Homemade Pottery

I love potteries. Especially asian or Japanese style potteries. Above is a photo of my shelve, showing you some of the insane bowls and plates I have. Mainly, I love Japanese looking bowls and potteries. I don't buy them in sets any more. Maybe use one unique piece on its own. Cause with Japanese food presentation, its ok to have everything of different design. But the main reason for this post is, I got a lot of homemade potteries from my husband's cousin recently. She stays in Melbourne, and took up pottery not too long ago. I think what she made is just beautiful, and she gave me some of her pieces when we went to visit her. I would have love to bring everything back, but my husband was already frowning at me. After coming back, I've placed them all in my shelve. But one day, I decided to use them, and shared the photos with her of her beautiful creation. So this post is also to share with you.

To be honest, it was inspired by the shisamon fish you see here. I recently found that you can buy them and bbq/toast them and they taste really really yummy. So we got a package of it for less maybe  less than SGD10, with 10 fishes inside. I decided to make a meal just using all her potteries. Above is actually my Japanese breakfast set! Just fish and sweet egg rolls and rice (which was still cooking at the time the photo was taken). For drinks, my fave houjicha. 

So let me introduce you to all the pieces shown here. The rice bowl, which looks small but hold the same amount of rice, if not more, from my normal japanese bowls. It was stripes on it and looks rather ragged. The blue cup is very beautiful although it may not be obvious from this photo. It is actually decorated with cat figures all around it. It was been promoted to my fave cup. I use it for hot drinks like tea and coffee. 

Next is this beautiful patterned plate. It just looks fitting for the shisamon. I now also use it for desserts and tea time cause it looked so pretty. I didn't really fancy it at first, but it is kinda artistic and goes will with random food I placed on it so far. 

Above is a little ragged small cup/bowl. Although not visible in the photo, it actually has the word "川"  on it, which means "river" in Chinese/Japanese. This word has a special meaning to me, because two of my favourite person in my previous company has the word "川" in their names. 

Above photo is taken on another day. And this is lunch. So from top left to right are: shisamon, boiled prawns, picked squid. And the overnight rice is heated up with left over sweet egg rolls, and some baby corns. I've been addicted to baby corns recently after eating them at a yoshinoya for lunch at my new work place. 

Lastly, a few random photos of tea time snakes. Above chocolate chip muffins served using the pattern plate, and Korean coffee in my Daiso SGD2 cup, which has been recently promoted to my office cup. I brought it to the office cause they have a fancy coffee machine there, and I wanted to use it to have a cosy coffee when I am feeling bored. 

Here again, blue berry muffins with Australian granulated coffee blank. The color of dark blue and pink is so contrasting that it looks good together. 

So thanks for letting me show off some of the new potteries I have at home! These are not all of it. Just some of it. 

Coffee Letters

Since we're at our favourite coffee topic recently, I wanted to share with you a little hobby I started in 2018. It started when I receive a coffee via snail mail from my friend Pei Shi all the way from Taiwan. You can read about it here. I was so happy that anyone would send me a snail mail at this age and time that I decided to start sending her coffee and tea from everywhere I was travelling to. So far to date, I have send her 3 snail mails containing coffee, tea and sometimes snacks from all the places that I've visited. And thankfully she took photos of them before I started to do the same. So now I have photo memories of these little "care package" of delight too!

1st letter was coffee and tea from Korea. I got the coffee from the last hotel that I was staying at, and the packaging was so pretty that I decided to collect them and send them to her when I got back to Singapore. This was also the coffee that got me hooked on coffee infused water, cause the coffee was so light that it suddenly occured to me that I don't have to drink thick coffee to enjoy it! Below row are also branded Korean tea I got from a high-end hotel. It was a set of 4 actually, but I drank some of it, and a complete set was given priority to  my other ex-colleague as she was the one that introduced me to these tea. Interestingly after giving all these tea away, I was kinda sad that I didn't have many left to enjoy. But surprise surprise, my dearest colleague got me a box all for myself when she came back from Korea! I'm thinking of bringing it to my new office to drink when I need to chill.

