Cheesy Crab Rangoon

Nobody really knows the origin of the crab rangoon. Most Americans think that its Chinese because you can only get them at American-Chinese restaurants and take out places. However, like the fortune cookie, the crab rangoon is only available in American and can not be found in China or anywhere else :P Chinese or not Chinese, they sure are great to eat!!
Kevin and I made some up as a late evening snack earlier today. It's really yummy and easy to make. All you need are some wonton wrappers, cream cheese, crab sticks, one egg, some pepper and parsley for seasoning.

Put some soften cream cheese into a big bowl.

Cut the the crab sticks into tiny pieces and mix it in with the cream cheese.

Add in some black pepper and parsley.

Meanwhile, beat one egg with a fork. This will be used to seal the wonton skin later on.

Using a teaspoon, put a ball of cream cheese mix in the middle of a wonton skin.

Spread some egg on the edges of the wonton skin.

Fold it up in half to make a triangle.

Deep fry the crab rangoons until golden brown.

Place it on a paper towel to soak up some of the oil for a bit before serving. Be very careful, it's really hot inside and eating it too soon might burn your lips! :D

Goodbye Hyundai, Hello Nissan!

My parents had this Hyundai Elantra for the longest time...I believe they bought it in '02. I guess it was more my mom's car, well, my mom's and whoever who needs to use it when she wasn't. Kevin and I used this car lots when we were back in Malaysia for that one and a half years. We would take it on road trips around Malaysia as well as the nightly mamak sessions around PJ and Subang area. My best friend and her husband also drives a Hyundai of the same make, model and year, so it's pretty fun to go around in twin cars! Good memories :)

My dad told me a few weeks ago that they were buying a new car and will trade the Hyundai in. He went to drop off the Hyundai and picked up the new car yesterday. I guess that's the end of the Hyundai era, every good thing must come to an end. It has served us well over the years and it was a good car.

Now, come meet the newest member of the family...a brand new Nissan Sentra!I haven't seen it in real life yet but from the photos, it looks quite good. Comes with a free Nismo body kit and the whole works.

Welcome to the family, Sentra! Drive well, keep the family safe and I'll be seeing you the next time I am home :D

Keep the change!

How often do we find change laying around the house? What do you do with those pennies you get back from the McDonalds drive thru window? I would just chuck it in the car 'ashtray' and think nothing about it. Kevin has this really big container of coins that he has collected over the years. One day, we just went through the car and the whole apartment and cleared out all the spare change laying around. We brought that, together with Kevin's container of coins and headed to the Coinstar machine at our neighborhood grocery store.

For those of you who not familiar with the Coinstar machine, it's a machine that counts all your coins/spare change and converts them to either bills or e-certificates for various merchants. You can also choose to donate them to your favorite charity. There is a service charge of 8 cents per $1 if you choose to convert your coins to bills. However, the service is free of charge if you were to exchange the coins to e-certificates. Among the participating merchants are Amazon, Starbucks, CVS, Borders, iTunes, Lowes, JC Penny, Disney, AMC Theaters and Overstock.

All you need to do is choose how you would want to convert your coins, pour in all your coins into the machine and let the machine do the counting. We chose to convert our coins to an e-certificate from Amazon. Once the machine finishes counting your coins, a printout of the total amount with a redemption code will be printed out. Look at the amount of coins we had in that containers! 979 pennies, 66 dimes and 31 nickles!!!

So, what did we get from Amazon with our 979 pennies, 66 dimes and 31 nickles? Well, we got an EVA case for our portable hard drive. We have been wanting to get that since my parents got us a portable HD for Christmas. Now we have a case to carry it around!

We also got a Mama Mia DVD! It's just one of those shows that is worth buying :D So, we bought two cool items from Amazon with the coins that we have in that container. Not too bad for spare change laying around the house! The next time you have spare change in your pockets, think twice before you just chuck it somewhere and leave it laying around until you forget about it! You mighjt be able to buy something coool with that change!

Crunchy Cornflake Cookies

Now that I have a hand mixer, there is no excuse not to bake cookies! I decided to try baking a few batches of Cornflake Cookies. They are my favorite type of cookies, especially during this Chinese New Year season.

They are pretty easy to make. It's my first time baking cookies from scratch, so when I say it's pretty easy, trust me, it's pretty easy :D This are all the ingredients that you will need to make them. Oh, all this and flour. I forgot about the flour when I took that photo :P

First, you would need to mix 1 and a 3/4 cups of flour with 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon of salt in a big bowl. Set that mixture aside.

Next, crack 2 large eggs in a bowl and beat it with a fork. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence into the eggs and also set it aside.

Add 1 cup of sugar to 1 cup of softened butter. Whisk the butter and sugar until it becomes white, light and fluffy.

Once the butter and sugar mixture is white and fluffy, add in the eggs mixture. Mix it well.

Then, add in the flour mixture.

Continue mixing all of the ingredients together.

Crush about 5 cups of cornflakes using a masher ( or Ziploc bag with a rolling pin).

Add in the cornflakes into the cookie dough and mix it well with a spatula.

Using two teaspoons, pick up some dough and form it into a tiny ball.

Coat the tiny dough ball with more crushed cornflakes.

Drop the dough balls onto a baking sheet that has been lined with parchment paper.

Pop it into the oven (preheated to about 340F) for about 20-25 minutes.

There you go! Crunchy Cornflake Cookies! I just love the smell that fills the whole apartment when its baking. It's so yummylicious! Really yummy and easy to make!

