Getting close

My kangaroo has been called a squirrel and my squirrel has been called a hamster (by someone who just saw its head in a photo). But no matter, they are sooo cute when they get close, whether it is to each other or to you!

Did you guess? This week's theme is get close.

Seoul Garden Hot Pot

This trip back to Kuantan*, I discovered that Seoul Garden Hot Pot had opened at East Coast Mall. There are three sets for two people at RM30 per set, so we went there for dinner one night.

We ordered two sets for the four of us. The first set was of a rice dish with chicken (like bibimbap) and japchae.

chicken bap (I have forgotten what the actual name is)

japchae (I forgot to take a photo before we started eating)

The second set was a chicken hotpot (we could choose between kimchi soup and miso soup, and we chose kimchi), with two pieces of fried chicken and two bowls of kimgaru rice (which seems to be basically seaweed rice).

kimchi stew

two fried chicken drummets

kimgaru rice

In general everything tasted pretty good. Not exceptional, but it's fair enough for this price. My parents were pretty happy with these new discoveries of Korean food.

* This post is about my trip back to Kuantan during the first week of October.

Pandan by any other name...

There is a show called France 360 on Astro Xi Yue. The host goes to different regions of France, and besides discovering France, she shares Malaysian dishes with the people there. The show is in Cantonese, so I don't really understand it all, but I can listen to the conversations with the local French people because they use English.

Today she visited Brittany (that is Bretagne's name in English), and she made onde-onde, while the French couple that she visited made crêpes.

When she was making onde-onde, she poured the pandan essence onto a spoon and let the French lady smell it. The French lady said, it smells like baiteuil (pronounced something like bai-tui). She said that baiteuil was a tree, and it has a green colour when we cook it (or something like that, I can't remember :P ) Anyway, the host said that pandan isn't from a tree, but from leaves.

But actually they are the same thing! I know because I used to buy pandan glutinous flour in France (to make onde-onde, incidentally), and they called it baiteuil. So I guess they got slightly lost in translation there...

Vietnamese dishes at Hoa Xuan

Hoa Xuan is a small Vietnamese place that is open for breakfast and lunch (up till 6pm, if I remember correctly). We had breakfast there one day.*

The tables were decorated with the restaurant name and some of the menu.

I tried the pho, but didn't find it very good.

With the condiments:

Actually I'm not even sure which condiments were supposed to be used with the pho. When the pho was brought to our table, they went to another table to get the three condiments for us. But were they all for the pho, or for the other dishes?

My mother ordered the tried-and-approved dish of beef dry noodles (I can't remember its Vietnamese name).

This one was good... I took another photo of it when we were almost finished eating, because I felt that it looked totally different after the noodles were mixed.

The third item that we ordered was banh mi. This one was disappointing... the meat inside was meatballs and therefore very unevenly spread out in the sandwich. The sauce wasn't very interesting either.

Personally, among these three dishes, I would only go back for the dry noodles. They have pork dry noodles too, for those who don't eat beef. As for the other dishes that we didn't try, who knows? Maybe there's another good one waiting to be found...

* This post is about my trip back to Kuantan during the first week of October.

Chu char discovery

On Tuesday night after badminton, we were going to get curry mee at the Dhoby Ghaut Cafe (which I have already posted about before), but it was unusually closed (usually it's closed on Mondays). And by the way it has changed its name to Uncle Ho's Recipe Cafe or something like that... but I might have gotten the Uncle's name wrong :P

We then went to the Sri Nibong Cafe opposite it. The place is famous for its koay teow thng in the morning and at lunchtime, and recently (not so recent, more than a year ago, I think) it has started to sell its koay teow thng at night too. But when we got there, one of us suggested ordering the chu char instead.

While contemplating what to order, we looked around at other tables and saw that almost all of them had a plate of yellow thing.

huge "egg yolk", as christened by J

J said it was steamed egg, but upon closer look, XY said that it was ice on top, so it couldn't be steamed egg. So when ordering the dishes, we asked what it was. They told us it was pudding that comes free with our meal. Turns out that they would serve it when we were halfway through eating, and the ice would keep the pudding cold. The photo above was taken when we were about to eat our pudding, so the ice was already half-melted. (By the way, J sweet-talked the person who brought us our pudding into giving us a second one :P Before that, the table next to us had received two... we saw the person bringing the second plate and saying, "Eh, you already have one?", and giving them the second plate too.)

