Raymond's Lovely Garden

Above is my friend's garden in Singapore...lovely isn't it?

Eat to live and not live to eat

For the last 2 months, I've been surviving on low salt,low protein, low phosphorus and low potassium meals (except for the occasional restaurant food like the mini Japanese curry rice), I've lost 4 kg of body weight. I am on the above special meals not to lose weight but due to my low kidney filtration rate or GFR of 54.
In my next medical checkup, I hope to see my GFR going up, say to 60+

Talented parrots

Tempura Vegetables by Luke Tan

Cooking Yakisoba by Luke Tan

My ex-RI cohorts (1960-65) & a teacher

Lose weight eating .......

Yesterday I ate small meals but I put on 1/2 kg!

Horse meat rice bowl and beef curry

We returned to this restaurant where we ate the udon etc a few days ago to try the horse meat rice bowl. As it was a rainy afternoon, the place was void of customers except ourselves.
We ordered the horse meat rice bowl for myself and the udon for my wife. The side dish was the deep fried onions (S$ 2).
I was a bit disappointed because the meat did not come in chunks as I expected by it was minced into tiny bits. The taste was more like beef than anything else.
However, I did enjoy the food as usual. The price of the horse meat rice bowl was 500 Yen (S$6.50) which I thought was not expensive.

   Below is the beef curry rice we had for dinner

Gyudon and katsudon

We had lunch at a restaurant. Being a public holiday, the restaurants were very crowded. In fact, when we arrived at the first restaurant there was a long queue and we skipped it and drove to another restaurant which was less packed.
I had the gyudon (beef rice) and my wife the katsudon (pork cutlet with rice).
The food was quite good and we enjoyed it.

Another new Udon restaurant

We discovered another Udon restaurant a few kilometers away. In this restaurant, horse meat curry rice/udon is on its menu. Will give it a try on the next visit.
When we were there, we had the beef udon and the fried gobo (Burdock Root).
The beef udon tasted like the Singapore beef noodle. The beef is delicious and tender. The fried gobo is crispy and cheap (S$2).
They do take away service too. The bright-colored van is for delivery of the udon.

Capsicums, okra, eggplants etc in 2020

Abalone & Turban Shells

Our neighbor gave us fresh abalone and turban shells which we cooked and ate them for our dinner. Her husband is in some kind of seafood business and looks like there are more to come.

Growing capsicums in our garden

Opening of Super Viva, a huge hardware store in Japan

This gigantic hardware store opened on 1 August 2020. It has thousands of hardware items. A big crowd was there on the opening day. My wife and I visited the place and scout for gardening items. However, we found out that the things are relatively expensive as compared to the old "Nafco" which is also selling the same wares. Disappointed, we left the place after a short while.

BT: Please note we couldn't snap many photos because we weren't allowed to.

Harvesting sweet corn

The time has now come to harvest the corn. This is our first time growing corn or maize. It is a success and will do the same next season. It is one of my favorite fruits. In Japan, one of these corn cost about S$1.30 or US$1.

A "BIG" new supermarket opens in Fukuoka

Name of the new supermarket is "Big"! Indeed it is really big and opened yesterday amid a rising Covid-19 in Japan.
We were there at 8.45 am but the place was very crowded and the parking area was full. We had to park our car 200m away in another carpark and walked to Big.
There were many discounted fruits, vegetables, fish, meat etc. on its opening day. We bought fish which was so fresh (1 kg at S$13) that we could have it as sashimi. The 8 kg watermelon was Yen 983 Yen (S$13) and we bought 2. In the night,we visited Big again and got ourselves some futomaki, yakisoba, okonomiyaki etc at a hefty 50% discount for supper and the next day's breakfast.
It looks like Big is going to be one of our favorite supermarkets.