I had this spicy black pepper lamb pie at secret recipe ystd. it was really good. really spicy!! at RM5.90, I highly recommend it. The crispy hot pastry goes very well with the bits of lamb and potato inside...and the sauce is really nice and black peppery. it was VERY spicy because of the copious amount of pepper in it. anyway I like my hot pies with ketchup on top.... [although my friends thought it weird]

Ok I havent been blogging here for a long time.......coz i've been so busy. So, my apologies to you all who've been checking here often..I hope you hvent gotten bored yet. I baked more cookies yesterday. so I decided to take more photos. Here on top are the peanut butter cookies all stacked up on a trusty airtight Tupperware container. Yeah you gotta love the tupperwares. they're top on every housewife's wishlist. back in the 80's-90's they were the "in" thing so my mum stocked up on heaps of them. I have them in every imaginable size and shape, and i even have a cute tupperware egg separater device where you crack an egg into it, and the yolk stays on the thing while the whites fall through. really nifty. and Joy gave me some limited edition Tupperware cookie cutters some years back. Not to mention now I'm using this perfume by Tupperware [yeah who knows what they'd come up with next?]

These are my new creations! Chocolate chip walnut cookies. I thought it would look pretty to put the walnut pieces on top. also posing on top of a tupperware lid...

and here..................... is something very interesting.. [to me anyway] gavin's been to a new exotic land..where they have exotic looking cheese. This is Haloumi, which is a Cypriot goat's milk cheese [I THINK!!] that the middle eastern folks like to eat. I've seen a lot of it in cookbooks but it's hard to find around here [i saw some at TMC in Bangsar but it was RM16.90 for just a small piece, 180g!] but gav brought some of it home and i've been enjoying it everyday in lotsa weird ways. it's ussually fried or grilled [fried cheese!! can u imagine!???????????? as if it werent fattening enough!!] and eaten with a sprinkling of lemon juice and oregano but i've been frying it with scrambled egg, putting it on my rice, on my noodles and even on my maggi mee. yeah it's so fun to microwave coz it has a very high melting point so instead of melting, it gets nice and chewy and squishy. it has a really nice salty tangy flavour. I even chopped some up and put it in yoghurt to make some sort of a dip. in Cyprus it's eaten with watermelon, I read.. i cant imagine eating cheese with watermelon though..one's salty and the other's sweet. isnt that like..wrong? it's like eating chocolate with garlic. [ugh!]

the one about the fruitcake...[it's after christmas but well, it's time to reflect on what happened at Christmas is it not?]

ok u know how people talk about fruitcakes as if they're the worst ever dreaded thing but somehow you keep having to deal with it. like at weddings..and at christmas. mostly weddings, in our malaysian society. [yeah remember those ubiquitous prepacked rectangles of fruitcake you get at the dinner that wasnt part of the BIG 6 tiered cake?] i've met lotsa people who hate fruitcake [rach is one of em...] and yours truly [im a recent convert!] it was martha who asked me last year if i were gonna make any for Christmas. she said "Christmas cake" and I thought..what's a christmas cake?? I thought any cake consumed at Christmas could be deemed Christmas cake. after all...as long as u decorate it with christmas themed decorations or eat it at a christmas party, isnt that christmas cake? apprently not. "Christmas Cake" is actually fruitcake. I didnt pay much attention to it after that coz i was not a fan of fruitcake but after taking out my Christmas issues of Donna Hay and Martha Stewart magazines, i saw that fruitcakes took centre stage. so I had to try my hand at it. my first try was a flop..it was too dry and crumbly. so i tried again and this time, i did it the longggggggggggggggg way that takes a lot of patience. Yes, i soaked the fruits on rum...for a week [!!] then baked the cake..then poured some rum over it..then kept it for 3 weeks, pouring "some" rum over it every 5 days. at this point, some people i think, overdo it so the cake becomes some massive alcoholic thing but well, some [most] would say thr's no such thing as too much alcohol. so, anyway, the result was, according to my relatives who gobbled it up at christmas dinner, fantabulous. I wasnt there at the dinner coz I was home sick. [probably coz of the frantic insane amount of baking i did in the week leading to Christmas] It was only my 2nd attempt, but I was glad they liked it. when I tried some myself, it was nice and moist and had a very strong rum flavour and you coudl still feel alcohol warming up your throat. Ok,s o maybe next year we'll have some fruitcakes up. I wanna experiment with adding other types of fruit in it..like chopped dried apricot or even dried pineapple.