I’m not much of a morning person, really

I arranged flowers to brighten up the living room for Chinese New Year, aren’t they pretty?

This morning, I broke my own record, waking up 7 minutes before when I was due to get into lab. I woke up with a start, did a very much abbreviated morning routine, and dashed out of the door, but still was almost 10 minutes late. Good thing was the lab tech was still in her office and had yet to get us started on lab work when I arrived.

Which made me rethink my usual morning routine on a normal day of lab/lectures. Ok, normally I lie in bed quite a while before I actually tell myself that I absolutely have to get out of bed, which these days is about 30 minutes before I have to head out. It’s sad that I’ve lost the skill of just jumping out of bed when my alarm rings since I’ve came to UK, or perhaps I just have to retrain myself. Then, after that is my usual bathroom routine, which takes about 8 minutes  in total, during which I may use to think of what to wear for the day. After a quick change of clothes, I sit in front of my VAIO laptop, press the quickstart Web function only button and check the weather forecast (to make sure I’ve got enough layers on) whilst moisturising my face and putting on makeup. After all this, depending on how distracted I get by the Internet or other things, I’m left with, on a good day, 10 minutes for a quick breakfast, or on a not so good day, 5 minutes or less. Then it’s time to get out of the door. I’m sure that there are some parts of this routine which can be made more efficient and less time-consuming so that I could get more sleep, heh.

Anyway, been having a really eventful weekend last week since my sister and her flatmate, who is also my housemate’s cousin, came over to Nottingham for the weekend. And gosh did we eat a lot. Oh one very nice discovery I’ve made is the beautiful simplicity in braised mushrooms and how awesome it is, made some last week and I could do with more shitake mushrooms, pity they aren’t exactly cheap. You soak the mushrooms in hot water, if you’re using chinese mushrooms instead it would take like hours to soak and soften. Then fry it up with some garlic, and ginger if you have but I didn’t have any, add the mushroom stock from the soaking of the mushrooms, and just simmer for forever and forever, making sure to top up the stock if needed. I read like so many different recipes that had many different techniques, but I tried one where the mushroom was coated in cornflour before frying and another where I just put in cornflour while simmering and both were fine to my unrefined tastebuds. But I did add soy sauce, oyster sauce and quite a bit of chinese rice wine to the mushrooms, it was good stuff alright… The mushrooms were just glistening and coated in this crazily yummy mushroomy sauce.

Small things like that that I used to take for granted back in Malaysia, ah sigh…