Weather talk of Arizona

Apart from the Grand Canyon, I do not have much knowledge about Arizona. So I looked up abit on the Internet on Arizona.

Arizona is actually located in the western United States, and best known for its desert landscape, also has primarily very hot summers and mild winters.

Since I have not stepped foot in any dessert location, I have always thought dessert landscape primarily has only scorching days and cold nights. How wrong of me! Arizona has winters and summers in:
Nov to Feb : winter (4–24 °C)
June to Sept : dry summer (32–49 °C)

Just by comparing Arizona's temperature variances with Malaysia (23-34 °C), I think Malaysia's all year round "summer" is much "cooler" than the dry summer in Arizona! And being a tropical country, Malaysia does not experience winters. But the raining season could bring the temperatures down to 22-25 °C at night, which you may say is comparable to the mildest winter of Arizona.

Arizona's weather may not appeal to much to me, but the real estate (e.g. Scottsdale Arizona realtors) there are definitely interesting and captivating. If it interest you so much that you wish to relocate, there is always the relocation specialist to assist you step-by-step.


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The RM50 winning photo that I took

I took this candid photo of dad feeding the monkeys at Bukit Malawati at Kuala Selangor, but the monkey got the better of him, clutching him from the back trying to get the whole pack of food for himself.

And this candid photo won me RM50! yeah..you read it right. I submitted the photo to The Star daily thumbnails with a funny title and caption: Piggyback monkey - Hey mister, I actually prefer a piggyback ride than bananas!

I thought I had a pretty good chance at the RM50 prize. And I was right ;-) Check it out at The Star's website. However, the editor had changed my photo's title and caption.

Crunchy Sesame Chicken

I wanted to cook chicken today, however I'm running out of ideas for chicken dishes.

I guess God heard me, so when my MSN homepage came out on my IE browser, this caught my eye "Simple chicken dishes". Immediately I clicked on the link and a whole long list of chicken dishes were displayed for my choosing. I thought this Crunchy Sesame Chicken sounded like a simple dish to prepare.

I printed out the recipe from the website and it didn't take long for me to prepare and serve this dish for dinner. I served them with Thai sweet & sour chilli dip.

One tip - the recipe didn't ask for marinating the chicken. However, the chicken could taste better if you marinade them for at least an hour. You could also add more salt to the recipe.

Homemade Chicken Satay

I bought a microwave oven during the recent CIMB Perfect Living '09 fair. And I've been experimenting with microwave oven cooking for the past few weeks. There were spots and misses. But overall, I scored more.

I had some chicken fillet in my fridge and I was trying to figure out how to cook it. As I flipped my microwave oven recipe book, I saw this...Chicken Satay! Well, I did have the main ingredient (Chicken fillet) and the satay sticks eventhough I don't have the satay sauce. Anyway, I decided to try it out.

I used curry powder, salt, soya sauce, pepper, few dashes of Maggi seasoning sauce and Chinese ShaoTsing wine for marinating the chicken. Then I let it marinade for about 2 hours. The rest was quite simple, I cut the chicken fillets into cubes and skewered them with the satay sticks, trying to cover all surfaces of the stick. (the stick may get burnt if left exposed in the oven).

I followed the instructions on the book, and after about 30 minutes of microwave cooking and grilling, the satay was ready! The aromatic curry smell filled my kitchen. But I thought the chicken was a bit dry, and I could have put more salt to taste. Since there was no satay sauce, tabasco sauce was the next best thing to dip it in.