A few months ago, I started experiencing a loss of appetite and it has been really disconcerting.

If you have been following my blog over the years, you might have concluded that I was an irredeemable glutton, such was my penchant to share endless gastronomical conquests, replete with mouthwatering photos.

I have loved food, especially unhealthy junk food, all my life. Barring the occasional loss of appetite due to temporal sickness, depression or jetlag, I’ve always lived to eat and looked forward to every meal with hungry impatience, always dreaming of all sorts of savoury delights rolling around my taste buds.

And then, all of that suddenly gone. Almost overnight.

I woke up one day and found no urge to eat. No food excited me, not even my favourite things, and I have many of those, trust me. One day rolled into two days, which rolled into one month, two months.

Piers would ask me, “If you could have anything to eat right now, anything at all, what would it be?” And I would say, “Nothing at all!”

Putting something into my mouth to chew and swallow started seeming a bit like a chore, even when I was hungry. I did still occasionally enjoy tasty food, but the enjoyment would be at about 30% of what it should have been.

“O.M.G. I’ve died and gone to heaven” became “Okay, this is quite tasty so it’s less of a chore to eat”.

At first I thought it was because I was sick of the food in England, since the variety there is quite limited, and I’ve always craved variety. I thought my appetite would go back to normal once I was back in Singapore and I looked forward to eating all the food I missed.

But I came back to Singapore and nothing changed. Faced with all the best food you could find in the whole wide world, my appetite remain unmoved.

It has been two weeks since I’ve returned to Singapore and I have woken up with dismay every day, no urge to eat, thinking of each day wasted that I’m not scarfing down chwee kueh for breakfast, chicken rice for lunch and chilli crab for dinner. I’m only in Singapore for six weeks.

But I just have no interest in eating, whatsoever.

My mind ruminated all the possible reasons. Prolonged jetlag? General malaise from having finished my course and undecided on my next step? Old age? I did use to wonder as a kid why adults never seemed to want to eat tidbits all day, even when they had all the money and freedom to do so.

And then, today, I suddenly put two and two together and discovered the culprit of my malediction. It is the stupid Omega 3 fish oil capsules I’ve been taking daily since Novemeber last year!

It didn’t cross my mind that something like that would suppress my appetite. I started taking it a month before my exams because our psychology lecturer told us that fish oils supplements have been proven to boost brain function. After that, I continued taking it because I noticed that my skin was getting smoother, too.

I think my appetite might have started buggering off around that time. I had then stocked my snack cupboard to the ridiculous brim for the exam period, expecting it to be all gone within weeks. After my exams, the cupboard remained untouched, still stocked well enough to last me through an apocalypse and a half.

(I don’t have a photo of my snack cupboard in England, but it’s bigger than this one I had in Singapore about 5 years ago.)

After my exams, I would literally not eat until about 7 pm when Piers would get home from work and we would have dinner together. For a couple of months, there were many days in which I ate just one meal a day. (Other days, I would force myself to eat something in the day.) But dinner would be a huge meal, which made up the calories my sedentary lifestyle needed, although it was probably not too good for general health.

So, today, I woke up and I looked at the bottle of fish oil capsules on my table and something clicked in my brain. I got up and Googled “fish oil suppresses appetite” and there was my answer.

While the evidence is compelling — the articles confirm it and my timeline fits — I can’t say for sure that fish oil is the main cause of my lost appetite. I suppose I will have to stop taking it for a while to see if the good ol’ appetite comes back. I only have 3.5 weeks left to eat my fill in Singapore!

If I am right, then I have found a way for me to maintain a healthy diet while at the same time benefit from the multitudes of health benefits of this supplement. I’ve never been able to stick to a healthy diet plan for my junk food cravings always got the better of me.

So, yay?

I do miss foodgasms, though, so now I’m kinda undecided what to do.

By the way, this is not an advertorial for fish oil or a recommendation to try it or whatever. Take it at your own risk and stick with reliable brands!

Just a quick update now cos I’ve been busy and I’m leaving England for Singapore tomorrow!

Actually, that’s all I need to say but since I’m already here, I suppose I could say a few more things.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. I’ve never really been partial to the commercialism of the whole event, not because I think it’s a scam (which it kind of is) but because I think it makes people lazy in relationships, thinking that they’ve got this one day to excessively shower their loved ones with love, and then the rest of the year they can take it easy, take the relationship for granted.

Regardless, I am not above appreciating some Valentine’s Day flowers.

Piers got me tulips instead of roses because he said he couldn’t find roses in colours that I like (white and champagne pink) and he wasn’t overly sure of the exact shade of pink I like, anyway, cos to him, all pinks look the same.

Which is fine because I actually prefer tulips to roses.

