Burnin’ Love, Whiskey River!

Yes, those were the names of the burgers we had for lunch today :) I had this urge to bite into a big juicy burger and so off we headed to the Red Robin, a wonderful place serving an array of gourmet burgers and spirits….yup it’s Halloween time but nope there we no sights of legless, flying things. This is of course, you know the kind of spirits that you drink and when you do indulge in too much, your eyes might actually make you see things fly around, legless.

Anyhoo, hubby thinks when you really want to eat sandwiches or burgers for lunch, McD, Burger Kings and Carl’s Jr., Subway or Quiznos are out of the question. Maybe okay for an occasional fast-food dinner but not when you are looking for fulfilling lunch. Well, it’s been ages since I have been to McD for burgers. Actually, almost never since I came to the US. There are just so many authentic burger joints around us that for me to try out leaving no opportunity for something that I can get back in Malaysia too.

For instance, I like my sandwiches/burgers at Mimi’s Café or Zous Mediterranean Café and burgers at Fuddruckers and now Red Robin is on the list.

Another restaurant with extensive menu that gives you a hard time selecting the thing you want to it at one particular time. After much serious deliberation, hubby decided on the Burnin’ Love Burger from the Classic Gourmet Burger category.

*I am pasting here the description of the burgers from the Red Robin website. It was the descriptions that prompted us our orders :)

*You’ll get fired up for the crispy-fried jalapeño rings, tangy salsa, and spicy Pepper-Jack cheese layered on top of our cayenne-seasoned beef burger. It’s topped with shredded lettuce and tomato to cool things off and served on a jalapeño-cornmeal Kaiser roll with Chipotle mayo.

As for me, I decided on the Whiskey River BBQ Chicken Burger.

*A tender, juicy charbroiled chicken breast basted with our signature Whiskey River® BBQ Sauce and topped with melted Cheddar cheese, crispy onion straws, lettuce, tomatoes and mayo. Cowpokes and real folks both love this one!

Although we were served bottomless (never-ending) steak fries, we couldn’t move pass what came in together with our burgers! Then we washed everything down with a really large glass of Root Beer float. Yummy! Overall, we liked the service and enjoyed the patio seating where little junior could eat and count on the passing cars.

 

A burger craving well satisfied :)

Mane TLC!

I went in to Fantastic Sams for my regular haircut a couple of weeks back. No fancy cuts or fashion but just the regular shampoo and trim. My hairdresser and I were chatting when she asked me if I wanted to get some salon brand products for my dry hair and scalp. I told her about the fact that I was still in the process of weaning my baby and that my dry scalp, asserted by my gynecologist, is due to the extended nursing. So I mentioned to her that I wasn’t interested in trying out any products when the problem was hormonal. She agreed and shared with me how she too had the problem of dry scalp and thinning hair because she too had breastfed her children. So we went on chatting until she finished her job.

At the checkout counter, she bent over and with a low voice shared with me a natural recipe for healthy, well-conditioned hair and scalp: a potion containing three ingredients – egg yolks, ripened avocados and a splash of lemon juice.

She told me to apply the potion on scalp and hair for two hours each time for at least two times a week to give the strands a boost of the much-needed protein. It made sense. I mean egg yolks are rich in protein and avocado…ahh what should I say about this super fruit!

Avocados were even recommended by my baby’s pediatrician as his first foods and suggested by my hubby’s doctor for managing the body’s good cholesterol level. With all that and more, I know it can do some good for my hair :)

We always have some avocado at home that we use in our sandwiches and salads. This time I did set aside some for my natural hair potion.

While writing this entry, I have already tried the potion once and really liked the effect! So today as I am writing this, I have the potion all spread over my hair :)

Now, if only vanity can always be as simple and natural as this!

Traveling the world with just your taste buds…no passports required!

