Colors of life

Excited to see the rainbow.

She is now 8 months

She's able to stand up with support. Must get ready to walk by now.

About food again

My first ever lasagna. Recipe can be googled, a lot of simple recipe can be found. For this I got from myresepi.com.my, by Eza, if I'm not mistaken. Thanx. The variation I made is I use the bolognese paste sauce branded Dolmio to lessen the preparation time. Tasty and yummy, said Farhan and Ammar, including the father, who asked me to make it again next weekend.

For the cooking too, I recently bought a stick mixer, AUD$39.00 at KMart. I found this simple mixer is so handy. It makes cooking easier especially to prepare food for Ainaa, who has started solid food since about 5 months old. She loves mashed potato, carrot and apple puree and chicken soup which is pureed too. It's good to make minced meat and chopping vegetable for salad.

After surveying several recipes, I tried to cook this pulut kuning (I think pulut is called sweet rice in English) in the microwave. Instead of hours, it took about 15 minutes only.

For my record, the rice is to be soaked overnight with some tumeric powder and I added some tamarind paste for I don't have the asam gelugor as suggested. This is for the color, I think. But it still has nice color.

2 cups of rice require 2 and half cups of liquid. The rice is to be cooked with 1 3/4 cups of plain water in high mode for 10 minutes. Then pour 3/4 cup of cooked and salted coconut cream. Cook another 5 minutes in medium high and it's done.

It's normally served with meat curry or rendang but I just served with fried egg and meat sambal, the leftover from the day before.

Small garden in our backyard

This post is especially for Emak, my mother, whose credit should go in making our small garden, now ready for us just to eat..

Tiny little blue/Thai ginger (Lengkuas in Malay) - almost 6 months already.

Chillies, which are so fat..

Daun kesum, taken from Kak Ika, our closest Malaysian neighbour in the vicinity. So, for sure we won't miss the Laksa Penang.

Lemon grass, it seems so hard to grow here.. hopefully it can go through the rough weather of forthcoming autumn and winter. At the back is chilli.

Pumpkin flowers. Just flowers so far, yet to grow any pumpkin.

So we can eat fresh tomatoes from our backyard for several weeks.

The Bluff Lookout

Spectacular views which can be enjoyed from The Bluff Lookout, located at Point Flinders, Barwon Heads in Ocean Grove. But I doubt the capability of our tiny little camera to capture the real beauty. Just for remembrance somehow.

Do plan to reach here just before sunset. It's a real great view, stunning, magnificent and inspiring... no word can be enough to describe!

Subhanallah.

Smith Beach, Ocean Grove

After a short stroll at the Victoria State Rose Garden, we headed to Ocean Grove. The town is located on the Bellarine Peninsula, 25 km south-west of Geelong and 98 km south of Melbourne. It took about an hour from the Rose Garden to reach the busy tourists town. Moreover it was public holiday. Ocean Grove lies on the eastern bank of the Barwon River estuary which separates it from its twin town of Barwon Heads.

It has great and beautiful beach for us to spend the whole day. The kids must be the happiest.

Ada penguin kesejukan di sini...

Victoria State Rose Garden

This is the first term school holiday. For this we took the time to have a time-out too. Our first excursion to outer suburban Melbourne, joining Kak Nab family and other four families' convoy, was to Ocean Grove, 98 km south of Melbourne. On the way of the one-day journey, we stopped at Victoria State Rose Garden to enjoy the smell of roses. The internationally acclaimed garden is located in Werribee Park.

A wild wallaby posing for us.