I came back from tutorial today wondering what to have for dinner. And then I remembered, I had half a can of chicken stalk left in the fridge. It had been sitting there since Friday when I made chicken rice. So at that thought, something welled up inside of me: it was time to retry cooking the ever elusive Wat Dan Hor Fun (a type of hor fun, 河粉).

Wat dan hor fun is another one of my favourite noodle dishes, probably up there with char kway teow and Hokkien mee. I suppose, it's one of those few Singapore-based dishes that I was exposed to as a kid growing up in Canada.

And given my favourable results cooking Hainanese chicken rice the previous week (I think it's all due to the fact that I acquired a jar of proper chicken rice chili from my last visit home), I was spurred on to give my hand a try at wat dan hor fun again.

Gathered all the ingredients I could from the four corners of the kitchen, washed, sliced and chopped stuff. There wasn't all that much slicing and chopping needed actually.

It's probably one of the more expensive meals I'd be capable of cooking here in Waterloo though, as it consumed pork, fishballs and prawns (and I was even missing squid). Usually, I'd just have one type of meat for a meal.

At any rate, boiled the hor fun noodles, and as soon as they were done, threw them into a well-oiled pan. Fried with dark and light soya sauce until I could see some of the noodles becoming burnt - quite necessary indeed. A bit too much dark soya sauce though - the noodles started to look like char kway teow instead

Then on to the sauce... this has always been the source of failure for me. I just can never get a handle of cooking with corn starch and egg at the same time. When everything is combined, they somehow just become a big clumpy mess.

But somehow this time, maybe the merlion was with me and things didn't go so poorly. As the sauce mixture came to a simmer, I held my breath and poured in some corn starch premixed with cold water. Mixed it in, covered the lid and waited. Washed some dishes, for good measure.

And finally it came time to add the eggs. Held my breath even more this time. Cracked two eggs and threw them in. Stirred them around a bit. Things looked like they were starting to get clumpy, and I thought I had met my match. However, the thought crossed my mind to maybe let the eggs cook from the heat of the sauce, rather than the heat of the stove.

And so I turned off the stove and moved the pan to an empty element (yah, I know, I should probably be using a gas burner, no?).

And... the egg stayed separate in the sauce. It actually looked, something like wat dan hor fun.

Now, in terms of appearance, I guess maybe I could fool some distracted passer-byer into thinking it was actual wat dan hor fun. Maybe I could even fool myself. But I know that since I'm no hawker, it probably isn't that great at all. Taste-wise, it's ok. But I have no standard here in Waterloo - where else can you find Singaporean cuisine?

At any rate, this is why perhaps I term today's version of wat dan hor fun the kiasi version. I'd imagine that if you placed my rendition beside some authentic hawker rendition, people would stay clear from mine. Why?

... Kiasi lah!

Wrote this earlier while on the bus... thought I should post it despite maybe the way I've been feeling lately.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Here I sit on a GO Bus, heading east towards Mississauga. Having just come from CCF, my thoughts still linger a bit on the Bible study. Perhaps not exactly what the actual study was about, but my thoughts have recently been concerned with knowing God. It sounds like such a simple thing, in some ways. We always sing it. We always pray it. God we want to know you.

Recently I've been trying to read some of the old testament. And in the Bible study at CCF today, the name David came up in the passage. And of course, the ever quoted phrase was also brought up: "a man after God's own heart."

But what exactly does this mean? And why was David such a great king? Take it a step further, and I wonder, what exactly is it about some of the old testament characters that had them find so much favour or so much peace in their God?

After finishing the book of Joshua, I had began reading the book of 1 Samuel this week. And I read a couple more chapters on the bus just now. And it came to Hannah's song. And reading her song, the thought that crossed my mind was: she knew God. She knew God's heart. And this made me think. You know, all these old testament characters that had so much faith, or did great things for God, or who really walked in the favour of God, the thing they all had in common was they more or less understood God's heart.

In reading Hannah's song, what really struck me was the theme of God's paradoxical nature. For example, note 1 Sam 2:5, "Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry have ceased to hunger. The barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn."

This kind of backwards contradiction is one of the themes in some of Jesus' teachings hundreds of years later in the new testament. Yet, what struck me is that out of the song of Hannah's heart, she seemed to understand this kind of paradox. She seemed to understand the Kingdom.

Take David now. You find strewn throughout the book of Psalms his songs of worship to the God he served. And in so many of these Psalms in his crying out, he too seemed to understand God's heart. Even in his sin, after committing adultery with Bathsheba, we find his cries in Psalm 51: "For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise."

David, remember, is in the old testament. Under old testament law, animal sacrifice was the de facto form of atonement. Yet David is somehow prophetically realizing that it's not about the sacrifice. It's not about the physical ceremony. It's about the heart. David knew this. David knew God. This is maybe why he was counted as a man after God's heart. Not because he was a great king. No. He was a great king because he understood God's heart.

Hannah and David are just two examples that come to mind, who to me, appear to exemplify knowing God, knowing his heart, and understanding Kingdom principles. I am almost certain now that if you study other old testament characters who were highly favoured by God, whether blessed socially, economically and/or spiritually, you will see that they each knew God. They had an understanding of being driven by eternity. They had an understanding of faith. They had an understanding that God's ways were higher than theirs. And with this understanding, they submitted their lives, wills and everything they had to God.

So where do I sit? Where do I invest my time and my energies? Is my faith important to me such that I would invest in knowing and understanding the God that I claim to worship? I sure hope so.

I had recently been quite challenged by Ally's blog posts. In particular, Transformation and Reality. Well worth a read since you've already reached the end of my post for today.

你念這個blog post之前, 請讓我對你說: 對不起... 真的很抱歉. 有些天我要寫這樣的emo posts. 我需要一點時間organize我的想法.

以往... 前事... 我忘不了.

過去經驗讓我改變今天的我. 誰知道去年的經驗會那樣的? 我不是說去年的事情不好. 其實我懷古的時候常常有好舒服的感覺. 好想念的感覺.

可是我也覺得過去的事情有些不好的東西讓我的心情變得很亂.

我真的討厭這樣的感覺. 最近我的心情真不好.

我要笑. 我要變得開開心心的人. 可是有時候覺得我的微笑就是騙人的微笑. 我在騙誰? 就是我.

最近覺得我最大的惡夢來了. (還是還沒有來了? 是怎麼大的惡夢嗎?)

我的沉默... 就是普通的沉默. 沒有人聽見我的聲音. 沉默就是這樣的.

Sometimes you don't enjoy things as much as you should. Yet somehow you still try.

We met this dog in the Philippines. Its hind legs were both crippled.

Clipped highlights may hinder your ability to see. Sensor scaling is everything. A lot of our perceptions or understandings are only relative to the other objects in the scene. This is not to say that everything in life is relative. Rather, our perceptions are. There are trees outside the window. Yet you cannot see them.