Hubby and I are self-confessed foodies. No, we definitely do not favor bizarre cuisine like Andrew Zimmern (grasshoppers and bugs satay, no thanks!) or pig out like the overly ambitious Adam Richman who basically tries to gobble down enormous sized portions of food on his shows. Now, Jeff Corwin, the Animal Planet guy, is starting this show on Food Network where he travels the world and explores exotic and yes, extreme cuisine. I just don’t understand what’s all the craze about bizarre and extreme cuisine these days!

Along that line, to us Anthony Bourdain is the most original globetrotter who manages to awe his audiences with his love for travel and food without trying too hard. Hubby and I are major fans of No Reservations and feel that he is a natural with what he does. Well yeah, he did eat a raw seal in Quebec but he is so witty and it’s fun watching his shows.

Okay, coming back to us being foodies. Perhaps we are not as adventurous as any one of those highly-paid travel journalists (I’ll eat weird stuff too if it comes with a huge paycheck and fame…at least I’ll try to) but when it comes to trying out new foods with bold flavors, novel tastes and unique preparations, we are all game.

I must say that living in California has made the better out of us foodies because it is the hub for world cuisine. We can find practically all kinds of the world cuisine around us here. Every weekend we eat out to give our palates a break from tasting their regular Malaysian/Indian/American cuisine. Let me see, thus far, hubby and I have “traveled with just our taste buds” to Greece, Italy, Vietnam, China, Thailand, Mexico, Korea, Argentina, France, Persia, Peru, Japan and Mongolia!


Last week we visited the newly-opened Elephant Bar Restaurant (http://www.elephantbar.com/) located at Laguna Hills here in California for lunch. It’s a place serving Western and Pan-Pacific foods. The ambience of the restaurant was rather interesting (although the interior was a little too dark for taking pictures with iPhone) with a full bar and open kitchen and a very (I mean really very…) extensive menu! The food was good but it was difficult when we had to choose from such an extensive menu. I guess we'd have to go there again then!

Here are the cocktails we ordered (cocktails for lunch – sure, why not!):

Mai Tai (left) and Raspberry Mojito…

Appetizer:
Crab + Lobster cakes on Fresh Mango-Ginger Sauce…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Entrées:

Oak Grilled Chicken Medallion and Prawn Skewer with Marsala sauce served alongside steamed rice and warm salad...

Mongolian Noodle Soup and Crispy Salmon Sushi...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skipped the dessert menu to allocate more indulgence for dinner :)

A Mom Eater’s Curse of the Cs!

Today I took a quiz from my September issue of the Oprah Magazine and wasn’t sure if I should be happy or sad with the results: I am no longer an emotional but a lifestyle eater! At least I am in one of the categories featured…I am not alone!

Being an emotional eater is not at all pleasant because every time the guilty feeling sets in (after the gobbling up of decadent cakes, ooey-gooey ice cream sundaes, hot apple pies, or the guzzling down of flavored sodas and creamy milkshakes), you usually feel terrible. Based on my experience, I’d say that being an emotional eater isn’t necessarily about eating too much but it is more about eating too much of the wrong thing: foods too high in sucrose or sodium namely. Well, we all know how indulging in rich foods can help elevate our moods almost instantly and so, it’s not totally surprising when people who are on an emotional roller-coaster ride take eating as a coping device.

My emotional eating bout lasted till the time I decided to take control of my life by being healthy. I didn’t really go on any kind of diet but I started working out so regularly that I didn’t need food to help elevate my good mood when I was down. By the time I got married, I lost the unpleasant weight (still pleasantly plump though!) and as a bonus, achieved clearer looking and glowing skin.

When I got pregnant, I gave in to all the cravings happily and did put on some major weight. But luckily for me, the weight dwindled down around eight months after my baby was born. Well, it wasn’t very easy to do that, mind it. It was mainly because I let go all of the munching and bingeing that I used to blame on motherly craving during pregnancy and kept myself always active. Another thing that helped was the breastfeeding. From the time he was born till to his sixth month, my baby was breastfeed exclusively…yes, no formulas. Since then and till now, he is still nursing as a supplement to his varied and rich solid foods.

