Home-made banana pancakes!

I was inspired by my Laos guesthouse owner to make my own banana pancakes... It's D's birthday this weekend and I had originally planned to bake a nice cake. But time was a little tight with the preps for Taiwan trip and random errands I had to run. So the grand cake plans were shelved and I prepared a mini birthday breakfast instead.

The pancakes didn't look that great, but they tasted quite decent nonetheless :) Actually as D was in a rush to get to work he had the slightly uglier pancakes without the banana-slices topping heh. But he got a rock melon mint fruit shake to go with his brekkie whereas I didn't :P

 Pancake batter (instant one lah) with lotsa fresh bananas!

Dunno why one of my pancakes turned out looking like a zucchini or potato pancake...

 Had two big pancakes drizzled with maple syrup (on a chio MUJI plate haha) to myself !

 One pancake gone!

 And down to the last slice :)

Am off to Taiwan tmr and another 2 weeks of volunteering at a Hualien organic farm. Many family members and friends weren't too confident that I'd be of much use at a farm (actually I am not certain I'm up to it either haha) but hopefully I will be able to rough it out a bit; lose some weight and grow fitter; pick up some useful skills for my own garden and not get too tan...  :)

We finally decided to invest in a mini auto irrigation system for our garden and our gardener came to install it this morning..

As usual he also helped to pluck out some weeds in the garden- and cautioned about a particular one growing in one of the flower pots.. (see 2nd photo) This one had to be gingerly plucked out.. Failing which the violent plucking motion wld instead release thousands of tiny new seeds into the soil!

The close-up photo below shows the yellow seed 'bags' neatly hidden and tucked at the underside of the leaves... These are usually invisible when looking at the weeds top down, which we usually do... Such a devious and clever way of propagating itself!!! And what an interesting science lesson this wld have made for a pri sch child :)

Got home late last night - and my own bed suddenly felt super soft and heavenly! :P

On my 2nd last day (Friday) in LPB I -

treated myself to a leisurely breakfast at Le Benneton Cafe - a quaint french bakery place opposite the temple I teach at in the evenings. I ordered a fruit salad, latte and a chocolate pear puff pastry - this place supposedly has amazing and authentic french pastries. Sadly for me the pear in the pastry was the coarse yellow chinese pear (commonly found here) and not the typical green pear (which I guess they dun get in LPB)... so the choc-pear filling felt a lot more grainy than expected and tasted a little strange heh.

completed a mini feat of buying 20 English-Lao/Lao-English dictionaries as farewell gifts for the novices from a local market (at wholesale prices) and transported all of them back to the guest house via hanging a bag on each bicycle handle;

ran out of patience at my stencil class after 2 hours and made the owner's brother finish the outer circle of my design for me (btw his brother was checking his FB acct in the background); 

and finally towards the end of the day I received a whole lot of little presents (which I definitely did not deserve) from students for a class I co-teach with another volunteer...

 

At the Bangkok airport before catching my flight back to SG - I also discovered that Auntie Anne's (I used to be a fan of their pretzels back in my secondary sch days) also did amazing sandwiches - using sandwich buns that taste faintly of pretzels! Erm it was kinda mildly sweet and had a nice texture. The club sandwich I ordered was really tasty. They may do better in SG today by switching to sandwiches heh... ;)

And so this kinda concludes my mini teaching stint in Laos - it was a good experience but it's also lovely to be home again! :)

p/s: If you recall the Japanese restaurant lady I blogged about in my previous post - I found out upon returning to the restaurant a 2nd time for lunch that she got married on the same day as me in Laos!! So coincidental that I had to double check a few times to make sure we were referring to the same date... :) I guess maybe we were fated to meet heh.