Happy birthday dad!

My dad turns 62 today.  Like me, dad loves good food. I guess i got it from him.  There is a saying that says "the easiest way to get to a man's heart is to get to his stomach first". I think there is a lot of truth in that saying. So, as our little celebration, mum cooked a very traditional Malaysian lunch, Nasi Lemak served with Ayam goreng (fried chicken).

Nasi Lemak is a traditional dish sold widely in many parts of south east Asia such as Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.  The rice is soaked and cooked in coconut cream / coconut fat (hence the name Nasi Lemak, which literally means fatty rice in Malay). Some people add Pandan leaves (screwpine leaves) in the mix to add an extra fragrance. My mum usually throws in a few slices of ginger to give that extra kick.

The rice is then served with a variety of side dishes including fried chicken, beef Rendang, spicy sambal squid, hard boiled egg, roasted peanutes and deep fried Anchovies (ikan billis). Nasi Lemak is often sold at the road-side hawker stalls, wrapped in a large sheet of banana leaf.

I have included a few photos, taken just before i devoured everything on the table.

Fried Anchovies and roasted peanuts.



Spicy sambal squid.

Mum preparing the frangrant rice.

Nasi Lemak lunch, served!

Mum and dad digging in.

As delicious as the nasi Lemak is on its own, a special birthday lunch can never be complete without dessert. For dessert, mum has prepared another traditional chinese dessert called "Tang Yuan" (sweet dumpling soup). Basically, little balls of flour is rolled into balls with their cores containing crush sweetened peanuts. These are then cooked in boiling water spiced with ginger and with sugar added into it. The word "Yuan" means round. Chinese believes eating this will give one a "rounded" or complete year ahead.

Tang Yuan

Yummmm....just looking at these photos makes me hungry again.

Santa says Hohoho!

It is still my first week in Malaysia and i have been extremely busy with various social engagements the past few days.  I have been part of a two-days wedding event (Raymond's wedding) and have volunteered to be a backup photographer. I will be posting another blog in the next few days detailing that wedding (with extensive photos coverage of course).

I was hanging out with a few friends few hours ago. It was at a little pre-xmas party at Stephen's house.  Stephen has been my friend for a long time and i have only just found out that he has moved to a new residential area. His new house was super awesome, in a safe and secured neighbourhood with a fairly decent piece of land. 

There was carolling at Stephen's house but i missed the most part of it because i was busy running through and editing some 400 photos i shot at Ray's wedding. But i was pleased i have not missed the food and the beer.

Here are some of the snap shots i took....

Going home

I have just realised i have not had a real holiday in the past 3 years. All the so called "breaks from work" i had in the past three years were strictly speaking study breaks. To me those were hardly holiday break at all. But now i can finally have my well deserved holiday. I have officially signed the contract with Auckland district health board last week, taking up a Anatomical pathologist consultant position at Labplus, one of the biggest and busiest regional lab in the country.  I will not start until mid February 2011. Not only i can have a guilt free holiday now, i also get to spend half of it at home with my folks in Malaysia. It's a nice feeling.  To top it off, one of my best friends is getting married. I will have the opportunity to photograph at least part of his wedding. How exciting.

Here are a few shots taken prior to my departure at Auckland airport. Must say the kiwis have done a good job renovating and airport. It looks nice.

 Here i come Malaysia...!

This is a shot taken while i was waiting for my luggage at Changi airport.

I wish i had my tripod.

Chicken curry

Although this blog focuses more on my passion for photography, i would also like to talk about my other passion....passion for food.

I have recently attended a dinner party organised for my office.  I brought along a pot of home made chicken curry and i have received requests from a few colleagues to give out my recipe. It is very simple.

Ingredient:
Chicken thigh or drums, NOT chicken breast. Preferably keep the bone and skin on but trim away the excess fat. I like to chop my chicken into 4X3 inches pieces.
Potatoes, skin off and diced into 2 inches cubes.
Curry powder, available at most indian or asian groceries. Somewhere between 1/2 - 3/4 coffee cup of powder.
About 2 table spoons full of tumeric powder if you have (optional).
Dry chilli if you want extra kick.
Two sticks of lemon grass, fresh or frozen doesn't matter.
Two sticks of Cinnamon.
A few Anise stars.
1/2 a chopped onion.
Curry leaves optional.
One whole can of Coconut cream.
Salt.


Cooking:
Pan sear the chicken to brown the skin. Put aside.
Then sear the potatoes in the pan then put aside.
Then put Cinnamon stick, lemon grass, Anise star and onion into the pan and heat them just briefly.
Pour the spices above, chicken and potatoes all into a big pot of boiling water. The water in the pot should be just enough to submerge your meat and potatoes, not too much more than that.
After your water has reached a steady boiling state, turn the fire down to low-medium, let it "slow cook" for somewhere between 40-50mins (depending on how much chicken and potatoes you are cooking). After this time, check your potatoes and chicken with a chopstick or fork. They all should be fairly soft by now.

