indications of what was to come. In recounting the story of his upbringing, Obama shows that his “Yes we can” mantra was not merely an aspirational soundbite but based firmly on his own experiences as a mixed-race American. The book was a key part of his mission statement about decency and optimism and helped to win him the goodwill of much of the world. As well as defining a moment in time, it also proved that Obama can write as winningly as he talks. Would it sell as well a year into his presidency?
"hubby has this book. it was actually a gift from Arvind "

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
FOURTH ESTATE, 2001
A big book in size, theme and ambitions, The Corrections put Jonathan Franzen in the vanguard of America’s bright young novelists. A simple core – a mother’s attempts to reunite her disparate children for a family Christmas – burgeons into a story about the complexities wrought on the American dream by pharmaceuticals, sexuality and shyster capitalism. Through the Lambert family Franzen conjures up a modern Everyman with ordinary lives teetering on the edge of bathos, tragedy or triumph. Proof that the Great American Novel (see Philip Roth, above right) is still worth aiming for.
"this book is collecting dust on my shelf. will read it when i'm back (as with all the other books!)."


Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
VIRAGO, 2002
A Dickensian story with a pink twist. With all the elements of a penny dreadful – orphans, double-crossing, madness and pornography – this Victorian tale could have sunk to the level of picaresque pastiche, but while much ink has been spilled on Waters’s lesbian characters it is her ability to summon up the past in palpable, brooding detail that is her most striking characteristic. This is a novel that seems easy to categorise but doesn’t fit into any obvious genre.
"the storyline seems interesting."

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale
BLOOMSBURY, 2008
A high-end piece of true crime writing, The Suspicions encompasses far more than just the story of a murder. Mr Whicher was a celebrated Victorian detective, and the crime that got his senses twitching was the vicious and motiveless slaughter of a young child in a quiet Wiltshire village in 1860. The case itself induced both moral panic and universal fascination in the country at large. Kate Summerscale’s investigation unravels not just the details of the murder and its investigation but also the birth of the modern detective and the influence of the proceedings on writers such as Wilkie Collins and Dickens. This is documentary writing of rare quality and intelligence.
"no comment."

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
HAMISH HAMILTON, 2000
White Teeth put multiculturalism on the literary map and made it fashionable to boot. Smith’s tale of three North London families – white, Indian and mixed – didn’t just show a slice of modern life but did it with wit and panache. The book is full of big themes, too, not least race, gender and class, but the potential for hectoring is deftly avoided, the messages being more subtly conveyed through vivid characters and sharp dialogue.
"i have this but as usual have yet to read."

The Human Stain by Philip Roth
JONATHAN CAPE, 2000
The first major book of the decade is a true Great American Novel. The Human Stain was the culmination of an extraordinary period of fecundity in Philip Roth’s long career. At 65, an age at which many novelists have said their piece, he started American Pastoral, the first part of a trilogy (with I Married a Communist and concluding with The Human Stain) that examines just how far the politics, social changes and political correctness of post-war America have eroded the promised land of his youth. The books – and in particular this last volume – powered by Roth’s autograph mixture of rage, sex and moral indignation, amount to one of the great achievements of American letters.
The Human Stain is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego, and deals with both racial and sexual politics and how they lay low Coleman Silk, a professor of classics at a Massachusetts college. First a piece of casual slang leads to him being forced from his job and then he starts an affair with one of the college janitors nearly 40 years his junior. And at the centre of the book is a plot twist that turns everything on its head.
The film version of The Human Stain, starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, is not to be recommended. The book cannot be recommended highly enough.
"we managed to catch this on the big screen but strangely enough hubby doesn't remember watching it. i thought it was a good show. so naturally the book would be better?"

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
JONATHAN CAPE, 2003
While the French may be besotted with them, graphic novels – apart from those by cult practitioners such as Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco – have never had much credibility on these shores. Marjane Satrapi’s two-part memoir changed that. In simple, bold, black-and-white drawings she tells the story of her childhood as the daughter of two well-meaning Marxists in revolutionary Iran. Through her six-year-old eyes and later as a student she recounts the experience of both the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq and she does so with both seriousness and charm. Like Khaled Hosseini, Satrapi shows a country by which the West is transfixed from an unusual angle. It was the combination of this powerful background, the striking graphics and a touching innocence that stopped Persepolis from being mawkish and made it into affecting personalised history.
"there's a movie/animation on this one too."

