Category Archives: health

: : Bento ~ Playing around with new toys : :

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I had new cutters. 🙂

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The faces were cut using the red cutter in the picture above (left). Bought them from Bentomarket.com. And yes, it’s just as expensive in Japan or US as the pricetag you see there.

One thing I realised about using those cutters is that sometimes the vegetables will crack a bit. The cooked carrots actually did crack a bit although I think it was probably due to it being too thick a slice. Need to cut it smaller. Those smilie faces will go a long way in decorating salads though. Hee hee hee!

: : Malaysian-made Food : :

This is a bit of thinking post because I have been a bit stumped at times. It’s one of those “guilt-trip” feelings where after watching a TV commercial on “Buy Malaysian Products”, I actually don’t do it much when it comes to food.

Oh, I eat the raw food that are grown locally i.e. vegetables, fruits, meat and fish. It’s just that majority of the seasonings or processed food, I’ve bought imported stuff. And all for one reason : reduced salt or no-salt labelling. Malaysian seasonings or processed food will either have no labels about sodium content or they would put a generic one of “Less than 2,400 mg” (equivalent to 1 teaspoon).

A good example is the Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. The one that is packaged in Malaysia doesn’t have the sodium content. However, the one imported in from the US does. So I bought the one in the US and not the Malaysian one.

A lot of people have also advocated that sea salt is also good because it has reduced sodium in it. Unfortunately, for a person who has a blood pressure condition, any salt intake is enough to get the heart beating. It also isn’t comforting to know that my Uncle Doctor mentioned that Norvasc will make my heart palpitate a bit more anyways. Aiya…

The difficulty about going on such a strict diet was the amount of hearsay that I hear from people. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Relax a bit. Little do they know that I eat enough now to be satisfied. Plus, because my diet is so clean now that taking outside food will give me discomfort. I either have a lot of gas in my stomach causing me to burp a lot or I get heartburn. I get the feeling that friends are trying to tell me to go easier to comfort themselves that they couldn’t do it. Haha! Ah well.

The one thing that is motivating me from going back to bad habits is my skin, to be honest. It’s starting to clear up a lot and if I ever went back to eating uncontrollably, the reddish bits are going to come back. Now that’s something I do not want to happen.

Also, Malaysian-made seasoning in the rare occasions, will give me allergic reactions. So, I tend to keep away from things like Chilli Boh which I suspect has a lot of artificial vinegar/acids inside it or there’s some bizarre chemical in there that’s giving me problems.

In any case, I hope one day that there will be a Malaysian Food Company who is like Del Monte. They took a very strong stand of reducing salt in their products that their competitors just loses out. Whether it’s can products or sauces, it’s reduced. They didn’t always promote their products as reduced salt but when you compare the products side-by-side, they use less.

Now, just to end this post. The number of people who I meet are now surprisingly starting to eat more healthily. It was an eye-opener for me as they came up to me to either say it worked for them or they are enjoying their meals more. So there is some truth at least in this clean diet business.

Anyway, I have had my cheat meal this week already. Lunch with Dad at Sushi King and an ais kacang dessert. Which resulted in me not being able to sleep well at night. Also, a bowl of Sarawak Laksa for lunch yesterday with Granny. So yes, I have these cheat meals but they are rare and in-between. I compensate it later with more veggie and no-carb meals later on. 🙂 It balances out pretty well, if you ask me. 🙂 But I can’t do this for long. 🙂

I’m off the whole week so posting up stuff on the blog again. Next week is back to work so less time to blog.

: : Breakfast salads : :

I find that in order to eat raw salad, I had to chop up the veggies into small pieces so that it goes down better.

The other thing that I find that I had to do was not include lettuce so much. Can’t stand the taste of it too much.

And finally, the salad needs to have a minimum of 4 different ingredients so that I get an interesting flavour.

Breakfast : SALAD again!

This was an experiment with feta cheese. In it, I had fresh cherries, shallots (small onions), 1 glove of garlic (minced), celery, carrot and onion. The size of the container was 200 ml and surprisingly, that amount is enough to last me until lunch time. Not bad for a person who used to have huge carb breakfast meals.

More pics another day. Cheerio!

: : Bento #8 ~ Inspired by olive! magazine : :

Waiting at the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, London, I picked up a free cooking magazine called olive! that is published by the BBC. Flipping through it, came across a very tantalizing picture of fish with soba noodles and edamame. Well, inspiration for one of my lunches one day.

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Remembering that I had bought some somen noodles and edamame beans before I left for UK, I decided to give this a whirl. I substitute the salmon for mackerel since that is what we have at hand in the fridge. I had the 5-energy somen noodle from an organic shop (looking for reduce salt noodles isn’t easy) and also inspired (again) by another picture.

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I could only squeeze in 4 of the noodles in here. It doesn’t look a lot, I know, but I think it was ok. And it will be filling enough for me. I put them into small quaint silicon cups.

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The last somen noodle, I put into a small container and put it in the fish. The fish was poached with miso paste, lemon juice and cracked black peppercorn. I actually pounded the peppercorn using a pestle and mortar. Marinated it for about 10-15 min and then poached it. The edamame beans were boiled until cook. To be honest, I think that they are still partially cooked but it shouldn’t be a problem eating them.

According to the recipe link, this should be under 500 calories. It may actually be less because my fish and noodle portion wasn’t as big so I hope that it’s not over the 500 calories. Also, there’s reduced salt here as I didn’t used as much miso paste.

Anyway, I really loved the magazine olive! and the concept of Eat In, Eat Out, Eat Away. Plus, the fact that they publish out the actual calories and nutritional information for each recipe (well, nearly all), is definitely interesting. And the fact that there is a face-off between Gordon Ramsay and a reader on their meals, it sure is interesting.

: : Bento #7 ~ Postmeal after returning from UK : :

Just got back last night from London and sent back home by Davin. Trip pictures will go up when I have time to put them up!

Anyway, here is tomorrow’s bento meal. This is bento #7.

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Most of the food were prepared by my Granny because I was too tired to do anything except for a few things. So I packed up leftovers.

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To the left is a seed-rice mix that was packed in silicon cups. To the right is a veggie mix of the traditional Hakka dish known as lui cha. It’s a stirfry combination of onions, cangkuk manis, long beans, bean sprouts and tauhu mixed with some grounded herbs which I have yet to check with Granny what’s inside it. This entire veggie mix was then poured into a pot of hot Chinese tea. I put the tauhu and grounded peanuts on the right side of the dish.

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On the top left is poached fish with tumeric, ginger, garlic and shallots. Half a piece of a mackerel steak. To the left is pak choy, a form of Chinese cabbage that was stir-fried with garlic. And the bottom is button mushrooms that were poached in rosemary and oregano.

This is bento #7 and now back to trying to lose weight. I put on 3 kg from my UK trip and now have to lose it all.