Lazy roast chicken & some sort of peach cake batter dessert thing attempting to be a short cut version of peach cobbler

On New Years Eve, my old university housemate came over with her kids. Since we were both lazy but hungry, we made lazy roast chicken which was basically just lathering olive oil, salt, pepper, dried thyme and rosemary all over a whole chicken. Since I happened to have it, we also rubbed some garlic powder all over the chicken as well. Then, pricked a lemon and stuck it up into the chicken's cavity. We further stuffed down pieces of butter and dried rosemary in between the skin and the chicken breast and placed the chicken in a disposable tin foil roasting pan (in keeping with the laziness of washing up) on top of some thick sliced onions as a sort of rack between the chicken and the pan. Roasted the chicken in the oven for about 45mins to 60 mins at 180 Celcius until golden brown, having basted it with its own juices halfway through. As the chicken roasted, we got our kids to make a sort of short cut dessert, which consisted of them emptying out a can of sliced peaches, juice/syrup and all into a baking pan, then adding an instant butter cake mix over the said peaches and mixing it about in the pan itself. There were still some undissolved cake mix flour and no peach juice/syrup left so we told them to improvise by adding some apple juice so that the cake batter wasn't too thick. Stuck that into the oven too and baked for about 30-40 mins.

A yummy way to end 2013.

Outdoor activities with the kids in KL & Selangor

During the recent Nov-December 2013 school holidays, we stayed in KL and Selangor. One main reason is budget and all the cost-cutting we will have to do in view of the latest and upcoming price hikes for so many things. Sigh... on the plus side, it did force us to get more creative on where to go and what we were going to do with the kids. They had already been this past year to Pusat Sains Negara, Petrosains KLCC and Aquaria KLCC and were yearning for more outdoor activities. So here are some of the things we did - in the order of the activities they enjoyed the most: 1. Farm in the City @ Seri Kembangan They enjoyed this the most I think because of 2 major factors:- good friends and being able to feed animals all together. One thing that was obvious to Eza and me from the start was that our kids are definitely city kids - the eeeww and geli reactions were quite a lot in the beginning! But they enjoyed being able to endlessly feed the animals at leisure. Gambar wajib kat entrance:

Kids takut kambing at first, before feeding it - macam daun sama je yang turtles makan:

Amongst the many other animals:

But their favourite by far and the longest area they spent in was the rabbit & guinea pig enclosure:

2. Rollerblading at Taman Tasik Titiwangsa, KL The next day we took them to Taman Tasik Titiwangsa, actually for them to ride horses (at RM1 per kid for 1 or 2 rounds, it was a bargain!) but for some reason the horseriding area was closed so we walked about a bit and happily found a section where they rented out rollerblades for RM5 per 30 minutes. My kids have never been rollerblading before but were keen to try and the guy renting out the rollerblades gave a sort of crash course for first timers. Some things you have to learn by trying it out so off they went. They had loads of fun. It helped that we went in the evening when it wasn't hot.

3. Sprinting across Dataran Merdeka, KL After going about KL City Gallery KL and watching the craftsmen at work at the Arch workshop and walking around the National Textile Museum seeing how different types of cloth (songket, batik etc) were made and tasting chocolate samples at the chocolate "museum" underneath Dataran Merdeka, the kids ran and jumped to their hearts' content all over Dataran Merdeka. There was no one else around as we went on a normal weekday. Even I did a bit of running across the field, and a lot of huffing and puffing after:

4. Mah Meri Cultural Village, Pulau Carey More on this later, have to go pick up the kids from school now.