More Christmas presents!

I was going to work on my New Years manicure today, but I woke up with a swollen uvula. For those who don't know, the uvula is the wobbly thing at the back of your throat. Mine was basically touching my tongue when I woke up.. so no going outside to play in the snow, no painting my nails.. basically no fun for me today :(

Since I can't do any of that stuff, I thought I'd take a minute to share some more of our Christmas presents with you. Not polish related, but I promise it will still be fun!

Mike basically used to live off of cashews and peanuts. They are pretty expensive up here in Wisconsin, so we rarely ever have them now. His mom was nice enough to buy him some mixed nuts. The other package is a bunch of food goodies from Josh and Amanda. I don't know if it's because we have such a large Hmong population here in my city, but we do have some pretty good Asian food stores here. Josh and Amanda bought us a bunch of goodies I will share with you here! Most of our goodies were made in Thailand.

First is this package labelled Bird's brand Thai Seasoning Mix. We have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to do with this, so if you happen to know, I'd appreciate it if you let me know!

There's also a coconut layer cake batter mix which looks kind of strange but sounds good! Requires a steamer, which we don't have.. so not sure what or when we're going to do with this. Also made in Thailand. It's basically a coconut cake mix made with tapioca flour, sugar, rice flour and vanila powder and you're supposed to add coconut milk and food coloring to it (hmm.. my dad bought me some neon food coloring for Christmas!)

This is Nam Ya Curry Paste, also a product of Thailand. We love spicy foods, so can't wait to try this. Mike loves to cook Asian style foods, so I'm sure he's going to have a lot of fun using this. Contains chilli, galangal, lemon grass, garlic, shallot, salt, kra-chai (whatever that is!), kaffir lime peel and coriander seed.

Next are two of my favorites of the bunch: Madam Pum Chilli Sauce for Seafood and Dragonfly Hot Chili Oil. The Madam Pum sauce tastes sooooo good from the little bit I tasted. It is another product of Thailand and contains chilli, garlic, acetic acid, sugar, salt and water. Sounds simple, but there are so many spicy sweet flavors going on in this little bottle. I can't wait to try it with fish.

The Dragonfly Hot Chili Oil is good, but not quite as spicy hot as I would like. It definitely has a strong after kick, but I'm used to hotter foods. It does have a good flavor. We've already used about a fourth of the bottle, which is only 7 ounces.  It contains soy bean oil, red chilli pepper and paprika color, and again.. made in Thailand.

We also got a packet of NOH Foods of Hawaii Chinese Barbecue seasoning mix. I find it strange to have a Chinese Hawaiian mix, but upon reflection I guess it makes sense. The ingredients are natural cane sugar, powdered soy sauce, onion powder, garlic powder, spices, red no. 3.

This is galanga powder, also a product of Thailand. I got to learn what galanga is, as I had never heard of it until this week. Apparently it's a root, related to ginger but with a stronger flavor. I used this in some of my cooking yesterday and it was very good. I'm not crazy about ginger; this, I think has a little nicer flavor.

This is our singular product from Singapore (and of course Samantha I'm thinking of you!) This is Meiji Hello Panda biscuits with strawberry cream. Haven't tried them yet, and I'm not going into all of the ingredients because it's a long artificial food list :P Can't wait to try these, and we may just save the packaging.

We also received these bottles of something called Ginseng UP which is marketed as "the root of all power" and "a Caribbean favorite Kola Champagne." Looking at the ingredients, it basically looks like a soda flavored with ginseng tea. I'm drinking mine now as I type this, and the flavor is very nice. I can't think of anything in particular it reminds me of, but it's very good.

Mike also basically used to live off of ramen noodles, and now we have a couple of samples of the real thing.

The first package, the blue one, reminds us of Yu-Gi-Oh which we find amusing,  and it is described as Tom Klong flavor instant noodles, whatever that means. On the back of the package is a label which includes the ingredients as: artificial smoked fish flavor, sugar, salt?, onion powder, chili powder, MSG & citric acid. I think I'll leave this one for Mike to eat...

The other two are just simple Oriental Style Instant Noodles Wai Wai brand instant noodles, and they're flavored with garlic powder, pepper, salt, MSG, and dried chives. Sounds much safer to me, although I do try to stay away from MSG!

Mike is going to cook supper with pork, using something from among these goodies, I just don't know what yet. Hopefully it's something good!

Thanks for reading and letting me share our presents with you :)