The new Queensbay mall here in Penang brings the southern chain, Jusco to our shores. Browsing the grocery section, they carry perfect ingredients for a Lazy Man Hawaiian Pizza dinner. All you need to get are:

Pizza Base: Sold in two sizes, 9 inch or 6 inch
Pizza Source: Good for two 9 inch pizza
Pineapple: Can Cube, a medium size is good for two 9 inch base.
Meat: Ham/Sausage, you need at least 200g for the two 9 inch base.
Pizza Cheese: Any kind of cheese to your liking.
Oregano: Minced Oregano leaves (comes in small bottles at the spice section)

This is truly a Lazy Man meal, all can be done within 30 minutes, and so simple to prepare compare to the previous Tomato Soup Pasta recipe. Spread the source onto the pizza base. Open the Can Pineapple and spread them on the tomato paste. If the pineapple cube is too large, cut them down smaller. Spread the Ham/Sausage together with the Pineapple. Sprinkle some minced oregano leaves. Lastly top everything up with Cheese. If you love Cheese, put more. You are done on preparation.

Heat your Electric/Convection Oven to 220 (top and bottom), and place the pizza into it. The pizza is done when the pizza base is light brown and the cheese is all melted or turn brown. This usually takes about 20 minutes.

The pizza base sold in Jusco can be placed into microwave as well, so if you don’t have a convection oven, you can use microwave, and it is quicker with microwave.

Being a young couple, (yes, I still consider us young, I know some of my friends my be chuckling away right now, I am still young ok.. hehe) we work from morning till the evening and do not make time for cooking. Cooking is such a chore, especially the need to clean up. Anything more than one dish is considered as complicated. Cooking is fun, but cleaning up after that, is not. It’s the thought of cleaning up that drives us to dine outside almost everyday. We dine out so much that, at one time, we become regular weekly customers to some restaurants. We just need to sit down, and the waiter would know what we want. We can’t afford to dine out that often anymore and this kinda made us to look towards our kitchen.

We came across a tomato soup with pasta recipe and improvised on it. The ingredients are:

Portions that serve 2:
Pasta: As much as you can eat.
Tomato: 1 Can skinned whole tomato & 2 table spoon of tomato paste.
Meat: Sausage, or chicken, or any meat of your choice, as much as you can eat.
Carrots: As much as you can eat.
Celery: As much as you can eat.
Onion: 1 large white onion.
Garlic: 2 clove of garlic.
500ml of water. Use 300 if cook for one person.
Black Pepper: To taste.
Anything else you want to dump into the soup. As long as it goes well with the savory tomato taste.

The ingredients are really up to you, there is no special formulae here, after all, this is a lazy man tomato pasta soup. Once you have the ingredients ready, you can cook the pasta to soften it, remove the pasta from heat once it is partially soft.

Then cut all the ingredients into bite size, how small or large is up to your liking. The larger the size, the longer it takes to cook, best if you could be consistent on the size, this is to avoid some of the larger size vegi undercook.

Firstly fry the onion, garlic and sausage/meat together. Once the meat is cooked, you can dump the can of peeled tomato, 500ml of water, and 2 table spoon of tomato paste. Add in all the cut vegetables and also the pasta. Bring to boil till pasta is soft. Add black pepper for taste.

Whoala, the lazyman pasta tomato soup is done.

What do one do while the significant half spends hundreds on hair that takes half a day to complete? Well, spend more money myself of course. I park myself at the nearest Starbucks and booted up my laptop to pace across the hot Saturday afternoon. The hairdo is taking 4 hours to complete, and blogging was on my mind. I got myself a mocha and log into WordPress to check for comments. I remembered seeing in the papers that Starbucks was promoting gift cards for the Christmas season, and I made a note to myself to get one. I am one of those junk collectors that loves to collect interesting looking stuff. When I was in the states, I collected giftcards from everywhere possible, not that it worth any money at this moment, I just like the look of it and the joy of admiring the design.

I took out my RM20 and handed over to the cashier, and he handed the card over to me. Hold on, it’s a paper card? Damn, its not plastic. Oh Crap, it expires in Feb 2007. I was disappointed as I expecting a plastic card, where we could reuse again and again, like what coffee bean has. Anyway, the paper card do look nice, and can complement my car collections, if it last the 2 months of usage before expiry.

Steve Smith have outdone himself again with the latest revision to his Tiger Admin plugin for WordPress. For those who do not know what I am talking about, Tiger Admin is a skin or rather a well pimp-up administration interface for the WordPress blogging tool. The interface theme is inspired by Apple Tiger, and hence the name Tiger Admin. With version 3.0, the entire color scheme, font, and images are changed. The layout is still the same, where all the key functional links such as Dashboard, Write, Manage, etc are all still arranged on the left column. If you run WordPress, this is a must have plugin. It will enhance your blogging experience. There is nothing more exciting than a new Christmas present..

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Steve Smith is a Web Developer residing in South Bend, Indiana and currently leading the University of Notre Dame Web Group.

I was only fortunate enough to attend half of the two day event. It was held over at Bayview Beach Resort, north of the Penang Island. The combination of great music, wide open field with everyone relaxing on the grass, starry night and cool December wind, romantic in its own way. No other place in Penang have that many souls all flocking together on the grassland, all single minded in enjoying an evening of exhilarating Jazz.

The event started on Saturday with groups such as Java Five of Germany and our own Fairuz Hussien, and on Saturday, the evening is graced with performances from John Kaizan and Denise Mininfield of USA. While the evening is reserved for hours of concert from various groups and countries, the day was laced with workshops on Japanese Traditional flute playing, guitar and vocal lessons, and even interview with artist, not common in music festivals. The workshops events are open only to Concert ticket holders, making it a fulfilling experience.

It was unfortunate that we did not manage to attend the full festival agenda, only manage to make it to the Sunday evening concert. We wanted to watch Java Five and attend John Kaizen’s Japanese flute workshop most, but we have to missed it. It was not all lost. The minute we arrived at the open field, we were delighted on the atmosphere, it felt like there are no worries in the world. Almost everyone was lying quietly on the field, all focused on the stage, and the music just carry our burdens away. For a moment, it felt like time never existed.

I did not bring my camera, and did not capture any of the evening event, but Mis-Chique did, and even have a short video on Jave Five performance. More photos of the past event and event news can be found at www.penangjazz.com. I could not wait to see what is install for us next year.