my parents called this morning, and were gratified that i've experimented with everything in the food parcel, and offered to send more ingredients, but i said i'd go hunt in food of all nations. my mother gave me a recipe involving poaching eggs with longan (!) which i think is very strange, but she assures me is delicious and nutritious. also gave lengthy advice on choosing the right sauce for various kinds of cooking, and to get vinegar for rubbing into rice. she laughed when i told her about my fish curry and said "zhu fan shi hen you yi si de, dui bu dui?" she also called me, not so unaffectionately, a lan3 ren2, when i told her about cooking soup in the rice cooker *after* cooking rice, so that the rice comes off and the pot is easier to wash later. (she frequently calls me a lan3 ren2. for instance, my flipflops are what she calls lan ren xie) i want a shi2 pu3.

i forgot! happy yuan xiao everyone! erm, well, it's over by far innit? right. eek. totally miscounted, though i meant to call people up! but, yes, hope people had a good yuan xiao.

been indoors all day. snow is higher than our doorstep, stairs positively a menace to ankles. woke up at 7.30 this morning, but haven't done much work. feeling stifled in here, and what i really want to do is simply to read a book and go to sleep, instead of working on the latin assignment, or writing my thesis. the whiteness of the snow is giving me a headache, but to shut the blinds is too bleak. looking for a cheap flight to visit poach or cindy or addy for springbreak. and discovering the number of non-traditional things you can do with japanese curry powder. if i had beef cubes i'd be making traditional curry, but i don't even have a sizable freezer, and my curry, for some reason, was refusing to thicken. so i thought, what can i make that is watery and goes with rice? i look around the room a bit and find a tin of tuna. aha! by beating the flakes up properly in the watery curry, and also swirling an egg into the mixture when it's really hot, and letting it simmer a bit, you get a soup that has the texture of (and actually looks like!) sharksfin or suan la tang, drench on rice while boiling hot, hah! know what it is? curry-flavoured mui fan!!! *beam* just what you wanted on a cold day.