Perceiving

Finally got a chance to make this recipe from the 2010 holiday edition of the LCBO magazine. Making the cookies are a little tricky. A lot of them turned out cracked or malformed. I got about 60% yield on the 24 cookies I made. Some lessons learned: After piping the mixture out to form the cookies, do not "top up" with extra cookie mixture at the end. Otherwise you get this nipple effect (picture below, left). Flattening the  macarons out with the back of a spoon dipped in warm water is a bad idea. While it is effective in flattening the peaks, it causes ugly bubbles like this (picture below, right) to form on the surface. Malformed cookies: (left) "nipple" effect. (right) bubbling on the surface I had a lot of leftover caramel in the end. If you don't have a super sweet tooth like me, you can get away with making just half the caramel recipe. The final product: Macaron on a plate with caramel oozing out Tin of macarons to share w

While reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, I came across this observation by a young Malcolm about well-intentioned whites. "They'll be there to support you during thin, but not during thick." Malcolm rejects the patronizing compassion of whites towards black. How often am I guilty of the same! I meet a need and I feel good about it, but ask me for more--ask me to hang out, ask me to be your friend--I don't know about that. The best kind of friendship is a mutual sharing of joys and pains, a relationship between two equals. What we need is more friendship, not charity.

Alex Haley has been challenged about the authenticity of his genealogy that he determined through investigative research. In one's quest for answers, often one may be so desperate to find answers that it's possible that he might overlook hints of inaccuracy in what he discovers. Jesus said "seek and ye shall find". Those who don't seek rarely find. Serendipity happens but once in a while, but those who seek will usually find. The latter ends up in a better place, if not finding the truth, at least one step closer to it.

Finally finished listening to 30 hours of Roots on Audible , wonderfully read by Avery Brooks .  Brooks reads out the story masterfully, adding song and rhythm to words, making the characters come alive in the listener's imagination. Roots tells the tumultuous story of an African-American family encompassing seven generations, starting from the proud African who was kidnapped near his village in Gambia, following the story of his descendants enduring five generations of slavery and then life after emancipation.  In each enslaved generation, the desire for freedom was always present in the undertone, with hope rising and ebbing with the reality of their circumstance. There were many emotional moments listening to the recording, such as when the fiddler finally saves up enough money to buy his freedom, only to discover that prices have gone up and he would never live long enough to buy his freedom.  Or the agony of a slave mother enduring the second time that her baby girl would

It's been brought to my attention lately that I complain a lot. Didn't really think of myself as much of a complainer, but hearing this from someone who knows me pretty well, I take stock. I do like to comment on a lot of things and I see how my negative comments can be taken as complaining. Like how the steak is overcooked, how google+ randomly inserts unsolicited posts in my stream, how cold it is in my house... In my view, I'm just voicing an opinion. Which got me thinking, is there a difference between giving a negative opinion and complaining? In both cases you are sharing a negative view about something, but I think the difference is that the latter is accompanied with a desire for recompense, whether from the subject or some unknown power. It is told as if someone owes you something. All the same, I will pay attention to what I say over the next few days to see if this is true. 

Something disturbs me about people celebrating the murder of people, no matter how evil they are. Today's news about Ghaddafi reminded me of when Osama bin Laden was killed and all the allies of the west were rejoicing. I could not empathize. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe if I was someone who grew up in that oppressive regime, who witnessed my own loved ones get imprisoned or murdered unjustly, then I would have a different view.

When my siblings and I were young, every year on our birthdays, my parents would always wake up early to cook a big batch of birthday noodles for our family and friends. Before they go to work, the noodles will be packed and ready to be delivered to my relatives' houses. This tradition went on for a few years until we moved to a different city. Then we immigrated to a new country.   Recently feeling nostalgic, I made a request to my parents to revive the tradition. So here's what my parents cooked up: hokkien style birthday noodles and oyster pancake -- both recipes passed down along the generations. Hokkien style birthday noodles with quail eggs, peanuts, and fried onions Oyster pancake

It might seem odd that I entitled this blog "Mountaineering" or go by the twitter handle mountaineer10 . I don't particularly like climbing mountains. Rather, the name came from a show I liked called  Alias where the heroine, Syndey Bristow, a double agent, went by the code name mountaineer. Initially I used the alias to set up a twitter account to play around with that doesn't have any obvious connections to me. But fast forward to present day, I actually like and use twitter now, so I've made my twitter identity known to the general public. Thus, the name has stuck. But maybe it's not a bad name. After all, life can be thought of as a constant journey uphill, like climbing a mountain, where we all are mountaineers. I'm just another one of them.