E N Y A B D U L L A H Photography: July 2012

Foods

My first attempt at photography, I have spent bulk of money on devices, accessories, blah blah.. It was only later that I realised, I seldom used all those devices. Like the CPL (Circular Polarizing Filter) lens filter, I thought I'd get a very nice saturate blue sky photo , but once I understand the formula, all you got to do is to consider the exposure setting.

After all, involving in DSLR , what you have to know, its not difficult to learn but its time consuming and expensive and not everyone could affort DSLR. You also have to consider how comfortable you are with the camera and the time needed to become familiar with all of manual setting. That is why sometime photography was always refer to hobby that only rich people or photo obsessive could afford to.

I travel a lot and it's hard for me to bring my DSLR around, my bag packed with stuffs like Notebook, Tab, and sometimes color printer kekekekek :p. No space left for my DSLR with the zoom lens, the tripod and accessories. i really hates carry them around in separate luggage. Black nylon case just really doesn’t do it for me, so I end up throwing it into whatever bag I’m carrying, which really isn’t great for the camera. Besides, for safety reason too especially when travel alone, I sometimes feel as though I am wearing a big diamond around my neck that all thieves are eyeballing.

You rather to hold your pee than to leave DSLR in car. Talking from experience of course!

Reasons why Instagram is a better option. A beautiful way to share your world!
Instagram has a set of 15 retro photo filters that you can apply to an image, so you can take a photo, edit, and then export it directly to Instagram.

Times are changing in photography, now everyone is a photographer with Instagram. There is a statistic that this year alone, more photographs were uploaded to the internet than the last 100 years combined!.. The saying nowadays, that everybody is a photographer!

No, I'm not saying that I'm changing my gun, I love my DSLR, its just that, its nice to have this program downloaded to my Android phone as there's a time when shooting with DSLR pretty much impossible! But with Instagram, I can still have great photos even with 3mp camera phone.

I'm Instagram freak and now I'm getting a little out of hand :p

Foods

Recipe : Nasi Daging

19:08

Something simple and delicious but not easily found. Not many restaurant or buffet serve this. Mom usually make this rice during ramdhan or raya especially raya haji. It's a very simple flavoured rice with tender chunks of beef in it and can be paired with curry, dhal, or acar.

During the cooking process, I watched everything what mom is doing. I ask her, how much you put that, how much this, but she could never give me a satisfying answer. A handful of this, a pinch of that.. you know :p

At the end, I managed to get the recipe from her and love to share it here.

My Mom's Nasi Daging (Beef Rice)

Ingredients
1kg beef cut into few big pieces.

5 cups rice / basmathi rice

7 cup water (depend to what type of rice you use)

3-4 tablespoon ghee / butter / margarine. (we used olive oil)

1/2 cup shallot, sliced thin

3-4 cardamoms

2-3 cinnamon sticks

2-3 cloves

Pandan leaves

Beef cube stock (optional)

Salt

To blend

4 shallots

1 onion (medium size)

3 garlic

2 inch ginger

1. Heat oil / ghee in a wok.

2. Fry the beef in the hot oil until it turns brown on either side.

3. Remove the fried beef and allow the excess oil to drain.

4.Add all the shallot slices to the hot oil, , and stir-fry briefly (about 7-10 minutes) until turn light brown and aromatic.

5. Add cardamoms, pandan leaves, cloves, and cinnamon sticks and blended mix

6. Mix well until it forms a dry paste.

7. Stir in the water and beef cube stock.

8. Put the fried beef into it.

10. Mix in the salt as per your taste.

11. Allow it to cook on low flame until beef cooked.

12. Add rice and when it comes to boil, reduce flame, and keep it covered and let it cook.
13. Remove the beef from rice pot, and slice beef thinly and serve beef slices on rice.

Air Asam Kerisik

3 big red tomatoes, removed seeds and water and sliced thinly.

2 onions sliced thinly

few cili padi sliced thinly

2 tbs kerisik

To blend,

belacan

4-5 Red chillieS

Thick tamarind juice

Mix all the slice ingredients and blended mix, and add sugar and salt as per your taste.

Sambal Ikan Talang Masin

Salted Ikan Talang, soaked few hours in water to remove excess salt, then fried until cook and crispy

3-4 tbs Chili paste

Onion sliced.

