I don't know if you've ever seen the Lion King Bloopers on YouTube, but they're essentially made by people animating the "animals" to match what happened in the voice booths when they were recording. There's a line where one of the hyenas, Shenzi (voiced by Whoopi Goldberg) is laughing and eventually stops to say "I can only do 'em in spurts". Which is basically my life, guys. Really only interesting in spurts.
Now that I've put a disclaimer on my uninteresting life for the week, here is the food I made that I'm quite proud of and a little something about CCF. This is what happens when I do weekly posts about my life, guys. Sometimes it's just boring as heck and I make the best of it. :P
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Avocado Smoothie Bowl
Don't sue me, but I actually didn't even like avocado until last year when I went to New Jersey (to visit my cousin) and New York (to sight-see, visit my childhood friend, and see my cousin's office). Prior to this trip, I had only ever seen avocado two ways: 1) sushi (which honestly, it was there for the health benefits and creaminess, not the taste) and 2) Mexican food and things like dip, guacamole, etc (which I don't eat much of at my house, because we normally have Italian or Asian). I discovered the versatility of avocado during my NJ / NY trip. I had avocado in a smoked salmon appetizer thing (which was mixed with matcha and was delicious), I had avocado as a pasta sauce (which I LOVE PASTA, so that was an immediate win), and my cousin spread it on her bread and popped it into the oven. Needless to say, I researched it and was excited about the health prospects of this versatile green thing XD
Quick disclaimer, I'm not normally one to drink / make smoothies. They typically have ice-cream or milk (I'm semi-lactose intolerant, which means that I have to be careful how much dairy I can actually have in a day), which would pretty much take up my dairy quota for the day...They also typically have bananas, which I HATE in smoothies (actually, I'm just not a huge fan of bananas at all, except in goreng pesang form).
I came across a recipe while surfing Pinterest of a chocolate + avocado smoothie. This caught my interest. I actually went TO THE ORIGINAL recipe in search of what the ingredients were, and was excited to see that it only required 1 cup of milk (easily within my quota, with room to spare) and 1 avocado (for 1 person's share). Even better, the "chocolate" was actually cocoa powder! All sweetness would stem from honey mixed in, which I was MORE than okay with. We had some left over frozen berries that I thawed and mashed and poured into the blender. Blended it, tasted it, adjusted the sweetness and it was FREAKING PERFECT. This little concoction tasted like the BEST chocolate milk that just got a boost to pudding richness, but with a smoothie texture. I had a ton of mixed-nut trail mix on hand, so I grabbed an easy handful of almonds, smashed the little babies and crumbled them on top. And there you have it. Guilt-free smoothie bowl.
Healthiest and least "guilty" 15 min breakfast I've ever made.
I'm definitely doing this again. I also found out that you can substitute avocados for bananas, so my smoothie curiosity has officially been awakened. I'll be trying new things soon. :)
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Popiah Making
If you like spring rolls (not the fried ones), you'll love popiah. This is a local Singapore dish and I have the great fortune of having one of the best cooks in the world as my very own mum, and she's also one of the most dedicated because she herself LOVES to eat.It all starts with a little turnip called jicama. It's used not only in popiah making, but also in yusheng / yee sang (think giant salad thing that is only mixed right before eating and in a giant group and you yell a lot while you do it, it's refreshing in more ways than one) and rojak (mixed fruit, veg, and shrimp paste thing, also delicious).
Here's Mum posing with her finished popiah. She spends lots of time making it pretty (for eating). I didn't really care and just dumped everything in mine, made it about as massive as possible, and gobbled it down like the over-enthusiastic foodie I am. If it's not pretty when it appears in front of me on the table, I don't really care what it looks like on the way down to my stomach. lol XD
I took a bunch of pictures this time (aren't you guys proud of me?) so that you can get a feel for what popiah making looks like at the Loh residence :) We're probably missing a few ingredients here and there, but the crucial stuff was around lol
two very important ingredients to make popiah, the skin and the sauce (sweet soy)
general photo of the ingredients
jicama cut in strips and stir-fried till soft with shaved carrots
+ spicy garnishy something that Mum got. I personally prefer crushed peanuts.
crab stick (tasteless, honestly, just there for the color) and lettuce
Dad making popiah. An ALMOST hard-boiled egg (soft, but cooked center) makes for good popiah
the two popiah I made (and obviously ate), photo taken prior to wrapping
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Not much to share here, but it has resumed, which means that I'll be busy on Saturdays working with it. We had a couple of new students this week, and with our attempt to only use the chapel basement, setting up and whatnot for worship was very challenging. We'll see how things improve...we worked out some kinks (which can really only be figured out THERE) and found some other problems, but everything will hopefully be resolved as the weeks continue.
Worship wise, it's just me. If you could be praying, I'm playing guitar and singing at the same time, which is manageable, but difficult to sustain an atmosphere of worship because I'm having to stop and flip pages between songs, which drops the music off a metaphorical cliff. I think I've figured out a way to work around it, but we'll see (next week) how well that works.
I'm also struggling to find ideas for our Chinese New Year event. Thankfully, many of the students are excited to join in on a performance item, provided I can even come up with one. A couple of issues that keep cropping up include 1) my inability to read and write Chinese make it difficult for me to search and screen songs and 2) a lot of Chinese New Year songs are either phenomenally cheesy or have very materialistic or money-promoting connotations (which isn't really appropriate for church).
So far (performance-wise), here's what we have in the works.
- dance : done by Helen and Julia, two undergrad girls
- piano (+ flute + beatbox?) : Helen, plus me if I can figure out a part
- group item : pending, because I still can't find anything...
CCF activities (that I know of) to look forward to:
- Chinese New Year (Feb 17)
- Calvary Campus Church Anniversary (Feb 23 - 25)
- International (Missions) Sunday (Easter Sunday)
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In other news, you may or may not know that for the past several years, I've pretty much been taking allergy meds year-round. If I stop for more than a couple days, I have trouble breathing well and I sneeze a lot. Finally decided to take advantage of the fact that I'm still on Dad's insurance and schedule an appointment with an allergist tomorrow. Depending on when the results come out and what they are, my life may get slightly more interesting...we'll see how that goes :)
I've got a fun bit of trivia for you this #FeatureFriday2018 that I'm excited to share, so look forward to it (it was suggested that I make a YouTube video, but I figured it'd make more sense if I write instead of talk about it).
~ See you Friday!
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