So with emotional eating well behind me, I have now become a lifestyle eater! It is like you eat according to the lifestyle you have. So is there such thing like “Yes, I eat like a mom”?! (Note: basically, my lifestyle revolves around me being a mother 24/7). I took some time thinking about it and kind of got a sense of what that means.

Now that my baby is a toddler and is in the snacking phase, the pantry is simple filled with several types of cookies, crackers, cereals and chips. He also has his fruits and cheese but it is the above Cs that entice me the most. I serve a handful of those innocent looking mini chocolate chip cookies to my son and have some for myself. Or, I pass him a handful of his goldfish cheese crackers and keep some on the plate for me to have with coffee a little later. Jeez, it is true that I have become a Mom Eater! I eat these crackers and cookies mainly because they are there in the pantry for my son and didn’t even bother having them at home before he started eating these things.

I cannot for sure stop buying these things which are my son's snack time treats and deprive him of nice things and so today, I wrote up a list of Cs on the cute little white board on my fridge: cookies, crackers, chips and to notorious C gang goes, coffee. I feel like coffee is directly related to the Cs. The Cs goes so well with coffee and vice versa. You have a cup of coffee and you almost instinctly start searching for cookies or crackers!

So I wrote the list with a black marker and took a red marker and crossed them out with a big “X” to remind me that I am going to stay off them simply because I feel like I am indulging in them a little too often lately. The thing about me is that to handle these kind of tempting situations, I need to go cold turkey and completely switch off the bad angel button on my left shoulder. I need to do it soon or go around singing this. For now, I am just hoping that my willpower will work for me and that the above song will only be something I sing for my son, a Sesame Street junkie :)


What about the most indulgent of the Cs - chocolate - how come they don't get into the list? No way, José! I definitely need a dose of this C from time to time to keep me sane!

I tell myself to be a healthy eater and remind myself to always look at all those apples, oranges and pears in the fruit basket in the fridge and pretend to ignore the Cheese Cake, Chocolate muffins, Cinnamon buns and Cream Cheese Cupcakes hiding behind the back of the fruit basket!

Hey, we are not attention freaks, we just deserve it!

“It’s hard to be me” was a friend’s status on Facebook recently. People commented to her status by agreeing that being a human is indeed difficult. That’s true. Even a human baby’s life is difficult coming to think of it. There are just so many challenging milestones to achieve and so much pain (hello, new teeth) to endure: yes, there are more to it than just the “eat, play, sleep and poop” routine. My comment to her status was a rather gender-biased fact: “if it is hard being a human, then it is 10 times harder being a woman”. She agreed to that, totally.

No, I am not a bra-burner and this post is not at all intended to bicker on the outdated notion that men lead a better life than their female counterparts. I think we woman are so over that cliché now that it is globally recognized that a woman can lead a positively engaging life if she has a will to do so.

Yet, no matter how powerful, how busy, how talented or how an all-rounder a woman is, she needs attention, recognition and simply some TLC (tender loving care) from her partner. Well, let’s face it – there are many types of woman out there and I can only speak for those who are on the same wavelength as I am: happily married, a proud mother and a juggler of home and a career. When I say that a woman needs some TLC from her partner, it’s not necessarily in the material form. (Although an occasional bouquet of roses, a box of chocolates or cough-adiamondearring-cough from Mr. Husband every once in a while is very much appreciated). Simple gestures like a kiss and a hug, a smile, an honest “how was your day, honey?”, a foot massage, a back rub or perhaps offering to take over with the kids so that we get some time-off (“I’ll take care of the kids now so you can do some blogging, honey”) every now and then is very more meaningful and perfectly fit in the TLC category I am talking about here.