Few tbs oil

Bring oil to heat and add chili paste and cook until it form thick, dry and oily chilli paste. Add salted fish and onion.

My Thoughts

All women keep score, only the great ones put in writing

22:57

.... a tagline for movie Bridget Jones's Diary.

A good movie I watched during my sahur time this early morning on Diva Channel. It was a great movie, and how it inspired me in love, in my life and my career as well.

I started to dream of my own cute-girly single apartment, in a trendy neighborhood where I could walk to the cafes, having coffee and pancakes and going crazy with my girl friends after work. And of course, I’d have some shiny career that I really love, maybe as a photographer or writer ....... well I think I get too nostalgic for the dream that never was. In reality, now I’m very happy as the wife of a wonderful husband. :D (Owhh how he robbed me of my bachelorette life ;p)

Life doesn’t always go as planned, and it’s impossible to foresee and plot out every detail. But just as we gain from all experiences, I think even the unrealized dreams still have value. They inform our priorities and help us learn about our selves.

After seeing this movie, I'm planning to continue my studies majoring in Photography or English Literature. Before this, Business Management is my priority other than Accounting. But, entah bila lah kan, duit kumpul belum cukup, and I have rensponbilities towards my family - my mom, my adik adik they are all I have.. I've got all blessings from husband as he is the one who encouraged me to do my very best at everything I do. But, I truly believe, Allah will give us that which we need, not simply that which we want. He has not denied you, except to give you.

Back to the movie, I love renee zellweger and colin firth and this movie makes me so happy. It's that movie that I think I could watch almost every day. Bridget jones (renee) is so real and funny and Mark Darcy (Collin) is wonderful.

Bridget Jones is an average British woman struggling against her age, her weight, her job, her lack of a man, and her many imperfections. As a New Year's Resolution, Bridget decides to take control of her life, starting by keeping a diary in which she will always tell the complete truth. The fireworks begin when her charming though disreputable boss takes an interest in the quirky Miss Jones. Thrown into the mix are Bridget's band of slightly eccentric friends and a rather disagreeable acquaintance who Bridget cannot seem to stop running into or help finding quietly attractive.

There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty

Here is the plot that copied straight from Wikipedia

Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) is frustrated; she is in her early thirties, still single, very accident prone and worried about her weight. She works in publicity at a book publishing company in London where her main focus is fantasizing about her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). At a New Year party hosted by her parents, she re-meets Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the barrister son of her parents' friends. They had known each other as children. After their initial encounter, Mark thinks that Bridget is a fool and Bridget thinks that he is arrogant and rude, this not being helped by his jumper with a huge reindeer. After a day beset by a series of mishaps, she misplaced her purse, broke her coffee mug and got stuck in a lift. When she returns home that evening, her shopping bags split. She reached to pull the curtains, only for them to fall off the wall; that was the final straw of a stressful day. When she catches sight of her svelte reflection in the window, she decided to turn her life around. She starts her own diary, which covers all her attempts to stop smoking, lose weight, and catch her Mr. Right.
Bridget and Daniel begin to flirt heavily at work, first over e-mail. After a book launch, they start a relationship, despite the fact that he is a notorious womanizer with a questionable personality, of which Bridget is aware, from when stating earlier in the film that she will not form relationships with alcoholics, workaholics, peeping-toms, megalomaniacs, or perverts. Bridget learns from Daniel that he and Mark have a history and as a result, hate each other. Daniel informs Bridget of their fallout, telling her that Mark broke their friendship by sleeping with his fiancée.
Daniel's dubious character becomes clearer and clearer to Bridget and eventually she breaks off their relationship when she catches him with another woman, a colleague of his, Lara (Lisa Barbuscia). After a spectacular departure from the office, in which Daniel's desperate attempts to make Bridget stay sparks the comment "I'd rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein's arse", she finds a new job in television.
She and Mark have run-ins at a bed-and-breakfast and at a mutual friend's dinner party. During the party, Mark, who has come to the dinner with his colleague, Natasha (Embeth Davidtz), privately confesses to Bridget that, despite Bridget's faults, he likes her "just the way she is". He later helps Bridget to land a major interview for work, her quirky approach prompting the classic comment "Bridget Jones - already a legend". She begins to develop feelings for Mark. Just as Bridget and Mark's mutual attraction for each other comes together at a birthday dinner party hosted by Bridget, Daniel comes back into the picture temporarily claiming Bridget's attention. Mark originally leaves the party, but comes back to face Daniel. Mark punches Daniel and the two fight, which moves into a nearby restaurant where Mark and Daniel smash through the window, landing on the street. Mark wins the battle and knocks Daniel out. Bridget chides Mark, but afterwards, after an insensitive appeal by Daniel, she says emphatically that she doesn't want to be with him.
Bridget learns the truth about Mark and Daniel's fallout after her mother lets it out in conversation - that it was actually Daniel that had seduced Mark's wife.("It was the other way round - my wife, my heart"). At a dinner party the same day, Bridget confesses her feelings for Mark, only to find out that he and Natasha are both leaving to accept jobs in New York. Bridget interrupts the toast to their pending engagement with a halting but moving speech about England losing one of its finest, which clearly has an effect on Mark, as he realises her real meaning, but he still flies to New York, though with obvious misgivings. Just as Bridget starts to embark on a trip to Paris with her friends to mend her broken heart, Mark returns to stay with Bridget.
As they're about to kiss for the first time, Bridget exits to her bedroom to change her undergarments, remarking that it is "an occasion for genuinely tiny knickers." While Bridget is changing, Mark peeks at her diary, in which she has written many insults about him. Bridget returns to find that he has left. Realizing that he had read her diary and that she might potentially lose him again, Bridget runs outside after him in a thin sweater and leopard skin-print underwear. Unable to find him and disheartened, she is about to return home when Mark appears holding a new diary, "to make a fresh start". They kiss in the snow-covered streets and the film closes.

