Dream a Dream of a Mudpie

Picture a wedge of very moist, very dark mudpie from Coffee Bean, the texture of the cake very rich and chewy, with cake crumbs that cling together in the wake of a slicing spoon edge. Picture glistening chocolate icing adorning the outer surface of the delicate confectionery, fine cracks attesting to its stiff consistency, rather bitter, yet light and silky and pleasing on the tongue. Picture also crushed pistachios scattered on the top of the cake, pale greens and browns a crisp contrast against the dark icing. The wedge was cut from a doughnut shaped cake; the semi-crircular cross-section with the icing on the curved side sits serenely and plumply in a cardboard package, and waits to confer its calories onto some deserving recipient.

What else is to be said of the beautiful mudpie? Nothing, except that it no longer exists.

A Morning at a Hospital

We need to undergo a health screening to apply for a visa to China, and the school sent me to SGH to do it. It was more thorough than the previous two times I had health screenings and looking at the price of the package, I would say that it had better be.

What was most memorable was not the ECG when they put little silver stickers attached with wires on your torso and limbs; nor the urine test when you are supposed to catch a sample in 'mid-stream'; nor the x-ray, nor the physical exam. The one thing that was the most horribly absorbing and fascinating was the blood test, by far the most physically invasive of all procedures in the screening, which of course, is not saying very much.

The nurse gave me a foam ball to squeeze and tied a tourniquet around my upper arm. She disinfected the hollow of my elbow within which a vein showed faintly green. I stared in fascination at the spot, moist with evaporating alcohol, and tried to imagine how much a needle would hurt going in. I mean, one could get used to the doctor's palpations during a physical, one could get used to having to hold one's breath while having a chest x-ray, but drawing blood or receiving an injection is almost a new experience everytime you undergo it, for all the dreadful fascination the notion of having a needle inserted into your flesh evokes.

I stared morbidly as the nurse inserted a needle into my arm, and pushed it further into the vein. Her movements (thank God) were deft and quick as she fitted a cylinder onto the needle and allowed it to fill with dark red blood. I noted dimly that the blood seemed to be spurting into the cylinder and later wondered how that could be so, since it was a venous and not arterial flow.

"Are you sure you are not going to faint?" she inquired with concern when she noticed me watching the blood filling the cylinder. I assured her that I would not.

"You are very brave," she remarked, "most people would not dare look." I wasn't sure that that amounted to bravery, but I smiled slightly anyway and continued to gaze intently at the needle. It did not seem to hurt much now that it was already embedded, compared to the initial insertion. This drew another remark from the nurse: "My, how intently you gaze at it!" I did not tell her that I found it fascinating, albeit in a rather morbid sense.

The nurse filled two cylinders before she withdrew the needle. The tiny wound stopped very quickly after pressure was applied for only under a minute. It did not even bleed further under the plaster. My platelets were apparently doing a splendid job. The same goes for the nurse with her deft handling of the needle. Last time when a couple of friends and I went to do a medical screening, the nurse apparently had some difficulty in locating the vein in one of the students and made several (several!) attempts at doing so with the needle.

Aside from the health screening, I must note also that SGH is a very prettily decorated hospital, with soft lighting and comfortable couches giving the impression of a cosy living room. Very family friendly, which was no doubt what was on the mind of the designers who furnished it. NUH doesn't do it too badly, but SGH takes interior decoration one step further, as if intending to convince patients that they were anywhere but at a hospital. There were also little landscaped gardens with flowing water, and lots of wood panelling. It was so restful. I suppose that part of the exorbitant prices that they charge go to the interior decor.

They efficiently whisked me through the whole procedure and sent me on my way armed with the x-ray film and instructions to return a few days later to collect the results. I gave the shuttle bus a miss and took a meandering route out of SGH.

Of pancake and related thoughts

My Finnish clustermate planned to whip up a batch of 'bundugruckw' (this is how she pronounces it, not how she spells it) or pancake for the block supper. (Aside: It seems like everyone is embarking on some kind of cooking project nowadays). It was a mixture of milk and egg and some flour poured into a pan and baked in the oven. A little like pancake batter, except that it wasn't fried. I warned her that the oven was very hot and the black baking pans could produce unpredictable results.

The pancake was to be baked for some 30 minutes. Barely 15 minutes later, I saw her in the kitchen cutting up, or rather hacking up the the tray of pancake, which had stuck to the pan upon baking. It looked alright, and smelled pretty good, but it was a little burnt on the surface and somewhat raw on the inside. She was very unhappy about it. Apparently this was the first time her batch of pancake did not come out to her liking. She was actually a little flabbergasted that she could screw up something so simple as her 'bundugruckw'. She said that there was no way that she would bring it down and tell everyone that this was what they ate in Finland. Anyway we sat ourselves down and started tucking into the pancake, which we had with some jam. She told me that she didn't understand how this oven could cook the pancake so quickly when it would take the oven at home some 30 minutes at about the same temperature. We agreed that the oven was pretty sucky, and the baking pans plain weird.

