yummy!

 

Doesn’t this look yummy?

Don’t be fooled though. I only cooked the chicken, the mexican rice is actually one flavor of Sidekicks, a.k.a. easy to cook meals. :)

But last weekend, I did prepare, with the help of my Aunt – my amah’s amazing, yummy, delicious siopao! I still need to work on properly closing the buns. If you don’t close it properly, there’s a tendency that the sauce from the inside will ooze out – as we call it… “sinipon”. You’ll actually see a lot of the siopao in the pictures below that were not closed properly.

On another note, I’ve also been into making healthy fruity smoothies lately. It’s very simple to make – grab some fruits, chop it, blend it with crushed ice. Healthy and yummy! I bought a ton of mango and grapes (my favorite!!!) and instead of just eating them all the time, I just decided to make smoothies out of them as well.

The one of the left is the grape. This is my favorite so far – but I still can’t mimic the grape shake that I love from Pancake House.

The one on the right is the Mango shake. I’ve also mixed mango with banana or apple. I find the mango-banana combo much better than the mango-apple.

One thing that I find nice with my new life here in Canada is that I feel like I have more time to do things. Maybe it’s because of the lifestyle here. Kahit walang katulong, I get to do more things. Or maybe since we do everything here on our own, I’ve become less lazy.

But I’ve been thinking about it more, and I really think one of main reasons is that I have more energy to move because I’ve been sleeping pretty well here, given the “regular” work hours now and the relaxed commute. Not only that, I do get more exercise these days which gives me that extra energy boost. So even though I find myself getting sad (missing family and friends back home) every now and then, I still find the positive side of things – that I can wake up each morning to a nice place, to a great job, and to a wonderful family and friends who I am still in contact with regularly (thanks Whatsapp! and gtalk and skype).

Bike and Frame

My aunt’s friend Mike is a serious cyclist and he offered to tune up “my” bike last  Wednesday for free. He even gave me a free (according to him – very cheap) bike horn, but will still be useful nonetheless.

This is technically not my bike. My aunt won this bike 5 years ago, and unfortunately, it has never been used since. And as I’ve always wanted to bike around the area anyway so I decided to adopt the bike as my own. It’s a mountain bike and a bit heavy though.

And now that it’s passed the safety checks (though Mike, the cyclist friend, said that he’ll update my brakes next time he drops by), I finally got to use it today do some errands! I biked going to the bank, and then went straight to a framing gallery to pick up my order.

This framing gallery makes custom frames for any of your framing needs. I had this name board that I’ve been carrying around which was a gift a few months back. So instead of this name board rotting in my cabinet, I decided to go try and get it framed last week. It was the first time I got something framed and it was a nice experience. You get to pick everything from the frame type, frame color, and even the boards, what’s the size, etc. It’s a complex piece after all. The lady in the shop who would be doing the frame was really helpful. She helped me decide the design and gave me suggestions on what would be nice. In fact, when I picked up my order earlier, she remembered me and even gave me a discount from her original quotation!

And so, here’s the finished product!

And that is now properly parked in my room:

Cooking Attempt #2

I picked another recipe from my recipe book to cook this past weekend.

Veal Cutlets with Red Pesto Sauce

I couldn’t find some of the ingredients in the recipe so I had to look for alternatives.

For example, the red pesto sauce required sun dried tomatoes, and all these other fresh herbs. Some of them, I couldn’t find, some only sold by bulk in the market, and I didn’t want to waste all that money buying 1 bunch of veggies, when you only need a teaspoon of it. 

Instead of veal, we used sirloin instead. We got a great deal out of two huge pieces of sirloin steak for only $12. The picture below is just the size of one – I just split it in half as it is huge. Look at that sirloin cooking. Yummy.

The red pesto sauce, in my opinion, was the best and unique part of this recipe. It’s a mixture of a lot of ingredients. And since I love Italian stuff, this definitely suited my taste. I loved it. I had so much leftover too that we decided to use it as our spaghetti sauce too! We just added some chickens and more mushroom.

 

I had a few leftover baby potatoes left so I decided to roast them! Unfortunately, I left them in the over a little bit too long, and it got burnt a little.

Nonetheless, not the best looking picture, but I consider this dish a success!

Cooking Attempt

Here’s my first attempt to cooking one of the recipes from the cook book Leda gave me last Christmas. I picked the Mustard and Rosemary chicken. It’s quick and easy to cook, with simple ingredients too. Tada, here’s the first attempt:

What went wrong

As you can see from the picture, there were a couple of things that went wrong. First, is that I had the proportions all wrong. I cooked too many potatoes, while I cooked a too little of the chicken. I didn’t realize the chicken fillets ended up being small in comparison to the potatoes.

The chicken tasted good, but the potatoes were missing a lot of seasoning. Next time, I’ll try to season it with different types of seasonings (aside from pepper!).

Also, the spinach were a little too big, I think. The recipe actually called for baby spinach, which we couldn’t find so I used the regular spinach instead. It’s still good, but I think I just needed to chop it into smaller sizes.

What went right (or so I think)

The chicken was pretty good. It was just mustard + rosemary + lime juice + garlic but tasted yummy.

I think that’s the only one that was right though. But it’s still a good start. I’ll cook again next week. Will hopefully get the hang of this cooking slowly, but surely.

Establishing a Morning Routine

One of the good things about being back to working from 9-5 is that I have the whole morning to be able to do what I’ve wanted to start doing even when I was back in Manila – create a nice morning routine.