Foods

Recipe : Marble Soft Cheese Cake

06:23

What can I say , this cheese cake is fluffy like clouds, cottony soft like pillow, light as feathers, and not dense. I love cheesecake but the ones that you get at the store is too heavy. But this cheese cake is very light to the tummy, less butter, not too sweet with a subtle hint of salty taste. It was not so cheesy too but you can still feel the milky-ness in it. Relatively suitable for people who don't very fancy cheesecake. It's really soft, and tasted best when chilled in the fridge. Since it does not use baking powder, the cake rises mainly by using egg whites that are whipped till stiff giving it a lot of air. This cake will be listed in what-cakes-to-bake-for-raya list ;p

Recipe adapted from wendyinkk

Ingredients:(A)

250g milk
20g butter
125g cream cheese(room temperature)

(B)
50g all-purpose flour
3 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract

(C)
3 egg whites
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
80gm sugar

(D)
½ tbsp cocoa powder
1 tbsp boiling water

Methods:
1. Line the base of a 8 inch square pan and preheat the oven at 150/160C.

2. In a medium sized bowl, cream cream cheese until smooth.

3. Bring milk and butter to a boil and pour ¼ of it into cream cheese and gently stir until incorporated. Pour in another ¼ the milk and stir again. Lastly pour in all the milk and stir until smooth. (At this point, prepare some boiling water)

4. Let the cheese mixture cool down and put in flour. Mix until smooth. Then put in egg yolks and vanilla. Mix until smooth.

5. In another clean bowl, beat egg whites until frothy. Put in sugar and cream of tartar and beat until soft peaks. Put in sugar gradually and beat until stiff.

6. Put 1/3 of egg whites into cheese mixture and fold gently but quickly.

7. Pour the cheese mixture into the egg whites and fold until well incorporated.

8. Mix cocoa powder with boiling water until smooth. Put in a few tablespoons of the cheese batter and mix until a smooth chocolate batter is formed.

9. Pour main cheese batter into prepared pan. Drizzle chocolate batter over main cheese batter.

10. Use a knife and cut through the batter to create a marbling effect.

11. Put pan into slightly bigger but shallower pan. Fill the bigger pan with boiling water until halfway up and bake for 50-60 minutes.

12. When cake is baked, remove from oven and release the sides of the cake from the pan immediately by running a knife between the sides of the cake and the pan. Cake will shrink tremendously but evenly. Leave it to cool down totally and chill until cold before cutting.