Last one

As everyone knows, I am such a peanut butter girl. I don't like most desserts, but one thing that I hold close to my heart is the peanut mee jiang kueh~ 

I like Jollibean's mee jiang kueh. Especially after a long Sunday ballet and pointe session.

  (Look at all that peanut filling oozing out)

I'll miss you! Wait for me to eat you again 7 months later ~

Best friend

This Is one of my best friends. He's the kind that will stay by your side patiently until you feel better, one that you can enjoy comfortable silence with.

I wish animals could operate skype/facetime.

Last Weekend of 2013

Last weekend to use up all my ingredients in the kitchen, and tidy up my stuff. Sounded Impossible to me too but I gave it a go anyways!

I had some leftover almond meal from my Birthday Tart so I decided to make some..

Gluten Free Honey Cookies

I was dancing around the kitchen and being distracted by 6724092364 other things
 so 1/3 of the batch ended up being burnt. Oops.

These are clean vegan and gluten free cookies.

I used a recipe from Elana's Pantry but switched some ingredients to suit what I had on hand. 

It turned out pretty good! Even my family, who usually enjoy sugary treats, approved!

Boiled eggs, KaiLan, Sautèed tomatoes, onions and portobello mushrooms.

I garnished my dinner with freshly picked dill from our mini herb garden (sounds fancy but its just a few pots of overgrown dill and mint plants).

I can still feel the vibes of satisfaction and accomplishment from harvesting and eating our own plants, even though I must admit, I'm usually the one who neglects my part on watering the plants.

Being in the last weekend, I also had to go through some of my old stuff. I love finding precious things that I forgot even existed! Like these dried roadside flowers from this year's US family visit.

My mom and I used to do this a lot. When I was younger we always stuffed lavenders in between the pages of my disney princess books so we'd get nicely dried lavenders. I found these flowers by the roadside curb while we were taking a walk around the neighbourhood.

Recent Photoshoot (1)

Here are some photos from a recent photoshoot I did with the super nice and sweet Ms Bernie Ng :) She has always been so helpful, warm and encouraging. Feeling very grateful and blessed once again, thank you Ms Bernie ♥

Happy Birthday Jesus :)

This Christmas was truly a specparents. Spent the day enjoying great food and had a cosy movie marathon with my family. We watched Kick-Ass 2 (yeah... you can imagine how awkwardly inappropriate the movie was HAHA) , Secretly Greatly (great movie about North Korean Spies, a must watch!!), and another Chinese MMA movie that was soo touching and awesome too except that I can't remember the title... Today I was reminded once again of how blessed I am to be surrounded with a loving Family. I don't understand. I can be so difficult at times, yet I'm blessed with a family and God who loves me so much. Going to miss everyone so much but I'm going to live each day to the fullest and treasure each day in London even though it might feel strange not having them by my side. But the Lord will take care of me as he always has, and I can't express how much joy and appreciation I have right now for everything he has blessed me with the past 16 years of my life. Have a Merry and love-filled Christmas everyone :> xx

MaMa lovingly cooked a flavourful, healthy and nutritious spread. Going to miss home cooked food so much.

Happy Birthday my Saviour !!

Christmas present I hand sewed for my host family

Also hand sewed this for my parent's Christmas gifts :)

Final few Breadventures

One of the final foodie adventures I had with my fellow bread sister..

We went to Freshly Baked by Lé Bijoux which is just a short walk away from Somerset MRT Station. It's a small little cosy shop filled with the strong aroma of fresh bread~

Someone should create a line of bread perfume. I'd wear it.

Smoked Salmon with cherry tomato confit on Multi-cereal bread
with a side of earl grey tea

This was the fluffiest and lightest bread I've eaten in my entire life! So airy and light that my stomach wasn't completely satisfied after finishing it. Overall it was yummy, the smoked salmon paired really well with the tangy confit and raw crunchy onion slices. But I'm a fan of toasted, warm and filing sandwiches so I don't think I'd come back all the way especially for this.

Ham and Cheese on Walnut Raisin Bread

Jill loved her sandwich! She bought some cranberry cream cheese rolls on a previous visit and said they were really yummy too

I'm really excited about the variety of breads in London! But definitely going to miss my sandwich hunting and grocery shopping with you Jill! <3 Let's do it again when I'm back! 

One week

I don't even know if anyone reads this blog, but sorry for not updating! It's been a really busy month for me and I seriously cannot believe that time has passed so quickly. It's been a fun month of spending quality time with friends, family and I've been having lots of fun doing various shoots and taking a few masterclasses as well (and cooking and baking ;) ). By the way.....wow I am finally 16 now. And Scary enough, I only have a week left before I fly off to London to start studying at the Central School of Ballet. But really, God has been so great. He's been looking out for me and taking care of me so well, placing many blessings and amazing people who are going to help me so much. Thank you Lord, for everything. I love you! <3 Off course I'll be homesick and I'll have my ups and downs, but I'm still pretty pumped about going :) Gonna do some updates about the past month soon, bye for now!

Refreshing Zoodles

  Nobody was cooking lunch so I made Zoodles for myself.

I first stumbled upon zucchini noodles, or zoodles quite a long time ago, after seeing it being featured on many health and fitspo accounts. To my surprise, zucchini is widely used to make bread loaves, muffins, cupcakes, oats, noodles. When added to baked goods it helps add lots of volume while lowering the amount of carbs, which is why so many health foodies/paleo people love this plant.

