How To Make White Sauce

I was thinking of making a fish and broccoli dish yesterday but I needed a sauce to tie up the ingredients together.

Normally we buy those ready made sauce mix but I was feeling a bit adventurous and decided to make my own sauce. How hard can it be? I found that the basic recipe for most white sauce is


1) 2 tablespoons butter
2) 2 tablespoons flour
3) 1 cup milk
4) Whatever else you want that sauce to taste like

So first melt the butter and add in the flour...

Then the milk...

Stir till it doesn't look lumpy and add whatever you want. I added black pepper, salt, cheese and some Italian herb mix.

And the result...

Tastes better than the ready made mixes but hey, I'm biased. A few things to add, I didn't measure the ingredients exactly and just threw whatever amount that I felt right. It took only a few minutes to make and wasn't that hard at all. It's interesting and I'll probably experiment more in the future.

So Why Can't I Resist From Buying That...

... gadget? shoes? dress? or camera? Usually the last one for me. I recently read about this concept of 'ego depletion' and it may explain a bit. What it means is that willpower (or any conscious effort that require self control) is a limited resource, like the amount of petrol in a car. So the more we use our willpower, the more liable we are to giving in to our splurges at a later stage. There are 2 experiments that demonstrate that it exists (and if you're not interested just skip the colored text below).

Experiment 1

- A bowl of radish and a stack of chocolate chip cookies were placed on the table

- Subjects were asked to skip one meal to induce hunger and then split to 3 groups - control (who didn't eat either the radish or cookies), radish and chocolate.

- The radish group were placed in the room with both foods and asked to eat only the radish while avoiding the chocolate, and vice-versa for the chocolate group.

- All participants asked to solve an unsolvable geometric puzzle (which was unknown to them).

Results: The radish eating group gave up earlier than both control and chocolate group, which both had similar times.The radish eating group also felt more 'tired' after the puzzle.

Interpretation: The radish eating group had to use more willpower to avoid the chocolate and have used up some sort of psychic energy.

Experiment 2

-The problem with the first experiment was that the task was unsolvable and it can be argued that the radish eating group was 'smarter' in realizing this and therefore gave up earlier. 

- The participants were asked to watch videos, some being humorous and some sad. 

- They were split into 2 groups, one was asked to suppress all emotion when watching and the other had no restrictions. 

- The subjects were given anagram letter sets.

Results: The emotion suppressed group had far fewer anagrams than the other group.

Interpretation: This proved further evidence that some resource was depleted after an act of self control.

Hang on a minute? Isn't life a series of choices?

Sleeping in vs hitting the gym

Reading up on recent developments vs Facebook-ing

Healthy lunch vs not so healthy

Getting the camera vs saving for that vacation

So back to the question... why can't we resist? Simple. Its because we've been working too hard and making too much of the right choices lately. *GRINS* Go have that fried chicken. It's better for you on the long run.

Seeing In Squares

Medium format photography is something that has been on my mind for quite a long time. The digital ones are ridiculously expensive but thank God I'm into film!

It's a bit of a challenge to frame my photos differently, with the looking at the camera like 'checking if my fly is open stance' instead of bringing the camera up to my eye, but I enjoy the experience.

One for the family album

The only downside is that it's really heavy but hey, I'm thinking of it as practice for carrying a new family member.

Allergies

For about a month, my lips have been very dry. Cracked. Flaky. Constant applications of lip balm gave relief for a while but in the morning it will hurt like I've been kissing sandpaper the whole night. To worsen things, the sandpaper gave me an STD - it got swollen and itched. So I tried cutting down on salty foods, drinking lots of water and all but it got no better. Eventually I realized that my lips were a lot itchier right after I brushed my teeth.

I'm allergic to the toothpaste? Heh? I just bought this toothpaste a few days back. Some more this is the second tube I've bought and I've been using it for ...oh.... a month. Ahh...

It made a lot of sense after that - like why the lip balm had no effect even after so long. I immediately bought another toothpaste and almost overnight the symptoms disappeared. Its still a bit dry and it'll probably take some time for it to go back to normal but what am I going to do with the full tube of toothpaste? I could throw it away. Or I could remind myself to never buy that toothpaste again..

I've decided to keep it.

New Skins

It took a month of patient waiting, but my new camera skins finally arrived!

I decided to go with a custom made skin for the Oly Trip 35, and if it looks familiar that's because you've seen it somewhere before.

The old skin needed to be removed and the body cleaned before the new skin can be applied. It's so simple that even I (with multiple bubbles of dirt under my iPhone screen protector) can apply it almost flawlessly.

I ❤ Oly Trip

There may have been 10 million Trips that have passed through the manufacturing plants, but I'm sure there's only one like this. I have an idea for another skin design, we'll see in a couple of months time! 

Gotong Royong and Precisa CT100

I've been spending a lot of time cleaning in the past few weeks, both at home and at the office, I don't really know why but I feel like I have to. Some kind of paternal instinct kicking in maybe? We've been cleaning a lot of places that we don't usually cover in our weekly cleaning, like the grill and under the bed (my God! The amount of dirt!).