I think it’s absolutely necessary for a woman to get more attention and be pampered by her husband. After all, she deserves it. In any healthy marriage, a woman (working outside or working full time at home) is the one who is at the giving end. Can anyone fight this fact: both husband and wife get pleasure out of sex but it’s the wife who gives a child out of it! What about the area where most guys look at while talking to girls: the chest! To men, the breasts are just a woman’s attractive assets but a woman not only uses them to give delight to her husband but also to give food to her babies. Being the giver, I must say, is an inbuilt trait of any woman. It comes to us all naturally and we give it all so selflessly. But we are human too and life can be difficult for us too.

With all that on top of giving in to PMS blues and menopausal hot flushes, not to mention the constant people pleasing, it would be nice to get back some attention (without all the hinting). Come on, guys! We know you love us. So please, really listen when we have something to say, give us our due attention and always, always take our feelings into consideration. We’d really like to be appreciated for all the things we do because we do it genuinely. You know, all that would make us feel so much better and then we could go back to our natural selves and give and give some more!

Time waits for no man…

…and the deal is, it passes by without any notice or whatsoever. Well you’d know what I mean if you too belong in the gang (I am hoping that there is such a gang out there) of people who at times, try to figure out what happened to Wednesday on a Thursday.

If you are a mom, it’s even easier to notice how literally time flies. One moment he is this helpless little angel who relies on you, his universe, his mom for a single serving of breast milk and the next thing you know you are cleaning up a single serving of store-bought organic chocolate milk (because that is his new preferred taste) which is all over the freshly steam-vacuumed carpet because he thinks it is fun sipping in a mouthful of milk and then spurting it out like a fountain. That moment while you are trying to figure out what happened to all the days between the day you brought the tiny bundle home from the hospital and the present double carpet-cleaning day, you become aware of how time, by the months, has passed you by so quickly and silently.

On a more ‘blogospheric’ level, today I realized how speedily time has sneaked by me as I logged in to my blog site and noticed that the last time it was updated was a little over a month back. But I still do remember conveniently posting my previously written poem like it was just yesterday! Sounds pathetic? Well I needed to do justice to my self-pledge of updating voilasheila at least once a month! In my defense, when I started this blog, I never wanted it to be the daily updated, up-to-the minute blog site like that of other bloggers I know of. I wanted this place to be an avenue to put my random thoughts on words. Not so much the things happening in my life on a day-to-day basis.

That’s why you don’t find here posts titled “The day my baby went in for his 19 months well-exam” or “The day my hubby started the first day of his business school for yet another Master's degree” or “The Moving Day: from a comfortable apartment that had turned into a Toys-R-Us store to a much bigger and comfortable place” or “The day I accepted a publishing proposal and got closer to my dream of becoming a published writer”.

Yes, all that (and in fact so much more) happened in the last month. Sometimes, it’s like there are just so many things to do with just too little time in my hands. Well then, does this mean that maybe I should try and stretch out the hours in my day to the maximum so that I can make the best out them and have the possibility to get much more things done? Like in the last one month, I needed more time and so I sacrificed sleep and stayed up so many hours late at night brushing up my manuscript, writing artwork brief, unpacking boxes, arranging stuff just so I can get more things done in a day. And nights work best, especially after my demanding 19 months old boss hits the crib. So yeah, something’s got to give…I lose some sleep, I gain some time.

But then, I gain some time only to realize that it’s not enough and it will never be. The fight against time is a never-ending thing for all Homo sapiens I guess. My hubby is the greatest example of a warrior against time at the moment: working 9-6 (or more these days) managing important projects at work, coming home to play and spend time with his flesh-and-blood, cuddling up with me and trying to get involved in my book, and then waking up odd hours to study for his business school. And this vicious cycle, I remind him, will be going on at full speed for the next three years, until he brings home the coveted feather to put in his cap. Bravo, my technocrat warrior!

I tell myself and him that it’s only best to do whatever 24 hours would allow us to do (beauty rest included) and wake up fresh and ready to conquer a whole new 24 hours the very next day. So that’s the bright side of this story: no matter how much time you've wasted in a day, or how much time you lack in a day, you still have an entire tomorrow to spend wisely or waste freely.

