Food Makes Me Happy

Yes, I'm back from a long period of summer sunshine. Summer has ended already, I think. The nights are getting colder and it rains almost every morning. I love Autumn because of the way the sun bathes the trees in gold and how the leaves turn from green to red. And also because the weather is usually cool and breezy, not hot and dry like summer.

Dana and I enjoying the last few days of summer on campus

I don't cook in my dorm, because I'm not fond of the little cramped slot they call a kitchen. Plus I don't have my own cooking utensils. Yet. So I grab every opportunity to cook when I'm out of Baridon Hall :) Like when I visited Rob and Dina during the weekend, I cooked several meals for them. I never cooked much in Malaysia, so I think my mom's impressed that I've been cooking since I got here.

My very own "Spontaneous Noodles"

There's a story behind every dish that I cook. Each time I visit Rob and Dina, I'd cook them something. And I always had to crack my brain to think of something to cook them. So for the dish above, we roamed the grocery store several times before I finally pulled off some random noodles from the shelf and announced, "Okay, I'm gonna cook these tonight." Then we got home and I picked whatever I saw in the fridge. Shrimps, baby bak choy, eggs, carrots. And then I tossed them in the wok and added some oyster sauce and hey, they turned out pretty well ;)

That's how they earned the name "The Spontaneous Noodles".

The next week, I cooked a meal composed of white rice and 3 dishes.

Sauteed mushrooms, honey chicken with shrimps and carrots, fried eggs and vegetables

All that preparation consumed nearly an hour. But it was no trouble at all! :)

Some of my friends at uni have been having cook outs in the past few weeks. There was a time when I went to their place for dumplings and beef gratin. Then a few days later, I went there to help them make sushi. It's really fun making sushi. It requires some skill but you'll get there eventually. My favorite part was adding the contents and then trying to roll it neatly.

As you can see, some look a little retarded but that's because most of us were making them for the very first time :D

But it was a great meal of sushi that night! Did I mention how much I've missed sushi?

There's actually a sushi bar on campus. It just started two weeks ago. Very good business. Too bad it's pricey, or I'd be eating there every alternate day of the week.

Last weekend, I slept over at Dana's house. She lives like 10 minutes away from campus, and we spent two nights staying up talking into the wee hours of the morning, and then on my last night, we cooked a decent dinner of fried rice and prawn sambal, and one of our friends came over to cook fishes.

Tadahh! Dinner was good :)

I've been eating A LOT. I went for two Chinese buffets two days in a row. Talk about gluttony, seriously. I was surprised that Chinese buffets here are pretty cheap; you pay like $9 per head and you can dig in all day long. In certain restaurants, you're even allowed to take the food home. Lol. Too bad I didn't capture any good photos of the food; there were too many dishes. And I was too busy eating :P

It's true that most people gain weight when they live abroad. It's happening to me right this instant. Lol. I'm embarrassed about posting up new photos of myself in fear that I might shock my family and friends. :D

But... well, here's one that I took a couple of days ago over the weekend.

I love food, but at the same time, I'm trying not to allow the "Freshmen 15" thing to get to me. Freshmen 15 is basically a saying that all new incoming students will gain 15pounds in their first semester. One or two extra pounds are inevitable, but 15??? Come on. I don't binge on food every single day. Lol. But if it does happen (which I won't allow), then.. I'll just hit the gym more often.

I've been busy with classes and writing for the school newspaper. I just got my second assignment; which is to interview the tennis court manager and print an article about the remodeling of the school tennis court. Hmm, it doesn't sound like much but this would be my very first time interviewing someone for journalistic reasons! Wish me luck :)