Chinese Home Style Dishes 1

Steamed Salmon and Tofu
This is one of my favorite recipes lately. It's so healthy, tasty, and super easy to make. Just cut, combine, toss and steam. It's from one of the new recipe books I got from my recent trip to Taiwan (Savory dishes by Paul Ho), but modified and made better by me :D

Ingredients:
Salmon 1/2 lb to 1 lb
Silken Tofu 10 oz box
Egg 2, scrambled
Green onion 1 stalk, finely chopped.

Seasoning:
Cooking alcohol (mirin) 1 Tbs
(Can be substituted by regular cooking alcohol with about 1 tbs sugar added)
Salt 1 ts
Corn Starch 1/2 Tbs
Ground white pepper 1/2 ts
Sesame oil 1 ts
Fish sauce 2 ts

Direction:
1. Cube the salmon, about 1/2 inch in size, add mirin, mix well, let sit for 5 minutes.
2. Cube the tofu same size as salmon, Add to 1.
3. Add eggs, salt, corn starch, ground white pepper, and sesame oil to mixture, toss to combine all.

4. Pour the mixture into a shallow plate, I used a glass 9" pie plate
5. Steam for 15 minutes over water in a covered pot, med to high heat.
6. Remove, drizzle the fish sauce and garnish with chopped green onions.
Enjoy!

Extra tips:
- I usually discard the salmon skin. However fresh the salmon is the skin part is always kinda fishy to me.
- The addition of mirin / cooking alcohol to the original recipe is to further reduce any possible fishy taste, also to add slight sweetness to the dish.

Useful tools for steaming:
- Use a rack to prop the dish away from water, a sterdy bowl would do the trick too.


- Use one of these tongs looking thingy to put in / lift the dish out. I got mine from Taiwan, but it should be fairly common in Asian grocery stores.

Pin Cushion

Before I started learning how to sew, the concept of having pins / pin cushion is just a myth to me somehow. Sure it's cute and all but why is it needed again? Then once I got into sewing thanks to Ayana and Ayana's aunt, having a pin cushion when sewing a project is CRUCIAL!! So I started searching Etsy for one and saw some cute ones and then realized... Why don't I just make one? Isn't it the whole point of sewing so you can make something yourself instead of buying? LoL... So after some googling I found this awesome tutorial for a biscornus style pin cushion. Although it still took me quite a while (about 2.5 hours) since I am such a newbie in sewing, the result was awesome and I am very proud of my homemade pin cushion :D Yay!!

Some extra tips from ultra beginners like me:
- I used a medium width straight stitch for stitching Valcro onto cotton twill tape.
My poor little beginner machine just would not go through the two thick pieces on the tightest straight stitch. Also to loosen the tension a bit seems to help too.

- I changed the fabric size from 3.5" to 4"
4 is easier to divide in the middle and the larger the easier to sew hehe...

- Step 12 about filling the cushion fairly solid using fibrefill is really important!
This would prevent the pins from poking through the cushion if it is not filled enough. Quite important consider this cushion is supposed to sit on your wrist... I ended up opening mine back up to stuff more :P I guess I learned this the hard way...

WDrama on Flowers 2 - Bouquets

Back to the flowers. I found pictures of this pink rose / peonies bouquet on TheKnot.com. Dangerous behavior I know, but might as well start off with something that's absolutely perfect and work from that. Peonies are not in season in September so that is out of question. Having a 12" bouquet full roses is also kinda expensive, so what my florist suggested is to use pink hydrangeas and mix in roses and some greens to create the lush pink / garden look with about 1/2 of the cost. Nice!! Just what I had in mind. In fact she showed me this trick to demonstrate what they can do to cut down the costs on bridesmaids' bouquets and I decided that is perfectly fine with my own bouquet too. Ingenious I tell you :D Also, I read somewhere that you can just use one of the bridesmaid's bouquet as a toss bouquet instead of paying for one, which is a great idea also, although the florist ended up making me a toss bouquet for free with the left over flowers anyway and I thought that's very nice of them hehe...

