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My weekends

November 09

Last weekend I was in Oslo. The weekend before that I was in a seminar called “Smittende tro”, or “Contagious Faith”. I think it’s this one, although we had a Norwegian speaker.

In the “Contagious Faith” seminar there was a test, to help you find out what evangelising type suited you best. My result was the serving type, which wasn’t really that much of a surprise. What was surprising was that I got just one less point in the personal type. I never thought of myself as a personal… person. Well, I guess this shows that you can’t really trust tests like these. It’s only a guide, after all. I guess I should try and be more serving…

The image on the right is not actually the book we used, but it’s most likely the original. (We used a Norwegian translation.)

My family had visitors from relatives from Canada, I believe they were my grandaunts and granduncles on my mother’s side. (My mother said she wanted to make a family tree, I do hope she’ll finish it so I’ll know who’s really who.) Basically we had a big family dinner on Saturday with a lot of my mother’s family, so I had lots to eat. Also I watched Spy Kids 3D. The movie was quite horrible, although it was kind of amusing to see the famous actors doing their incredibly cheesy roles. (Gotta love George Clooney commenting that “This’ll be the end of my career” in the outtakes in the end credits.) And even though I saw the movie for the 3D effects (you use red/blue glasses), the 3D didn’t really show so well. Maybe the projector just wasn’t bright enough… I should’ve tried to set it brighter.


Some other things that happened:

  • my mother cut my hair (my original plan was to wait untill I went to Hong Kong this Christmas before cutting it)
  • I took my Bachelor’s degree cup from my graduation from my previous University
  • My parents gave me a big plastic bag with prepared chicken, spring rolls and cha xiao! No need to buy meat before at least next year! Lots of thanks to them!
  • I also brough some spoons, some plastic can lids, a pillow cover (now I don’t need to use a t-shirt as a pillow cover!), some thermometers, and some games

Oh yeah, since I’m mentioning thermometers, I’ve found that my apartment is usually around 12 degrees Celsius warm. Or cold. I tried putting on the heat floor in the living room today, but from my calculations, it cost 20 kr more per day to keep it on! So I’ve turned it off, and instead I bought a pair of slippers for 40 kr. I’ll have earned the money back in just two days! Now I just need to figure a way to keep my hands warm while typing on the computer…

Ah, one last thing: I got my last wisdom tooth pulled on Monday. It was something wrong with it, so it hurted to chew. (Not that it stopped me from eating.) I thought it was a hole, but the dentist said there were no holes anywhere, so it was probably an infection caused by the tooth. I’m still hurting a bit in the mouth, partly because of the gaping hole left in my mouth after the tooth got pulled, but I hope it’ll be fine again soon, erh, so that I can eat more freely.

 

Posted by on 2004-11-09 in Uncategorized

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Anime cube

November 05

./imgs/cellpics/animecube1.jpg

I made this in June 2003! Neat or what?

The other sides of the cube:

I basically used an old Rubik’s cube I had lying at home. Some stickers were missing, and some were loose. (The cause for this was that when I was young, either moving the stickers around or taking the cube apart to put it together was the only way I knew to get the pieces into the right places.)

I removed all the old stickers from the cube, then I found some nice images on the net, with as different color backgrounds as possible, and printed them out on sticker label sheets (usually used for printing addresses for sticking on envelopes). It takes some work to get the size right, too… After that, I just cut the labels up and sticked them to the cube.

Some things to be aware of:

  • If you want to try the same: Make sure the images are printed out correctly, before you actually use colors or label sheets. Test it with black/white and normal paper first.
  • The colors may come off when you use the cube, depending on the quality of the printer, ink and labels that you use. My cube is still looking somewhat okay, but I haven’t really used it much, and I’ve noticed my fingers getting some ink on it after each use. Don’t use it when your hands are very sweaty…
  • It’s somewhat harder to solve a cube with images than with just blank colors, since the centre piece has to be rotated correctly!
 

Posted by on 2004-11-05 in Uncategorized

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Cha Siu Bao

October 26

Look at what I’ve made last weekend!

Edited Oct 30th: Changed the name from Cha Xiao Bao to Cha Siu Bao.

I like to experiment with cooking, especially in the weekends. A few weeks ago I made pizza. Not frozen pizza, but a pizza from scratch, dough and everything! Not that it’s that difficult. I made it with lamb meat, champignon and onion. Erh, the pizza that is, not the cha siu bao.

For those who’re interested, here’s roughly the recipe I used (freely converted from a recipe I found with Google):

Dough

  • 9 dl flour (hvetemel)
  • 2,4 dl lukewarm water (should be milk though!)
  • 1 tablespoon dry yeast
  • 3 tablespoon sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1,5 dl oil

Filling

  • Some cha siu (Cantonese barbecued pork)
  • Half an onion
  • Soy sauce
  • Sweet soy sauce
  • Potato flour

The original recipe was somewhat different, but I changed it a bit, because I didn’t have milk, and I didn’t have all the ingredients for the filling, so I just made something more or less randomly. Other than that, I mostly did what the recipe described.

  1. Mixed one tablespoon of the sugar with the yeast and some of the lukewarm water in a bowl.
  2. Added the rest of the stuff for the dough, and mixed it with a mixer. Added more dough untill the dough wasn’t too sticky and wet. (Untill dough pulls away from the side of the bowl.)
  3. Took out the dough of the bowl and kneaded it a bit, adding flour so it wasn’t too sticky. “Untill smooth and elastic” according to the recipe.
  4. Put the dough back in the bowl, covered with plastic wrap (actually, I used a plastic bag since I didn’t have any plastic wrap), and let it rise for one hour.

  5. Chopped cha siu and onion into small pieces, less than 1cm cubes.
  6. Fried the onion untill soft. (Not deep fry, just normal fry. Steke.)
  7. Added the cha siu. Fried untill somewhat warm. Then added sweet soy sauce and normal soy sauce. (I don’t remember how much I used, I just poured untill it looked about right.)
  8. Then I think I added potato flour mixed with water to make the filling thicker (less like water and more like syrup), and poured the filling out into a bowl.
  9. I also cut apart some… hmm… “bakepapir”, paper used in the oven for baking stuff, into small squares. You’re supposed to use “matpapir”, which is the paper you use for packing bread for school, but I didn’t have any of that. Baking paper is too smooth, so the dough doesn’t stick as well.
  10. When the dough had rised for one hour, I took it out and kneaded it a bit more. Then I formed it into balls, flattened the balls, put the filling in and wrapped the dough around it.
  11. Finally I steamed the bao in a wok, since I didn’t have any proper equipment for steaming.

Some things I noticed:

  • The baos growed quite a lot when steamed. Even though I thought I made them too small, they were about the normal size after steaming!
  • They did taste somewhat different, I think it’s because I used yeast in the dough instead of baking powder, which is more commonly used in cha siu baos. The filling tasted somewhat right, but it was mostly because the cha siu had so much spice on them, so they made most of the taste.
  • I put in too little filling. And yet I had trouble closing the baos…
  • Except for those points, I was surprised that I the baos turned out so similar to the ones I’ve eaten before!

So, there you have it. Maybe I’ll try to make something else some other time. Dan tat! Not sure if that isn’t too difficult to make, though. I guess I’ll just look up a recipe and see how it looks.

 

Posted by on 2004-10-26 in Uncategorized

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