The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
FABER, 2001
This was Peter Carey’s second Man Booker winner (his first was Oscar and Lucinda in 1988) and is a retelling of one of Australia’s great foundation myths. The story takes the form of a journal written by Ned Kelly to his as-yet-unborn daughter, and describes the hard scrabble outback life and frequent conflicts with authority that turned him from a mere larrikin of Irish stock into the Robin Hood of the Antipodes. The novel’s power comes from its unromanticised portrayal of Australia and the plausibly rough and flawed figure of Kelly himself. Most notable though is Carey’s employment of a distinctive vernacular prose style (based on the one surviving letter written by Kelly himself) that uses only rudimentary grammar and no commas. While it makes the book a frequently uncomfortable story to read, it does gives it a memorable and appropriate grittiness.
"seems interesting and I think hubby would like it too."

Atonement by Ian McEwan
JOHNATHAN CAPE, 2001
The book that catapulted Ian McEwan out of his high-literary sphere to a new level of general acclaim. A seemingly straightforward tale of cross-class love and blundering miscomprehension in pre- and wartime Britain turns out to be not a piece of engaging and immaculate pastiche but a story about writing. It is a trick that could undermine the novel but McEwan’s brilliance with set-pieces – a sweltering country-house summer, carnage at Dunkirk, an hermetic love affair – wrap the reader so tightly in the story that the tricksiness comes as revelation rather than irritation, and the fact that McEwan has proved to be a manipulator of the highest order is forgiven. He may have won the Booker with Amsterdam but this is a better book by far.
"a good movie but i think the book will be better."

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
PICADOR, 2005
The Laconic McCarthy, the icon of Southern gothic, is frequently likened to William Faulkner and hailed as one of the great contemporary American novelists. Public recognition, however, did not arrive until the early 1990s with All the Pretty Horses. No Country for Old Men (the title comes from Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium) keeps the Western setting of his early books but the story is set in the modern age. The plot involves a drugs deal gone wrong, a man who finds a case full of dollars, a hitman and a sheriff, and mixes violence with pared down descriptions of the sun-blasted American-Mexican border. At heart a simple thriller, the menace is made tangible through the person of the icily deranged hitman, Anton Chigurh.
"no comment."

Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
PROFILE, 2003
A book about commas and semicolons made perhaps the most unlikely best-seller of the decade. With this manual of grammar, Lynne Truss, formerly a droll journalist, emerged as the champion of proper punctuation and thus gladdened the hearts of the millions who bemoan the slackness apparent in contemporary English usage and the negative effects of email and text-speak. Their reason for gratitude was two-fold: through its anecdotes and gentle humour it laid out the case for punctuation, but it also saved purists from the charge of pedantry.
"sounds interesting."

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
CANONGATE, 2002
The previously unknown Canadian’s whimsical yarn was the unexpected Man Booker winner in 2002. The story of a young boy shipwrecked on a lifeboat for 227 days with only animals – in particular a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker – for company, combined elements of fairy tale, fable and allegory. While the imagination on display is unarguable what it all adds up to is less clear – and for many beside the point. Allegations of plagiarism from a Brazilian novelist did little to dampen the book’s popular success.
"heard about this one since ages ago but have yet to pick it up."

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
BANTAM PRESS, 2006
The book that turned Prof Dawkins from respected genetic biologist into the God-worrier in chief. His contention that creation has nothing to do with God and everything to do with evolution has made him the rallying point and spokesman for atheists who can be as noisy in their proselytism as their religious opponents. “There’s probably no God,” he curiously claims, but this book definitely made militant atheism a pressing public topic.
"no comment."