Another trick I learned is to use the bouquets as decor for the head table. I was too cheap to decorate the head table, and I was pleasantly surprised that day when I saw the way they put the bouquets together on the head table, it's so pretty and I am so glad they did it! I don't know whos idea exactly it is, whether is the florist or the my wedding director, but it turned out great!

The conclusion is that I absolutely love the way my bouquet and my bridesmaids' bouquets look in pictures, and there are in just about every portraits. The color of my bouquet is a bit darker pink than I expected, but it turned out beautiful in pictures, just the right amount of pink without looking washed-out.

WDrama on Flowers 1 - Florist and the big picture

I know the wedding is over but there were so much I didn't blog about and I was just too stressed out to blog at the time so here I am filling in the blank after the fact and hopefully what I've learned can help/entertain other brides-to-be.

Many people think of wedding flowers they think of how cheap it would be if you do it yourself instead of hiring a florist. This is true in some cases but sometimes just not worth the trouble unless you have a lot of people to help you out making the flower arrangements, space to store them once they are delivered and someone responsible enough to set them all up on the day of the wedding. To me, that is just WAY too much trouble and I don't want to worry about it and I can't think of anyone I can ask to do such a thing since I want my friends and family to sit back and enjoy instead of work at my wedding.

I am a bit of minimalist type of person when it comes to flowers. Unlike my mom who likes to take pics of flowers / with flowers wherever she goes, even as far as going on a Japan tour just to see the sakura bloom, I don't care for flowers yet it's a bit of a must at a wedding and I know it'd make my mom happy anyway. I was under the impression that flowers would be raelly expensive since supposedly my aunt spent $10k on my cousin's wedding on flowers and frankly, I was like "What flowers!?" when I was there :P The point is, no matter how much you spend, it's where you spend it that matters. To me, there are a few places that the flowers really matters - on me and my bridesmaids and all wedding parties, some on each table, on the cake, and petals on the white runner that leads to the gazebo in the garden for the ceremony. Having great flowers on the bridal party also ceremony makes sense because they will show up the most in pictures. Having some on each table is just so I can say I have it and the tables are not completely bare, and having flowers on the cake is just my personal preferences :D

Anyway, for my wedding I was under restriction to use the contracted in-house florist provided by my venue. It's a bit frightening at first thinking they would totally rip me off. Thankfully I did my own research on various prices on flowers, also gotten good price range references from my recently married friend Wiewiek and Sylvia, turned out their price is not bad at all, in fact better than other places. I am not required to use them for anything on the bridal party, just things on the facility, but I went ahead and use them for everything. Simply for the convenience and the price and peace of mind not having to deal with yet another separate vendor. Sure there are risks such as are they good at what they do or if they can provide what I had in mind, but really as long as you can provide concrete examples of what you want and properly communicate that with the florist, you will get the result you want, providing the florist is not just scamming you the first place. The in-house florist does all the weddings in both the Atrium and Flinthill, I'd imagine they would get lots of complains if not having their windows smashed if they consistently do a horrible job. Actually what I realized at the end is that they are actually like a whole-sale florist, kinda like Costco if you think of it, they earn their money through doing lots and lots of wedding at a reasonable cost, not by ripping off a few weddings. It's simply not worth their time and energy to even try ripping you off since they don't need to.

Whew... Continue reading up about the rest of the WDrama on flowers!

Hmmm...

I am a little peeved... I used to have a blogspot although I hardly ever post there, there were a few posts and now it's gone!! I had the exact same address and everything. How can they just get rid of it like this!? Grr... Anyway, here I am starting a blogspot again and maybe I'll move my xanga over once I figured out how and when my left index finger stops hurting so bad. I should totally take a sick day off! What good is a full time software developer without her left index finger??