Cooking Up a Storm and Becoming a Cobbler

On Tuesday, I had a plan in mind. I was going to wash my car for the first time since Chinese New Year! However before leaving for home, a number of errands cropped up and I had to get them done. While I was on the LDP, it started raining like it was the end of the world - I could only see 1-1.5 cars in front of me, max! It was THAT heavy!

After dropping my colleague off at Sunway Pyramid, I took the KESAS back home and surprisingly, my area had not experienced one drop of rain! There was still some daylight, so I quickly washed my car - even climbed up a chair to wash the roof! When I woke up the next morning, there were rain droplets on my car :S
Why does it always rain after I wash my car! Personally hand-washed, mind you!

Later, mum got back and she was in the mood to cook a Vietnamese pork dish (which she said she watched Grandma cook when she was a child). She had verbally taught her colleague to cook this dish but had not physically done so for more than 15 years! So she made me dig out the ingredients from the refrigerator (because I'm the one who reorganise a.k.a spring clean the fridge from time to time, effectively throwing mum off track on where she stores certain things).

So what goes into this dish? Pork belly (three-layer pork), chili padi, ginger, onion, belachan, dark soya sauce and spring onion as garnishing.

It is a simple dish to cook, but the fumes it produced... suffocating! I helped mom stir-fry the ginger, onion rings, chili padi and belachan till the mix was fragrant. And the both of us had our senses ambushed by the stinging fumes produced. One second we were fine and the next, we were doubling over, sneezing, coughing, tearing... It was uncontrollable! Although our bodily reactions were getting the better of us, we couldn't help bursting out in laughter at how silly the whole scenario was! Here we were half guessing what to put in and how much of each ingredient was needed that we'd forgotten to make sure the kitchen was properly ventilated! It really was a "huru-hara" experience but the result was great!

Later in the evening, something got hold of me and I decided it was time that I mended my shoes (those that required minor repair). There were altogether 5 pairs, of which the repairs ranged from gluing the sole back with shoe glue, repairing the spit seam of a pair of fabric shoes, sewing a faux gem which had dropped off a pair of gold slippers and hot-gluing a faux gem to another pair of embroidered sandals. I didn't have a clamp (like the ones cobblers use) to hold the shoe in place while the glue dries. I had to improvise and use rubber bands to tightly tie the shoes so that the lose sole would be properly glued back. I hope it works!

The missing jewel in the shoe