Monday, January 24, 2011

homemade peanut noodles

Yesterday, my little one decided he wanted noodles for lunch. "Long noodles with sauce!" Easy enough, right? The only problem is that I'd used the last of our sauce earlier in the week, and there was no way I was getting all bundled up to go to the market for sauce when it was in the single digits, or at least felt that way. Not a chance. "Sounds good, that's what mom wants too!"

I remembered a post I'd gotten recently...something about peanut noodles. Pulling the bookmarked recipe up, I realized I could concoct something similar with what I had on hand. Maybe even better, since the paltry amount of whole wheat spaghetti I had on hand meant that I'd have to bulk it up with shredded veggies. The result was fabulous, and it was made in minutes. Here's what went into my version:

Peanut Noodles with Shredded Veggies

whole wheat spaghetti, cooked al dente

shredded carrots
shredded English cucumbers or zucchini

peanut butter
sesame oil
rice vine vinegar
dried ginger (leftover from Christmas cookie baking)
frozen cilantro
frozen basil
frozen garlic

Cook pasta according to package. While the pasta is cooking, shred carrots and cucumbers (or zucchini would be good too) in a Cuisinart using the shredder attachment (the disk with all of the little holes).* Pop shredded veggies into a big mixing bowl. No need to rinse the Cuisinart bowl out, as it's all going in the same place...just replace the shredding attachment with the regular metal blade. Then, I made a dressing of peanut butter + sesame oil + rice vinegar + dried ginger + several cubes of frozen garlic, cilantro and basil.** Add the noodles to the mixing bowl once they're cooked and drained. Pour the dressing over noodles and veggies and toss with tongs.

Note that I didn't give you measurements for the dressing ingredients because it can really be made to your taste. I made ours zesty with more vinegar than peanut butter, but you could definitely go the simple, creamy route by erring on more peanut butter and sesame oil. Try it as you go and add a little more of this or that until it's just the way you and your family would like it. These noodles store perfectly in the fridge...though I am not sure for how long, since we polished them off at lunch today!

* To give you an idea of quantities, I used about 1/2 a package of whole wheat spaghetti + 1 lb of carrots and 1 English cucumber. Really, that's because that's what I had on hand. You can do any ratio, but I thought this end result where it was 50:50 noodles to veggies was perfect and I'd do it exactly the same way when I make these again.

** I always have a stash of these frozen herbs for times like these, when I want to make something but don't have fresh on hand. Around us, they carry them at Trader Joe's (in the frozen aisle, of course).

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Other people may experience more misery than you realise

You are not alone ...
Have you ever had the feeling that everyone else seems so sorted, so at ease? You look about you and see friends chatting over lunch, people laughing on their mobiles, others escaping contentedly through novels or newspapers. According to Alexander Jordan and colleagues, most of us have such a tendency to underestimate other people's experience of negative emotion. In turn the researchers think this skewed perception perpetuates a collective delusion in which we all strive to present an unrealistically happy front because we think that's the norm.

Jordan's team began their investigation by asking 63 undergrads to describe recent negative and positive emotional experiences they'd had. As expected, the negative examples (e.g. had an argument; was rejected by a boy/girl), more than the positive examples (e.g. attended a fun party; had a great meal), tended to occur in private and to provoke emotions that the students had attempted to suppress.

The most frequently cited of these experiences were then put to a separate set of 80 students whose task was to say how many times in the last two weeks they had lived through something similar, and to estimate how often their peers had. The important finding here was that the students consistently underestimated their peers' experience of negative events (by an average of 17 per cent) whilst slightly over-estimating their peers' experience of positive situations (by 5.6 per cent).

What about close friends - surely we have a more accurate sense of their emotional lives? A third study was based on emotional weekly blogs kept by over 200 students, which they used to rate their experience of various positive and negative emotions over the course of a term. Each blog student then nominated a close friend or romantic partner who had to estimate the range of emotions the blogger had experienced that term. Consistent with the study's main message, close friends and partners tended to underestimate the bloggers' experiences of negative emotions and to overestimate their experiences of positive emotions. A deeper analysis of the data suggested the underestimation of negative emotion was partly mediated by the bloggers' deliberate suppression of their negative emotions.

A final study showed that students with a greater tendency to underestimate their peers' negative emotions also tended to feel more lonely, less satisfied with life and to ruminate more, thus suggesting that underestimating others' misery could be harmful to our own well-being. Of course the causal direction could run the other way (i.e. being lonely and discontented could predispose us to think everyone else is happier than they are), or both ways. The researchers acknowledged more research is needed to test this.

Assuming the present results can be replicated, an enduring mystery is why we continue to underestimate other people's misery whilst knowing full well that most of our own negative experiences happen in private, and that we frequently put on a brave, happy face when socialising. Why don't we reason that other people do the same? Jordan and his colleagues think this is probably part of an established phenomenon in psychology - 'the fundamental attribution error' - in which people downplay the role of the situation when assessing other people's behaviour compared with their own.