They say that habits are hard to break, but it’s the same the other way around, habits are hard to establish too. And since I’ve been here, I have attempted to start an exercise habit for myself.

Beginning last week, I started running for around 20-30 minutes in the morning. Every Monday, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, I wake up at around 5:45 AM, and then go out the streets to run around. The weather’s been pretty supportive so I’ve had no problem dragging myself out of bed and enjoying the run outside. I still wear three layers (including jacket), unlike other runners I see, who wears one layer of shirt only. After a few minutes of running anyway, your body heats up and you won’t feel the cold anymore.

Afterwards, I walk around a bit more to cool down, and then go back home to get ready for work.

I try to change up what I do on Saturday. Since this is a non work day, I decided to explore something new.

Last Saturday, to make things a little different, I went for a 1.5 hour walk around Queen Elizabeth Park instead of running. It was quite the walk too. Based on my pedometer, I had 9000+ steps done! And the walk wasn’t that bad either. The weather was cool, and the scenery was very pretty.

 

This is as much of the sun that I saw that morning 

Next week, apparently the Grouse Grind is now open so I might just do that (if I don’t get lazy as I need to take the bus to get there). I’d prefer to doing it on my own first (no pressure from other friends who are way faster than me!). I haven’t done this for two years so hopefully, I can still do good. Or maybe I might go for a bike ride, who knows.

Tomorrow is the start of another week and I' hope I can continue this routine. I read somewhere that if I can do this for 4-6 weeks, then that I’ve probably succeeded in making it a habit and I might just find it hard to break this “good habit” by then. That’s one of my mini goals anyway. Once I’ve established this, then that’s when I’ll incorporate an additional activity and then establish a new habit once again. I’ll take it one step at a time.

Essentially, the overall goal is to be able to keep healthy when I am here.

walking and reading

walking

This is where I walk by every day going to work.

 

Via this route, I can take the bus, but since it’s only a kilometer, I usually walk, and then take another bus to work. That’s what I enjoy here, you can walk anywhere and feel quite safe and peaceful.

Of course, only if the weather is good. If the weather is freezing cold, I don’t think I’d feel happy walking around!

And since I take the bus now, I also get to read more now!

reading

And thanks to Rhys – I finally have it:

I’ve been delaying buying one for the longest time, and I finally have it! Paperwhite!  And it is the best. You can now read at night! That was one of the main problems of the kindle before, you need a night lamp to assist you with reading in the dark.

I already gave up my samsung tablet to my parents and sister in Manila and so far, kindle and my smartphone has totally replaced the tablet (which means, I am not missing it).

What I found amusing with Amazon is how easy it is to purchase books, and to load books into your kindle. You can do your shopping either via the amazon website, or via kindle’s store itself. For my first book, I bought “Silver Linigs Playbook”. I’ll talk more about this on another post.

Another thing that made me love kindle even more is how easy it is to load files into it. It can be as simple as sending a file via your "kindle” email, which loads it into your online repository (via its cloud) and then automatically syncs to your kindle! Managing your books online is good too.

My bus rides and bus waits have been made more interesting by my kindle. I’m currently reading “The Girls With The Dragon Tattoo”. Funny thing is, I’ve read the second and third book already! Haha

run and walk

I dragged myself out of bed around 11 AM to go for a jog outside.

I got a new nike armband so I wanted to test it out as well. It’s quite small, but can easily fit my keys, my bus pass, and some money. Unfortunately, my galaxy cellphone won’t fit. Too bad, I wanted to take pictures of where I end up running. Maybe next time when I just take a walk.

Since it was quite cold outside, I wore three layers of clothing, my shirt, a long sleeves shirt, plus my jacket (when I was on my way home, I saw another running, wearing only shorts and a shirt! LOL). After running a kilometer on an uphill slope, I was dead tired, breathing heavily and my lungs had some trouble adjusting with the cold weather for some reason. I was planning to head off to a farther shopper’s drug mart to purchase my bus pass, but I ended up retreating and instead went to a nearby shopper’s drug mart instead.

And while walking around for a bit, I just realized how different the place is from 2 years ago (that last time I came here). Along this main street, I see a lot of new shops, cafes, and even a new yoga place. I saw this one European cafe that sells fresh European breads. I don’t know what are European breads but I will try it out a little later. It’s just around a 5 minute walk away.

Walking or running out and about is a good way to explore the city. Although I’ve only started exploring this part of the city, maybe as the weeks come by, and with the weather getting warmer, I might be able to explore and discover nice little places and shops further out of the area I’m living at. Hopefully next week, I’d find some time to walk around downtown, or maybe go running again near False Creek area too.

I wish I could’ve done something like this in Manila. I just think our city back home is not pedestrian friendly. Maybe the weather limits us too, or the places are too crowded. Or maybe I’m just lazy when I’m back home. But I’d like to envision something like this in the Philippines, where we have parks in every area, or maybe where it’s a quiet place and people can freely walk around to relax (not only in villages and subdivisions, but all around the city). I think slowly we’re getting to this mindset too. I remember walking around in MOA area by the bay, that’s a pretty good place to walk around. And Ayala Triangle’s a nice start – where there’s a park in the middle of a bustling city. Nuvali’s supposed to be developed with eco in mind. One can only hope for the best.

And hopefully next time, I can run a bit longer than just 1.5 km. Haha