Simple pleasures

It is becoming increasingly difficult to have dinner out. Muffin naps at day care. It is a long nap. And because of that, he takes a long time to fall asleep. This means that we aren't kid free till 9 pm earliest. It's put a dampener on date nights for us. Date nights now require a bit more organizing where we ensure that someone else is around to get all 3 to go to bed. It used to be a situation where all 3 would fall asleep before 8 and we would sneak out of the house for a late-ish dinner or movie depending on how tired we were.

So because dinner options are severely limited by the time 9 pm rolls into 10 pm, I've taken to making up for it by making little treats at home and having fun eating them. That way, we don't get too bummed about not being able to sneak off and we still have something to look forward to.

A few nights ago, inspired by Shermaine, I made coconut jelly. One of my favourite Chinese restaurants in Singapore is Peach Garden, not so much for the food but because they do this divine dessert where it is essentially coconut jelly in a coconut. When Shermaine made it and claimed it was easy, I wanted to do it too. And it was fun, extremely tasty and an adventure to eat! Of course, the next time I make it, I won't use agar jelly (too hard) and I would use less jelly powder. The weird ironic thing was that coconut is meant to be a cooling fruit. Agar is supposed to be a cooling food. But when I was done with the jelly, it certainly felt that I was going to end up with a sore throat! Perhaps cooking it altered the yin-yang qualities of the ingredients. Who knows?

For the past few weeks, I haven't had to work nights. When I do work, dinner is often a one dish meal that I can inhale in 5 minutes and be on my way. Since I was on a hiatus, I wanted a multi-part dinner. No doubt burritos still count as a one dish fast food, but having to assemble the burrito and eat it messily made it a big deal. There was also a lot of leftover that I could look forward to for lunch over the next few days.

I haven't given up hope on going out. In fact, we are going out for supper on Friday night. But this has been planned weeks in advance. I look forward to the day that Muffin sleeps early and we can decide spontaneously what we want to do and even if it was taking a night drive to the Gardens by the Bay or heading across the road for ice cream!


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