Butter vs Margarine

Just earlier tonight at 6.39pm, I'd thought to myself "It's a Friday night and I'm off to the library. Gosh." ^^

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On the way back to the dorm from the library, I made my customary rounds at the supermarkets (so I guess it's not surprising at all that most of my expenditure is at supermarkets, so much so that I think I have accumulated enough food to hypothetically last me through a world war...). To my horror, I realised that the supermarket seemed to have started selling much fewer brands of butter, and many more of the cheap affordable, claim-to-taste-like-butter margarine. I've always been some sort of purist when it comes to food and ingredients: Want it to taste like butter? Then use butter, not a replacement! Want to be healthy and ingest less oil/sodium/polysaturated fats? Then ingest in moderation, but never ever replace it with less-salt/fat/etc items that more often than not compromise a lot on taste. I tested this out recently by purchasing a low-sodium soy sauce, and can I just say it must have had a totally opposite effect. Its taste is so mild and mildly off-putting at that too, that I probably have ended up putting in salt just to try and remedy the taste. Ugh. The only reason why I'm still putting up with that low-sodium fake of a soy sauce is because I'm holding out for fish sauce, which I have yet to locate.

Anyway, back to the point of my post. It all got triggered because when I got back, I checked my mail and the daily quote that I subscribe to and received today was none other than about butter and margarine!

"As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists".

-Joan Gussow

So true, don't you think?! Hehe. =)

First weekend in - aka Lazy Weekend

This was my first weekend where I mostly stayed in and it's still certainly over too soon. I joined Rachel and Isabel for dinner at a izakaya (居酒屋）at Shinjuku though. An izakaya is basically a kind of drinking and gathering place, where they also serve many side dishes to accompany the drinks. We simply had the food though - corn and bacon dish, cheese tofu, lobster (which turned out to be prawns) and potato gratin, crab pizza and octopus. The food was not too shabby and it came up to about 1000yen per person. The izakaya had a really pretty name though! Hana no mai (花の舞) - the dance of flowers - and it totally reminded me of Kuchiki Rukia's zanpakutou name (Bleach anime).

The days are getting filled with readings, homework (weekly assignments for some of the classes) and sometimes Japanese dramas. Seems like the workload here is slightly heavier than back home, but then again I'm taking 6 classes, of which one -Japanese - is taking up a whopping 9 hours a week. So nothing to be surprised about I guess. So many people go on exchange and talk about how deliriously fun it was (usually clubbing and travelling) and how slack it was (taking the minimum load of 3 modules) but I'm here studying hard =)) or trying to HAHA. Quite abit of difference there eh? =P

So, back to the work. Blah.