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
FABER, 2005

A collection of both new and previously unpublished pieces, this book amounts to the quintessential Bennett. It is at its most affecting when describing his family, notably his parents’ marriage and a strain of mental illness that was never discussed at home. It also includes revealing pieces about his own sexuality and private life. These are leavened by diary entries and accounts of childhood trips and adult musings all related with the gentle humour that he has made such an effective tool for wrapping around emotion. The words on the page are like hearing Bennett read them to you.
"no comment."

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
LITTLE, BROWN, 2000
Gladwell is the corkscrew-haired Canadian who has forged a new genre out of studying the little-regarded consequences of various sociological phenomena, from teen smoking to fads for certain types of footwear. The tipping point of his title is the “levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” and the book itself is an examination of what establishes those levels. This left-field thinking has made Gladwell the Edward de Bono de nos jours, though some might argue that the granting of a $1.5 million advance was the book’s own tipping point for success.
"no comment."

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
DOUBLEDAY, 2003
Bill Bryson used to be the cuddly American whose love of Britain endeared us both to him and to our own country. This book used that popularity to striking effect. The perfect primer for an increasing non-specialist age, it explains in layman’s terms some of the big subjects and personalities of science. Bryson has been admirably candid about his motivation: he knew little about science himself and his teachers had failed to excite him in the subject. His broad-sweep survey, taking in everything from the Big Bang to evolution and from Isaac Newton to earthquakes, is a noble attempt to fill a black hole in the school curriculum.
"have this one too."

Austerlitz by WG Sebald
HAMISH HAMILTON, 2001
The son of a committed Nazi, Sebald moved to England in 1970. His life was cut short by his death in a car crash aged 57, but by then he had already established a new and deeply personal style of writing that is concerned largely with the theme of memory and in particular his struggle to understand the history of Germany and the Second World War. His favoured format was a mixture of fiction and fact interspersed with evocative photography. The career of Jacques Austerlitz, the eponymous hero, encompasses many elements of Sebald’s own history, and his travels tell not just the story of the Holocaust but of the lost world of old Europe.
"no comment."

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
FABER, 2005
The novel that should have won the Man Booker Prize in 2005, Never Let Me Go is nominally a science-fiction story. It describes the childhoods of a group of young people cloned, although they are not fully aware of it, to provide donor organs. A writer who shuns the overblown, Ishiguro’s gradual building up of the full import of their fate is hauntingly done. A masterpiece of incremental detail that becomes poignant as well as horrific, the novel includes elements of both boarding-school stories and superior sci-fi such as John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. Ishiguro’s habitual feeling for ill-defined menace is used here to powerful effect.
"sounds interesting but I wonder if it'll be too sci-fi-ish. if it is then i'll just give it a pass. can't stand too much of sci-fi reading!"

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
BLOOMSBURY, 2007
The Kite Runner has sold some 12 million copies, and Hosseini’s follow-up is another lush and unashamedly emotive tale of hardship and the Taliban. This story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, has been hailed as an insight into the reality of Afghanistan. The plot itself is an old-fashioned heartstring-plucker and the writing is often hackneyed but the context gives the novel the appearance of capturing historical reality.
"would love to read this."

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
LITTLE, BROWN, 2002
Susie Salmon is a most unusual narrator – she has been raped, murdered, dismembered and is now in heaven looking down on the family she left behind and the man who killed her. Perhaps the reason for the novel’s success is that it is not a tale of retribution but rather an unusual coming-of-age story. Susie may be dead but she continues to grow up, using the living as the markers in her own development. Some critics, however, refused to be beguiled, criticising Susie’s God-free heaven. Alice Sebold based the story on elements from her own past – she was raped as a university student.
"a recent surprised gift fr hubby. yet to read though."

Saturday, March 20, 2010

St Paddy?

One wished for Saint Patrick's Day to last for two days. Some couldn't wait for the 'celebration' and others were on a high. The best part is that these are Msians. Why the excitement? We do not enjoy a public holiday. Is it the exhilaration of drinking and partying with fellow happening people? (And possibly with green costumes?) But do they really know the meaning behind all this 'partying'?


