June 2008 – miyagi.sg

Weekend breakfast

We live in such times as that where we don’t have time for a good meal to kick start the day because the day has already been kick-started and we’ve been dragged along, hanging on to the handlebars for dear life.

Oh, and the price of food and other household items suck too.

But if you can, and when you can, get up a bit earlier and make a nice breakfast for yourself and loved ones, sit down, eat, and say, fuck it, I’m having a good meal I don’t care what the rest of the world is doing. Try it this weekend:

Eggs, scrambled; Salmon, smoked:

Ingredients:

3 large eggs or 4 medium eggs

100 ml full cream milk

1/3 cup shaved parmesan cheese

50g smoked salmon

chives or parsley, finely chopped

freshly cracked fresh pepper

25g unsalted butter

2 thick slices bread (ciabatta, white, focaccia etc)

(optional:

1/2 cup cherry tomato

rocket or spinach)

Method:

Combine eggs and milk in a bowl, melt butter on skillet on low heat until it bubbles, then pour eggs in, stir continuously until it cooks, then pour half the parmesan in, and keep stirring.

Turn off the heat, then stir in smoked salmon. Pepper to taste, and serve on toasted bread, top with remaining parmesan and chives. (serves 2)

More recipes can be found at this nifty website called Open Source Food (my page there), which I found via Uncle Dee’s Project Trattoria, where there are also recipes to be found.

Meet the Karen Cheng

I’ve been following Karen Cheng’s blog on and off since blogs were invented way back in 1976. If you’re not already a fan, she’s a hot Perth mother of two lovely kids who blogs about her family, shopping et cetera on a very pretty self-designed website at www.karencheng.com.au.

On occasion, she takes self-portraits in a manner which has spawned this viral thing called “doing the Karen Cheng“, where someone takes pictures of themselves in front of a mirror, with the camera visible in the picture, and with their heads tilted at a specific, precise angle, facing north by northwest.

The point of this all is that Karen will be visiting Singapore for the first time in six years, and instead of merely dropping in on the shops and hanging out with friends, she has decided to also raise money for the Singapore Red Cross while she’s here.

On Saturday, 5 July at a location to be finalised on the Facebook event page, she will “do the Karen Cheng” in front of a, preferably large, mirror. And everyone is invited to attend and “do the same Karen Cheng”, and donate $10 to the Red Cross.

If that sounds even remotely dodgy to you, maybe you, like me, have impure thoughts, and should really read Karen’s blog post for a clearer explanation.

(Thanks for the alert, Lancerlord)

Joe Augustin got what?

It was with shock and horror that I logged in to Facebook for the first time in yonks, to read amongst the hundreds of superpokes and superclittickles that Joe Augustin got fired.

I haven’t listened to radio for so long that I’ve never listened to 91.3FM (the station that fired Joe), much less known about his axing, even much more lesser known about the circumstances surrounding his axing, even though it’s been making waves on the ingterneck and other non-mainstream meejums.

The only inkling I had that something was going down was when a friend in the radio business texted in reply to my asking how things were, that things were “ok, except for upheaval in the radio industry”.

But, yeah. So if you want to listen to Joe Augustin in his new old former revamped radio show, tune in to Power98 (98FM) in the mornings, sit back, relax, and wait for the next upheaval.

Green neighbourhood. Not.

Here in Singapore, we send our trash overseas – Photo by Where is Clifford The Big Red Dog?

I asked our apartment block’s cleaner where the recycle bins were and he said there weren’t any. Just chuck everything into the big wheelie bin, he said.

What made me sicker was a friend of ours telling me he saw his neighbourhood’s rubbish truck dump everything from their block’s recycle bins into the same truck as the other regular rubbish.

I would like to think that the private company that collects our trash for a monthly fee has some super-duper system at their trash depot that does the sorting for us, but it is hard to give anyone the benefit of doubt these days.

My flu-induced headache was exacerbated by researching “green cars” over the weekend, trying to find out if the carbon footprint of a CNG car was significantly less than that of a conventional one, and how many CNG dispensing stations there were in the country besides the three in very far flung parts of the island which require a CNG car owner to use up a significant amount of gas just to get to.

The flu medication does stave off some of the gluggy feeling, but it doesn’t stop me from being delirious enough to think about such things as the total square footage of all the rooftops of all the HDB blocks in the country, and how many solar panels can be fitted on them.

I think the good people at HDB and NEA would have thought of it already, with or without the flu. Then again…

When policemen still wore shorts

“Wah, you must have bought this when policemen still wore shorts”, said the lady at the lighting shop as she asked for my permission to dismantle some more of the tiffany lamp I brought in for her to fix.

As took the base off, the debris from inside the lamp fell out and dirtied her table, and I felt bad, until she told me it would cost around $100 to fix up the lamp and bring it into the 21st century.

I’m not complaining too much, because it’s a really nice lamp my mother bought in San Francisco in 1979 or 1980, and it hasn’t worked properly since. (Probably because we didn’t know the difference between AC and DC, and we probably melted the fuse or something).

And this lady’s shop was only like the seventh or eighth I walked into on Balestier Road, and the only one whose occupants didn’t say, “No, we don’t do repair. Only sell. Try other shop. Sorry”.

Then again, it was quite likely she knew how to fix this lamp, because her shop had several similar lamps, although she said, “Those different. All from China, not brass one”.

The lamp and some other stuff in the house should be ready by end of next week. Yay!