Rae Makes Breakfast

Rae had gotten past the first stage to be enrolled officially as a Brownie. She had completed some important basics and in the next weeks, there will be an enrollment ceremony for her. She had been pestering me to let her quit this co curricular activity (soon after joining) in school last year and I persuaded her many times to continue. She persevered for a year and this year she can finally put on the brownie uniform and the scarf. She is feeling the excitement, finally!

However, before the enrollment, she needed to complete some tasks. Among them are cooking, serving and wash up after a meal. She also need to iron her Brownie scarf, wash the uniform, sew buttons and other tasks at home. Last Sunday, I got her to take care of the family's breakfast. I taught her to make scrambled eggs for herself and Lea, set the table, serve and she enjoyed herself so much. Lea is the little kitchen helper.



Now Sunday breakfast will be her responsibility until she complains! LOL

Happy New Year Wishes to All

I would like to wish all my friends and bloggers a wonderful Chinese New Year. May the year of the Ox brings you everlasting happiness, prosperity, joy and health. Those who are born in this Ox year are known to be dependable, calm and modest. Let's hope it will also spell a steady year of growth as well.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!!

I am running out of time...

GASP! Tomorrow is Lunar New Year Eve! I don't have much time! I better get down fast to complete some things.. I've been procrastinating and dilly-dally that I have not cleaned the top part of the book shelf yet! Those are where all my fengshui stuff is. I better do it now. And I HAVEN'T change the new notes yet! I am so late in this! Oh dear Oh dear! I know I know! Blame myself! I blame Facebook and internet! heeheee

What about you? Have you...
Completed Spring Cleaning, clean the ENTIRE house? (clear the old for new things?)
NO?! Do it now!! you have 2 DAYS LEFT!

Put away all your brooms and brushes (for those who have completed spring cleaning)
Pay all your debts (bills, money you owe friends, families, anything). I have yet to pay my girl's ballet fees. But it's not due till end of the month... so it's not counted right?

Resolve differences with your friends or members of the families. Any thing like squabbles and mini-quarrels lately? Clear it up now and make up.
Things to get: Candy tray (those with dividers, preferably 8 sections, for prosperity), HongBao envelopes (don't use old ah), New Notes, Flowers (peach blossom, pussy willow, water lily...etc), New clothes (phew, I've got them, even undies..hahaha), the chinese word for you RICE container (it means 'FULL' i think..err hanyupinyin - 'Mun' ?? )tie little hongbaos and paste chinese decors on your plants, put up the red cloth on the door entrance.

Anything I miss out?
Sorry I have to run!
I have to do mine now!

Lea uses her Mighty Power
to help put things right!

Twitter and People

If you have been in the blogging industry for at least a few years, then Ted Murphy should be a name that is familiar to you. People like him have gain popularity because of some of the right things he had done in making money business through blogs and websites linking to advertising and marketing. Latest technology and gadgets mean you won't be left behind if you are a fan, by following ted on twitter, besides posting comments or queries through his blog.

I'm Not Fretting Yet

How have you been preparing your Chinese New Year? I enjoyed mine a lot mostly as a child. Now the anticipation is not like when I was young. Perhaps it has a lot to do with commitments, preparations and also not to forget digging up more cash to pay for lots of new things.

As a child, we always will have at least 2-4 sets of new clothes for each day of celebration. Then we'd also have new set of PJs, and sleep on new set of sheets. Now that we have grown up, we take care of the kids' needs first and worry about ourselves later. It is less than a week to Lunar New Year and I am not even fretting about my own new year clothes! It was different before when we had no kids.

My girls are excited about their new year clothes of course. Lea tried on the Chinese dress and showed me how it looked before I send it for a quick rinse to make sure it's clean.

Lea posing in her Lunar New Year Cheong Sam

Interests of the Same Kind

I've got a little book to help me remember the sites I go to, the userids I use and many other particulars. In this day and age, we have so many userids, passwords, login accounts for so many things when we surf and shop. I don't have a trained memory for so many digits, alphabets and worst, when they require you to remember the ones they assigned to you.

But I was just a little adamant in wanting to sign up one more networking site that was newly launched recently. It lets people interact and share information of same interests like movies, gadgets, games, fashion, books. Totally anything. And perhaps that could send some traffic my way.

Snow Wishes

It's snowing! It's snowing! Let's go out and build a Snowman!


Snowing in tropical Singapore? Not really actually. I found this image of Lea as I was organizing the photo folders. I had forgotten taking this of her for a while. It was done before her school concert about Christmas and Winter.


"How I wish we had Snow in Singapore", Lea said.

Well, I'm sure many would also like to have that. But for the time being, perhaps the only closest thing is to visit Snow City that is located just next to Science Centre. I've not being there. I wonder if they open during the Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year in Singapore and Malaysia are always well known to be hot scorching days. I hope my girls recover from their runny noses soon. Seems like I heard many people are getting sick this week too.

I'm boiling a large pot of herbal tea now.

Gifts Do Not Cost The Earth

Gifts do not have to cost the earth. As a matter of fact, something personalized is more special that an expensive gift that one may just put them aside and forget about it few months down the road. In case you haven't any idea what to get for someone special, personalized poems actually make a lovely gift. How about paying only US$15 for a poem that includes two names in it. Imagine when that someone looks at it many years later, he or she will remember the one who gives this beautiful piece when it's beautifully framed and becomes a permanent part of the house decor and heart of the recipient.

My New Food Blog

I had not really made it official yet so it's time to do so, after a month. In December, I finally decided to get a domain for a food blog finally. I got it using the blogger free hosting platform but paid for a domain name.

