A busy food court

This week's theme was busy.

I thought of snapping busy traffic on the roads, but finally settled for a busy food court, simply because the resulting photo looks better.

I don't like the puddles of water on the floor (it had rained that day), but I like how the food court's name, "Pisa Corner", is nicely "framed", even though that wasn't intended when I took the photo.

Le Petit Four

Snorlax brought us to a French patisserie called Le Petit Four. It is quite famous for its croissants.

Unfortunately someone beat us to buy the only two almond croissants left, so we settled for a plain croissant and a pain au chocolat.

croissant, RM7

The exterior was really crispy, and the inside was really buttery...but maybe because of the butter, it was stickier and not so fluffy.

pain au chocolat, RM9

This was crispy and fluffy all the way through :D

We also ordered a hazelnut cake.

hazelnut, RM23

This was like hazelnut chocolate / praline.

inside

The blobs on top were cream, no hazelnuts inside (at least not solid ones)

mocha, RM14

A visit to Edo Ichi

We went to Edo Ichi for the first time (for all of us except Snorlax).

I wanted to take this chance to try uni (they had some “smaller” dishes with uni), but unfortunately they didn’t have any uni that day. :/

three appetizers
It seems like the three items may not always be the same...we saw different items on the menu, and also on other people's photos on Google.

eel and sashimi dinner set

garlic fried rice

grilled beef with amiyaki sauce

grilled scallop and mushroom with cheese

salmon belly with teriyaki sauce

salmon mentai aburi yaki
Just to try the difference compared to the cheaper Sushi Mentai. Here it's quadruple the price! The fish slice is thicker, the rice is less and somehow better seasoned.

soft shell crab salad with salmon skin

This was the worst in my opinion. We were going to order it anyway, and on top of that Snorlax highly recommended it. But I didn't feel the sauce was that good, the salad was mostly poli cabbage, and the salmon skin was not even crispy... In the end I think Snorlax ate most of it.

Which was just as well, because most of the dishes didn't suit him. The garlic fried rice was mainly for him to have something to eat, and even that wasn't enough and we ordered another one.

The total price was RM234 for the four of us after a 10% member discount (I'm confused, it seems that Watson's card, Public Bank cards, and Standard Chartered cards can all be used as a "member card"? Not sure whether the cards change every year... :P ). Then add on 10% service charge and 6% SST...

Checklists with Google Docs

I found something by accident using Google Docs.

Type [ then ] then space.

It becomes a checkbox!

It becomes indented too, and I just realized that when we check the box, it crosses and greys out the line. So now I've figured it out: It's meant to be a checklist!

Promises, promises

When you hear on the radio that a certain song is coming “up next”, you can be sure that it’s not going to be coming “soon”. I have heard this more times than I can remember when driving home from work. Hearing that a song you like is coming up makes you stick to the channel…and then they bombard you with a number of ads before the song actually plays.

Today the DJ announced Roxette’s Joyride. Knowing their trick by now, I decided to flip channels for some other songs, waiting for five minutes to pass before switching back for the promised track. After five minutes, there were still more ads…so I resumed flipping (lots of talk and ads on every channel at that hour), until I finally flipped back and heard  the song playing. Guess what? It took them approximately 8-9 minutes to actually play the song!

Good and bad food in Ipoh

During our last trip to Ipoh, we went to GLK Restaurant. Previously during MCO, we had ordered rice sets from this restaurant through GrabFood and they were really good.

Here’s what we had:

“Khau yok” with peanuts, RM29. This was really fatty…the photo with flash looks worse because of the light glinting off the fat, so I’m using the photo without flash instead :P

Stir-fry potato leaves with sambal, RM11

Some kind of river fish, steamed, RM45. This was the most special and also the most expensive. Seems that the restaurant specializes in river fish.

We also went to Tong Sui Kai. The curry mee stall that I liked (stall 42) wasn’t open, so we ended up trying another stall (stall 26), which turned out to be quite good as well.

We also tried another popiah stall, which seemed pretty popular (people were queueing up for takeaway), but it was not as good as we expected. The crispy bits were extremely crispy, so it wasn’t bad, but the taste was slightly lacking.

We tried looking for breakfast closer to “home”, and found this shop called Hoi Teen on Google Maps. It seemed to be a popular place among locals. We tried the beef noodles, curry mee, and yong tau foo.

Verdict? Looks good, does not taste very good. The beef tripes were rather tough too.