The Zucchini/Courgette Plant is widely recognized as it has many health benefits. Many praise it as a low-carb substitute to carbs, (like in this case, a substitute for noodles). 

To create zoodles, use a julienne peeler and julienne the zucchini length-wise.
Or you could use a Spiralizer if you have one.
Check out this how-to post by Oh She Glows!

   

What I used:

(Noodles)
1 large zucchini
(Topping)
1/4 cup pomegranate arils
1 small ripe avocado
1/2 can tuna
2 tbs lemon juice
2 tbs greek yoghurt/cottage cheese
pepper, dill, oregano

Vary the ingredients according to how hungry you are.

1. Julienne the zucchini lengthwise with a peeler

2. Mash the avocado, mix it with the tuna, lemon juice, greek yoghurt/cottage cheese and herbs

3. Sprinkle with pomegranate arils. 

(This is best served cold from the fridge)

    

Zoodles are great! They're so crunchy, light and refreshing. But they don't even come close to noodles or pasta.
They work best when you need a light meal but don't expect it to be the answer to "carb-less" spaghetti.

Personally I don't see any point in substituting (unrefined) carbs,
because they are so good and the human body relies on them. 

   

Even though I am a supporter of carbs I'm definitely making this again, it's so simple, light and fresh!
(FYI: I had sweet potatoes after this. Sweet Potatoes are pure amazingness)

Treasure finding

While clearing up my stuff, I happened to stumble upon my old chinese calligraphy exercise book from 2005.

Amazing attention span, what great intellectual capacity

nailed it (only once).

Then I found other pretty Interesting things from even further back (2004).

I had a great chidhood

Life after Loaf

Remember the healthy spelt loaf? It was almost completely gone within a few hours! 

Fate of the Spelt Loaf:

My parents and sister ate it with butter.

yucky photo but oh well

May it's spirit live on in my stomach.

100% Wholegrain Spelt Loaf

I'm sooo glad to be able to say that I know how it feels like to be surrounded by the nutty fragrant smell of bread, which fills up the whole kitchen and brightens up the whole house.

Yes that's right, today was a great day. 

   

Never underestimate the toaster oven

   

Small but mighty! Spelt is an ancient grain that is highly nutritious and has countless of health benefits ! It has this really unique, subtle  nutty fragrance as well, which for really delicious baked goods and other products.

Here's a very brief informative read-up about baking with spelt

    

To make this small loaf,  I used the recipe which can be found here.
I added 1 tbsp of honey* (highly recommended!) and used half of the
required ingredients, and only baked the bread
for 30mins before flipping it over and baking it again for 5mins.


Tips and tricks for baking quick breads is really short and helpful, please read it!

*Any honey/sugar/sweetener should work. I used organic raw honey.

   

My whole family was so surprised that I was able to bake this! They loved the bread so much. Since it was made purely from nutritious all-natural ingredients, they decided it was safe to give some to the dog and the hamsters.

According to my Dad and Sister, the dog and hamsters were begging for more!
That made me so happy! You never know if you'll succeed until you try. I'm so glad I managed to push away my fears of failing and get on with baking this bread. So please, even if you've had worse/really bad past baking experiences like me, don't hesitate to try this! It's the simplest and best recipe for beginners!

   

my loaf looks like it has a cute little butt 

My Baking Breakthrough!

FIRST OFF, TODAY WAS THE FIRST TIME I'VE EVER BAKED ANYTHING SUCCESSFULLY IN MY ENTIRE LIFE! THIS IS WHY EVERYTHING IS IN CAPS, I'M JUST TOO HAPPY I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!

A few days ago I came across a recipe for a Spelt Pumpkin Loaf and was itching to get my hands on some spelt flour. Despite feeling so pumped to try baking bread (because baking bread is so cool and bread is just simply amazing), I was feeling very hesitant and afraid. Spelt flour doesn't come cheap here in Singapore. But after consulting my very encouraging friend, fellow health foodie and baking queen, Jill and reading up tons of articles, tips and recipes about baking spelt products, I decided to #YOLO!! and bought a huge 5 oz bag of Bob's red mill Wholegrain Spelt Flour. It cost me $10.70! I was investing money into something that I wasn't sure would work out, with the risk of wasting away a big bag of high quality flour.

For someone like me who has had absolutely no prior training/experience in baking at all, I am very relieved, happy and pleased with the outcome. You have no idea how terrible my past attempts at baking were..

(Brief Flashback of my Sad baking past)

Okay so I used white flour/oat flour, and followed non-conventional "healthified" recipes for cookies and banana bread. The cookies were supposed to come out "crunchy and crumbly", the banana bread was supposed to be fragrant, fluffy and thick.

And then clumsy me took on the recipe, and produced ugly moist and limp monsters that could pass off as a failed flat-cake. As for the banana bread.. Well.. it looked like a hideous uneven mountain range, a drunk lost brown blob that stumbled out of my toaster oven. The insides weren't even cooked. Miserable failed attempts at creating healthy and sugarfree treats that everyone could have enjoyed.

Oh and pancakes? Yeah, failed my first attempt too. The batter lumped up on the pan and refused to budge, resulting in a strange clump of pale uncooked goop.

Thank the Lord (literally) for Spelt Flour! It's so healthy, nutritious and delicious, yet so versatile! With Spelt Flour I was able to make my Clean Spelt Pancakes and a super satisfying 100% Wholegrain Spelt Loaf !

Something meaningful to end off this post