There really is nothing like home cooking… there are times here when you get really sick of eating inexpensive Chinese, Malay, Asian food… when you crave Western food or something homemade.

This morning I made banana and chocolate chip pancakes for everyone and boy, was it a nice change. Thanks to my friend Tiff’s fabulously easy recipe, all you do is use powdered pancake mix following their directions except maybe add half to 3/4 of the milk. Instead substitute 1 to 2 mashed bananas, the riper the better. Then add as much chocolate chips as you like. Then that’s your batter and cook them like you’d cook regular pancakes. They turn out really moist. I don’t remember why or when she showed me this but I remember them tasting really yummy. But now I’m craving fresh blueberry pancakes…

Then for lunch I made grilled cheese with avocado sandwiches. At home we have a panini maker so it’s much easier to make grilled sandwiches. I had an interesting time trying to flip the sandwich to brown the other side. One of my favorite types of cheese is Gruyere which is a cow’s milk cheese and when you bite into it, it has salt crystals in it. It’s a hard cheese though so it was difficult to cut it up into pieces to make the sandwich. I bought one avocado at the wet market last week but I wasn’t really happy about it, when I opened it the skin was really tough to remove and the seed was really big so there wasn’t much avocado “meat”. Plus it was pretty expensive, I think $1.50 each. I remember buying a bag of 6 at Costco for maybe $5 and the quality was much better.

Hm, I forgot to take pictures.. oh well. I burnt the first one but the other two turned out alright. The must’ve been good because my flatmate Justine finished off the last piece of the burnt one 😛

Ron went out studying at INSEAD again so to save him the trouble of going out to find lunch, I brought him something to eat. I had marinated some chicken drumsticks with this pouch of spices that Ron had bought a while back, it was called “spicy fried chicken marinade” or something. I figured I’d try my hand at frying something, although I hate hot oil. I ended up using a big crock pot and putting in approx 1cm of oil at the bottom. It ended up working pretty well because the pot was deep so oil couldn’t splatter out as easily and with the cover on, it cooked the chicken to the bone while also still making the skin crispy. The taste wasn’t anything spectacular to me but Ron seemed to enjoy it, he said it was like Kentucky Fried Chicken without the breading 😀

But I totally smelled “fried” so that’s not something I’m going to do too often.

Then I indulged myself tonight and had dinner again at Margaritas with Alex and Joyce. Alex says he has been craving authentic Mexican food since he left the US because most of the places he’s been haven’t been that great. He had finally finished studying and taken the BCOP exam so finally had time to have dinner. Joyce and Alex had just come from a day full of talks at the 19th Singapore Pharmacy Congress. Apparently there are at least 1500 pharmacists in Singapore, about 500 attended this congress.

Everything at dinner was so delicious and I am so stuffed! I had a chicken burrito and we shared a pitcher of mango margaritas. Joyce and I shared a serving of Kahlua Tiramisu as well. It had tons of cocoa powder on top and was very delicious. It was Mexican because the lady fingers were soaked in Mexican coffee. It was served in a nonconvential way as I think it was made fresh in a bowl.

Alex was playing with my camera… but doesn’t this picture make you want to try some Tiramisu too?

We’re way too stuffed… don’t ask me where Alex is looking…

We took a little walk to the bus stop and called it a night. It’s been over an hour since dinner and I’m still so full…

Thank you to Alex and Joyce for their birthday wishes. Thank you to Patrick for trying to send me a Super Wall message on Facebook 😛 Thanks to Bani and Elaine for their email wishes. Thank you to Kurtis for the Hello Kitty birthday card from Japan!

It’s been a nice weekend in Singapore. Next week we are going to Vietnam!