Sunbeam MixMaster

I have always wanted to try my hand at baking but never really got around to it. Yes of course I have made some instant muffin and cookies here and there, but nothing from scratch. One of my 'excuses' is that I do not have a mixer. It's so tiring to mix the dough/batter manually by hand and somehow, it doesn't always come out right. I have been looking at hand mixers but nothing really caught my fancy.

We went to Kmart on Sunday to look for Brita filters and I made a little detour to go look at hand mixers at the small appliances department. I was looking at a 5 speed, 100watts hand mixer and Kevin commented that it looked like it might be a little under powered. He showed me this Sunbeam MixMaster and asked what I thought about this hand mixer.

220 watts, 6 speed controls with a 'burst of power' button....very nice. The design of the hand mixer is also more 'modern' compared to the rest. I pointed out that it's a little bit more expensive than the other ones that I was looking at but he said it's alright, it's better to pay a little bit more for something good than to buy something crappy and watch it break down after using it for a couple of times. He said as long as I use it and make him home made cookies at least once a week, we can buy it!

YAY!! So this is my new hand mixer! Of course I will use it...promise! Thank you thank you! You are the best husband in the whole wide world!! :D

Here we go STEELERS, here we go!!!

The Steelers crushed the Ravens 23-14 and is crowned AFC Conference Champions! Now, they will be heading to Tampa in two weeks to face the Cardinals. One bird down, one more to go!!

Pittsburgh's going to

SUPERBOWL XLIII!!!

Snow, snow & more snow

It started snowing early this morning and boy, did it snow! The snowflakes were really huge, some are almost as big as a Ritz cracker. It was also really windy, thus making the snowflakes fly in every direction!! It looks pretty weird, check out the video I took this morning from my window. It was snowing so hard, the whole skyline of Manhattan totally disappeared.

CNY Card from Penang!

Guess what we got in the mail today?

A Chinese New Year card from Malaysia! Well, Penang to be more precise. We were pretty excited to receive a CNY card in the mail (yes, I know we are a bit jakun but nobody sends cards through snail mail these days, so we have the right to be excited).

It's from my Tua Tneoh, Tua Ee and family! For those of you who doesn't speak Hokkien, Tua Tneoh means 'eldest brother in law of my mother' and Tua Ee means 'eldest sister of my mother'. I just love the Chinese language, you immediately know how one is related to another family member just by the way you address somebody.

Here is a photo of Tua Tneoh, Tua Ee, my parents with the rest of my mother's siblings and spouses taken two Chinese New Years ago in Penang. It's really a bummer that we won't be able to go back to Malaysia for Chinese New Year this year. I will surely miss out on all the food, fun, family reunion as well as the 'gambling'! Oh well, maybe next year :(

To Tua Tneoh, Tua Ee, Alex, Adeline and little Alyssa...thanks for the CNY Card! Gong Xi Fa Cai to all of you!!

It's Taco Night!

It's official...starting this week, I have declared that we will have a "theme dinner" once a week at home! What is considered a theme dinner? Well, first we decide on a theme (doh!) and we try to follow the theme as close as possible. From the food, drinks...everything! To get things rolling, we had " Taco Night" tonight! We bought this dinner kit a few days ago and it's just great. Everything you need in a box. All you need to do is buy the meat and toppings.

Some soft and hard taco shells. I used to like soft tacos more than hard ones, but (due to a recent order mix up at Taco Bell) I think I have grown to prefer hard tacos more.

A photo of the taco meat filling with the toppings. All I needed to do was buy 1 lbs of beef, brown it, drain and add in some water and seasoning that came in the kit. The sauce that came in the kit was great, very mild and nice. I guess it was too mild for Kevin, he ate his tacos with Taco Bell's fire sauce! I also chopped up some iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and got some shredded Cheddar and Monterrey Jack cheese, seasoned with taco mix.

Here is a close up of the hard taco. Yummmmy? :D

One serving of hard and soft tacos! The kit makes twelve tacos in total, six hard and six soft tacos.

Since it's Taco Night, we also had some frozen margaritas! Everything must be according to the theme, right? Even down to the drinks!! :D

I loveeee this 'once a week theme nights' idea, I am surely looking forward to next week! I wonder what theme will be next? :D

A Miracle On The Hudson

It was just another regular afternoon for me earlier today, staying in at home to keep away from the super frigid -7C temperature. It was really really cold out, with a wind chill of -15C. I was checking my email when I got an instant message alert from CNN that a US Airways Airbus 320 jetliner had just crashed into the Hudson River! I quickly went to the window and took out my binoculars to check if I could see what's happening. It was about 3:30pm in the afternoon and I believed the plane crashed somewhere near the midtown section of the Hudson. I couldn't see the plane but there were lots of news helicopters flying around.

I turned on the TV and saw on the NBC News later on that all 154 passengers and the captain survived the crash! What a miracle! With the frigid cold waters and both engines failing, God was definitely protecting all of them. Everybody was rescued from the crash site, thanks to the help of the NY Coast Guards, FDNY , NYPD, NJPD as well as some local Circle Line tour ferries. The plane was heading from LaGuardia to Charlotte, NC when a flock of Canadian Geese flew into the engines.

By nightfall, everybody was rescued but the plane was drifting south towards Lower Manhattan. It is now tied up at Battery Park and they will remove it from the river tomorrow or the next day. We can still see a lot of helicopters flying around the lower Manhattan area, even at this hour. It looks like tons of fireflies, just circling around that area! Oh well, I am glad that there was no casualty in this plane crash and that everyone is alright. Wow, a little excitement for the Podanys on a regular boring winters day :P

* All photos are taken from www.nydailynews.com