*Saint Patrick's Day is actually a catholic holiday to commemorate the death of Saint Patrick on the 17th March 461. According to the Irish folklore, he uses the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to the Irish people. (Now, the shamrock is actually a three-leafed old white clover. Please do not confuse it with the four-leaf clover, used as a symbol of good luck.) That certainly does not sound like our country.

I wasn't really 'aware' of St Patrick's day until we were in London last year (coincidentally on SPD). It was a public holiday there and we saw people in green and in costume everywhere. The atmosphere was even merrier at night.
I think it's silly if you are ignorant of the day but use it as another excuse for clubbing and partying and drinking all night long. Grow up.

*with reference from wiki

Friday, March 19, 2010

Main masak-masak

Sambal ikan bilis. Anchovies in sambal paste (?). My first attempt (after much bugging from hubby). I must say it was not bad, thanks to the cili boh from the neighbour and mom's instruction. I wonder why I didn't try this earlier. And hubby wonders too!

Six-treasure fried rice. The 'treasures' are prawns, duck liver lap cheong, raisins, baby corns, carrots and snow peas. I would say this is my best fried rice yet.. SELF-PRAISE!!

Ayam sioh. Braised chicken in tamarind juice and coriander powder (?). Sounds complicated but it is actually quite easy. Now, the trick is to get the same taste as mom's. Almost there..

Betik masak titek. Spicy papaya soup. This soup is full of spicy-oomph! Not for the faint-hearted but of course you can control the spiciness with the amount of pepper used. Salted fish will give that extra flavour. Sambal belacan is a nice accompaniment. This is a peranakan dish but I have yet to find it in any of the nyonya restaurants. One of my favourite dishes ever especially when mom cooks it.

Ayam masak merah. Chicken in red sauce (? - haha). My first attempt at this online recipe.

Mixed vegetables with carrots, snow peas and fresh scallops.

Vegetable curry. Used 'fish curry paste' as the base. Not bad at all.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Must read novels?

These are the '100 novels everyone should read' as recommended by the Telegraph.co.uk (published: 7:00am GMT 16 Jan 2009). Loads of classics, and I guess this is just one of the many other lists out there.

*my colour code: have it, have it but yet to read, would love to read it


100. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein (ehem, only the first book!)
99. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
97. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
96. One Thousand and One Nights Anon
95. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
94. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (and not Satanic Verses?)

93. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
92. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
91. The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
90. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
89. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
88. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
87. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
86. Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
85. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
84. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
83. Germinal by Emile Zola
82. The Stranger by Albert Camus
81. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
80. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
79. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
78. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
77. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
76. The Trial by Franz Kafka
75. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
74. Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
73. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
72. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
71. The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
70. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
69. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
68. Crash by JG Ballard
67. A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
66. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65. Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
64. The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
63. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
62. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
61. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
60. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
59. London Fields by Martin Amis
58. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
57. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
56. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
55. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
54. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
52. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
51. Underworld by Don DeLillo
50. Beloved by Toni Morrison
49. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
48. Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
47. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
46. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
45. The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
44. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
43. The Rabbit books by John Updike
42. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
40. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
39. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
37. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
36. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
35. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
34. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
33. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
31. Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
30.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
29. Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
28. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
27. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
25. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
24. Ulysses by James Joyce
23. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
22. A Passage to India by EM Forster
21.
1984 by George Orwell
20. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
19. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
18. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
17. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
16. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
15. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
12. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
11. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
9. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8. Disgrace by JM Coetzee
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
3.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Monday, March 15, 2010

My book wishlist

Here is a selection of books that are currently on my wishlist (besides the said Antonia Fraser books - refer to the previous post Fraser, Antonia).

I am a fan of Mary Roach. Love the way she writes - witty, peppered with a mild sarcasm. I already have two of her books 'Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers' (bought it from Times @BSC) and 'Spook: science tackles the afterlife' (from a bookstore in Spore). So the following two books will complete my Mary Roach collection.

'Bonk: the curious coupling of sex and science'

'Six feet over: adventures in the afterlife'

Then there's Paul Theroux's 'Kowloon Tong'

I have yet to read a 'proper' version of 'The Three Musketeers' so when I stumbled upon this penguin deluxe edition, I know I got to have it!