As for the main dishes, this is what we ordered:

Curry fish (RM15), signature tofu (RM10), and veggies (RM7).

The curry was really good, and not too spicy either, so we practically wiped the bowl clean. XY was eating the curry as a pre-dessert...

The tofu was good too, it had some "special" taste in it. I can't make out what it is though, their secret ingredient I guess.

As for the veggies, not bad, but nothing special. Just as expected.

Vivid contrast

This week's theme is vivid. It had me looking high and low for something that looked vividly striking... and for most of the ideas I thought, why didn't I think of this for contrast?

Anyway, I finally decided on this: A vividly-coloured remote control.

Now why didn't I think of this for contrast?

The specialties of Jess Cafe

Another eatery I tried in Kuantan* was Jess Cafe. The specialty there seems to be the curry mee with yong tau foo.

I liked the taste of the curry, and the yong tau foo filling was pretty special. There are only four types of yong tau foo: tofu, tau pok (beancurd skin, they called it), eggplant, and bitter gourd. Each bowl of noodles comes with three pieces of yong tau foo. They don't ask which ones we want, but we specially requested what we didn't want (in my case, bitter gourd!).

Then there is the Japanese pancake that my mother recommended. It is like okonomiyaki, but thinner and therefore crispier too. This is the seafood pancake (the other one was vegetable pancake).

They had already cut the pancake into squarish pieces with crisscross cuts, so we could just pick up the pieces to eat.

We also ordered an ABC to share, which tasted pretty good too.

* This post is about my trip back to Kuantan during the first week of October.

Age is a disease

I have been mulling this in my head for some time now. It all started during the Motorola sports day some time back. I mentioned to a friend that during one of the men's doubles matches, our teammates were already very tired, whereas one of the opponents still had a lot of energy.

My friend's immediate reaction was, "Was that guy young?"

I acknowledged that the guy in question was young, but I felt that something was amiss with that logic. A lot of people blame their age for their lack of stamina, which is understandable because you do lose stamina as you age. But when someone has good stamina, by attributing it to their young age, it does not seem right because they are not getting the recognition they deserve. Just because they are young doesn't mean that they don't have to work for their good stamina! It is not a given; some people are young and yet they lack stamina.

More recently another friend posted something on Facebook about the effects of his exercise making him realize that he was not as young as he used to be. I was pleasantly surprised to see yet another friend comment that people shouldn't use age as an excuse for this.

All that said, I discovered recently that age is a disease... one able to give me an MC.

AGE aka acute gastroenteritis

Best murtabak ever

I think it's about time I posted about the food I had in Kuantan. First up, a roti canai and murtabak find.

Near my house in Kuantan, there is a restaurant called Farouk Maju. My mother recommended the naan, tose, and murtabak. We ordered those three and roti canai on my first visit there, but I only remembered to take a photo of the murtabak. :P

murtabak daging

Then I went there again with a friend, and this time I took a photo of the roti canai.

roti canai

The roti canai comes with sambal, which I find a bit strange. The sambal is good though. I just find it strange to have it with roti canai.

A recap on the dishes that I tried:

1. Naan. We ordered garlic naan. There were two others on the menu, butter naan and ghee naan. So garlic naan was the healthiest. The naan was really soft and fluffy, but I didn't like that the garlic pieces were too big. But they were on top of the naan, so it was easy to pick out the bigger pieces. I think I would have preferred butter naan. :P

2. Tose. When our tose arrived, my mother was disappointed to see that it was not crispy enough. It turned out that the tose from their previous visits were crispier. Taste-wise, it was fine... I'm not a big fan of tose anyway. (but a lot of people say the tose here is good, so I guess it is a must-try for tose fans)

3. Murtabak daging. This was simply amazing. I would say that it is the best murtabak I have ever eaten. Every bite had pieces of daging in it. The price also made it the most expensive murtabak I have ever eaten... but at RM8 for this size and being able to actually taste the meat inside... I'd say it is reasonable.