Flowers are relatively cheap in England and we can get pretty tulips all year round so Piers was happy to buy me a bunch every week to pretty up our apartment at the beginning of our relationship.

Eventually, though, I told him to stop because I got tired of maintaining them, having to replenish or change the water every so often. I started leaving them to wilt for weeks before I could be arsed to dump them and give the mouldy vase a good clean.

You just can’t please a girl.

But, seriously, since I’m leaving tomorrow, it means Piers has to take care of these tulips and dispose of them when they die, so that’s perfect for me. I am very pleased!

A few days ago, I baked this fresh cream chocolate cake because I felt like eating cake.

It was a bit of a disaster.

It started off being an 8-inch cake and ended up being a 5.5-inch one because I left it in the oven too long and the sides got rock hard so I had to cut them off. Because of that, the sides looked ugly so I decided to cover everything with fresh cream, only I didn’t have enough cream so everything just looked uneven.

If you look on the inside, you can see a hole in the middle filled up with cream:

That was me gouging a hole in the middle of the cake to check if the middle was edible.

It was barely edible, tasting like stale cake because it was so overcooked.

Piers was excited when he saw it, coming home from work. He thought it was his Valentine’s Day cake because of the heart on the top. But that was just me trying to make the cake look less ugly but even then I didn’t do a great job of it.

We each had a small slice for tea and he said, “Wow, that is really delicious!”

And then he said, “Hang on, I need to have a sip of tea. It’s stuck in my throat, need to wash it down with a drink.”

On the bright side, the cream was quite tasty.

Well, I can’t wait to be back in Singapore where I can buy anything I want to eat, without having to try and make it myself, and poisoning my boyfriend in the bargain.

And now I’m off to spend Valentine’s Day with the boyfriend sans poison. We are eating out today.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all. Hope you have or had a great one, depending on when you read this.

Since I am blogging again and since I hardly do anything more exciting these days than play video games featuring tentacled monsters, you will be obliged to read about my cooking escapades, that is, after I’m done talking about my gaming escapades.

I believe I mentioned before that I started experimenting with cooking out of necessity. Missing the food in Singapore was propelling me towards a permanent hunger strike that led me to realising that I had to do something about it or starve to death.

The solution was to cook things that I never would in a million years have thought to cook had I still been in Singapore. Things like bak kwa, curry puffs and chicken rice. It baffles me why anyone in Singapore would make these things themselves when they can buy them really cheap and good, but they do. People just do.

I, on the other hand, have no choice but to make them because I would stop eating altogether, otherwise.

I made spicy tuna puffs once because I was tired of spending hours frying little potato cubes, but potato ones taste infinitely better.

I really miss being able to walk out to buy something good to eat, whether a snack or a full meal, and be back home within 15 minutes with something good. You can’t really get anything like that in England unless you don’t mind having McDonald’s and KFC every day.

Even if there were, it takes five minutes to dress warm enough just to pop out for 10 minutes. And then another five minutes to undress when you’re back home, the thought of which makes staying home and starving the more appealing choice.

The food in England is quite bland compared to Singapore fare, which is actually a good thing if you’re health conscious. People do seem to be quite health conscious here. While doing job placements at nurseries, I noticed that my co-workers always had salad for lunch, and they don’t do Thousand Island dressings or anything calorific like that. It’s usually oil and vinegar or plain. Seriously, I would rather starve, and I mean that very literally.

As a side note, I make a rather good balsamic vinaigrette so I do like salads but not as meals by themselves and never for lunch! I miss my Raffles Place lunching days of curry chicken noodles and nasi lemaks and bak chor mees.

And this, I don’t even remember what this is called anymore:

I did enjoy eating in England the first year I was here but the novelty has worn thin and the blandness has quite effectively killed my appetite. Now, I would rather cook than go to a restaurant, even if money were no issue. This is a complete turnaround from when I was in Singapore, when I practically ate out every day and loved doing so.

The wonderful thing about cooking is that you can make your food taste exactly the way you want it. Include more ingredients you love and none of those you hate.

The not so wonderful thing is that sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you envision it. I enjoy making up my own recipes (based on current cravings plus inspiration from online recipes plus available inventory) so it takes a bit of trial and error to get the proportions just right. And then I never get it perfect because I tend to dole out sauces and seasonings by feel rather than measuring them out scientifically, so I can never remember how much to use the next time to make it perfect.

This is my chicken steak with garlic butter mushroom sauce, with courgettes and spaghetti to make it a balanced meal.

Piers likes having balanced meals; otherwise he feels guilty. Yes, the whole country is like that. It makes me feel like a gluttonous evil alien when, like, I have KFC and skip the coleslaw.

On the healthy side, I have recently become addicted to Brussels sprouts after discovering that they make a very tasty side dish.