The ultimate snacking indulgence

I'm no fan of snacks and junk food but I have a particular weakness for this one. I could just go on and on. And anything that tastes this yummy (and addictive) definitely couldn't be healthy!

Fraser, Antonia

My interest in the tudors started when I read 'The Other Boleyn Girl', and I got even more fascinated after reading 'The Boleyn Inheritance'. That led me to watch 'The Tudors'. I managed to catch the first two seasons, and will find time (soon, hopefully) to watch the third season. And after much googling, wiki-ing and amazoning, I came across Antonia Fraser (and I thought only Philippa Gregory could make history interesting!). She is the author of 'Marie Antoinette: The Journey', in which Sofia Coppola's movie was based on (watched it for thirty minutes earlier before hubby claimed the tv for football).


I should have bought it earlier when I first saw it in the bookstores. This particular edition is now difficult to get and can be quite costly.


Second best would be this edition..


I would also love to know more about this other french king..
And of course I certainly would like to read from AF's perspectives 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII'. Sometimes I feel that people those days are more promiscuous, especially the royalties.
And lastly, I would like get to know this Queen Mary better.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Alice in Wonderland

The new Tim Burton movie has sparked a newfound interest in this Lewis Carroll classic. I couldn't really remember ever reading the book, but I do know (or I would like to think that I know), the storyline - Alice was in the garden and she fell through a hole and encountered various quirky characters... Yes?

A recent visit to a bookstore told me that I just got to have the book! Why not, with this latest edition ('gothic' and 'creepy' illustrations by Camille Rose Garcia included!).

Oh wow! I just love her illustrations, and am now a fan. But hubby being the dear hubby that he is, had to be a wet blanket, "You really want to get that? AIW should be read with its original illustrations (by Sir John Tenniel). You want Annabel to read that?! Gothic pictures only give out negative energy. Blahblahblah."


When the hardcover opens...

Finally after much pondering, I settled for a 'safe' version, one with hubby's new favourite illustrator, and one that I can pass on to Annabel later. And at the same time still thinking of the version that I (still) want...

Friday, March 12, 2010

Our drama queen

Here is Annabel, just a few weeks short of being two. She is ever the drama queen, very expressive and just cheeky. I would say that she's quite smart and able to pick things up fast. But I guess most kids nowadays are. Also she is rather independent, always wanting to do things on her own, "I do, I do!".

She loves singing and dancing. She knows the ABC song, row row row your boat, happy birthday to you, this is the way I brush my teeth, twinkle twinkle, old macdonald had a farm (she enjoys making animal sounds!). Don't be alarmed. When I said 'she knows', I meant she recognises the songs and will try to sing along, and when she sings certain songs on her own, I can make out what she was singing.

She talks a lot as well. She tells you what she feels and thinks and wants. She is now able to string a short sentence like, "pls mommy I want bread". Aww.. so cute! She will shout out "fwen" and "ghee" when she sees the series FRIENDS and GLEE on the tv. When she sees a kissing scene, she will make the smooching sound. She has her own favourite shows like Hi-5, mickey mouse clubhouse and dora the explorer. She recognises most of the characters and can predict the next scene and interact with the characters like "no", "there" etc. I say with proper guidance a child can learn a lot from the not-so-idiot box. She is beginning to recognise numbers and able to count. Oh, and she knows her colours as well.

I must say I am quite proud of what she is able to do before reaching two. But most importantly she doesn't give us much problems (although at times she does tire me out) and is a healthy little girl. And I thank God for that.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Hello blog

It's been aeons ago since i last updated rosietheposie. Blame it on facebook. One can practically do anything a blog can offer and more - one's thoughts for the day, self-advertisement, photo uploads and comments, article/photo/videoclip/etc-sharing, buy and sell stuff, play (addictive) games and many more.

What have i been up to? Nothing much really, just the usual stuff. Oh and eagerly waiting for our little angel's second birthday end of the month :)