Salmon is one of my favourite fish. I would usually just pan fry it (did that again last night for dinner). The original taste of the fish is nice and sweet enough that I don't need to add any special seasoning other than some salt and pepper. I tried making an oriental-type salmon fish head soup once and I quite liked it. I poached the fish head with an adequate amount of ginger and garlic, added some salt and loads of Chinese cooking wine, then topped it up with chopped spring onions and deep-fried chopped red onions.
AllRecipes sent me a salmon recipe today called Lemon Rosemary Salmon. It is another very easy-to-cook dish. After looking at the recipe I realised that a recipe I created on my own once is similar to this one. I baked dory fillet (instead of salmon) with olive oil, lemon slices, parsley (instead of rosemary) and some salt and black pepper.
The recipe for lemon rosemary salmon is here. The picture above is from the recipe.
I've got an 'energiser bunny' at home. She has been one that's difficult to put to bed since birth. At this time of writing (around 11.15pm), she is still awake. That's because she had a good nap late this afternoon after returning from her energy-sapping drum lesson. I had insisted she took a nap because she clearly needed a rest. (If you want to know how and why I did it, see here.)
She is now in bed and getting her nightly dose of bedtime stories from Eugene. I hope it would be lights-out soon.
With this post, I'm calling it a day too. My back and shoulders are already feeling the strain from sitting here for over an hour!
In the mid nineties, I used to drink coffee and tea quite a lot despite their adverse effects on me (totally can't sleep if I take too much or too late in the day). After getting bouts of gastritis pretty frequently, I decided to stay off these two drinks. I wasn't addicted to them so it was not difficult to deny my body of the caffeine and tannin it was used to. The only tea I would drink was Chinese tea during Chinese meals at eating places. I continued to stay away from coffee and tea when I got married, pregnant, and started breastfeeding in 2002, mainly for the baby. The hot beverages I would take were chocolate, milk or malt drinks.
Late last year, I returned to drinking a bit more tea, especially Chinese or green tea for its health and cleansing properties. Somehow along the way, I developed slight cravings for coffee too. It became full blown when Eugene switched instant coffee brands and I decided to check it out...(yes, I'm blaming him!). My coffee tastebuds were awakened from their 10-year slumber so now, I'm back to drinking coffee although I'm still careful about not taking too much, especially those brewed ones which are stronger.
It also got me thinking about learning more about coffee and tea. In the process, I found some fun trivia facts here and here. Did you know that:
.Bach wrote a coffee cantata in 1732 .Milk as an additive to coffee became popular in the 1680's, when a French physician recommended that cafe au lait be used for medicinal purposes .In 1900, coffee was often delivered door-to-door in the United States, by horse-pulled wagons .In the days of the early Chinese emperors, legend tells us only virgins wearing white silk gloves were allowed to pluck the budsets that would become white tea .There are reputed to be more than three thousand types of green tea in China alone, so it rivals wine in diversity .There are ‘Blue Mountains’ famous for both coffee and tea: the Blue Mountains in Jamaica where exquisite coffee grows, and the Blue Mountains that are known as the Nilgiris in southern India, on which a very special tea thrives
And of course, Manhattan Transfer's Java Jive came to mind.
Do you know the meaning of your name? When we were expecting our daughter, the search for the 'perfect' name for her was aided by the internet, and a rather unconventional (it contained a lot of uncommon names like Andromeda and Gaia for e.g.) English baby names book for her Christian name which we found in a bookstore. For her Chinese name we used a Chinese names book with romanized letters and English-translated meanings (both of us don't know Mandarin, shame on us...we are what is termed as 'bananas' - yellow on the outside, white on the inside!).
Last year, when Caitlin had to learn to write her Chinese name in Chinese characters at school, I had to look it up again to let her teacher know. I then realised I had quite forgotten what her Chinese name means, as well as her Christian name(s). I only remembered that Caitlin means 'pure' or 'clear'. And I couldn't remember what her middle name Sophia means.
I did a search and found Think Baby Names dotcom which provides more than the meaning of names. It provides the origin, variants, pronunciation and also gives statistics of how popular the name was in past years. According to it, in the year Caitlin was born, her name ranked midway between the top 200.
As for 'Sophia', it means 'wisdom' and was ranked among the top 50 in 2002.
Someone emailed me a video clip which appears to have been broadcast by Animal Planet and featured by Ellen Degeneres on her show. It just goes to show how smart dogs are. I found it on YouTube (I thought we're not supposed to post copyrighted videos there(?!) but there seems to be millions of them in YouTube!)
Salmon is one of my favourite fish. I would usually just pan fry it (did that again last night for dinner). The original taste of the fish is nice and sweet enough that I don't need to add any special seasoning other than some salt and pepper. I tried making an oriental-type salmon fish head soup once and I quite liked it. I poached the fish head with an adequate amount of ginger and garlic, added some salt and loads of Chinese cooking wine, then topped it up with chopped spring onions and deep-fried chopped red onions.
