Eye makeup!

Drama.

I like.

The following are done by professionals mostly for fashion shoots (and you'd need a lot of guts to wear them in public, or you have to live in Japan/Hong Kong/France), but I guess even everyday people can just purchase some eye makeup, lock the bathroom door and go crazy.

First up, eyeshadow on steroids.

Next, fake eyelashes. I've heard it's pretty difficult to put on though, and the cheap ones end up looking like spider legs, so I don't think i'll be purchasing any soon. But I really love those dramatic eyelashes, maybe partly because being Asian with squinty eyes makes you want to seek out any way possible to give the illusion of bigger eyes. And I love the photoshoots for Shu Uemura's Tokyo Lash Bar.

Also, I wanted to write about oats right. Maybe not from a food perspective, although I like eating oats( which most people find strange) You can sneak in some oats into any form of pastry if you bake it yourself, or even substitute flour altogether with ground oats which is both good to control your cholesterol and has low GI (and might minus some guilt if your pastry recipe involves more than 50% of it's weight in sugar, 2 bars of chocolate, 4 egg yolks and about a bottle of oil). Or you can boil oats by itself and top with anything you can think of although Westerners prefer sweet toppings and Asians prefer salty and we both think each other are weird.

Besides being a good form of food, turns out that oats is quite a common ingredient for making homemade spa formulas. It's exfoliating and absorbs oil, so that's good if you have oily skin like me. Cooked oats can be put on your face as a mask just to absorb oil, or if you want something a little less basic, you can blend oats and mix it with yogurt, add lemon juice for oily skin, or honey for dry skin, and use as an exfoliating mask. Also, one recipe that I tried out recently is a body mask, and that felt pampering, or maybe just because I haven't tried body masks before? *shrug* But either way, there's something satisfying about wasting food by slathering it all over your body (don't start thinking about starving people in war torn countries though). Anyway, the body mask is made by mixing oats with brown sugar, honey and some hot water to form a paste. You could add crushed almonds too, though that's a little expensive and I dunno if it's too harsh to the skin. Leaving it on for 10 minutes and enjoy the smell, try not to lick yourself clean. When you wash it off, it does tend to look like someone puked in your shower, still smells nice though. But I reckon I could feel my skin getting softer after using that formula.

Another spa formula for soft skin is milk baths, which you can buy as a shower gel in supermarkets. Apparently it works because of the lactic acid in milk or something like that. You can have a homemade milk bath too, by just adding milk to your bath tub water, although I don't know if that's practical. Maybe if you have a couple of pet cows at home and are lactose intolerant or something. As a side note today, I heard from a documentary that a cow can carry 20kgs of milk in it's body. Is it just me or does this sound painful?

Let's talk about...

food.

I usually start becoming a bit fanatical about certain types of food if I stay up late and my stomach starts to rumble, especially after I've brushed my teeth and am not supposed to be eating anything more. But anyways, lets talk about 2 of my favourite; eggs (which I am thinking about today) and mushrooms(which I was thinking about yesterday DX).

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Eggs. I just saw an article about them in the newspaper today, about how they can be concidered superfood eventhough people say it's so high in cholesterol. But then again people say it's nature's convenience food, protein in a packet. I remember when I was a kid, I used to eat half boiled eggs and bread to soak it up. Every. Single. Day. It was a ritual to me. My mom even had one of those orange containers that you put hot water in to cook half boiled eggs, like what they give you at modern kopitiams. Which is kind of cute. I think my sister just bought one for her kid as well. I also used to have this Mr. Men book, and one of the characters; Mr. Strong, eats eggs copiously, and that's where he gets his muscles from, like what spinach is to Popeye (oh yeah...that reminds me of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast). So you see, I have this kind of sentimental childhood value attached to eggs (which probably also explains why I was a chubby kid*cough*)

But now I'm thinking, what would be better if I could have an egg bingeing session. I'm imagining a chicken egg the size of an ostrich egg, half boil that, and when it's done, add soy sauce and pepper and eat it like a protein-rich soup. Wow...yum. Chicken eggs are too small, the standard 2 eggs per meal goes down too fast. I don't do stuff like century eggs and pigeons' eggs though. And my parents think it's very un-Chinese. Also, I don't get people who eat eggs and take out the yolks. That's the best part! Poached in the soup when you eat instant noodles, the yolk is semi solid and creamy, the highlight of the meal, better than the instant noodles soup itself. If you want to control your cholesterol, eat oats or oyster mushrooms, but I'll come back to those later.

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OK, next,mushrooms.

Yeah, as I just found out from Wikipedia, seems that oyster mushrooms are able to lower your cholesterol. But lets talk about a recipe that I tried awhile ago and liked- Jong gol.

Jong Gol is basically a Korean beef and mushroom hotpot, easy to prepare, and eaten with rice, makes a complete meal. What you need is thinly sliced beef, balanced up with matchstick slices of carrots, spring onion and chilli (not chili padi, the bigger less hot one) and the best part, any kind of mushroom you can think of, the oriental cooking varieties are better, i would think. Oyster mushroom, enoki (the long ones, they are like noodles but in fungal form, lol...), black chinese mushrooms (i think it's the same as shiitake?)which are dried and has a stronger taste, but that's all good. That's what I would use, because they are easy to find in the supermarket and are quite cheap(enoki being my current hero. Have you seen those gigantic mushrooms like king oyster and portobello which are expletively expensive and look like they are big enough for 1 full meal?) Back to the jong gol, put these ingredients in a wok or big pan, add some water, together with soy sauce, rice wine, sugar and crushed garlic. I think noting tastes more natural and healthy, and is easier to prepare. Just cut and boil and you're done.