Double Celebration

I had to get prep done for dinner earlier today as we were visiting the Abu Dhabi Motors showroom after Kyle gets off work, but since it was Dragon Boat Festival yesterday I decided we should still try to commemorate the tradition somehow even though, it was impossible to make the traditional rice dumplings. That's when one of Mama Hu's comfort foods came to mind - a dish she makes occasionally when we needed to put together a meal quickly in a pot.

During this transitory period we're unwilling to burden ourselves by stocking too much ingredients and so we had to made do with whatever we have, for instance we could not possibly have glutinous rice yet so we used jasmine rice instead. Since we will be shifting to yet another apartment next week we have imposed a grocery shopping ban on ourselves in order to use up the existing stuff, so I dug around in the fridge and we had this for dinner:

Ba-zhang inspired rice pot: Dried shiitake mushrooms, dried shrimp, soy sauce and ginger for it to bear *some* semblance to the original, with rest being random veg that we had to exhaust. Oh yes, the meat is chicken..

For a side dish and to simulate salted eggs we made an Asian-flavored deviled eggs (basically hard-boiled egg halves with the yolk flavored and assembled back into the egg white "bowl"):

Soy sauce, sesame oil, black pepper, dried basil, topped with cayenne pepper

As I had pre-cooked the ingredients before I headed out all we had to do once we got home was to throw the ingredients into the pot where the rice was already soaked and waiting, and while the rice cooked we flavored the deviled eggs. The dinner turned out very well and the surest sign of a successful meal was when we started to eat the final bits out of the pot. This is one dinner we are sure to recreate again.

What is the double celebration you ask. Well why were we at the showroom for...

Spice up your life - we went for bold with the Mini Cooper S in Spice Orange

Today we have staked our claim on this baby! There are still some paperwork to be done (*ahem* money needs to be exchange hands, primarily) before we can drive her home. Of course I still need to find a way to get a driver's license but that's a problem to tackle another day..

And when it's all final, we should be able to take better pictures of her (instead of this crappy one taken hastily at the dealership.) Plus I'll let Kyle describe the car a little more as this is completely out of my department.

Whee! Vroom!