Add in the whole can of coconut cream and stir. Add salt (you will usually need quite a bit of salt to balance the curry spice). The coconut will equalise the temperature a bit, so you will need to boil a while longer to bring the content up to a boil again. Stir a few times and check the meat. Turn off the heat once the meat is starting to fall off the bone easily.

Optional: Sometimes i add in a handful of Mustard seeds just prior to turning off the fire, to add a little bit of crunch to the dish.

Malaysian Chicken Curry, served!

End of an era

It is the end of an era for me this week....my last week as a registrar. After this week, i will no longer be doing the boring jobs the superiors hate doing.  After this week i will no longer have someone telling me off because i have one minor spelling mistake in my histology report. After this week i will no longer be getting crappy registrar wages. The end of this week marks a new beginning, a future to look forward to but at the same time it also marks the end of a journey which i have shared with a few very close  colleagues of mine. With the never ending fellowship exams in the past three years, life has been a battlefield. I would not have survived if i have fought the battle alone. I am blessed to have supportive colleagues fighting the same battle with me. They are not just colleague, they are close friends, comrades, brothers and sisters. Sadly, one of them is leaving. Heinrich is heading to Australia for his fellowship. It is hard to say goodbye to somebody you have been spending almost every Saturdays of the past three years with.

We went out for a farewell dinner at Thai house, Ponsonby. The food was yummy. I brought along a bottle of Bandit (a red wine i got from Ascension Winery, Matakana). It was divine.

After dinner we took a short detour to Western Park on Ponsonby road.  Every year, the local Telco Telecom sets up a giant Xmas tree at the park.  This year, the xmas tree is as big as ever and there is a stage at the bottom of the tree with giant bean bags for people to sit.  Viewing the brightly lid xmas tree from afar was nice, but admiring the view from underneath the tree while snuggling into a giant bean bag was something else. We stayed for a little while and had to leave because it was a bit chilly and none of us was adequately dressed for the weather.

 The photo above was shot while i sat under the tree. Very cool view.

There were phone booths around the giant xmas tree. Here's Heinrich in one of them. Goodbye Heinrich. We will miss you.

Gentle beast

It's my last week as a registrar.  I am "secretly" feeling anxious.  I am 32 year old this year.  I have spent 6 years in Medical school, two years as an intern (they call it house surgeon in NZ eventhough we don't cut people up with scalpel like Dr McSteamy and McDreamy do in Grey's anatomy) and 5 years training in pathology. In other words, i have spent more than a third of my years alive achieving what i have now. And now i feel like i have gone back in time to be an intern all over again. I need to pick up new responsibilities, make decisions without people babysitting me. And this time, if i mess up and make the wrong call, it's all on me. You can understand where my anxiety is coming from.  That said, it is a very exciting time. At least i don't have to deal with exams anymore.

So i was driving home from work. In front of me was a Ferrari. I don't know much about Ferraris apart from the fact that they are fast and pricey. I think it was a F430. If i am right, this beast must have something like 500 horsepower and will go from 0-100km/hr in 4 seconds. I took this shot with my crappy Nokia just before the light turned green. I was expecting 430 angry italian stallions to disappear in front of my eyes, leaving my poor WRX with a plume of dust to chase.  I was wrong! The car turned slowly onto the motorway and then moved along the slow lane at the speed of 70km/hr.  I tailed the car for a while and gave up in the end. I overtook it and through the speckless driver's window i saw an old man in some fancy suit.  He must be in his early 60s.

The moral of the story is, when you are privileged enough to own a Ferrari, you can drive as slow as you want, whenever you want, anywhere you want and don't have to give a toss about what people think.  You certainly don't have to entertain a chinese boy racer in a WRX trying to race you at the lights :)

Endless summer

It's my birthday. I am turning 32. I know 32 is not a big number but somehow i just feel that much older.  I spent the whole morning cleaning the house. It has been a mess for a long time and i was so busy "unwinding" from all the exam stress i couldn't be bothered doing house chores until now. I vacuumed the carpet, threw out all my study notes and did some laundry. Went out to the mall and grabbed a copy of the New Zealand D-Photo magazine, Dec/Jan 2011 issue. I brought it to a nearby homestead/cafe by a park, sat on the sunny veranda and read it while i drank a glass of hot sugarless soy latte with a perfect layer of foam on top. In this issue of D-Photo, they did a side by side review of Canon 60D, Nikon D3100 and Sony A55 SLT. The Canon scored 92%, Sony 90% and Nikon 88%. I was quite surprised that Nikon lost the show down to Sony. Then again lets not forget Nikon gets all their sensors from Sony. I thought it was a bit unfair to throw the 60D into the game sine 60D is a much bigger and serious camera weighing 200g more than the other two in this comparo and costs almost $700 more than the A55 and D3100.  The D3100 was let down by the poor performance of its kit lens.