Love Is What You Make Of It

For Kish and Vish who fill my life with so much love...

Blooming garden of red roses,

Sweet-smelling, perfumed ambience.

Sun-bright day, full of promises,

Picturesque sceneries, life's essence.


Songbirds with sweet voices,

Euphonious serenades that delight mankind.

Witnessing these, with joy my heart bounces.

Attributes of nature, one of its kind.


There is no denial to nature's exquisiteness,

As it vigorously provides us soaring spirit.

It indisputably blesses mankind with happiness,

And LOVE is what you make of it!


Copyright © Vijayan, Sheila

Motherly love

I never realized falling head-over-heels with a person I have met for just a couple of seconds of my life is possible until the second day of Christmas of 2007. Until that day I became a mom. The otherwise clichéd love at first sight became very real that day.

How can I describe the way I felt the special day I became a mom? What word can possibly illustrate that phenomenally real feeling, the feeling that has grown so solid over the last 16 months and the very feeling which I know is only going grow deeper and stronger over the years to come?

What’s the best word for the sensation I get when my baby stares into my eyes and smiles at me or when I gaze at him as he sleeps innocently in his crib? How do I explain my inability to be angry at him when he bites me while breastfeeding (accidentally at first and on purpose later!) or my lack of annoyance when he wails and runs the opposite direction when we are shopping at the mall?

Now that I am a mother myself, I can verify through my experiences that it’s definitely not easy to find just one word to describe such form of genuine, motherly love. Well, that’s it! I figure there can be no better word to describe such nonpareil feeling of love than the word “mother” itself.

I’m thankful to God and feel privileged to be a mother because only a mother can contain much love in her and yet be strong to let go when the time is right. Only a mother can be strict when there’s a need for some disciplining and yet be a clown during playtime. No one can handle such a juxtaposition of emotion as well as a mother. No one can understand the true meaning of motherly love but a mother herself.

Happy mother's day to fellow mothers out there!

P/S: My respectful cheers to adoptive mothers who choose to give so much love to deserving children, putting “mothers” who abandon their newborns and those who abuse their children to shame.

Hubby and I started our 2008 with a three-day old baby. All the 12 months of the year were endlessly filled with so many new challenges and changes that brought us both closer as spouses. Most importantly, we both grew as parents as we watched our baby grow from a fragile infant to a robust toddler.

To celebrate the year that was nothing but excitingly joyful, we flew to Lake Tahoe for a short winter vacation to mark our son’s 1st birthday (otherwise known as my labor day!). Living in Southern California and not having experienced snow, vacationing at a ski resort and looking at snow-covered everything from the balcony of our rented condominium was indeed amazing. Above all, Lake Tahoe will always hold a special place in my heart for being the celebration spot of my little tyke’s very first birthday.

And so we started 2009 with a hangover from our winter vacation. It took me days to unpack our luggage. When I finally finished unpacking, hubby reminded me not to put away the luggage. “Yes, our major vacation is in another 3 weeks”, he said nonchalantly. “How can he be so cool about it?”, I thought as I almost bit my fingers. I mean it took me days to pack the stuff that was needed for our local vacation. With a young one in tow, I cannot imagine how I am going to get all things ready for an international travel! I am after all sort of a paranoid mom.

I started off the whole international travel thingy by making several lists (gifts to buy, baby items needed etc. etc.) and happily scribbled “done” on the items of a list only to realize that I needed to add on more items to very the same list!

All junior-related items were ready before I started on the stuff both hubby and I would need for our travel. Everything from medicines, diapers, wet wipes, toys, jars of baby food were carefully packed first. I guess this must be the natural, motherly instinct: the impulsion of having things go by that particular order.

Well, all that hoo-haa was about three weeks ago. Our flight is today! All the bags are packed and we're ready to go!

Hubby and I are looking forward to a wonderful and memorable vacation(this would be jr.'s first introduction to the whole family)!