Bought this magazine today while I was doing grocery. I almost never buy magazines off the shelf, no $ and they usually are crap full of ads and spam and price lists. Okay this one is super cool, I knew it after flipping through 3-4 pages. Tons of very useful tips, for a variety of situations. Easy to follow, and the images the author’s taken were exquisite - the kind of images that I’d like to learn to take. Minimal ads too. At $11 I think it’s a no-brainer. I buy 2-3 magazines a year, I guess this is going to be the first one for 2011. It’s thick probably going to take me a month to finish reading it with my busy schedule. I’ll probably bring it with me when I fly to Hong Kong next month. It makes me happy when I see good books that I like and are hugely beneficial to my skills, AND easy to read. Thanks to whoever that wrote it.

I got this new McDonald’s buttermilk sausage and egg breakfast muffin for free with their promotion. I wanted to like it but I couldn’t, it just sucked. The bread/cookie could be tasty on its own but not when it’s bundled with the sausage and egg - super dry, mushy, made me super thirsty, and I almost couldn’t finish it cuz it was just too dry. Felt even worse than eating a raw potato. I doubt it will be a success, it sucks too bad.

To improve my ice-cream making skill I searched for recipe for green tea (matcha) ice-cream and black sesame (goma) ice-cream. Surprisingly they aren’t too hard to make, basically use the same ice-cream base and then add in the flavors. The Ho Yummy blog has a recipe for the black sesame ice-cream, and it pointed me to the Fujiya Japanese food store for getting the black sesame paste. Went there tonight, got the paste and also a bag of black sesame seeds. Also got a can of really pricey Japanese green tea powder. Nice store, got tons and tons of Japanese imported products and some freshly made bento boxes and other good stuff. I got an unagi rice bowl for dinner.

Tonight I tried to make the black sesami ice-cream. For the base it’s always the same: 2 cups whipping cream, 1 cup half & half, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, and beat them all up. To prep for the sesame part I pan “roasted” 1 table spoon of the seeds (they actually pop when they got too hot!), then put them into my food chopper to chop them into pieces. I could have used a bit less seeds actually, maybe half a table spoon next time. As for the black sesame paste I used 3 table spoon instead of 6 as the recipe says because of 2 reasons: the bottle of paste is so pricey and tiny I didn’t want to use it up! and then I tried out the taste, it’s already super strong after 3 table spoon so I thought that should be plenty. Blended everything up and poured it into the mold as usual. I think 1 cup of sugar is too much, it’s a little too sweet to my taste. 3/4 cup of it should be perfect.

Chinese New Year tomorrow, I wish myself a happy and prosperous new year!

It’s really been a while that I played some game, got this new free online game called Uncharted Water Online. It was a sequel to this Chinese game I played 1x years ago that I was really addicted to, now in English version, in form of a MMORPG. I never play MMORPG as I hate online games but…guess I’ll give this one a try just cause I’m too bored, plus Vincent and his wife are playing it as well so I might as well join them up. So far it’s quite interesting, I get to wander around a lot of familiar European cities like Amsterdam, Antwerp, London…etc. The graphics is so-so however it did have some really cool looking churches and architectures. So far I’ve been taking “lectures”, although they are pretty boring but they help me gaining level. Combat at the sea is also quite interesting. I just have to figure out what’s the best way to make money as I’ve spent all savings on buying this new ship, lol, it’s fast and good looking though.

Days were boring without games, hopefully this game will cheer me up a bit. Just booked tickets and I’m going back to Hong Kong from March 4th to 19th. Not really for fun, but to deal with some messed up problems. We’ll see what happens. Oh well, at least I get to getaway for a bit from the neverending, super busy workload at work..