Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Woke up with a bad sore throat this morning and decided to take one-day MC... there's so much work to do but v little motivation to get to them... bleah :(

On a brighter note, I have been taking Illustrator online classes the past few weeks, and am discovering how powerful and fun this program is! Alas, it is extremely extremely expensive and have yet to figure out a way to get hold of the software after my trial version expires :(

A simple homework piece I did for this week! The jap characters just read "Pretty flowers!" haha. These few simple Japanese characters have made the whole picture look a lot more poetic-looking... isn't it? Maybe I am biased.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Cooking Class @ TOTT

Pre-Valentine's, we took a cooking class together at Tools Of The Trade (TOTT) at Dunearn Rd. The class was called Cooking To Seduce: Kamasutra in the Kitchen, but obviously it was nowhere as suggestive. The only faint association with the title was the supposedly aphrodisiac nature of the dishes we were taught.

The class was pretty packed (we were typically given only up to 15/20 min for each dish) but quite fun. The cooking studio was really new and well-equipped with modern and chio kitchen utensils (which could be bought next door at their in-house store). The electric stove was also a bit too high-tech for me and I cldn't quite figure out how to operate it without assistance from the staff. Or maybe not that it's high-tech, but just that I seldom cook!

I realised that chopping is an essential and important skill to acquire... Cos we had to chop up stuff for practically every dish, my hands got a little achey at the end after chopping lotsa spring onions, leeks, lemongrass, ginger etc.

Our tom-yum soup... actually it isn't that difficult to make this after all :)

Oyster fritters in batter form. I was terrible at deep frying these - and transferred my frying duties to D halfway after a blob of hot oil leapt out of the pot onto my right forehead!

Time to savour the rest of the dinner! (The greenish looking thing is actually our ginger-crusted salmon; while the bowl of brown liquid is raspberry choc sauce for our fruit spring rolls. The oyster fritters with pomegranate chilli jam were gobbled up during class :P)

There was quite a bit of washing up to do throughout the class... but luckily kitchen assistants helped to do the more mafan parts...