28 Oct, Saturday - Steamboat and Exchange Halloween celebrationg

Today, we were going to celebrate Halloween with the exchange students. There was a pumpkin carving event and after that, we will have potluck. We were supposed to bring something that represented our country for today's potluck,so we decided to try our hand at cooking curry. Becky and I spent friday's night to cook the curry. We got the pre-mix on friday's groceries shopping and bought other ingredients to go with it.We threw in the chicken drumstick to cook the curry and scooped them out for our own consumption. The curry only had onions,potatoes and vegetables so we named our dish chicken flavoured vegetable curry. No choice.. Have to save money.

Anyway, today was really wonderful! We were supposed to dress up but I didn't want to spend money buying costumes. Actually, I didn't want to do anything but I ended up borrowing Becky's scarf and wrapped a turban instead.

Pumpkin carving was fun but dirty. I never knew that pumpkins were actually soft. The knife could easily pierce through the skin of the pumpkin. Anyway, we had to first cut open a cap at the top and digged out all the flesh and seeds inside. Used my hands to dig out all the seeds and flesh as it was faster but it made my hands so sticky. The carving part was easy and I made a normal pumpkin face (2 eyes, jagged mouth), added 3 lines at the side. It represents the comic characters - 3 lines down, when someone says a lame joke.
ook pictures with friends and we headed downstairs to eat! The food was surprisingly good... Fried rice by the thai students was really good, then there was potato salad, pasta, all kinds of cakes and pastries, sushi, sausages, fried chicken and lots more... Hmm.. The response for our curry was disappointing. But I am not surprised as many found the curry super spicy.. And it didn't cross my mind to add salt and sugar to the curry. Haha.. So it was actually quite spicy with no saltiness or sweetness. My bad - I thought that the pre-mix would have everything.

The winner of the pumpkin carving was xiao tong. She carved a pig! So kawaii! After all the good food and fun, becky, jo and I immediately rushed back home to prepare steamboat at Garry's place. All of us, Singaporeans, were so looking forward to it. I sliced up the meat and all of us left for Garry's place. Thanks to our landlords, we got a steamboat pot that could hold 2 flavours of soup.

Anyway, we decided to push back the steamboat to a later time as all of us wanted to see a pumpkin exhibition. Apparently, there was an artist who carved fake pumpkins and displayed them during the halloween seasons. There were more than 400 pumpkins on display. I took so many pictures! There were different themes. Snoopy, Lord of the Rings, Broadway shows, Sesame Street, Disneyland, Starwars and so on.

Finally! Steamboat time! After spending over an hour admiring the pumpkin carvings, all of us were super duper hungry and we headed back to garry's for our steamboat.

Look at the spread we had! There were beef, chicken, pork, salmon, fish ball, meat ball, fish tofu, tofu, prawns, crab sticks, sausages and vegetables!!! And we have two soup base, miso soup and chicken broth with radish. The steamboat was simply fantastic and all of us ate and ate and ate till we couldn't eat anymore. And to think that we thought that the food was not enough. It was more than enough and we had to enlist Bee to help finish some of the food.

I felt so "xin fu" (lucky/appreciative). A singaporean style steamboat. Yummy!

After the marvellous steamboat, we had strawberry cheesecake for dessert! Garry baked it himself as a birthday cake for Ellince. The steamboat was actually a belated birthday celebration for lince. She was going to spent her 21st birthday in Canada. Anyway, we sang the birthday song for ellince, got her to make a wish. The cake was really good. Must get the recipe from Garry!