Happy puasaing!

No food pictures because it is Ramadhan, yet again, that glorious month-long period (or ordeal) of restraint and reflection (or starvation), where I cannot look at pictures of food for fear that I will drool all over my laptop. I know. Sexy.

All the familiar signs of a KL Ramadhan have returned: my stomach's deafening rumbles of hunger are being studiously ignored by my office neighbour; traffic in KL has gone back to being predictably bumper-to-bumper between the hours of 5pm and 7pm due to the exodus departing the city to make it home in time for buka (good luck, what with said traffic jam); I enter a food coma every 8pm on the dot and have to face the dilemma of whether I should just let myself fall into a state of delicious, satiated sleep, or whether I should suck it up, be a (wo)man and get dessert to make up for the lack of sweet food intake during the month. Also and very importantly, pasar ramadhans have returned, though this is a topic I get more excited about in theory than practice, because when I don't have food, I am just not in the mood to push and elbow my way through crowds of people. Not even to get murtabaks and different kinds of ayam goreng.

I spent the first few days of Ramadhan in a tortured state, being enticed by practically every kind of food I saw or smelled... but this feverish madness seems to have passed, and the obsessive fixation on such random foods as cempedak goreng, Daikanyama sushi, and feta cheese and olives (in fact I just finished my little jar of heaven yesterday; heavenly because this little jar has feta cheese AND olives in it and I don't have to share it with anyone! Heaven!) has morphed into the altogether more monstrous and infinitely more terrible (for my wallet) obsession with the Mulberry Alexa. I just can't win. Unless I finally decide on whether Oak or Black is better and buy this bag of course. Then I most definitely will win, because it's SO pretty.

Tiramisu; Jerudong Park Polo Club

Who goes home, eats the homecooked food that she loves so much yet is incapable of reproducing because she can't cook to save her life if ever she were to participate in an event in which one must cook savoury meals to save one's life (it could happen, okay), attends her sister's wedding vow ceremony and wedding reception with yet more albeit not home-cooked food, and then very cleverly forgets to take pictures of anything?

That would be me.

Though I did get to take a picture of the tiramisu at the wedding reception. You might not see it at first glance (because this dessert is like one of those really trippy optical illusion pictures of coloured landscapes that my third grade teacher Mrs Gibbons used to show her class, wherein one little third-grader at a time would shout out that they saw all manner of elusive objects camouflaged in the landscape, when all I ever saw was.... a picture of a coloured landscape. I was so traumatised by being such a failure at seeing things in these kinds of pictures, so agonised about why, why, WHY I did not see these things that everyone else seemed to see, was there something wrong with me, was I not looking hard enough?!, that I used to join in and lie and say I saw all those things too. When I didn't. I confess, Mrs Gibbons: I was a optically challenged competitive little third-grader), but in fact:
1. Those two letter Ss in the background are actually biscuits trying desperately to be kissing swans. My sister, who picked the menu, confirmed that they are biscuit SWANS, people, SWANS, while I can confirm that they are doing a poor job of being swanlike, because if anything, they look like kissing snakes;
2. That little teacup of what looks like black coffee is actually tiramisu; and
3. That dark imposter of a teaspoon is actually a chocolate, urm, teaspoon.

Okay, so perhaps hidden object #3 is, upon further scrutiny, not so hidden and kind of obvious, but seeing as I have historically had problems with seeing what is always so annoyingly explicit to everyone else (I'm not still bitter about this at all, no no), I was pretty awed by this tricky little tableau.



And after I ate my dessert with my chocolate spoon, I ate my spoon! How many times in your life can you see your sister get married AND type out that sentence? (Rhetorical question as I have two more sisters, both of whom seem matrimonially inclined, and can foresee many more edible utensils in my future, now that I know of their existence.)

A Mango; My Desk

Am too nauseous, ill and queasy to look at pictures of fatty foods.

This is nobody's fault but my own because I didn't leave enough time to have dinner before going out last night, because I took a nap in the evening and as the boyfriend unfortunately knows, naps in the evening are the Mr Hyde catalyst to my normal Dr Jekyll state, because I love sleep, hate waking up, and especially hate being woken up to get ready and go out because that just seems like climbing-Mount-Everest-like unnecessary effort to sleepy Iman Hyde when the alternative would be stay in bed status quo, so I snapped at the boyfriend (he is very long-suffering) every time he tried to wake me up, and then finally woke up totally cranky, and then spent far too long getting ready because in my cranky Hyde state I was convinced I looked like a hideous monkey who would be turned away from Zouk, and had to be reassured by the boyfriend that I was not hideous and could I just find something to wear because I probably would be turned away from Zouk if I didn't put some, any kind of, clothes on, and then by the time we got to where we were supposed to be, the event was at full house capacity and we couldn't leave it to grab a bite to eat and now I have a splitting headache because I didn't eat dinner and stayed out too late on a weeknight.

The moral of the story is I should not take evening naps. Will I heed this moral? Of course not, evening naps are totally delicious and rejuvenating, and I am always eventually convinced that I am not a hideous monkey. But the point is I know what the moral is.

So no food, but I found the sweetest smelling mango on my desk today. Which is totally appropriate because I'm in the middle of Midnight's Children, which features a protagonist with a giant nose and superb sense of smell, as well as copious amounts of mango chutney. I will very much enjoy eating this mango while reading this book when I feel brave enough to face food again.

Mama's Beef Bolognese Spaghettini; Delicious

Who's going home tomorrow?! I'M going home tomorrow!!

The lovely unpolluted-cause-there-isn't-enough-industry-going-on-the-country Brunei skies are calling me! My bed is ready to be slept in (I lie actually, I no longer have my own bed, so what I mean is my sister's bed is ready to be slept in), my brother is ready to be cuddled (I lie again, in hopeful vain, because the monkey doesn't like being kissed and hugged anymore; what is up with that? It's not cooties if it's from your sister) and my little sister is ready to spill to me all her deep dark 16 year old angsty secrets, which I shall then divulge to my other sisters and my mother, because we know best, and really 16 is a cuh-razy hormone-fuelled age and experimenting is bad and testing your boundaries is unnecessary, because I can tell you exactly where your boundaries are by telling you not to do anything naughty.

And if those things AREN'T ready, they have approximately half a day to GET ready, because that is what I'm coming home for!

Along with home cooking, which I have missed dearly. My old maid used to make the best spaghetti bolognese. (See relevant photo below of sample spagbol). And my mom makes the best mee cina becak. Which sounds racist, but nobody knows what else it's supposed to be called so I think that gives us a pass. And my aunt makes the best tiramisu. And my grandmother's maids make the best tempeh goreng ever. And we always have feta cheese and olives in the house, which I try to replicate in my own home, but it's not the same eating feta cheese and olives at midnight without gossip and sisters.

I seem to be getting homesick, so it is a good thing I'm GOING HOME TOMORROW!