It's called Fad About Food. I realised that there are still so much food recipes that I have as well as eateries that I have tried and I want to consolidate all of them in my new blog.
I started Caramel Corn more than a year ago with the intention of putting together food, kitchen and home tips, natural remedies and wellness. But as I go along, I found myself unable to stop myself blogging about other subjects (for $$$ of course) and now it has become a blog or all sorts.



Hence, I will clean up Caramel Corn into a blog solely for Wellness, Remedy, Home and Kitchen Tips, DIY. All my food recipes will be moved to the new blog Fad about Food.

For all my blogger friends who have been so supportive of my blogs, thank you so much. I hope Fad About Food will be a wonderful place solely for foodies and those hunting for food recipes in the near future.

Do visit my new blog and tell me what you think about it. Thanks!

Medical Billing for Health Industry

For every visit to the local medical clinic or those offering various medical services - consultations, patient and customer care plays an important part. Every customer or patient wants to know that they are being taken care of exclusively and gets prompt attention. Such intangible efforts can be made possible if organizations, companies, medical services and business focus more on customer and patient services instead of financial, ordering and other administrative tasks.

In an article I read recently, with initiatives to tackle and provide a long term solution in long winded tasks in purchase-order and billing, a flagship product by Netalytics is founded. This product by the name of Metasoft will play an important role by reforming health care with electronic billing.

The need for electronic billing is a solution for those in the medical business to simplify, organize and reduce costs and allow these medical practitioners to focus and concentrate more in their patient care. Methasoft's Netalytics increase clinic's efficiency by linking customers' data, billing, treatment, patient's addiction tracking and medical history and convert these data into formats that are required by Medicare and Medicaid for insurance and other medical claims. By using MPMsoft, an Electronic Medical Record is created for each patient and this cuts down additional paperwork as it can be transmitted to thousands of medical insurance payers.

In the case of small medical clinics and those that have shortage of staffing, doctors can now focus more on the emotional, care and treatment of their patients. This will in turn allow a more effective patient recovery. An electronic medical billing certainly is the answer for the booming health care industry.

Baking in the Kitchen

Oh I've been busy in the kitchen in the morning. I wanted to try the Sweet Buns recipe that I have sourced online recently. It took me a while before I decided to use one recipe that don't call for Bread Improver. Baking bread without the machine is hard work but it gives me a nice rewarding feeling. All your stress is excreted into the kneading, I must say.

So, that was what I've been doing. Want to try it out? It's posted in my new recipe blog, Fad About Food.

Little Nyonya

For the past month, I've been glued to drama Little Nyonya on Mediacorp's channel 8. This show is really an eye opener about the life of Straits' Born Chinese and there are still many things that we do not know about their historic culture and traditions. Growing up in Penang, I was exposed to the life of these people, but I had not learnt to appreciate them when I was young as I left Penang in my late teens. My mom used to attend her ritual Thursday or Friday Dondang Sayang thingy in her kebayas. Back then, I thought was too 'ornate' and loud for my liking. But now when I look at these clothes in the drama, I wondered if mom still kept those at home..

Watching this show and the preparation of Nyonya food reminds me so much the poundings on the pestle and mortar that mom uses in most of her cooking. It was familiar sound and it had faded off into the background as 'white noise' but I do remember the poundings very fondly. Mom tried to get us to learn cooking but being new generation kids, we prefer to be out playing with our neighbourhood friends more than be in the kitchen.. She also did not force us and hoped we would be married off and not have to lift a muscle in the kitchen!

As this show is shown in local Singapore television, there is no guarantee that it will be made available on any DVDs because I have not come across Singapore dramas (only movies) on DVD, for the time being..

However, I found that because it is available on MobTV, one can actually get to watch it on the internet like those demand tv or pay tv. On MobTV, this show will be available till the third quarter of 2009. MobTV can be subscribed online.

On the contrary, you may also like to watch it on YouTube that was uploaded by someone called Media Corp Fan.

Here is the first episode in 7 parts:

Episode 1/Part 1


Episode 1/Part 2


Episode 1/Part 3


Episode 1/Part 4


Episode 1/Part 5


Episode 1/Part 6


Episode 1/Part 7

Pasta Mania Maniacs

When my helper was on vacation last month, I brought the girls out for meals out more often instead of cooking. Guess after cleaning and cooking one meal a day, the thought of cleaning up dishes, pots and pans really freaked me out. I envisioned my poor fingers all stripped to bones as my fingers are quite sensitive to dish-washing liquid soap and I hate to put on gloves.

One of those days, I brought the girls to Pasta Mania, their favourite fast food restaurant. Rae loves Pizza with lots of cheese and the pizzas in Pasta Mania is reasonably priced and tastes good, unlike Pizza Hut's quality which had gone from bad to worst.

The service in Pasta Mania was also good although you need to order and pay at the counter first. But they are very polite and helpful and brought the cutlery to my table although I could have done it myself.

I ordered a kid's Alfredo pasta for Lea as I worry that the regular portion might be too much for her. I chose Penne as it is easier to handle. But she really loved it and finished almost the whole plate of it, except for a few spoonfuls which I gave to Rae cos she was starving waiting for her pizza. Rae had the Margherita pizza (Mozzarella cheese and tomato!) and she loved it too.

Rae loves Pizza...

It was wonderful to see them eat and enjoy their meal when normally on that day. I could enjoy my own meal of Spinach Tortellini in peace.

Spinach Tortellini, pasta stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese..