Weekend Babbles : Food with Family

The past few weekends, we have had a couple of birthday celebrations and my mum and dad took it upon themselves to create lovely dinners for the family. My parents are very good cooks and homemade dinners with them are always a delight.

My cooking is nowhere near as accomplished as mum's and dad's. I mean, look at the food!

* roasted duck on a bed of salad *

* Turkish lamb with cous cous and vegetables *

* mixed salad with shredded duck *

* Italian beef stew with pan-fried sausages and cous cous *

* grilled salmon with garnishing and cous cous *

My parents don't just cook food... They create feasts. Each of the courses is paired with a suitable wine or drink and the whole dining experience is a real joy visually as well as gastronomically. My sisters and I are honestly very lucky to have mummy and daddy feed us :-)

The star of the evenings are almost always the soups prepared by dad. If you think you've had the best soup that you've ever tasted out there at a frou-frou restaurant, you have not tried my dad's. We have now dubbed him "Soup-er Man"!

* clam chowder with prawns and bacon bits *

* light prawn bisque with a blend of classic root vegetables *

The soups are smooth, full and bursting with flavour that you'd usually want to have seconds (or thirds). My mouth is watering as I type this. Gorgeous and sublime is what I would call dad's soups. By the way, he makes the best pig trotters vinegar stew (Hokkien : Too Kah Chor) too. I hope we get to have it this Christmas holiday *hint hint*.

So, what have you been eating lately and have you had any memorable home-cooked meals? Do share so we can spread the foody love!

A Special Note:

Thank you, mum and dad, for all the wonderful meals you have prepared for us. We are such pampered children :-)

Weekend Babbles : Nail Polish on the Brain

If anyone has been following my tweets, you would have noticed I have a disease called "Nail Polish Syndrome". You know, where all you can think about and talk about is nail polish, all day and all night. I have been stalking a number of gorgeous nail bloggers too. The last I counted, I have subscribed to 69 nail blogs on my feed reader!

The obsession first started when I decided to do something about my dingy nails. I'm not a nail biter but I have a tendency to scrape the tips off whenever I'm stressed out. One evening, I decided to pull out a couple of polishes from my stash and started painting my nails. The results were pretty nice although my nails and cuticles were in a rather sad state at that time.

* collage of photos taken with my phone *

There's something about nail polished nails that makes me feel happy. And no, I haven't been inhaling too much fumes. Nowadays, whenever I am stressed out (which is quite often at work), I would just take a glance at my nails and it instantly cheers me up! It's definitely better than scraping them off.

I also find painting my nails to be quite a therapeutic activity. I have the tv or some music going on in the background and normally do it in the evenings or weekends. It takes about 30 to 45 minutes from start to finish, including the drying time unless the nail polish is thicker and takes longer. That's equivalent to watching an episode of Dexter :-)

So, hands up if you have nail polish on the brain too!

Hope you're all having a lovely weekend and to those in Malaysia, enjoy your long weekend too!

Weekend Babbles : A Little Tour Around My Room and Pineapple Tarts

I read a comment left by ParisB on Tine's blog about how tiresome it can get to just do review after review and it got me thinking that there's not enough fun on my blog. So instead of bringing you yet another review, I shall blabber incessantly about my weekend (so far) and the things I've been up to. And yes, I have named this series "Weekend Babbles". There may not be any logic or point to these posts but it's just a break from the usual monotony.

Today, I shall give you a mini tour around my room. There's nothing particularly fantastic about it and it's a fairly standard room. Oh wait, now I remember what I wanted to show you. I bought three Ikea Helmers on Friday and fixed them up yesterday.

I decided to go with red because the rest of my room is sort of clinically white and these red drawers have a bit more personality than plain ol' white. It took le hubby and I less than an hour to assemble all three Helmers. And no, they are not all filled with nail polish. My collection is not that huge... yet.

My room is quite neat to begin with and believe it or not, I don't have beauty products strewn everywhere. There used to be a smaller cabinet which has now been replaced by two Helmers (pictured above). One of the activities I really enjoy doing is sorting and organising. Call it a hobby if you will, I just like keeping things in order.

My table top is not very cluttered and I like my dressing table a lot because it has three very useful shelves on the side and a secret compartment (!). I had just washed a few of my regular eye brushes and left them to dry on my table.

The mirror slides out to reveal three more shelves! I keep brushes, eye primers, liners and mascaras on the bottom shelf and most of my foundations, bb creams and face primers on the second. There's not much to look at on the third shelf and it's filled with some um... 'miscellaneous' products.

The rest of my room is quite boring. There's a bed, a television and dvd player, books, a bedside table and wardrobes (but is hidden in the photo). I have dark curtains because the morning and afternoon sun can get very bright. We have an ensuite bathroom but it's not terribly exciting so I can't be bothered taking photos of it.

My house is filled with the wonderful aroma of pastry today because le hubby has been making pineapple tarts (batch no. 4). He's been baking quite a lot lately because there's a potluck lunch with his team tomorrow. Just as long as he doesn't give anyone a tummy ache, it should be all right.

I sincerely hope you've had or been having an enjoyable weekend! Do let me know what you've been up to and hope to hear from you soon :-)

ps - One day I shall reveal the contents of each drawer but as you can see, there's a lot of drawers to go through!