I roast them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar with a very generous sprinkling of coarse ground black pepper. It has to be really good quality olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I have experimented with many different brands in the last two years and realised that the quality totally changes the taste in food.

Also, baby Brussels sprouts taste a lot better than “adult” ones. The baby ones are hardly bitter and taste more buttery and nutty.

On the not so healthy side, I am as klutzy as usual and always run into mishaps in the kitchen, such as dropping eggs on the floor or dropping the whole salt shaker into my cooking pot.

My most recent catastrophic incident involved me being violently attacked by an open cupboard door on my way out of the kitchen, resulting in a bruised knee and ego.

I know it is quite evil of me to bully your senses with such an unpalatable picture after all that food porn, but your choice of being a blog reader obliges you to endure any and all visual hazards rampant on the Internet, therefore it is okay for me to do it.

The good thing about living in England is that I hardly ever have to show my legs since it’s always too cold to, even during the summer, so my bruises are safe from public viewing (except on the Internet but you have been warned, albeit rather too late).

I actually have another bruise on the other knee but that one is quite unremarkable and undeserving of narcissism so you won’t see it. Also because I don’t even know how it got there.

Piers denies all responsibility.

And I am making no comment on that.

That kind of reminds me of a new American drama series we are watching called The Following, starring Kevin Bacon. It’s about a serial killer who fucks the mind of an ex-FBI agent by committing kills by proxy while being a death row prisoner.

It’s as exciting as 24 but Kevin Bacon is no Keifer Sutherland so it is a bit disappointing in that regard and Piers keeps telling me to stop being mean to Kevin Bacon (even though he did agree with me that KB looks like a weasel) but what can I say except again that he is not Keifer Sutherland.

Still it is worth watching and I have gone off the point, so I had better give it a rest and bid you adieu.

And so I shall.

Adieu, and be wary of sneaky cupboard doors, as always.

I’ve been thinking of getting back into running. My Nikes and Adidas fell apart a couple of years ago and I haven’t run since then.

I have been putting off getting new ones because there are so many other things I need to spend money on in England, such as warm clothing and… even warmer clothing.

But I am finally putting my feet down to have them fitted for a new pair of running shoes.

Now, Bournemouth (where I live now) is not a shopping paradise like Singapore is. You can’t just take a short MRT ride to Orchard Road and immediately have access to 500 sporting stores offering pretty much the same stuff but all the brands and models are represented within a 500m radius.

(That means if you don’t like the attitude in one store, you can walk 10 seconds to another store to get exactly the same thing.)

You can even find trained consultants who professionally flirt with you and make you run on gait analysing thingies, then know exactly which pair of shoes you need to instantly improve your speed, stamina and intelligence by 300%.

In Bournemouth, on the other hand, you could choose to walk 10 minutes to a small sports supermarket (and I’m using the term “super” very loosely here) offering products that would make all the fashion policemen in the world vaporise from agony.

And there are two staff members in the whole place, one manning the cash register and the other bustling about pretending to be busy with stock or something.

Or you could drive an hour to a slightly bigger sports supermarket offering similary fashion-offensive products, and there are three staff members manning the cash registers or pretending to be busy.

I chose to go online.

And after a bit of looking around, this caught my eye:

I am partial to Adidas shoes. I had a pair several years ago which were the lightest and most comfortable track shoes you’d ever wear. I almost felt like I was flying in them. Sadly, they didn’t last very long because I wore them almost every day, not just for running but for everyday use.

So I’m hoping to find another pair that feels the same.

I was quite excited to find the pink and black Adidas because I love the colours and design and it’s really hard to find running shoes with nice designs. Most branded running shoes seem to me to be designed for aliens. Which makes them only marginally better than the ones in Bournemouth.

I quickly MSN’ed the link to Piers (who was at work).

I said, “I’m going to buy this!!!”

It took him just one second to reply, “Those trainers look ugly!”

“What?!” I said, “They don’t!”

“They do to me!”

I said, “You’re just saying that cos it’s £75!”

He said, “I am not!”

Then, he was silent for two seconds and came back with this:

“These ones look much nicer!”

I said, “That’s £8!!!!!!!!!!”

“Oh! Are they?” he said, “Wow, that’s good value!”

“Yeah, right,” I told him. “Too bad, cos I need an Adidas.”

Then another three seconds and he sent me this:

“These look nice!”

I said, “Those are man shoes!!”

“And old!”

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

Not to be deterred, he took a few more seconds and came back with this:

“Nice!”

Indeed, it was time to change strategy.

“Thanks,” I said, to lull him into a sense of false security, “I love that.”

He doesn’t know that I have gone ahead to order the £75 Adidas. With his credit card! Mwahahaha.

I suppose he will find out when he receives the bill at the end of the month.

Or when he reads this post, which will presumably be sooner.