4. Roti canai. Good, rather fluffy and crispy. Not too oily either. One of the better roti canais we can find!

5. Murtabak ayam. I ordered this with my friend who doesn't eat beef. It also had lots of meat inside... but the beef one was better. :P

6. Kari kambing. I forgot to mention, but on my first visit, we got a small dish of mutton curry to go with our four dishes. The curry was very good, and the mutton was very tender. Very good. :D But unlike the murtabak and roti canai (and probably the naan too), it is easier to find good mutton curry elsewhere.

Fake risotto

A while back, Cheesie posted a few recipes using oats. I wanted to try out the recipe using rolled oats, but not being an oat person, I didn't have any oats available... and it took me a while to get some. So I finally tried it out today.

The resulting dish, which was supposed to mimic risotto, looked rather like porridge. (and technically it is porridge...)

The photo above was taken right after pouring it into the plate, and below is the dish after I had stirred it a bit with a spoon. The oats continued to soak up the liquid... at the end it was even drier than this.

I found that it tasted pretty good... which I guess is basically due to the sausage and mushrooms. I'm pretty sure I could make the same dish using pasta too...maybe when I have no more oats.

Monochrome murukku

Celebrating a year of Photo Friday!

The first post was on 9th October 2016 with the theme from the 7th October. This week's theme is from the 6th October.

This week's theme is monochrome, and I'm glad I have some murukku from my trip back to Kuantan.

Yummy picture makes a good Photo Friday anniversary post! (I haven't been so happy with some of the photos lately...)

Note: There were green peas mixed in with the murukku too... but I shook the murukku a bit and angled my camera in such a way that they wouldn't be visible in the photo.

And just so that you can see more types of murukku, this was the first shot that I decided not to use because it showed the plastic bag.

 

Drawbacks to other people deciding on your wallpaper

Not too long ago, I posted about my computer lock screen.

Recently I got a picture of a frog as my lock screen background. I have a friend who hates frogs and the like with a vengeance; I wonder what she would have done if she had come back to her computer and seen the frog on the screen. Well, looks like this auto-refresh has its drawbacks too.

Me? I changed the picture as fast as I could. I'm not a fan of frogs either...

Grumpy dog

The neighbour's dog is always in a bad mood when seeing us. Most of the time it jumps up barking, and I thought I could get a photo of that. But this time it didn't... and I didn't want to provoke it!

Redheads

They just gave me a Windows 10 laptop at work recently. It seems like Windows 10 will automatically update its lock screen with pictures from the web. I think the photo is refreshed once a day.

Last week it gave me a photo of these two cuties.

I took a screenshot, so you can also see the trivia that it gave me. These bits of information are tagged to every photo to tempt you to click on it and launch a web search.

By the way, this isn't the full photo... I cropped off the left and the top bits that only showed the extended desert. This is the part that interests me!

Good and cheap, and not that slow either

The night before taking the bus back to Kuantan, we had dinner at Kim Hin Cafe at Sungai Dua.

charcoal tofu with abalone sauce, RM10

the four heavenly gods, RM8

salted egg mantis prawns, RM15

signature pork ribs, RM16

There were four of us, and we ordered three plates of rice to share. We also ordered another plate of charcoal tofu because we didn't have enough of the first plate (only six pieces of tofu for the four of us!) So here's the bill:

While writing this post, I did a search and I realized that I have never posted about this restaurant before. We actually discovered it two years ago, and were very pleased with a this chicken wing dish which was stuffed with a tomyam chicken paste filling. (I took the photos from our recent visit above, but not these photos from two years ago. I wouldn't take photos with some of these angles! :P )

What's special is what's inside!

The bones were removed and the chicken wing was filled with more chicken. If not mistaken, the white part is the meat from the chicken wing, and the rest is the tomyam chicken paste.

We also ordered some tofu in pumpkin sauce last time. And the same mantis prawn dish; it is what this restaurant is famous for!

However when we wanted to go back for the chicken wing dish, they said they didn't make it any more. Therefore we had a "cooling off period" for a while and didn't go back there until now.