Dumplings: Take 2 & 3

Hi,

So these past days, I've made vegetarian dumplings. I'm not vegetarian, but I don't think I can cook meat successfully and I want to avoid food poisoning.
But it's all good, because this makes me eat a good amount of vegetables (I barely eat vegetables during school semester... especially this semester was kinda weird.. o_e)

I followed this recipe I found on the internet. Thank you.
I substituted some vegetables in the recipe for others I could more easily find here.
Also I used gyoza wrappers because I prefer thinner wrappers, and didn't cook them the same way.
(I boiled them)

Here are pictures \^o^/
(by the way, take one is here)

TAKE TWO

Vegetables I used:

Spinach, carrots, celery, enoki mushrooms and green onions

My filling. Tasted good.

Several dumplings exploded that time...

... But others turned out pretty good!

Also fried them.

Ended up burning them. -.-

TAKE THREE

Because I still had celery, carrots and green onions, I decided to make the recipe again. I think it tasted pretty good. Of course, it's not as good as when you put meat in them (I like eating meat), but it's a recipe worth taking the time to chop all of these veggies.

Vegetables used:

Spinach, carrots, green onions, celery, white mushrooms

Added noodles because the filling was a bit too liquid.

You can see the ends of the gyoza pastries starting to become dry...

>o<

Boiled too long!

Next batch was better~

Top plate though..

Frying :)

I don't really feel like writing a lot...

I had planned to write a couple of things on here during the Christmas holidays, but somehow didn't really follow my plans.

Anyway, byebye.

Merry belated Christmas and happy early New Year 2016. :)

Chinglish and Chinçais

Since I've been learning Chinese, I've come across a couple of Chinese words that sound phonetically almost the same as English, and thought it was pretty cool, but never really dwelled on them (although all remembered them cuz they're easy to).

The more I came across words as such, the more I got interested. There were also more "complex" expressions such as 'Good morning' or 'I love you', which is quite funny. Although I do know Japanese, Korean, and other languages also use the English phonetic for some of their words, I still find Chinglish (and Chinçais) really cute.

Here are some words like such, most of them are in English but there are also some in French. I will try to update this list whenever I learn new ones. Some of the words have been told to me by Chinese, so thanks to them. Other that that, I found these words randomly whether by tv shows, reading, listening to music, or the teacher told us. And there are words I learned from yourmandarin on Instagram. I love how they explain each word within their context and provide a lot of examples.
Also, I haven't included the countries/proper nouns since they sound similar pretty much everywhere.

* February 12nd 2017 *: lmao I just learned these are called loanwords. I called them Chinglish all that time (even though I knew it wasn't exactly Chinglish but I didn't have any other words to describe it.) Also there are already lists of loanwoards in Chinese on the internet lawl.
I created a google spreadsheet, where the nouns are on the first sheet and the expressions on the second sheet.

ACCESS TO THE GOOGLE SHEET : HERE

Some Asian Snacks 亚洲食品

Hello,

A couple of weeks ago, my sister's boyfriend bought me a couple of Asian snacks he used to eat when he was younger. Awesome. Thank you ( ﾟヮﾟ)!

Here, let me show you the food haul:

Except for the Pocky, the egg tarts 蛋挞 (dàntà), I've never eaten or tasted any of those.

So I took pictures and decided I should post some here. :D

I had to ask someone what was this, because my sister could not tell me.

He said to me it was a sort of  rice cake 米糕 (mǐ gāo) or also called 团子 (tuánzi).

Said texture was sticky because it was made of sticky rice 糯米 (nuòmǐ).

I have to be honest, I ended up giving it to my sister. I had put it in the refrigerator before, because I wouldn't eat the whole rice cake in a day. But the cake stayed in for too long, I believe... so two days later, it was hard as rock... and did not look that fresh. I don't think I should have put it in the refrigerator?

My sister seemed to like it.. I think fresh, this would have taste good.

