Assorted Ravings of the Slightly-Weird

Tis The Season...

... for baking, baking and more baking.

This past weekend, I marshalled up the forces (a skeleton force indeed due to attrition over the years) and spent 2 days making peanut almond cookies and pineapple tarts, with our own home-made pineapple jam.

5 people in 10+ hours over 2 days = 8 1/2 recipes of peanut almond cookies and 2 1/2 recipes of pineapple tarts. And it's not close to being enough! I'm facing the prospect of having to work the next few nights making more pineapple tarts. We normally make open-faced tarts so I thought I would try making the closed version with some store-bought jam, just to fill up the bottles and make it look more 'presentable'.

If there's time I'm also going to make love letters aka egg rolls. We did that once, a long time ago. We set up the barbecue, thinking that after we made bottles and bottles of love letters we could feed the army of helpers with some good ol' BBQ.

HA. HA. HA. Oh ye of over-abundant faith. Who knew that love letters would be so damn tedious. After one afternoon of grilling and rolling and much swearing (due to burnt fingers) we ended up with one bottle. Albeit one big bottle but still, just one bottle. The helpers were so wiped out, we just ordered takeout instead.

So, it's probably just a pipe dream of mine to make love letters on my own this year. But I have to say, the home-made ones taste so much better than the ones you get commercially. Yum.

I leave you now with some pictures of our spoils. A lucky few will get to see these in person! :)

Pineapple tarts and peanut almond cookies waiting to be packed


The loot

A Weekend Jaunt in Jerusalem

On a whim I took a quick trip to Jerusalem.

That's right: the Holy City.

I hopped onto Turkish Airlines from Shanghai (on the tail end of a work trip) on a Thursday night and by Friday mid-morning I was in Jerusalem. Woohoo! My first impression: the whole country is extremely rocky. My second impression: all the houses look the same, 1- or 2-storey buildings in the same colour.

As I walked around the Old City, I just kept wondering what it must have been like back in the year 1BC. Some of the streets are so narrow, they look like they've been there forever. But then some of the buildings look new enough that you don't really get the sense of history seeping through the stones. Plus, most of Jerusalem feels quite commercialised so perhaps a traveller making a pilgrimmage may be disappointed. As for me, I was glad I hopped onto the plane. 3 days may have been a tad too short, but I did manage to visit most of the historic sites and to immerse myself a little in the culture.

The only snag was that when I got to the airport on Sunday, my flight was delayed and as a result Turkish Airlines put me onto a different airline to get to my final destination of Shanghai. In the end, it wasn't really much of a snag because I ended up getting home 9 hours before scheduled :) And, I managed to watch Kingdom of Heaven on the plane as well, which was kinda apt.

Photos are here. I only brought my Fisheye Lomo as I didn't have space in my luggage for a big bulky camera. Lomo rocks!