"No spending" day

Hi Natty honey!  How are you today, my beautiful young lady?  How's school?  You don't share your college experience with us.  I would love to hear about your studies.  Anyway, I hope you are having a great time, and everything is going smoothly for you.  The weather here has cooled down, since it rained last night, thank God.  In an effort to save money by not wasting it on vanities, I have implemented a "no spending" day upon myself today.  I eat what I have in the cooler.  If I have bills to pay, I pay them some other day.  I didn't spend any gasoline either by staying at home, just working in the kitchen, on the computer, or in the yard, and enjoying the company of my lovely cats.  I did do a lot of kitchen work in the morning.  I made more of that coconut alfredo sauce, thinned out this time, then put it in the freezer for future use.  I worked on some curry pup stuffing: I had some potatoes boiled, cubed them up then mixed them with fried onions and curry leaves.  Lunch was steamed rice with pepper steak, just wonderful!  And for dinner, I fried up the rest of the boiled potatoes, and finished off the pack of hot dogs I bought the other day.  And there you go.  "No spending" day.  When's the last time you went through the day without spending any money?  How often do you do so?

A busy day

Hi Natty honey!  What's going on over there?  I hope you are having a great time and getting things done nice and easily.  I've had quite a busy day today.  Nowadays I get up every morning at 5 am, do some cleanup then some extra worship, then wait for them to call the dawn prayer, and after that I go back to sleep until daybreak then do more chores then whatever.  I didn't go back to sleep today, I got started on all the chores early so I could leave the house to run errands.  First I had to go to the insurance company then the local DMV (here known as the JPJ) to renew the road tax on my motorcycle.  If you didn't know, Shadowplay is a registered business so I had to go pay a bill on that.  All that running and waiting around kept me busy until 11 am, then I had to worry about making my lunch then getting some rest before voice training.  Good thing my Mom gave me some lunch.  Thanks, Mom!  Wow, it was a hot day, and hot last night.  I had trouble sleeping.  It's still hot right now.  Needless to say, I was exhausted by the time I had to sing.  But the show must go on.

I got killed again during voice training.  Some guy with 666 in his name threw a bomb at me as I was about to finish the last song.  I guess it was irony that I died then.  However, I am more concerned right now with the color of my shoes.  I wore pink, and when I put the outfit together the shoes matched the dress.  Then when I started my set, the shoes were purple.  That irritated me, so I had to adjust it.  Then the shoes later turn electric pink, then a bright pink, and I just gave up.  It seems the shoes had a different texture than the dress, so they reacted to sunset and night differently than the dress.  Maybe I'm just color blind.  Oh, I AM color blind.  Still, though.  😒

Coconut alfredo sauce

Hi Natty honey!  How are you today, beautiful and precious lady?  I hope you are doing and feeling great.  What was that?  Did you suddenly feel a moment of satisfaction?  I love it when God grants us glimpses of happiness.  Just remember that perfection is a reward for the righteous in the next life.  Since we are still stuck in this world, then it's back to the toil after the brief high.  What's for dinner?  My Mom gave me a box of low fat milk a while ago, and I've been figuring out what to do with it.  I didn't want to drink it, and it's so thin I can't cook with it.  Then a few days ago I harvested some coconut, and I thought I would try to make coconut alfredo sauce.  It's simple really, just blend the coconut meat in the low fat milk until smooth, then cook it as alfredo sauce.  So dinner was spaghetti in coconut alfredo sauce with chicken.  It looked and tasted good, so I think it works as an alfredo sauce.  It tastes like alfredo sauce without tasting cheesy.  Does that make sense?  I made it too thick, though.  So thick it sticks to your lips.  I also made too much.  Alfredo sauce is a heavy sauce, and I made too much, I couldn't finish it.  And pasta doesn't keep as leftovers, so I had to throw the rest away, which is a shame because it really did taste good.  Next time I'll thin out the sauce and use less.  I made 2 pints of sauce for only the cost of the garlic and half a tomato (the coconuts were from my yard), compared with 2 pints of heavy cream which would run at about RM30 or more.

Sunday is BLACK!

Beans

Hi Natty honey!  How are you today, my beautiful lady?  I must say that you are looking as wonderful as ever.  You and your buddies look comfortable- neither hot nor cold.  Not much of a clothes dilemma there.  Here, it's hot.  It's disgustingly hot.  The days are hot, the nights are hot, my room is hot, and I have to work in here.  Ya Allah, please have mercy on me!  I am amazed that my cats seem to handle this heat better than me.  They don't even bother for water.  As for me, Canada sounds really good right now.  It's so much easier for me to heat up than to cool down.

But I can't afford air conditioning, and right now my food budget sucks.  So I have decided to master the art of cooking beans.  Beans are cheap!  Lentils, red beans, and soybeans.  My first project will be chili, and I have some red beans soaking right now.  I think I'll try to make tofu.  I actually have some soy lecithin, which I bought 8 years ago, thinking I could use it to harden chocolate.  It's actually for hardening tofu, so I'm going to give that a try.

The fridge rules the menu

Hi Natty Honey!  Wow, that's a pretty lake you have at school.  With nice, calm waters.  Is your heart and mind as calm as those waters?  I hope so.  But it's the modern world, and everyone's in a big hurry to go nowhere!  I had a very busy day today.  I left home as early as possible to pay some bills, bought some groceries, then spent a very successful morning in the kitchen.  The lite soy sauce I made turned out very close to the original.  The curry I made (after harvesting some coconuts) turned out awesome.  The fried rice I had for lunch, made with my lite soy sauce mix, was perfection.  But my food budget is still poor, and I have to make sure I use everything up.  There was still some "sambal tumis" (onions, chillies, and "belacan" (fermented shrimp) blended then fried in oil until saturated) left, and it had to be used up immediately.  I was thinking eggplant, so I had to go to the big supermarket on the other side of town, because it was almost sunset, and it was the only one selling fresh produce this time of day.  But eggplant was RM6.99 a kilo!  Yikes!  I was prepared to spend only RM4 a kilo for eggplant.  But tomatoes were RM3.79/kilo and hot dogs were RM2.79 per pack.  So that's what I spent my money on.  I made "sambal tumis hot dog with tomatoes and onions", with steamed rice.  Alhamdulillah.  I was having such a good day in the kitchen today, that my dinner was a success as well.  Very delicious.  Here's a snapshot of it.  You can see the hot dogs under the tomatoes and onions.