I shall try it another time, but eat it in one day.

Really good, feels like strawberry flavored-air.

Reminded me of other wafers I ate when I was young.

Didn't know Yang Guifei liked Lychee.

(FYI Yang Guifei was Emperor Minghuang's favorite concubine during the Tang dynasty (618–907). She's considered to be exceptionally beautiful, but is one of the reasons of the country's (and dynasty's) downfall... But yeah, I really like the lychee flavour too. （・∀・）

It's really cool that it's packed individually

(maybe not good for environment though...)

So good!

Lychee flavour is really good~

When I went to Taiwan, I bought Hi-Chew candies for my sister, thinking we didn't have those in Montreal. Found out one day we actually did have Hi-Chew candies in Chinatown supermarkets. ^^'

I have only tasted Grape, Peach and Lychee flavoured Hi-Chew, but Lychee is definitely my favorite one out of those three.

From the packaging of the cake, it is from the Asian bakery Harmonie

(FB page here)

I've seen this type of cake a lot in Asian bakeries, but never bought one, so I was really happy to try it. The taste is good, it's like vanilla.. the typical white cake, but because the cake is pretty dry, it makes A LOT of crumbs. Don't bring this cake to eat at school or the library, it will be a mess.

When I saw this cake, the texture, shape and little white cream line in the middle reminded me of the Japanese strawberry sandwich/cake:

[x]

If you've read other articles on the blog, you may already

know I really like egg tarts. These were amazing (◎o◎)

That crust though (ﾟ∀ﾟ)

In the Harmonie carton box, there were three snacks:

Deep-fried sesame seed balls 煎堆 (jiān duī)

Had never tasted this before - better than I expected (oOo)!

Had to google it after to know the name of it.

I don't know the exact name, I guess it's kind of a coconut Asian bun/bread.

It was good, since I like coconut, but the taste is quite strong,

so if you don't like this flavour, I don't recommend it.

(or maybe it was my bun that tasted particularly strong)

I'm sure this would have tasted way better if I had thought of heating it in the microwave before eating it... It's a bun with meat (I believe), onions (I believe) and some type of tomato sauce (I believe...) The filling tasted salty but also pretty sweet... I don't really like it when my food tastes sweet except for desserts, so I ended up eating most of the bread... haa.

But again, I guess it's better when it's eaten hot (than cold like I did). D:

Dyeing Light Hair Dark Brown (almost Black)

So... I decided a couple of days ago that I should change my hair color. And my mother dyed it for me yesterday.
And it's not that I'm thinking dyeing my hair dark brown was a huge mistake, but I think dark brown looks better.. in my imagination. It's not that I thought I would end up a bombshell with dark brown hair, but I definitely thought it would suit me better than my light hair. I've always liked light hair. Alas, being Asian, my natural hair color is black (I know there are Asians with naturally brown hair, but I mean, most of Asians have black hair).

A year ago and a half, I decided to go to a hair salon get streaks of my hair bleached. I actually wanted all of my hair bleached, but the hairdresser told me this would be very damaging to my hair, so I agreed to have a lot of hair streaks bleached instead.

This was my hair color before getting my hair bleached (after repetitive blonde hair dyes for about two years):

My hair with bleached streaks. The color turned out nice, light as I wanted. Hairdresser was right about making me streaks only!

And then three months passed, and I 'realized' black roots on blonde hair did not look good at all.

I also learned of the existence of toning shampoo, but was not a fond of using it. But yeah, eventually my beautiful blonde streaks started to turn yellow-orange. ヽ(ಠДಠ)ﾉ

So I went back to the hair salon to fix my roots, but also lighten my hair again (bleached streaks).

First time bleaching made my hair quite dry, but the dryness must not have been that bad, because I don't really remember having excessive dry hair. Second time bleaching though was another thing.

This time, my hair was so dry. It's when I look back at that moment that I realize how dry it was. But at that time, I wasn't really conscious of how damaged my hair was after that second bleaching job.

