Detoxify

The festive season is almost upon us! A time for eating, drinking and perhaps more eating, for money and new clothes and seeing your relatives and celebrations. A time to trigger your inner OCD by cleaning the house and eating nothing but leftovers for days on end. It sounds exciting already! So grab some lettuce for the local lion dancers and doll yourself up to collect those red packets because Chinese New Year comes Monday morning!

And to explain myself for the all too over-the-top enthusiasm in the above paragraph is that it's only been 20 days into the year, 2 weeks into school and I feel exhausted already. I can't remember the last time the universe tried this hard to kick me down. Again embracing a terrible biological clock screw-up and negative correlations between critical thinking skills and never-ending deadlines at midnight. I'd say I won't make it past June.

Photos via Instagram, gastro-porn and dainty new bedside table lamps and all. Pretty evident of the time I've been spending in the kitchen as of late, and all the nifty skills I've picked up through a concoction of Mum's good ol'tricks and the online web. Gone are the k-pop videos, and beauty tutorials aside, my subscription list is now 50% cooking channels. Also, have I mentioned I adore Gordan Ramsey? His crudeness satisfies me in a way Simon Cowell does and I love them both.

The build-up towards this year was strangely satisfying. During that time, I managed to get out of the country twice, visited some extremely picturesque places with the people I love, and enjoyed really good food. I don't take much of a liking to street food, but hawker food is right up my alley. How unfortunate we do not have the priviledge of what Penangites do, and anyone that says our local hawker scene is good enough for them, they obviously have not been to Penang.

So here we are, in 2012. The family and I spent New Year's at home. We sipped red wine, popped champagne, and had a very entertaining round of Monopoly. 2011 was gone, and I hurried with my mental thank-yous and a quick reflection. Then I prayed that 2012 wouldn't disappoint, and that we would visit the famed Tsukiji in Japan sometime soon.