This week I’ve gotten more used to my work environment and got a good start on the accounts payable aging report. I’ve gotten all of the Excel functions to work and just need to work on the Excel macros. The videos I’ve watched have been pretty helpful and I’m starting to get the hang of using the more difficult Excel functions. This week consisted mostly of me eating or learning to cook. I work from home every Friday and I got a bit bored eating at the mall near Orchard. I ended up going to Suntec City to visit a friend and tried some curry udon noodles. The fried cutlet was crispy and the curry sauce had a nice kick to it. Working from home is really fun but I get no work done, and I spent most of my day working out and eating lots of different foods. The price of groceries is expensive here and cooking at home ends up being more expensive than eating out. But we basically spent the time talking about how it’s so weird that the prepped foods here are cheaper than groceries you would buy from the store, yet back in the U.S. it would be the opposite. I think it might be because the prepared meals usually consist of mostly bread, noodles, or rice and a little bit of meat and vegetables.
On Thursday I was able to find a cool Lanzhou pulled noodles restaurant near my work and went to try it out. I got some extra beef and an egg on the side. The total ended up being 15 dollars, and the deal wasn’t that bad. I sort of lost my sense of taste, which made the noodles not as spicy as they should have been. Or my spice tolerance is through the roof and I can handle anything spicy. I’ll have to check back on that later and see if that’s the case. The noodles were really fresh and the egg was jammy, which enhanced the bowl as a whole. The beef soup had really deep flavors. I honestly prefer lighter flavors and nothing too spicy. Eating spicy food in this weather makes me sweat way too much and I sort of regret eating this for lunch. I ended up going back to the office full of sweat. There was a lot of mala in there and even though I couldn’t taste it, I could still feel my mouth being numb and that I was sweating from all of the hot soup.
Speaking of noodles and spicy soup, this Saturday I went to a cooking class that Bucknell took its students to. I didn’t know that there were two sections and I got separated from my friends, but that’s alright. I learned how to make Nyonya Laksa with a chef. The dish consists of rice noodles and bean sprouts covered by a coconut sauce created with different aromatics and peppers, topped with fish cake, shrimp, fried tofu, and Thai basil. It took about 40 minutes for me to finish the dish from start to finish and seemed like a pretty easy dish to make. The hard part was having to use a mortar and pestle to grind all the spices together into a paste, but that can be automated with a food processor. This dish is really reliant on adjusting the dish until it suits your taste palette. If you think it needs to be a bit creamier, you can add in more coconut milk. If it’s too spicy, you can add in coconut sugar, and make sure to adjust for salt accordingly. Not to brag, but I think that my bowl looked the nicest out of everyone else’s. Don’t mind Estrella looking over—she’s just jealous of my presentation.