Actually, I loved my light hair, despite the ends that were so dry for days (eventually it went away).

Hmm I don't really know where I'm going with this, but all this to say that I always loved light hair.

I kept light hair like this for a good one year and a half. And I got used to seeing myself with light hair. Since I was 14, my goal was to reach a very light color. I had actually half-reached that goal when I was 15 and bought Revlon Frost & Glow which really did a decent job in my opinion), but then one month later I got tired and dyed my hair very dark brown, and then jet black. JET BLACK. Can you believe it.
I never really stuck to my hair color when I was younger. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then I had no choice but to keep jet black because it's practically impossible to go from jet black to light hair. But I didn't and ended up at the hairdresser to fix an uneven foam dye I had tried on my jet black dyed hair ft. natural black roots.. And two years later (2012) I restarted dyeing it, but this time, I sticked to my goal; going lighter and lighter each dye (to end up with hair you see on the first picture).

So I've been used to seeing light hair when I looked in the mirror for about three years. And I liked it!
I felt special because I think even though there are Asians out there that dye their hair different colors than brown, not many Asians have light hair.
And also, I secretly wanted light hair because that would 'un-asian' me, like make me look less asian. I thought how cool it would be if people would ask me my ethnicity, because my light hair confused them, instead of already assuming I was Asian.
And in fact, I did get a lot of comments from people who could not believe me when I told them I was Asian (or were just surprised to know I was Asian). But I really don't know if it was my hair that made them think this way.

Anyway, back to the present in 2015.
Having light hair is cool~ except for the roots. I actually had huge black roots in April 2015 and then dyed all of my hair red, which was a fail because only the roots turned red (which is the top of my head) but the rest stayed blonde?!
A couple of weeks after, my mother dyed my hair a blonde color to kind of blend both colors together. Improvement observed.
September 2015, dyeing my roots again with blonde dye. Ends up kind of copper light-brown (it's darker than the tips), not much of a surprise.

I absolutely love this color, but sometimes,

it just looks ugly on me because of my skin color.

Then, some things happened; and it made me consider my hair color.
Dark hair = going back to boring. But if I can make my face stand out, maybe I'd be less boring-looking.
October 2015, starting to think about going back to dark hair (for a couple of reasons).
October 17th, my mother dyes my hair very dark chocolate brown....,!!!!

With flash

I don't love it, but neither do I hate it.
I do miss my light hair, but only in certain lightings. Sometimes, it would look nice, but other times it looked very unnatural because of my skin color, and some bleached streaks would fade to yellow overtime. When I took selfies, my hair would usually look great with my face, but then I'm in a group picture and it looks hideous. lol.
And also, my hair is so damaged. I really want to not dye my hair excessively or bleach it again. If I had kept light hair, I would have had to continue fixing the roots regularly. I'm kinda tired of this now. If I want light hair back, I'm gonna buy a freaking wig (I'm serious). But the thing is, my hair is SO thin because of all it endured those past years..... my hair have always been thin, but they definitely thinned out a lot since I started dyeing them. So I really want to grow out healthy hair again...

Anyway thank you for reading. Or just looking at the pictures.
:-)

Changed Blog Design, Language Switch, Blog Name etc.

Hello,

A couple of weeks ago, I started writing my articles in English rather than in French. I really enjoyed writing in French because it's my first language, but a switch was necessary. Nearly every blog I am subscribed to is written in English, and I feel it can be easier to access my blog if it's not written in French.

Anyway, today, it was the finalization of a new blog design. I had started yesterday to draw a couple of doodles and do the header, and I think it's now finished. Not perfect but I like it!

Here's how my blog looked like:

I kept this blog 'design' for about two years... I liked its simplicity, but it was time for a change.

Of course, I did not do everything by myself when making the new design (well, except for the drawings I guess).

First, I just googled something like 'how to make your own blog design blogspot' and stumbled upon this page.