A fascinating implication of this research is that it could help explain the popularity of tragic art, be that in drama, music or books. 'In fictional tragedy, people are given the opportunity to witness "the terrible things in life" that are ordinarily "played out behind the scenes",' the researchers said (quoting Checkhov), 'which may help to depathologise people's own negative emotional experiences.'
_________________________________

ResearchBlogging.orgJordan, A., Monin, B., Dweck, C., Lovett, B., John, O., and Gross, J. (2010). Misery Has More Company Than People Think: Underestimating the Prevalence of Others' Negative Emotions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37 (1), 120-135 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210390822

Sunday, January 23, 2011

less is more (in the playroom too)

We didn't leave the house today. It's just too darn cold. Between these low digit days, and the old CA friends I've reconnected with this past week, I am wistful for my childhood where we could play outside all year round. Anyway. Rumor has it that there's another big storm on the way, which I refuse to believe because that will surely mean another snow day. But, if that really is going to happen, then it was high time we got the playroom back in ship shape, so parts of toys and board games don't end up strewn throughout the house (threatening to both trip me, and drive me nuts). In the same way that Small Notebook's author wrote about her undie drawer (and I took to heart here), I know the kids have more stuff to "do" when the toys are whittled down and organized. Undertaking this project with the "help" of my 4-year-old was like herding cats, but now that it is done there's a sense of accomplishment (and relief). And-- miracle of miracles-- since we finished, I haven't been badgered once about "turning the TV on because he has nothing to do". Next up, the pantry and the massive stack of articles and recipes I have ripped out of magazines this past year.

Cursed (Kena Bomoh)

So I have been missing for several days, and so many things have happened these several days it's absurd.

For one, life has turned upside down for me when I woke up one day realising I was living in a painful reality of lies. I'll skip that part for most of the part right now, since it's too personal and private to talk about about it.

Then I found that my condo has been cursed, yes literally, like "kena bomoh".


"shaman"


And I never really believed this, hearing it from parents and friends never change my skeptical perception on the world and its spiritual realm... that was until I experienced it myself.

I know many of you have heard that line before: oh I never believe it till it actually happened to me.

Well it did.


And till today I wasn't sure if it's psychological or actual dark spirits at work, but I was having really odd moods and always wanted to sleep all day long. I meant, I could sleep up till 18 hours a day and still want to sleep more. Worst part, I was getting nightmares, and the last one struck me so hard it woke me up sobbed in tears.



To top it off, I was getting in fouler and fouler mood, if that explained the angry and moody tweets I've been throwing off on the internet. Sorry about that.


Let me explain.

It started one day, exactly 6 days ago when one morning, my baby found a red string tied to the gate of our condo where the padlock should go. It bound the gate together and we had no idea who did it. But it was creepy.

Red string? Haven't we heard that one before.


Now to explain what further happened, I have to talk about my neighbor, and not just any neighbor, this particular grumpy scrawny middle-age man that lives diagonally from my condo.

I have 7 neighbor on my floor and he is particularly the most evil person I have ever met, not just any neighbor. He used to burn these Chinese money-for-the-dead in front of his house, on the 17th floor, next to the voltage room!!

And could you believe how he smoked all our condos every twice a month he did that?! An utterly inconsiderate man!

That's not all. Whenever someone went up to him and advised against him on his burning act, he would grab a metal stick and threatened to hit you and then chased you away while throwing swears at you.

He was nasty. And he's been nasty to the neighbors for YEARS.

So we called the fire department.


Bla bla bla. Skip the dreary details, fire dept came and he was fined RM10,000 for burning "kim-chua" on a high-rise building, which could set the building on fire.

That was 10 months ago.


Few months later, my baby's car got scratched, three long key-scratch from front to back of his BMW.


(not my baby's car, just an example)


A month after that, one of his tyres was punctured (technically, the valve-cap was unscrewed to let the air out) and had to be towed to a nearby mechanic while mid-way driving on the road.

And then it happened again. Yes, TWICE that bastard punctured our tyres.


And how did we know it was him who performed the deed? Well, he gave it away by parking his Camry in the visitor's parking instead of his given parking lot (which was two cars next to ours) for one whole week.

Point 1: There was survellaince in the visitor's parking (none in our given parking lot area);
Point 2: hiding his car on a different level parking lot.


He just gave himself away as the culprit of all these sneaky indecent slimy acts. That bastard.



Now I have seen inside his condo before, through the curtains, and I knew what I saw, and it wasn't the buddha or the guanyin statue I saw inside that's glowing under the spotlight of red and orange lights. So I'd assume here it's, dare I say, a devil (evil god). Or in Chinese, "xie shen".


the statue I saw wasn't colorful, but just to show you how creepy seeing something this creepy feels like.


I don't know what he's praying but it made him a really angry man, like all the time. It's not the first time I saw him slapped his daugther for not obeying him. There's even one time he whacked her little 6 year-old daugther so hard across the tiny cheek for not obeying him to stand in front of the house, she went to the lift to press the lift button which was 5 tiny steps away from his door.

An old uncle saw it and told him that was not the right way to teach a his daugther, and the evil man scolded that old uncle for dipping in other people's business. WTF?!