But that’s okay because I have suddenly and mysteriously turned into a good cook so I will distract him with some nice Chinese cooking.

He liked the wat tan mai fan and curry puffs I made in the last week, which is saying a lot because men’s taste buds are as good as their fashion senses are bad.

Vermicelli in egg gravy

Curry puffs

I don’t mean all men, of course. Just the ones who equate expensive with ugly and cheap with sublimely gorgeous.

Which is why I will never take a man shopping with me. The best strategy is to go online to buy anything and everything you want while the man is at work. It’s fast and convenient and when the packages arrive, you can feign ignorance. “Goodness me, where did that come from?”

Just remember not to send him any links.

Or if you must, send him eBay links of really cheap stuff to drive him into a permanent state of deep, deep security.

In other news, I am micro-blogging on Facebook more than updating this silly blog so I would respectfully suggest that you go to Facebook for quicker updates on my superfluous life.

Thanks!

I had great plans for the summer. And that was to complete every last one of my waist-high homework assignments (see last paragraphs in link).

Not quite the party of the century but it was a great and noble plan because the amount of homework we have in my course is of epic god-level magnitude and I wanted to start the new term in September with an empty inbox so I could have at least one stress-free day before the box piled up again.

Unfortunately, Piers ruined my plans by buying a new oven.

Suddenly I acquired a new hobby — baking — an absurd turn of events since the only time I ever wanted to bake anything was during my Agricola phase when I wanted to make cute clay figurines for the game.

(These aren’t made by me; I found the photos on the Internet.)

The thing is, me enjoying cooking of any sort can be considered a phenomenon as bizarre as a meteor hitting Singapore and killing off only cockroaches and my enemies.

I was capable of cooking easy stuff (thanks to Home Economics classes in secondary school and the invention of instant noodles) but have always felt it an inconvenient chore.

A year ago, if I’d been asked to write a Personals ad, it would have read:

I love gaming and hate cooking, so expect to eat out or live on instant noodles. On the bright side, you can game as much as you like.

Living in England changed that. Missing my favourite food from Singapore, I’ve had to try and make stuff myself, like my experiment with bak kwa. It actually tasted quite decent and no one died eating it.

That astonished me, since I’d always thought that being able to cook anything more complex than instant noodles required years and years of study and you had to start age age three or something.

I learnt instead that cooking is simply looking up a recipe on the Internet and following instructions. It did make me feel a bit cheated for having always thought that people who can cook are demi-gods. (Maybe they were before the Internet but not now.)

A few weeks ago, the nursery I was interning at threw me in the kitchen with three toddlers and said, “Today you bake bread with the children.”

“Excuse me?” was my immediate thought.

But I wanted to make a good impression so I said, instead, “Yes, please!”

Then, “Um… I’ve never baked anything in my life.”

I was given verbal instructions and then thrown into the deep end.

I managed to wing it. My toddlers didn’t realise I was clueless as they were too busy grating cheese and trying to eat it all up.

In under an hour, we had bread and it was good and tasty.

I was stunned by the ease of breadmaking and that was without a breadmaker. Which made me realise that actually expanding my cooking talent beyond bak kwa and instant noodles was a delicious possibility.

On the first week of my summer break (right after my time at the nursery), our oven door at home completely broke off, so Piers had to buy a new oven.

I wanted to use the oven right away to bake something, never mind I didn’t have all the ingredients and tools necessary. I simply searched for the most basic cake recipe, then whisked up a batter using a fork, and made a baking pan out of kitchen foil.

It’s called hot milk sponge cake and supposed to be light and fluffy, I think. But what came out the oven tasted and felt more like a Chinese steamed egg cake. Which was actually fine too because I love that cake.

Except it was too sweet, so I looked up many more recipes of random cakes and found that they all prescribed similarly lethal amounts of sugar. I think Internet recipes must be written by children.

But I had made it.

I had baked a whole cake from scratch and the achievement was addictive.

Two days later, I bought proper cake ingredients and made a vanilla poppy seed cake, which ended up with an overpowering vanilla taste because I had trouble measuring out 1/8 of a teaspoon of vanilla extract (I quartered the recipe since I didn’t want to bake a cake for 16 people).

Apart from the vanilla overdose, it was quite a good cake.

And I made some bread for our breakfast the next day. But the dry yeast made my skin prickle and hairs stand. The tiny long grains have the ability to stand up on their own (like if you were to run a magnet over iron filings).

Unfortunately, I’m incapable of taking a photograph of it because even thinking about it makes my skin prickle.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, never mind, it’s not important.

What’s important is that maybe, by the time school starts again, I will have fine-tuned my baking skills to perfection and will then be able to bribe my lecturers into overlooking the fact that I haven’t done any homework at all.

I hope they like cake.

Great plan, isn’t it?