The author of the blog makes lovely designs, and I really liked the style showed in her tutorial. On top of that, everything seemed to be well explained. So I decided why not jump into it. :D

I started by drawings some cute stuffs on Paint, and make my cookie header and borders on Gimp 2.

After, I followed the steps in the tutorial to assemble everything into a blog design.

Sounds pretty simple like that, but it actually took me a whole day and a half, especially because the little drawings took me quite a while (and I had no idea what to do), and dealing with the CSS part was kinda difficult and long.. (a lot of trial and error) but all in all, I made it through hehe.

One problem I had that I still haven't found a solution though is moving the whole article text more to the right..

This is the bottom part of the article, but everything higher is the same.

But I did find a solution on a website where they told us to add a column on the left, so I added one (now I have one column on the left and one on the right (but the one on the right was always there)).

Even though it's not perfect, it's still better than having the text over the left border!

I am still not yet finished with this blog's design, as I want to add other cute pastries all along the top header. I also want to do a background for the blog. Although, this will be done another time.

For now, I am quite happy with how my blog looks, and I thank Blog Designs by Dani for all the help making this design.

Byebye!

* ­¯`~-._.-~` ­¯*¯`~-._.-~` ­¯*¯`~-._.-~` ­¯*

Update 2015.08.30

Looks like this design is not really optimized for the mobile version of Blogger, sorry!

Besides leaving it as it is, you can always click on

'View web version' at the bottom if you believe your mobile will handle it:

Bling My Flip Phone (part 3 of 3)

You can see 'Bling My Flip Phone (part 2 of 3)' here
and 'Bling My Flip Phone (part 1 of 3) here.

Hello!

Finally, the final part of 'Bling My Flip Phone' has arrived.

I added the last stuffs the day before yesterday and yesterday.

Day 5: Silver chain

After looking into necklaces for chains, I found one that had an adjustable chain, so I just cut that little part off and stuck it to its respective place on the phone.

I wouldn't say the result is striking, but I prefer the silver chain to the gold one a lot. And as expected, the chain covers the transparent gems without hiding them completely, which gives a nice effect.

After, I stuck different sizes of different colored gems in the heart contour screen. I forgot to take a picture of the result, unfortunately, but you will see it in the next pictures. They don't shine a lot.. but they don't look that bad, and it looks great when the phone has its little front lights turned on.

I also found that the Hello Kitty face was starting to look greyer and even yellow in some lightings, which was definitely an issue that had to be taken care of.

Day 6: Finishing touches...!!

Yesterday, because that Hello Kitty was annoying me, I bought some white glitters. I thought that not only would it make the Hello Kitty shinier, but it would also hide a bit of its grey color.
I also decided to put some glitters on the gems in the heart, on the two little heart charms on top, and tried on the gold chain around the bow (the last one was a fail, and I ended up removing as well as I could the nail polish and glitters stuck on)..
After waiting a little bit, I just slightly blew on the glitters and dusted them with a small brush.

And... my phone was done...!!

With the front lights on

Kinda went overboard with the glitters on that Hello Kitty..

As I tried to remove some excess on its right eye, I removed some black. :(

With the flash

Still have a long way to go before that phone is 100% completed...

Concerning the back of the phone, I have no idea what to do (yet). Only thing I know is I want the phone to stay flat on that side, so I do not want to put 3D stuffs on the back. But I will probably not start working on that part any time soon, and when I do, I shall post some pictures here!

- - -

To conclude this journey (separated in three parts total), I wanted to say that I am overall very satisfied of the outcome of this bling phone (but not perfectly).

As I said it in part 1, I always failed trying to bling something before, ending up disliking it after. But this time, I am proud to say I love my phone much more than before blinging it! I do not regret it at all.

Even though this is definitely not a budget savvy bling phone, I love it, and that thought will certainly make me take care more of it. Furthermore, that phone has a truly unique look.

Thank you for reading!

Byebye~