Some should call the child abuse authority to take this man to jail!


A day after spotting the red string incident, we found an old lady wandering in front of our door one evening, after hearing footsteps near our place, but she got away by the time we tried to unlock and open the gate to go after her.

You see, we live at the end of a corridor, with our door facing the corridor, so there's no reason for anyone to even walk in the corridor that technically belonged to us unless they want to come into the house.

What was she doing out there? God knows. Or may I say, only the devil knew.

(I'm assuming that old lady is the evil man's mother)

Then finally, a day after that, or exactly on Thursday (four days ago), as my baby stepped in after getting back from work, his foot felt something buldging from beneath the 'welcome' mat outside our door. He lifted the mat up...


Guess what he found?


It was a palm-size black sheet of paper, with a brush of red ink on it, wrapped in dried reptile skin.


it looked something like this.


OMFG it's so creepy talking about it even gave me the pimples now!


F F F F !!!!!

We packed, left and never returned.


Till today.

Only to return in the afternoon to box up the things in the house and started my first day of.... MOVING OUT.

Yes. In a short four days, decision has been made. I am to move out from that cursed place for good. And I have one week to pack before I hand the keys over to my landlord.

And no, I'm not sleeping there anymore.

And in case you're wondering, vivid nightmares of my mom being torned apart to death while sleeping in that place motivated my decision to move out pronto.


ps// a neighbor old aunty told us today that evil man abuses his wife and daugther all the time, for the past 5 years.


pps// if for any reason you think I'm giving in to some superstitious "curse" and denied myself access to my home; I see it this way, even if it's not real, these crazy acts would still be psychologically disturbing to continue living in that space, and if you can't even feel safe or comfortable in your own home, how is it still called a home? Especially staying in close proximity with a neighbor that prays to evil god and abuses his wife and daugther. That thought alone is worrysome enough.

Not to mention the liability to have your cars damaged, scratched and punctured an incosiderable amount of time. If you act back, you're only as low as them, and the battle never ends; if you don't, it's too bloody costly to keep fixing up the car, or giving it a new paint job. So why bother? Moving is the sanest move thus far.


ppps// he parked both his Camry and Altis in the visitor's parkings today. Ah hah!

Saturday, January 22, 2011

table talk

Because of the soup bounty from Monday’s swap, I really didn’t need to cook much this week. That was good because between two snow days and the boys’ tag-teaming sick days, I did not catch a break last week. Those of you on the facebook page know that I did still manage to bake not one-- but two-- big batches of cookies. Other than that, we enjoyed a lot of soup.

Assuming everyone goes back to school on Monday, I’ll get back to jotting down some fabulously simple, healthful recipes for those who want some inspiration. Until then, why don’t we do a little give-away!!

The notion of family dinners has been a hot button topic lately. So, say you’ve got the meal made (or assembled, or picked up), and you’ve got everyone at the table. I don’t know about you, but I am the solo parent at the kid’s dinner hour on weekdays and if I try to ask about school, I get a lot of “I don’t knows”. So, when I saw these little matchbox-sized “Box of Questions” at our local variety store I thought they were brilliant. Each matchbox-sized box has 21 different questions, and they are things like:

Where is the coziest spot in your home?
What do you think is the greatest invention of all time?
and
Do you have a family rule that is unfair? If so, how would you change it and why?

I am not really sure why they say age 6+, unless they’re afraid small children might eat the cards? Anyway, I think they’re perfect for any age child and I have four of these little boxes to give away, and will mail them anywhere in the U.S. There are two ways to enter:

Two winners will be randomly chosen from those who “like” the Meals in a Snap facebook page. So hop on over and “like” the site, if you haven’t already!

Two winners will be randomly chosen from the comments section here. Simply leave a comment here letting me know your favorite, go-to family meal.

For double the chances to win, you are welcome to enter in both places! But hurry, this contest only runs from today, January 22nd at 10am ET through Monday, January 24th at 11:59pm ET. (Winners will be contacted Tuesday morning for their mailing address.) Enjoy!!

Friday, January 21, 2011

Strong Tower

"The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe." -- Proverbs 18:10

I love the way God uses my alarm clock to speak to me. This morning I woke up to "Strong Tower" by Kutless and I immediately thought of the verse in Proverbs 18:10 that says "The name of the LORD is a strong tower." No matter what is going on around us or in us we can always call on His name; He is our strong tower; a place of safety and shelter. LORD, I run to your name today.

Strong Tower, by Kutless

When I wander through the desert
And I'm longing for my home
All my dreams have gone astray
When I'm stranded in the valley
And I'm tired and all alone
It seems like I've lost my way

I go running to your mountain
Where your mercy sets me free

[chorus]
You are my strong tower
Shelter over me
Beautiful and mighty
Everlasting King
You are my strong tower
Fortress when I'm weak
Your name is true and holy
And Your face is all I seek

In the middle of my darkness
In the midst of all my fear
You're my refuge and my hope
When the storm of life is raging
And the thunder's all I hear
You speak softly to my soul