We Love Duchess

Posted on Feb 11, 2013 in Restaurants | 0 comments

I’m currently working on about 4 projects and must be chaotically busy, right?
But because of the Chinese Lunar New Year, everything is slow (as all my clients are in Hong Kong). So now I have time for blogging!

Happy Lunar New Year!

It’s a good time as I have so much things to write about. For some stories, I have to go back the time and write about around Aug or Sep last year. A half a year has already passed, so some memories are gone, but it’s OK. Better than nothing.

 

Aug 28, 2012:

It was the next day we came back from the NY trip with our car, with the 13,000km drive!

I was going to start tackling my mountain of work! Then I heard the ding-dong upstairs (our landlord live upstairs) and then banging the door. Our landlord and his wife were all out. There were 2 firemen there when I came out of the house, telling me that we have to evacuate for 4 – 5 hours due to the gas leak around here.
What! This timing!? I’m so busy!!

Well, OK, we have to leave as soon as possible.

We went out for a grocery shopping that we had to do anyway soon or later.

There were quite a few fire engines out there, a few police cars and also media people. Sounded like some construction worker at the site got a gas pipe by mistake.

4-hour waiting is a long time! We went to Duchess (Cakes and bakery cafe).
I was taking a rest with nice tea and cake gracefully, even though I haven’t even started working… ^^

Lavender Meringues & Banana Cream Pie

Raspberry Tart

Lavender Meringues

Gochiso-sama (Thankful for the food)!

My Food Tendency These Days…

Posted on Feb 11, 2013 in Home Meals, Pregnancy | 0 comments

I’m eating crackers and fruits frequently everyday because of my morning sickness which I get the worst at night.
(*”Morning sickness” is totally mis-named. I normally get most sick at night.)

When I go out, I always take crackers in a zip-lock bag. Probably too much carbo (carbohydrates). So I thought of cutting carbo on meals, but I love rice and noodles so much and I realized I couldn’t do that for breakfast and dinner. So I decided to try that at lunch!

As a result, my recent lunch is like this:

Fish and a big bowl of veggies!

This fish tin is sardines (with chile jalapeño). Yum yum. It’s like my hubby’s dad’s snack for beer. I should take them out of the tin and put them on a plate, but it’s OK. It’s all for myself.

And some left-over from the dinner I made the day before. It’s a fried chile vermichelli with lotus root, carrots, celery and bamboo shoot in chille oil. Root veggies make your body warm from the inside, I heard. So I want to eat a lot in winter in Canada.

Salad would be a mountain in a ramen bowl.

It’s a super easy meal, but it still contains 12 kinds of food (sardines, jalapeño, lettuce, tomatos, wakame seaweed, artichoke hearts, cucumber, vermichelli, carrots, lotus root, celery and bamboo shoot). Plus, I had some Greek salad as well, so goat cheese and olives would be added into it. And it’s 14 kinds. 14 kinds just in one meal is pretty good!

By the way, my hubby’s lunch is this:

Smoked salmon on a bagel. We often put avocado as well, but this day it wasn’t ripe yet.

 

From at least one month before pregnancy until three months of pregnancy, the intake of folic acid is recommended to prevent the onset of neural tube closure failure. That’s what I was told 1 year ago. So I’ve been taking this recommended Materna since. This contains not only folic acid but also a balanced variety of stuff.

For someone who are planning to get pregnant or pregnant ladies, it’s recommended to take 0.4mg of folic acid per day. But 2 heads of spinach (60g) contains only 0.25mg. If you cook them, 50% of folid acid reduced and you get only 0.125mg. So it’s pretty difficult to intake enough every day.

Doctors would say that if you are too sick, just eat whatever you can or you like, and when I search on the net, I often see the same advices. I think you can eat whatever you like only if you are too sick, but I think doctors can say that only when the patients are taking some supplement like this regularly. Otherwise, you need to have balanced food.

There is nothing I can not eat really. Maybe coffee at the first stage of pregnancy. Caffeine should be anyway avoided, so it was OK. And I started hating Kimuchi (a traditional fermented Korean dish) somehow.

