春天，有的不只是百花齐放。

喜欢春天叶子的颜色。

淡淡的绿，象是刚染上的，告诉你它还年幼着。

生长数日，颜色渐深。

新叶、旧叶相映，胜过炎夏的一成不变。

Guess what these are for.

The house cook was at it again. This time round, the intended outcome was a comfort food-type South-east Asian pastry.

The coloured liquid might have looked like some sort of paint, but they really were mixtures of flour, sugar, colouring and a very important ingredient that give the end product distinctive taste – coconut milk. The mixtures were then steamed to obtained the soft and sticky pastry.

I have not eaten this pastry for many, many years although I used to eat this a lot when I was a child. My impression of the work needed to prepare it was that it involved a lot of effort. It was also hard for me to imagine that placing those colourful mixtures in a steamer would transform them into a solidified and tasty snack.

When it was time for the taste test, I took a bite of a slice of the pastry. The taste and the texture were familiar, what I thought they were like when I ate it as a kid. Verdict: the taste is right. Success!

Kueh Lapis

A couple of weeks ago, the house cook prepared mee rebus for lunch. This is a Singaporean/Malaysian dish and I do not recall having found any Malaysian restaurants in Atlanta serving it.

I just found out from Wikipedia that “mee rubus” literally means “boiled noodles” in English. Thick, yellow egg noodles is typically used and served with a gravy. The dish is often garnished with a hard-boiled egg, fried tofu, calamansi limes and whatever the person cooking fancies. Ours had chopped chili padi, fried shallots, anchovies and bean sprouts.

Most of the work went into preparing the gravy, which had potato flour, soy beans and a concoction of spices, which I guess are the most important ingredients to giving it its taste. The result was delicious!

This past MLK long weekend, I did some experiment in the kitchen. I had stumbled upon a recipe for what is known as the Nagasaki Castella cake. I thought it was not too difficult to make and went for it late Sunday night after I came back from my run.

It was a disaster. I must have done something wrong in the preparation and the cake turned out like a rock. Puzzled by the results, I spent some time on Monday searching for different versions of the recipe for making the cake. You can actually find a lot of information if you try looking for it.

Still feeling cross with myself of the previous night’s disaster, I wanted to give it another try, somehow incorporating some of the new information I learned. This was the result.

Quite unexpected, because it actually tasted pretty well. Maybe it was because anything you prepared yourself tastes good and maybe I really got it this way by chance.

Anyway, I am quite happy that I can now bake something that rises in the oven, something that is actually spongy when a bite is taken. I am no more restricted to chunky brownies, and, oh yes, this was not from a pre-packaged off-the-shelf cake mix.

Speaking of pastries, we also made some pineapple tarts that weekend to get us into the Chinese New Year mood.

Two types – the “cocoon” shaped ones…

… and the “exposed” ones.

Now, somebody has to consume all these calories.

Figure out what my goals were going to be, set out what I needed to work on to attain them, worked out a reasonable time table and there I go. This was the plan that guided me through my marathon training.

I did have my share of new year resolutions for some years, and I did have them realized. Though I believe in luck, I also believe that many things in life do not simply happen by chance. If we want a chance for something to happen to us, we often have to put in a good amount of effort to have a chance to make it happen. The festive holidays towards the end of the year is probably a nice time for us to decide a highlight that we would like to see in our lives the following year and set our minds to work towards it.

As we enter 2008, I am thinking that new year resolutions should not be called new year resolutions. They are really a form of planning – goal setting, putting together an action plan, laying out timelines and milestones to track progress. At the end of it, you have a roadmap to follow, rather than leaving everything to chance. Just like what I did for my marathon training, with a plan, I knew what I needed to work on and when. The thoughts of “I think I should be doing a 17k next weekend” did not work.

I am planning my 2008 like how I planned my marathon training. 2007 has been a forgettable year where I did not have much idea on how I wanted it to turn out and I pretty much took things as they came along. I do not wish this to go on for another year.