Weekend Stay

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Hampton Hotels. All opinions are 100% mine.

Hubby's brother (the 2nd one) will be arriving for a two week stay this weekend. We're all very excited as we have not seen him since we left for the US after we got married years ago. We're also very excited and look forward to Swe-Cha seeing another uncle for the first time.

We have not decided yet where we would or could bring DiHya around but I'm joining the Hampton Chain of Friends Sweepstakes in the hopes of getting a free weekend stay at any Hampton hotel. It'll be fun if we could all go for an overnight trip, especially over the labor day weekend. Winning a free weekend stay mean big savings for us because that's usually where the bulk cost of a trip lies - hotel costs. I'm thinking that a short trip out of state might be a good idea, maybe somewhere in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, maybe ?) as Washington, DC might be too far a trip for our first overnighter with the baby.

If we don't win (see how I am referring to our win as a sure thing ? that's how optimistic I am, haha!) it in time for DiHya's visit, we can always keep it on hand for future trips. We plan to travel more when our baby gets older - I can almost imagine our future trips to Disneyland, Disneyworld, Seaworld and other theme parks. I wonder how old our son has to be to start appreciating these trips ? My nephew was a little over 1 year old when we started bringing him abroad for trips and he seemed to enjoy himself.

Chicken fillets with hoisin sauce

I bought several packages of boneless skinless chicken thighs from Costco today and decided to make a chicken dish for dinner. As I usually do when I'm in the mood to try something new, I drop by my favorite food blog, HomeCookingRocks (formerly pinoycook.net), and chose a dish for which I have the ingredients on hand.

Tonight's choice was a slight variation from chicken fillets with hoisin sauce and Szechuan pepper.

I also had to make slight variations on the seasoning as I had more chicken than the recipe called for, this was what I prepared:

5 boneless chicken thighs

5 tbsp lite soy sauce

cornstarch

cooking oil (for deep frying)

hoisin sauce

toasted sesame seeds

1. Slice chicken thighs into small strips, season with lite soy sauce and let stand in the refrigerator.

2. Coat the chicken fillets with the cornstarch and deep fry. When cooked, let the oil drain on paper towels.

3. In the pan, heat a dollop of hoisin sauce, add toasted sesame seeds and toss the chicken fillets to coat them with the hoisin sauce-sesame seed mixture.

Note that I prepared a small batch for tasting first and purposely did not coat the chicken evenly and completely with the hoisin sauce. Both hubby and I prefer it that way to preserve the crunchiness of the chicken and we preferred not to have that strong of a hoisin sauce taste.

Boost

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Boost Mobile. All opinions are 100% mine.

Today, I'm writing about the new cellphone service provider, Boost Mobile. It's a new no contract, prepaid, unlimited cellphone plan which has a Re-Boost program which allows you to either pay online, pay in person, or pay by phone in order to reload your account. If your friend or family even wants to gift you with service, they can even pay for your account by any of the Re-Boost options I mentioned above. Alternatively, you can also sign up for automatic payments so you won't have to worry about forgetting your monthly payments and getting your service interrupted.

My favorite part about Boost mobile is their Blackberry unlimited monthly plan which gives you unlimited nationwide talk, text, web and email for only $60 a month. This is a huge difference compared to the other leading cellphone providers.

If you're not a blackberry fan, you might want to check out the i1 phone by Motorola, it looks pretty spiffy to me. This has me seriously considering switching to Boost mobile because all my friends are able to connect to their Facebook pages and update their status from the mobile phones (everybody, that is, except for hubby and me). It would be useful to be able to have access to the web all the time as well, especially when we're out playing tourist in other places and have no web access, being able to get to the internet from our phones will be handy for those last minute research that you usually have to do. I can't wait.

Oh, and before I forget, I'd like to remind everybody that Christmas is just around the corner. We're only a few months away and if you do want to get some Christmas shopping done, why not get a Boost mobile plan for that special someone ?

Braised Short Ribs, Korean Style

I had some short ribs which had been sitting in the freezer for a long time now and I wanted to cook it to make baby food. When I took it out, it was then that I realized that beef short ribs wasn't really appropriate for making soup meant for baby food as it was too oily.

I really should name this dish "Short Ribs Surprise" as the ingredients and seasoning was really more of a "taste & see" [translated: tantiyahan] so I won't be able to post measurements here for now.

Ingredients:

Beef short ribs

water

spring onions

sugar

soy sauce

salt

ginger

garlic

New school

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Charter. All opinions are 100% mine.

My nephew will be going to a new charter school in California. Unfortunately, the applicants were too many and slots too few that the school eventually had to pick their students by lottery. My older nephew got picked but his younger brother was (and still is) waitlisted.

I figured that since this was a new school and all, that it's supposed to be way better than their previous public school and that it's a brand new school which will be holding classes and occupying a previously vacated school building (school w/c closed a few years ago), they'd sure welcome some new laptops if they do get picked on laptop-a-day giveaway by Charter cable.

Aside from the laptop giveaway promotion to schools, I also passed along the info to my sister that if she ordered any Charter cable service, then she automatically gets a chance to win and get up to $300 cash back.

If you have a Facebook account, you might also want to "like" Charter on Facebook and pass the word along. I just nominated my nephew's new school for the laptop-a-day giveaway and I invite you to do the same and nominate your favorite school. I'm sure that the school and the students who will get the benefit of the laptops would appreciate your gesture and your taking the time and making the effort to nominate them.

Sitting still

I've been reading the Sites I Read list from my previous blog in Xanga and I read a post by one mother who has a son who is one week younger than mine. She says "my son can sit still for 30 minutes now" and I'm like "Huh ? She can get her son to sit for 30 min?" I can barely get mine to stay put for 5 minutes.

Swe-cha is always moving around and making me chase after him. One factor could be that he learned to crawl weeks before he learned to sit so he really didn't get a chance to sit still because he already knew how to crawl.

Management Consultant Services

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Lillilooloodotcom. All opinions are 100% mine.

It's been a while since I've been able to try out new work-related online services so it really excites me to share this new discovery about Lillilooloo and talk about the features that they offer.

First off,Lillilooloo is the only online website that serves the management consultant community. it offers thousands consulting templates and also has a new book called "Succeeding as a Management Consultant". Seeing as how I'm sort of in-between-jobs right now, this might be a good time to start exploring the management consultant field. After all, I do have a little experience in this field as I've worked with lots of management consultants on various work projects before. And I have been checking out opportunities to get certified as a project manager by the Project Management Institute - just as soon as I am able to get a breather from mommy duties.

Document templates are also available from their template store, if you do not happen to have the specific template that you need. Or, worst case ? You could even have their research team prepare your documents and professional presentations for you! This feature would not only be helpful for newbies like me but I'm pretty sure that even seasoned veterans like my friend, S, would find this useful as well. I wonder how he would rate this site and its services ? Hmm, check this site out and give me a holler or drop me a line, S, I would love to hear what you think.