My Housewarming Gathering ...

Held my housewarming gathering on the 7th January 2007, invited the usual group of Singaloreans to my place to have dinner. It was the first time since I moved in the first week of October 2006 that my apartment has so many people. It was also the first time for me to prepare food for so many people. Planning has to start way back at the beginning of the week… plan on what the menu should be… where to buy the ingredients… drinks…. how to prepare the food… utensils… yup… not easy.

I remember the last time I cooked for some gathering it was a Black pepper crab meal for a bunch of frends quite sometime back. Black pepper crab was relatively easy to prepare especially the black pepper sauce is readily available at the stores. However, there are no fresh live crabs in Bangalore. Therefore I can only fall back on the few other dishes which I know – Stir-fried beef slices, Chicken chops, simple Bai Cai with shrimps and Bak Kut Teh (using ready-made sachets).

Preparing those food can really be challenging as I need to “programme” exactly what I should do starting from having to thaw every kind of meat in the morning. Oh ya… they don’t sell deboned chicken drumsticks here so I had to debone the drumsticks by myself… 15 of them. Washing and cutting the vegetables and peeling the garlic is also time consuming, not to mention the neck ache I got from the prolonged position of looking down as I cut the stuffs.

After the meat is marinated while I cut the vegetables, I started frying my chicken chops. Having small pans, I had to fry the chicken concurrently using 2 pans and had to do it twice to fry all the chicken. Challenging huh? Hehe… as I was frying inside my kitchen, I even almost didn’t hear my doorbells ringing as the first few guests arrive. Not exactly as I planned as I had to continue my cooking in the kitchen instead of entertain the guests.

Next was frying the beef. I was thinking if I could shortcut the “frying two pans at the same time “ thing as beef usually get cooked very fast so I put all the beef in the bigger pan to fry it once… bad choice… I think there were just too much beef for the pan capacity thus it doesn’t necessary heat for all the meat. Moreover, the beef were giving out water that I had to keep draining the water. I think the beef was cooked abit too long in that process and wasn’t as tender as it usually should be.
After the not so successful beef, I reverted back to 2 pans at same time for the vegetable. Once again, I think the pans were too small that after frying all the vegetable leaves, there ain’t space to put in the cut stems.

Nevertheless, all the food are brought out on the dining table and somehow, 10 of us managed to squeeze around the round table for dinner. With additional contribution of food from Margaret, Raymond and Sam, there is enough food to fill everyone’s stomach. After dinner, it’s time to catch an exciting FA cup tie featuring Man Utd vs Aston Villa which Man Utd managed to conjure a win in the injury time through their ever-supersub Solskjaer and to enjoy a nice dessert contributed by Sharon.

As I was busy preparing food and no time to take good photos, I have to refer you people again =) Photos taken by CK.
http://singalore.blogspot.com/2007/01/kah-mings-housewarming.html

NYE...

We had a small gathering at Ternasser's place with the few Singaporeans left in Bangalore as most of them has returned to Singapore over the holidays. Though smaller crowd, we still had fun with Mahjong and good food prepared by Ternasser.

After the clock struck 12am, we decided to go and set some fireworks (bought since deepavali)which I have brought. We tried to access the rooftop where it would be safer to play but it was locked up. So we went downstairs to the swimming pool area to try out the fireworks and crackers. It's the first time for many of us playing with such prohibited stuffs back in Singapore.

It was hell fun and loud time!

Started off with the crackers (those CNY kind). Just light the fuse and throw to the driveway area... Early celebrations for CNY... =)

Hock Lum seemed to be the most experienced one dealing with these crackers. He took initiative to try out all of those different kinds of cracker, fireworks, bombs... Chris helped to light the fuse most of the time as he had his lighter and most of us were not brave enough to light those short fuses.

Its a swinging sparkle... after swinging for awhile HL swinged it into the empty swimming pool... and oops... it left some burnt mark on the swimming pool mosaic tiles. Hopefully it can be cleaned off. Hehe... or the resident here may be in trouble.

The most fun fireworks are the rockets. HL and Raymond found suitable "launching pads" amongst the branches of the plants and we launch the rockets from there.

These rockets can fly as high as 7-8 storeys. Luckily they are mostly vertical flyers and don't end up in other residents' balconies. =)

We also tried those big bursts of sparkles....

There were also others such as snakes (will fly around randomly), Peacocks (small bang sound), Hydrogen Bombs (really big bangs) and many others... HL was once almost hit by a flying cracker.. luckily the column he hid behind at saved him...

At the end of the "Cracking" session, we did suffer some casualties.. Chris and Raymond's thumbs were slightly burnt when they were lighting fuses... Hope it doesn't hurt that much and will recover real soon. Thanks for their sacrifices. =)

Lastly, let's end with another of HL's silhouette photo...

Brand new post for the brand new year.

Yup... I know its been another long time since my last post. Been really busy and too lazy to post. Moreover, not much new photos to put up too. However, I will still do a quick summary of what has happened over the month of december.

Throughout the month of Decemember since my last post, I have been busy with work. One of the amusing thing which I have encountered is that one of my local colleagues actually assumed helicopter landing pads to be found on the ground floor of a residential development. There should be 1 pad for each cluster of connected blocks, where to find so much space to have helipads on the ground? Well, it was surprising to me but I have to forgive them for their knowledge as there isn't that many skycrapers in India for them to know that helipads for tall buildings are meant to be at the rooftops. Then again, they should have watched movies or tv advertisements which have shown helipads in the roofs... eg. Independent Day. Ok... shalln't argue further.

Then comes Christmas!...

This is the Christmas decorations at the Bangalore office. Erm... I have sent this photo to some friends previously and they all laughed... hehe.. well... this is a real tree... not a fake one.

Christmas is actually celebrated in Bangalore as well. There are many christians around too. Besides the churches, the people acutally do organise some christmas parties themselves. The residential block beside our office held a family fun and games party on their rooftop on one of those nights nearing to Christmas.

For us, the Singaporeans here, we had a Christmas gathering party at the Chia's house. It was good fun and good food! Plentiful spread of nice home-cooked food. I had contributed my sambal prawns.

We had a gift exchange thingy for Christmas spirit. I've got a black addidas cap. Thank you to the person who bought that. =)

Good party and some of them stayed back to play Mahjong till wee hours in the morning. U can view this entry for a better description and photos of this gathering. http://singalore.blogspot.com/2006/12/christmas-party-2006.html

I called taxi to fetch me back. It was another confusing process. Called one operator, he told me he has no cabs around my area so I called the other company. After talking for a long time to tell him the address, I thought he understood... in the end, I got a call from a cab driver asking for directions again. Duh... Never mind, then another cab driver called me ... he is from the 1st operator I have called. So confusing... dunno how these people work. Anyway, I did managed to get back home safe and sound.

For Christmas itself, I din really go out as I was quite tired with all the rush work in office and also the thought of trying to get transport (telling drivers directions etc) makes me totally sian. Had a good rest at home and played WoW.