Right, so I decided to try my hand at homemade granola bars now that the wedding invitations seem to have eased off and I’m less busy.

I fried some sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and rolled oats, then put them in a bowl and stirred in some orange peel preserves and honey. Into a baking pan lined with greaseproof paper, I poured in the granola and flattened it out. I topped it with another sheet of greaseproof paper and stuck the pan in the fridge to cool. A few hours later, I was all set to cut my granola into bars but found they weren’t sticking together.

I added more honey thinking maybe there wasn’t enough earlier to hold everything together. Nope, so I decided to bake it. When I took  that lovely slab of bedrock granola out of the oven and started cutting, I ended up with this !! How do you like my granola bars?

What? They don’t look like bars to you? You sure ? Well, okay, I managed to get a few jagged chunks (not bars, mind you!) here and there. But by the time I got them unstuck from the greaseproof paper, even those few miserable chunks had gone to pieces.

What a disaster! I showed the kids “my new style of granola bars” and we just sat there laughing. I scooped up the bits (literally) and now I have a whole container of granola bits to finish up.

I don’t like to waste food so I guess I’m stuck with this for breakfast. Every so often, I have to fish out the paper fragments floating on the milk and leave them on the side of my cereal bowl. See the paper fragments in the picture? Those are the ones I caught. As for the ones I didn’t catch, don’t worry, I’ve digested them, hahaha. Honestly I could develop a taste for paper !

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The Dumpling Festival came and went during the days when I was on my vegetarian diet. So I didn’t get to join my family sitting around on the outdoor chaise lounges at my Dad’s house to savor these goodies.

Luckily for me though, my dear neighbor slipped me some of her homemade bachang, or rice dumplings across the fence. I kept them frozen till recently when I took them out, resteamed them and mmmm, words can’t describe.

There’s 3 different types here - spicy sambal bachang (top left), rice dumpling with wobbly pork chunks, chestnuts and dried shrimp (top right) and the pea version of the rice dumpling (bottom).

Dang, these dumplings are so tasty I wish I knew how to make them myself. The filling takes quite a bit of work to make. As for the banana leaf wrapping, I admit I’ve just never mastered the art of getting the filling to stay inside the banana leaf while I’m trying to get the string secured.

The ones I make are not foolproof. I can never be sure when my painstakingly wrapped dumplings will pop open and come loose in the pot. It’s like they’re wearing a swimsuit that’s a size too big and wo-oosh, the swimsuit slips right off in the water ! OMG, how awful when I have to go fishing in that pot for those naked bachangs, hahaha!

During the days of my vegetarian diet, I cooked green pea soup several times. It was a great way to fulfill those hunger pangs I was experiencing. And it’s a sweet dessert that can be enjoyed by the whole family.

Green pea soup is a tong sui, or dessert soup, that is commonly eaten for its cooling properties which help reduce heatiness that causes fevers, sore throats, acne breakouts, etc  during hot spells. I cooked this again today because the weather’s been unbearably hot lately.

In the days when I was working on of those exhausting jobs in IT, I never had the luxury of tending over soups like this. But it’s really simple to make, just that you have to watch the fire.

I don’t use exact measurements so these are just estimates. To make a big pot, I just throw two cups of dried green peas (they’re sold in small packets) into a pot with 6 cups of water.

When the water comes to a boil, turn it down to medium/low and simmer for 2 hours till soft. Add 1 cup sugar or enough sugar to taste. Again the time here is just an estimate depending on how soft you want to peas to end up. I like the peas to be really soft, almost of porridge texture, so I let the soup bubble on for a while longer, checking every now and then. So it’s completely up to you.

Well, here I am, at the beginning of the last week of my 30-day vegetarian diet. It’s a great experience and I’m doing great! I work out, I eat, just avoiding meat, seafood and eggs and …

… well, just about the only thing about being vegetarian is that I’m always hungry and need to eat all the time . So like every one or two hours, you’ll find me raiding the kitchen and munching on milk and Oreos (man, these are the best!), guacamole and chips, biscuits and whatever else I can get my hands on.

I’m not a snacker by any means so it’s really hard figuring out what to eat all the time. With everything I’m eating, you probably expect that my new best friend would be the fitness equipment at the gym . But most times, I just end up drinking lots and lots of tea and water to fill me up.

One day, I made ambrosia, sheer heaven!! A couple of times, I made huge pots of tongsui, or dessert soups - lotus seed soup with gingko nuts, three-bean soup, black glutinous rice porridge - and survived on those for a whole day.