I must say the Sony A55 is a very interesting gear with a bag full of fancy features. Sweep panorama mode and GPS geotagging are two of the most useful features. I have to constantly fight the urge to buy this little piece of art. One day i may cave.

There is a photography gear fest in Auckland tomorrow. I will TRY to go if i can wake up. It will be a struggle i tell you.
Took a walk in my neighbourhood in the afternoon and got excited when i saw the evening sun shining through the clouds in the slightly overcast sky. Got my camera out and took a few shots and here's what i got.

The first photo is my favourite.  How did i do it....  Everything can be done with photoshop. First i adjusted the levels to make the shadows darker and the midtone also darker.  I thought the clouds weren't standing out enough, so i applied a gradient filter on them. Then i played with the colour balance.

Some Hydrangeas, flowering gloriously under the summer sun.

Treated a few friends to dinner at one of the top ten japanese restaurants in Auckland, Sakebar on Manukau road, Epsom.  I love the atmosphere there. Very authentic japanese, very cosy. Their food is great too.

First post-exam weekend

This is an exciting time. It is my first weekend of freedom. I feel like i should put up a flag and sing the national anthem, haha. But instead, i had a few glasses of Riesling, nicely chilled in the fridge and found some outdoor tasks to keep myself busy since i am alone at home.

On Saturday (which was yesterday), i visited the Auckland zoo.  I tried visiting around 3 weeks ago and had to return home disappointed because i could not find a parking. The carpark was full by 11am and all the nearby street parkings were full too. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that's Auckland.  So this time, i have learnt my lesson. I woke up early, had a quick breakfast and arrived at the zoo entrance by 10am. The carpark was already half full by then. Shocking. I spent a solid 4 hours there. The weather was glorious. Perhaps a bit too warm. Some of the animals like the lions, the Serval cats and Lemurs were all in hiding in the shades. But still i had a really enjoyable time and got a lot of nice photos.  Things i have found most challenging were shooting through the enclosures' glass. The sunlight on the glass causes glare and led to some ugly flares on the photos. Some people said wrapping a black cloth around the lens will solve the problem but i did not have a cloth with me then. Shooting photos of caged birds was also tough because the cages for birds were all made of closely placed wires. Despite my very wide aperture of f2.8, my depth of field was still not shallow enough to throw the cage into blur. So i ended up taking very minimal photos of birds. Here are some of the shots.

Sunday morning, woke up at 8am and found myself fully awake and unable to sleep (8am was the usual time i start studying when i had exam). I watched a bit of TV. Q&A with various talks about the recent Pike river mine tragedy was the only show on TV. Ate breakfast at home and headed down to Queen street early for the parade. Queen street was absolutely packed with people.  It was extremely difficult to find a good spot to snap photos. So i went "downstream" and ended up on Albert street (the end of the parade), managed to find a decent spot there. I was very trigger happy, snapped around 250 photos. I was mainly photographing the crowd and the people in parade costumes, not so much the balloons etc.  In a way, i am testing my own skills in people photojournalism.  My conclusion from today is it is very tough. It has made me realised hard hard wedding photographers have to work. Half a day of shooting in  the sun really drains your energy away. when you get home, you have another half a day of photoshop editing to do.  I use to complain about how wedding photographers overcharge their client.  I don't think that anymore now.

Anyway, here are some of the shots from the parade. Lots of kids around.

Back alive

So blogging has become a trend. Quite a few of my friends are blogger. It seems fun. But following the trend is not the reason why i have decided to join the blogging community.  My primary intention is to use this blog as a tool to share my photography. This can also be my little outlet to vent my emotions.

Why now, you may ask.  The past 3 years of my life were dedicated to studying. I had exams after exams as part of my 5 years training in Pathology. After all the hardwork, i have finally completed my training and cleared the exams.  Hence the title "back alive" for this post.  When you have dedicated all your time and energy to hardcore exam preparation, practically quarantining yourself at home 24/7 and removing yourself from any form of social activities, you don't feel alive as i believe human beings thrive on people-to-people interactions. It is actually a weird feeling, now that i can be normal again. I still hesitate for a few seconds before i switch on the TV.  I have been telling my peers it is like a tough pregnancy. You have morning sickness for he first 3 months and lower back pain in the later part of the pregnancy. You want the pregnancy to end soon but when it is finally over, a sense of emptiness hits you.  I am still adjusting to that. But the joy that comes with the achievement is certainly sinking in slowly.

So what have i been doing since?  I have been eating out a lot, sleeping more and taking lots of photos.  My wife is out of the country.  I really want to share the joy with her, i guess i just have to wait a while longer.  I had a nice japanese dinner at a local japanese restaurant with some friends the other night.  I must say i was pretty impressed with the food. I am sure i will go back again.

The beef Tataki was absolutely beautiful. The thickness of the meet was spot on (i have tried some thick horrible ones). I feel like going back already.