2nd letter was from Vietnam. I collected these from the hotel that I was staying at. I actually like G7 coffee cause the aroma of it was just wonderful. It used to be my favourite instant coffee when my first Vietnamese colleague got them for me when I was working at the hospital. Whenever he makes them in the pantry, the whole office would smell of coffee! The green package are Vietnamese Jasmine/Green Tea. They are stronger than the Japanese green tea. When I'm travelling, I actually like drinking tea to unwind when I'm back in the hotel. Drinking hot tea or coffee kinda calms me down when I'm on a hectic schedule. It reminds me to relax and just breath and enjoy the aroma. Top two package are my favourite coconut snack from Vietnam. I am totally addicted to it and would buy boxes of it whenever I go on business trip. They were so light I decided to include some into the envelop to share them with my friend.

3rd and last one was from my recent trip to Melbourne Australia. I collected the granulated coffee from all the places that we stayed in, as well as some teas. I really really like the coffee here cause they have a strong burnt aroma of it, are are really really nice and thick but dissolved smoothly in hot water. I really like the consistency of it. I even made some coffee muffin using the Cafe Noir pack recently and its delightful as well! From the 3rd letter onwards, I also started using fancy papers. And I just love this one cause it's so colourful and fit the theme of coffee and tea! I had them all along, but just never had anyone to write letters to. Hmmm, maybe I should send some to my mum as well. Maybe that would surprise her! Ha! But my coffee stock is already running low....

So there you have it. Little things that are cheap or almost free, which you can share with your friends and family and doesn't cost much. The only thing that is expensive about these are probably the postage at almost SGD2.50 per envelope depending on weight. And you have to declare what are the content as well. But its definitely fun. I send them via normal mail cause even if they get lost, you don't really mind. And its nice to know when both of you are enjoying the same cuppa. You can only do these with people who enjoys tea and coffee as you do. 

October 2018

And so finally we catch up to October! Woohoo! Mission accomplished! But October only adds another big backlog list to my list: My Melbourne trip. My husband decided to spend his bonus money by buying me a ticket to Melbourne to visit his cousin and family. And since this was the 3rd trip I've made to Melbourne, I really didn't want to go. To top it off, the ticket was expensive, and everything in Melbourne was expensive, and I've been to most of the tourist attraction in Melbourne already. So when given the task to plan the trip, I planned 3 days outside of Melbourne and decided to stay 2 nights in Phillip Island itself. The rest of the time, we spend mainly outside of Melbourne as well with his cousin. It was an awesome trip. 

The most memorable of all was probably the Whale Watching Cruise which I booked. I was thinking what can we do that we have not already done in Melbourne.... And voila! I booked a Whale Watching Cruise before realising that it was no where near Phillip Island! It was like 1.5 hours ride away! Luckily for me, my husband was planning on renting a car for the trip, so I managed to persuade him to go for the cruise. I wasn't expecting to see any whales to be honest, but goodness! It was so exciting! We saw so many cool things! Wild dolphins, seals, and 22 humpback whales! Unforgettable trip well worth the money spend! As for the rest of the trip, let me save those details for the backlog post coming up soon....

The other highlight of October was my farewell from my company. I spend the last week of work catching up with colleagues who really made it tough for me to leave. Above was my fave photo of my farewell even though it didn't captured everyone that was there. This photo was taken impromptu and capture the moment best. 

I guess I've grown so closed to them through out the project and through travelling together. My colleagues from Japan even sent a video message to say goodbye to me. It was all very touching. Even after starting work at my new place, the first week was rather tough as I was still receiving messages from my ex-colleagues. It was all in all, an emotional move for me even though I don't really showed it. And as fate would have it, I didn't manage to say goodbye to those that meant the most to me. I guess when you get really close to people, you don't want to say a formal goodbye, cause you want to keep that channel open to meet again in future.... that was all I could conclude from my past experience with all my closes colleagues/friends/vendors. Sigh. I plan to do a post to share some of my team photos one day, cause I did had a great time working here. All the people were so unique and memorable. And not forgetting all the wonderful business trips that made me bond so much closer with all these wonderful people. It indeed something that I would look back fondly upon.

And so now I've started a new beginning at a new company, doing a totally different industry, different methodology, and different part of Singapore, and hopefully, a different part of the world soon.... Hope to update more on that in near future soon!