(a pre, pre, pre-teen Jo): "Mom, next time when we shift house, can we get a mini stove so that i can cook beside you?"
Mom: "Ok, ok."

And in my childlike ignorance, i had always thought that it would materialize, even though time and time again, i was disappointed. I can't really say that i've grown out of that stage that wished for a miniature stove. Because... I've been wanting a mini wok for the longest time and NOW, i've got one! Whee!
It makes cooking with a wok a breeze because it's lightweight and takes managebility to new heights. I love my new mini wok.

And this would be its virgin dish. Fried... Erm, i believe, they are french beans. I think.
For mom's birthday, we got to dine at Yuki Yaki, a japanese cook-your-own-dinner-on-hot-plate thingy over at Marina Square. Each table is equipped with a hotplate covered by aluminium foil, where you fry your meats and the other assorted raw food, while next to the hotplate, you'll have an in-built pot for soup if you fancy a soupy meal. I believe you have a choice of 3 soups: Tom Yum, Herbal Chicken and Fish. I made a waiter slip and fall when i covered the restaurant's floor with my drool. Everything looked soooo tantalizing (at the parents' table, picture below) :
And then what's extremely cool about this place (that sets it apart from Seoul Garden) is that once you're done with your hot meal, you can ask a waiter or waitress to clear up the aluminium foil and to cool the hot plate down... And you don't just cool it down so you don't burn yourself, but they turn it down so low that you can now make... ICE CREAM... (that is not ice cream, just so you know)
Before the plate is ready, there'll be a thin layer of ice, which means that the plate is now cold enough for you to begin making your dessert. That little creature was drawn by my god brother using the ladle meant for the ice cream. The poor dude had to wait quite a while for my sis and i to be done eating before we could all begin on the ice cream making.
So what you do is, you pick out a flavour from this assortment of "ice cream mixes" that the restaurant has stocked up in a refrigerator and then you pour it out onto the sub-zero plate. Now watch your goo turn into ice cream! No, not true. It takes some skill to make your ice cream look like ice cream. God brother made his and it turned out as ice chips (next time i show you when Blogger is not so irritating).
This was a rather interesting plant i saw outside an Italian restaurant, it has holes in the leaves but they weren't caused by caterpillars. Mom had a double dinner birthday treat this year, so it was from Japanese cuisine to Italian that we got to savour. Cantina, is the name of the Italian restaurant, tucked away in a quiet spot along with a couple more non-local food restaurants together with an odd ball cheena looking furniture place that was shut (if i don't remember wrongly) within the Greenleaf housing area (i think).
Ok, that was a dessert that we bought and shared among the 6 of us, an orange skin shell that was filled with orange sorbet ice cream. Yummmm. Since we are a strange bunch of people, we found nothing else better to do than to find ways to mutilate what was once an innocent dessert, poking holes into the skin and whatnot (this is not the only bo liao photo).

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Till next time, pictures of monkeys, i believe.