Siti to The Rescue

Director Yasmin suffers a stroke, stable after brain surgery
By RIZAL JOHAN, The Star

PETALING JAYA: Award-winning director Yasmin Ahmad, famed for her advertisements and films capturing the essence of racial harmony in Malaysia, collapsed while attending a meeting at Sri Pentas here.

The 51-year-old creative director at Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur was rushed to the Damansara Specialist Centre yesterday, and underwent brain surgery following a stroke due to bleeding in the brain.

Paediatric surgeon Datuk Dr Zakaria Zahari, Yasmin’s brother-in-law, said she was in a stable but critical condition.

Yasmin had earlier met with TV3 officials, as well as pop diva Datuk Siti Nurhaliza, at Media Prima’s Sri Pentas premises to pitch a potential commercial.

Siti told The Star that during the meeting, Yasmin complained of feeling unwell, cupped her face and rested her head on the table.

Sensing something amiss when Yasmin remained motionless for a few minutes, those present rushed to her side.

“We laid her on the floor. She was having difficulty breathing. A panel doctor from Sri Pentas came to assist.

“While she gave Yasmin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, I helped with the chest compressions until the ambulance arrived,” said Siti, a former ambassador for the Malaysian Red Crescent Society. (Good PR for Siti and MRCS :P)

A host of media representatives and personalities had congregated at the hospital where Yasmin was admitted.

Yasmin had previously suffered a stroke about five years ago. Her parents are on the way from Langkawi to be with her.

Easy-Peasy Pork Stew

Yesterday night, my dinner was waiting for me at home. The moment I stepped into the house I could smell the wonderful pork stew and my stomach started to growl - this was after I screamed and ran around in the garden from the sight of 2 tiny black squirrels jumping from the roof; Polar bear looking at me from the window with a wide grin and mouthing "poor Vivian".

Anyway, back to my dinner story. This wonderful dinner was courtesy of my wonderful new toy, the slow cooker. Before I left for work, I dumped some pork, celery, carrot, mushroom, bay leaf, dry onion soup mix and a can of undiluted Campbell mushroom soup and 50 ml of water. It was cooked on the low setting for close to 10 hours.

It was so good that this time around, we had no left-over for lunch.

Quick Dinner

I've just invested in a slow cooker recently because I was craving for my friend's hearty beef stew for a long, long time now. She used a slow cooker to make it and I'm sure you can actually do it on the stove top but I think the reason why the stew was so good was the fact it was slow cooked. So, I bought a 5 litre slow cooker from Cornell (Parkson;RM119) - it was the only one with a dark coloured ceramic pot. Mum has one which is white and it stains easily.

With the new toy, I did some research for recipes and even bought a recipe book for slow cooker (Borders; RM28) which has 200 recipes covering from appettizers to desserts. Bet you didn't know that you can bake a cake using a slow cooker! Ask any Chinese - slow cooker is for soup and sweet soupy dessert tong sui. And bak kut teh.

Did a bit of history of the slow cooker as well. Apparently, slow cooker was conceived to help women who were starting to work in the post-depression era to prepare a quick yet hearty dinner for their families. They needed a device that would slowly cook the food for 8-10 hours and ready to be served when they got home. This is great as I have been trying to cook our own dinner so that the polar bear (my husband) will not roam to McDonald's drive throughs.

I successfully replicated a beef stew using this simple recipe:

about 500g beef, cubed (I bought mine from Cold Storage and it had the word STEW on the label)
2 stalks of celery, choppped
2 carrots, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 potatoes, chopped
half pack of dry onion soup mix (look for it in the soup section, if you can find Campbell's soup, it should be there)
1 cup of beef broth (I made this using a Knorr beef cube)
salt, pepper, 2 tablespoon of flour, Worchester sauce, 2-3 bay leaves
fresh rosemary
parsley for garnishing

I seasoned the cut-up beef with salt, pepper and flour before browning them on all sides on a pan. Browning means the meat should just changed its colour. This process will help seal the flavour of the meat.

Once that was done, I put all the items into the pot and put on high for 4 hours (for working days, you can cook them on low for 8-10 hours). You can serve the stew with rice, but I served it with mashed potatoes.

This recipe is for 3-4 servings. We had leftovers, and polar bear had it the next day for lunch.

Really yummy and so easy to prepare.

Let's do this for real

I actually started this blog in 2007 but never gotten around to actually do something with it. There was this fear in me, that I had to have something profound or intelligent to share, to blog. So for the fear of being judged, being boring, I shelved the idea.

I must be damn bored and shameless now :)

The thing is, I figure, it's my blog and I can write whatever I want and if it's boring, well, ta-ta!