This put me back to the time when I baked a rather dry cake which some clever-pants still likes to describe as looking like a mud-covered football with its somewhat uneven chocolate frosting. (No, I'm not angry that you call it that, I'm just... dryly amused) My friends valiantly choked down about half of it (with the help of chocolate sauce) and managed to smile after doing that, even while diplomatically trying to find something nice to say about it. Or the time when I scorched the base of some cookies and they ate most of it anyway, albeit with blunt comments from some quarters -- "tastes like burnt cookie" -- ahem. Yes, don't we all need friends to eat our cooking fiascoes? It gives you the encouragement to go on, it does.

I figured that she could at least use a helping hand to scrub that baking pan and a helping mouth to eat some of the pancake, to say nothing of someone to vigorously agree that it was not all her fault that the pancake turned out weird. And I think it wasn't, since she obviously is a seasoned cook, from the descriptions of the cinnamon rolls and whatnot that she makes at home. Just blame it on the oven la.

Of cooking adventures and caramel candies

It was a container of crumbly golden brown chunks with a tantalizing aroma of burnt sugar and butter. A chunk of the sweet confectionery melted in my mouth and released a medley of aromas. It tasted of toffee. Or caramel. I pronouced my verdict: "Not...bad..."I took another. "Not bad at all. Although quite unlike anything I have ever eaten." My brother, who was anxiously awaiting my opinion of his creation, looked relieved.

Last Saturday, my brother whipped up a batch of 'honey caramel', minus the honey. What went in was white sugar, butter, condensed milk (in lieu of the sweetened cream that he could not find). All positively delicious yet infinitely unhealthy materials. I complained that the resulting chunks of candy were literally calorie bombs and he cheerfully agreed.

I was very surprised to hear that he embarked on such an ambitious cooking project; he, whose early independant culinary efforts on campus were limited strictly to cooking with the microwave. But he has acquired a saucepan lately, and appears to have expanded his cooking horizons. He had apparently obtained the recipe from the internet. And he had doubled the portions.

Another point to note is that the phrase 'whipped up' seems to trivialise the effort he has expended over this confectionery -- he told me that he literally spent the whole afternoon on it (while the rest of us were catching 'Hitch' in the cinema). Nearing the end, the sugar syrup apparently acquired the viscousity of chewing gum and he claims that he nearly could not move the spoon inserted into it. It looked like it was done. He promptly inserted it into the freezer, because he couldn't wait for it to cool.

I gasped: "You What?" Him: "Mom would kill me if I ever suggested doing that at home, I'm sure." Me: "No wonder it is so grainy! It must be because you flash-cooled it!" Me again, sputtering with sheer incredulity: "If your fridge spoils because you were foolhardy enough to do that you would have to make do for a whole semester without it before they replaced it for you!" As it turned out however, his fridge survived this encounter with a hot pot, ALTHOUGH this is not to say that this will always be the case if someone were to make a habit out of such practises.

Reflecting on this however, I would say that it is highly unlikely that he would ever have gotten a chance to produce such a confectionery at home. Sure, cookies and cakes would have gotten the requisite approval from The Powers That Be, but caramel? sugar, butter and condensed milk? Such a project would surely have been decisively vetoed/killed at inception/smothered in infancy by my health-conscious mother who has very definite ideas of what constitutes acceptable food/cooking projects. (Aside to Mom: Right, Mom? Aside to Ken: Tsk! So this is how you exercise your new-found freedom!)

This is not to say that the confectionery was not a success, in its own small way. At times, I would find myself reaching again and again into the candy jar. It's addictive, until you get absolutely sick of its cloying sweetness. KM agrees with me. She says it is more addictive than chocolate. It's in the rich buttery flavour and the crumbly texture, I guess. I'm not sure this constitutes an encouragement on my part to go ahead with another batch, using the same destructive methods. Well, ok by all means make another batch. But for heavens sake use a tray of ice water if you have to flash-cool anything ok? None of that hot-pot-in-freezer nonsense again, please.

A tale of lost delicacies: Food thieves in hostel kitchens

Sometime last week, a note appeared on the door of the fridge, posted by a clustermate who was apparently in high dudgeon over the loss of some fruits, warning the 'thief' to lay off her food and promising dire retribution if she ever caught that thief.

