Back to Reality

We are back after fleeing the country for the second half of the holy month of Ramadan - turns out that not being able to eat and drink publicly before sundown was too much for us. Instead we spent a few days indulging with hedonist abandon at the French Riviera (! very unholy too) for Jade + Olivier's epic wedding and then split ways to spend time with our families in Europe and Singapore respectively.

As we are still waiting for our alcohol buying license to be issued to us so we shopped heartily for our home bar during our trips, collecting a nice stash at the numerous duty free stores we passed by, pretty much maxing out our limits.

"Room for more": as a dear but alas alcoholic friend remarks

Back to reality, back to life, I'm back at work today from my 5-month holiday, my office being our guest room which we have yet to buy furniture for. So now I'm in our living room which is a mess consisting of a disheveled rug, loose cables, opened and unopened paper boxes, unfinished DIY projects, and a deeply underutilised bookcase (currently home to a lot of junk) -- or what Kyle calls "looks exactly like a startup". Nonetheless this is not bad at all considering that the view of the Arabian Sea is mine all day long and the nespresso machine is but a short walk away to the kitchen. It also means Kyle still has his housekeeper and probably still expects dinner when he is home from work.. Right now markets are slow, and I'm stuck in the drudgery of struggling to get all my hardware and software up and running, which is why I am blogging...

To mark my retirement from my being a housewife, incidentally my official occupation stated on my UAE residency visa, we had for dinner a miso udon (ramen-style) last night completed with a homemade chashu and marinated egg. I followed the Momofuku roast pork recipe for the chashu and this for the egg. Having yet to master temperatures of this oven the pork turned out to be charred at some parts but otherwise perfect in seasoning and texture. The eggs are a real chemistry project, that need a lot of patience and precision. It will be a long while before I'll embark on another of such ambitious recipes.

A deceptively-simple looking dish can be excruciatingly painfully difficult to make

Photo editing wizardry credits to Kelvin Luffs Photography