I thought, I'd better saved all the last opened peonies from
the rain, when I was removing the withered petals in the
garden. Perhaps a silly action, but I need a reason for cutting
so many flowers at once :-P

Two things I made lately.


a lavender wand and a collage

I had to crop (part of) the lavender very early this year. The
weather (and the fact that I didn't trim them this spring) made
them grow enormously and blocked half of the pavement.
But then, the buds are not yet well developed. Normally people
would cover the buds. But I thought, I'd rather cover the leaves,
which also have great scent. Also, normally people would use
ribbon. I didn't have any suitable ribbon, but stitch yarn in
lovely colors. It took a lot longer to make, but weaving is like
meditating.

I finally found this video again.

When I first saw it back in 2010, I thought he's SO right.
At least it applies to me (not only in creativity, but in many
cases of my life - with or without my real effort), but I know
this doesn't necessarily apply to others.

I loved my mom's ikan pepes. She used averrhoa bilimbi
and they makes her ikan pepes so special. I miss Indonesia
a lot at the moment, especially the food (of course, my son
would say, only food in my head lol). Looking at what I
have in the fridge, I decided to do my own take on ikan 
pepes for lunch..



... and failed shamelessly! lol I don't know - either I used
too much lime (as substitute for the bilimbis) or my tongue
hasn't been able to taste everything right. I could taste the
hotness of the chilli, although it was not as hot as I expected
using two chilis, but I couldn't taste the sourness at all - only
the bitterness (the last rice cakes I ate yesterday was also
bitter instead of sweet). Weird!

But at least I had some fun with my kitchen waste while I
was waiting for the fish to cook ;-)

Sick on holiday - arghh!! The summer flu has caught me.
Again, I cannot smell and can only barely taste anything.
Thus, when I made some rice (cup)cakes yesterday (well,
it started as a rice noodle experiment and ended up in
strawberry rice cakes), I thought they were not so sweet,
but my son told me that they're very sweet o.O



The rice cakes are more an Asian style of cakes - steamed.

I used the following ingredients, but I'm going to vary a bit,
to make the cakes less sticky (and also perhaps less sweet)
next time (if ever ;-) as I'm not such a sweet tooth actually).
For 8 cups.

150 g wholemeal rice flour
50 g starch (mine was a mixture of rice/corn/tapioca)
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
200 ml hot water (or 250 ml? - I forgot..)
2 Tbsp sugar

Mixed everything up and wait for half an hour.
Add one egg (size L). Mixed again.

Prepare a steamer (I used a similar setup as here, but used
the steamer basket of my pressure cooker instead of the
bamboo steamer). Arrange the muffin cups in the steamer.
Fill in 1 Tbsp dough in each cup. Steam them for around
5 minutes. Cut strawberries in half and arrange two halves
in each cup. Cover the strawberries with dough. Eventually
sprinkle with some coconut rasps. Steam again for another
15 minutes.

Taste better, when the strawberries are still warm (but then
the cake is also stickier...).