Notices like these are not unusual. Which hostelite has not had his or her share of food thieves? My old cluster used to be plagued by a food thief (or thieves) and girls were frequently complaining about missing fruits and whatnot. I generally keep my fruits in my room and saw no reason to change that habit. Back in Chinese High Boarding food thefts happened to such a frequency that several cluster meetings were held on that subject alone, which however failed to formulate any meaningful plan of action. Girls were merely advised to tie up their food securely and some did so, in multiple layers of plastic bags, often to no avail.

YX's cluster has a particularly audacious food thief, stealing all manner of delicacies including(YX's) Haagen-Daz ice-cream, someone's mince meat (a particularly fine homemade delicacy), fruits, yoghurt, slices of cake. Frequently I would see new notes on her cluster fridge door angrily denouncing the despicable thief, warning the thief to lay off food that was not hers and promising dire retribution if ever she was caught. From one angry hostelite to another, the problem remains the same; however no one has ever come up with an effective solution to nab the thief once and for all and can only grind her teeth in frustration.

The girls in YX's cluster frequently compared notes about who had lost what recently and even came up with theories on who the thief might be. I suggested laxative, a particularly large dose of it, in some of the thief's favourite food. Since the thief was known to abstract large quantities of the food at times, one need only, after the food was stolen to pay attention to find out if anyone had any stomach problems the following day. An elegant solution? Not quite. YX pointed out that there was the problem of monitoring the toilets (well, sit in the kitchen and read, there is a good view of the toilet entrance from the kitchen). Furthermore the thief might actually be out when the stomach trouble hits. Still that particular thief is an exceptionally active one, and if one couldn't nail her on the first attempt then a second attempt almost certainly should do the trick. Now if such a food thief occurred in my cluster I should certainly be driven to such measures.

One more suggestion which has just occurred to me is to place a note on the fridge door saying:

"Some food in this fridge has been spiked with medicine designed to give the FOOD THIEF a TERRIBLE STOMACHACHE. Eat your own food and you will be safe. If you continue to steal food we shall soon find out WHO YOU ARE!"

See if that thief dares to strike again.

A Hong Kong exchange student that I knew last semester faced the same problems in her hall. Her boyfriend had brought a box of mooncakes when he came visiting and she lost half the box in one fell swoop. In deep disgust she divided up the remaining mooncakes amongst us. Better we have them than some nasty thief, she said.

Now back to the problem the purported food theft in my cluster. I was surprised to see the note, for throughout the previous semester everything had been very peaceful in this cluster . There were no food thefts at all, an attestation to the decency of all the girls in the cluster. It only takes one miserable, deceitful food thief to introduce a miasma of suspicion into the cluster atmosphere. There were two new additions to the cluster this semseter and I had wondered uncomfortably if it could be one of them. They were both very nice girls.

Last night however, a friend of my aggrieved clustermate went up to her room door declaring that she had found a bag of tangerines at the fridge door and could it possibly be the bag the aggrieved clustermate had lost? It turned out that it was, indeed, and amidst some hilarity and embarrassment the (previously) aggrieved clustermate went to remove the misdirected note on the fridge door. Someone else had apparently relocated her fruits causing her to think that they had been stolen.

I was glad not to see the note on the door anymore. I was glad not to have to suspect that there was a miserable food thief amongst us. I really think that it takes a person of unusually low moral stature to steal someone else's food, and unusual brazenness not to blush at her clustermates' complaints of food thefts actually committed by herself. In the case of the thief in YX's cluster, I cannot understand how the thief can read the notes on the fridge and blithely go on stealing food. Has she no shame? no self control? no respect for the education she has been given? no sense of decency at all?

But my clustermates are good clustermates. We do not steal food. Food thieves are the problem of other clusters, for this semester anyway.

I wonder if I should put a note on the fridge door announcing that the previous suspected 'food theft' was all a misunderstanding and instead commend all of my clustermates for their honesty? I think I will.

A day of blunders

I have been unusually dull and unfocused today and just about everything that could go wrong, did.

I was at YIH thinking of photocopying some forms when I realised that I left my photocopying card in the Law Library photocopying machine. Drat. I resigned myself to that loss and pulled out my spare card to use.

After photocopying, I realised that I would need photographs for the forms, which I forgot to bring. I would have to return to post the forms another time.

I left YIH in disgust, but decided to return to the library to see if I could somehow find the card that I left there. To my pleasant, someone had turned it in to the counter and it was promptly returned to me. I left the library, my faith in the goodness of humanity renewed.

I returned to my room happily, when I realised that I had checked out a RBR book to photocopy, but had forgotten to return it! I had left it on the reshelving shelves with some other non-RBR books that I had also photocopied from. Goodness, the book must be overdue by now (past the two hour time window)! Also, anyone could just take it out of the library and I would have to compensate with a new book.

I called the library frantically and they said they would check. A moment later, a librarian called me and informed me that they had discovered the book and checked it in even before I had called them. Whew. No harm done. Again.