And the liquid that I’ve been hating since I got pregnant was water. Yes, our essential thing: water. This troubled me a lot. I’ll write about it later.

Basically I can eat anything. But I start getting sick when I stop eating… this kind of symptom or feeling hungry all the time is called “Tabe-tsuwari” in Japanese. I don’t know if you have a name for it in English. What troubles me is that even though I’m feeling full but also feeling sick, I have to keep eating. And I get fat in result of suffering… What’s the point!?

I just can’t wait when it finishes…

A year ago, I was only recommended to take Materna, but this time Vitamin D as well. And my hubby also started taking some. It’s important for men too.

Originally I’m not so leaning towards taking supplement. They are not really food in my opinion. So taking more supplement doesn’t make me feel good. But it’s true 90% of pregnant women in Japan is lacking Vitamin D. And actually it’s easy to get Vitamin D from the Sun, but if you live on the area where winters are long, or the Sun time is too short, or rainy or cloudy all the time, you can’t help. You don’t get enough Sun. So we started taking it. Especially us! When we go out, our bodies are all and covered tight for the cold and only a part of face exposed to the Sun even when it’s out there. And we live in the basement. And I don’t commute. I’m not getting any Sun. It’s kind of scary when I think of that.
Having said that, when we travel, we would be exposed to the Sun the whole time with only once-a-day Sun screen put on the skin. So I have a lot of freckles and mottles.

 

Today I made sweet and sour seafood with veggies for the first time! I’ve never made dish with some starchy sauce, so I was worried about how the corn-starch can get starchy well. But I didn’t need to worry too much. It was a success and my hubby loved it. So I was happy. It was a good dish. I’m glad I tried a new dish!

So for dinner, we had 18 kinds of food! Garlic, shrimp, squid, cod fish, green pepper, (carrots,) onions, green onions, ginger, vinegar, soy sauce, white rice + grain, miso, (wakame seaweed,) tofu and mushrooms. For snack, I had oranges, strawberries and crackers. And I had a decaf cafe latte after dinner.
33 kinds just for lunch and dinner! Good for me!

For breakfast, I had a natto with rice.
(* Natto is a Japanese traditional food – fermented beans.)
Natto is so great. It has a good amount of folic acid, and calcium, iron, fiber, a few kinds of vitamins and more. And it’s so delicious! When I’m eating it, I always ask my hubby “it’s delicious. And it’s good for you. Do you wanna some?”. But he never ate it in the morning. He must not like it so much…

Anyway, I had 34 kinds of food today!

It reached 50 once before. But it’s not an easy job.

By the way, sardines come with a variety of flavors. So nice!

The ones I often buy are the one with chile jalapeño and in tomato sauce. They are good!
By the way, my hubby wants nothing to do with these also! Too bad.

 

Nano for My Workout

Posted on Feb 10, 2013 in Gym / Sports, Mac, Music | 0 comments

It was in Sep last  year.

I think I used this iPod nano for 5 years. The capacity was only 912.5MB. I didn’t peel away the original protecting sticker (normally you do?) and I put a cover on top of it. So the look was still so shiny and brand-new!
But! I put it on the floor at the gym (That was wrong! My hubby said later) and a dumb dumbbell fell from a shelf and rolled onto my nano. It shouldn’t hurt too much, I thought. But the screen got broken! Yes, it is a delicate gadget. Of course!
As it has a small capacity and therefore not too many albums in it, I didn’t have too much trouble listening to my favorite music without the navigation on the screen. I continued using it.

But gradually we bought a new one.

The current nano got smaller and thinner. The capacity didn’t grow just twice or three times. That was much more. More than 16 times! It was 16GB. So big!! The iPod from 5 years ago was 16 GB? Probably.

The nano also has a function of step counter. Just put it in a pocket and it counted well. Good!
I’ve never used a step counter before. But sounds like a person should walk 6,000 steps a day at least. Today, I used the function to go and back between home and the gym, and it was 3700 steps. It wasn’t too bad. As it’s very close, I thought it would be about 1,000 steps.