On another point, I've been testing out the Agfa Precisa CT100 film recently.

Scorching sun is good for...

...doing the laundry

I've been shooting film almost exclusively for quite some time and should have tried this film sooner. It has that greenish-yellowish-bluish tinge to it with the super saturated blues when you cross process it. In other words, its the 'lomo' feel.

It is a very light hungry film, and the effects are best achieved on a bright sunny day. I had a couple of indoor shots with flash but it turned out quite ordinary, save for a slight yellowish hue.

I like it! I think I'll be using this film more often.

Fructose - Something To Worry About?

There was this middle-aged man who was so frustrated with having many episodes of gout attacks. He told me that he's already cut down everything imaginable - no red meat, no kacang, no seafood and no alcohol at all. Still, he will be needing painkillers and gout medication almost every other week. When I pressed further, I discovered that he has quite an active lifestyle. Eventually we traced the problem down to his consumption of 100-plus. He drinks two 1.5L bottles everyday...for as long as he can remember. I read sometime back that there's a link between sweetened/sugary drinks and gout and suggested he stop the 100-plus. He did. The incidence of gout attacks totally reduced and he's bought  painkillers just once in the past year.

The keen business mind might point out that I just killed off a source of repeating income and that gives me a lot of food for thought. More importantly there's all this buzz going on about sugar and fructose in particular. Check out the video by Prof Lustig from UCSF, it's a full length lecture but a very compelling case against fructose.

Unfortunately fructose is very common in our modern diet and it mostly comes from High Fructose Corn Syrup (55% Fructose - 45% Glucose) and table sugar / sucrose /gula (50% Fructose - 50% Glucose) used as sweeteners in many beverages and foodstuffs. Recently due to the bad rap against HCFS, they've changed the name to corn syrup (sirap pepejal jagung), but its the same thing. So how exactly does fructose increase uric acid?

Eh? Whadaya mean bollocks?

It does far more damage than just increasing the uric acid concentrations in the blood. There are links between high fructose intake and blood pressure, increased triglycerides, diabetes and quite possibly cancer. But before we go overboard with an ascetic lifestyle and totally swear off sugar, I'd like to say a few things in defense of fructose.

i) It is present in a lot of fruits. Dates, raisins, prunes, grapes, pears and apples are a few with high concentrations of fructose.
ii) Our bodies are made to handle fructose.

So what's the fuss about? Looking at a typical Malaysian diet -

Breakfast: Tausa pau, Dim Sum (dipped in ketchup), Coffee (with condensed milk)
Morning Snack : Apple and Kiwi
Lunch: Sweet and Sour Pork Rice, Soya Cincau
Afternoon Snack: Yogurt Drink, Tiger Biscuits
Dinner: Baked Beans and Tuna (with mayo) with lettuce in tortilla wrap, Mixed fruit juice
Dessert: Cheesecake
Supper: Roti Telur and Teh Ais

Do you see the problem here? And this is on a relatively healthy day, not yet including soft drinks, various types of snacks (chocolate/ice cream) or fast food meals. We mostly focus on eating healthy 'main meals' but we tend to forget the hidden sugars present in the small titbits and condiments that accompany it. The obvious ones are the drinks (including the fruit juices with no added sugar printed on it - not so healthy after all). Another thing we can see is that almost all processed foods contain sugar.

I'd like to state that there's nothing wrong with having sugar in our food, the problem happens only when there's chronic overconsumption and this is where Prof Lustig hits the spot. We're eating too much of it because we didn't know that its everywhere. And we're wondering why the metabolic syndrome and cancer rates are going through the roof. 

It is also not just about 'oh, I'll go do more exercise and burn off the calories from sugar'. If you have 120kcal from a piece of white bread and 120kcal from a bottle of coke, the white bread contains mostly glucose and that can be utilized by every cell in the body. Coke on the other hand, has 45% glucose only and the 55% of the fructose have to be broken down by the liver thereby placing an extra burden on it, not to mention the by-products of fructose metabolism (uric acid, triglycerides). It is like telling an alcoholic to do more cardio exercises to burn off the calories from the bottle of whiskey he's just polished off, it doesn't work that way.

A few years back, I would have probably said 'Life is short! Control your food for what oh? Eat what you like!' but I don't subscribe to that view anymore. Earlier this year one of my in-laws passed away due to complications with cancer (quite ignorant of lifestyle modification advice by the doctors I heard). Another family friend has just spent RM300,000 in 3 months for cancer treatments and I am hearing firsthand the suffering and difficulties they are going through. Tragic isn't it? You've retired and are supposed to enjoy life in the golden years, but what little you have left of your entire life of hard work goes to keeping you alive. Instead of traveling the world with your loved ones, you're contributing to your doctor's vacation fund instead. Or traveling around looking for a cure.

I'm probably not going to stop eating sweet stuff like cakes and ice cream but I'm definitely going to do it in moderation. No one can say for sure now how much is too much, but one thing's for sure, we will benefit from eating less sugar.