The last place that we discovered this time was Sin Tat Seng at Bercham. We accidentally found out about this shop because we were looking for a frozen boneless roasted duck that my parents had bought before. We found that the particular brand was sold at a number of places, and this place was convenient enough for us, because we could have breakfast there, and also buy salted chicken (Feng Weng brand) there. (We usually buy from Aun Kheng Lim, but on our recent trips, they were always sold out)

The breakfast here was satisfying. The salted chicken (we bought one back to Penang) was also good, so we will definitely come again…

Dry curry noodles. My father specially requested for “mee hoon + mee” (without being asked by the seller). After eating, we realized that the noodles were probably supposed to be served with wantan noodles.

herbal soup noodles with salted chicken

Wantan mee. My father was so pleased with the char siew that when he ordered a dry curry noodle dish (the one above, but with wantan noodles) for takeaway to bring back for Snorlax, he requested extra char siew. The wantan (in the soup) was nice and smooth as well.

A uber difficult shot

This sure looks like a difficult shot to take…

And also a difficult shot to capture! So I caught it during the slow-motion replay :P

This week’s theme was difficult shot.

Since the Thomas Cup and Uber Cup competitions were ongoing, it was perfect for the theme. I was happy that I managed to get these scenes from the Uber Cup finals.

This was before the main pic above. The first Chinese player had already fallen down, and it was up to her partner to take the next shot. And in the photo above, you can see that the second player also fell down attempting to take the shot, and the Koreans were already celebrating since she didn’t manage it.

Then afterwards, the second player had fallen down as her partner managed to sit up…

…and a shot from another angle which looks pretty awesome as well, but which would probably fit a theme of “tiredness” rather than “difficult shot” :P

Jalan-jalan cari makan at Balik Pulau

Some time ago, I found out about a deep-fried hor fun stall in Balik Pulau. Because it was so far away, we kept postponing our visit, and this trip back to Penang, my mother found a Facebook post that said the stall opened at night at Pisa Corner.

So we decided to try it at Pisa Corner, which is just 5-10 minutes away!

The hor fun was nice and crispy…but once it soaked up the sauce and became soggy, it was not as nice as regular hor fun. (not as smooth)

At the same time, we tried some pork and chicken skewers (the stall is called “Special Skewers”), which were pretty good (but expensive).

The flat one is the usual Thai “moo ping” pork skewer. The other two are chicken; the green one is green curry, and the red one is a Korean flavour (probably spicy Korean).

But after that, my mother found another Facebook post that advertised lots of other food at the Balik Pulau stall that sells that fried hor fun. So we ended up going there too… 

We were surprised to find that the Lok Khoon “coffee shop” was actually a few shops/stalls near each other, but we could order from all of them. It’s more like many stalls making up a sort of food court.

A set of chicken rice balls. We weren't planning to order this because we didn’t want rice. But my father thought they were fishballs and ordered a set, haha. But it's pretty good, especially the chicken.

From the same stall, we ordered a bowl of 10 fishballs. (this was the minimum order) This was nice. The fishballs were nice and springy. You don't see ten fishballs in the bowl because we had already eaten some before I took the photo. They don’t look that great anyway (how good can fishballs look?), which is why I didn't think of taking a photo at first…but when taking the photo of the next dish that arrived, my father asked me whether I had taken a photo of it, so I just took one. :P

The lighting was not good from my side of the table. We can see the sun’s reflection of some of the food, especially those with soup. The effect is the worst on this photo.

Then some yummy belacan chicken wings. Very good. This came from the stall that sells deep-fried hor fun.

We also ordered fried oyster. It’s a bit different…it’s thin and crispy with a few oysters on top. We’re not sure whether some oysters were chopped into the batter. It’s not bad, but not that good to me, I would prefer the Ayer Itam one.

Then the prawn fritters arrived…the star of the day. It was one of the first things we ordered (after the fried oyster), but it took ages to arrive… After we had ordered, it was some time before we saw a tray of fresh fritters being brought out. But despite the tray being huge, our order was not included inside :O We had to wait for the next huge tray…

And when we ordered, they did not have tofu. By the time our order arrived (before it reached our table), my mother noticed that they had brought some fried tofu out as well. So we added it to our order.

After that, our deep-fried hor fun and yee mee arrived.

My mother said that the sauce here is better than the one at Pisa Corner. Actually we weren’t even planning to order from this stall because we said we could eat it at Pisa Corner, but we first ordered yee mee to have something substantial for Snorlax to eat (we were going to order jawa mee but the stall was closed), and then when seeing the deep-fried hor fun being served to other tables, my parents said that the dish looked better than the one at Pisa Corner. So we ordered one too.

As for me, I can’t tell much of a difference…except that the prawns seem better here :P

At the hor fun stall, the number of plates of deep fried hor fun, plus the fried but unplated ones (see the huge strainers? There are at least three on the table, and two on the pots), are pretty impressive. :O

By the way, we arrived there at 10+, and a bit past 11, the owners started telling people not to sit beside the river (or the canal?) because the tide would come in and the water level would rise and cover our feet. They didn’t tell us that, but my parents overheard and my father got very excited and asked them a lot about it. At that time, we were waiting for the last two dishes if not mistaken. One seller told my father that the water would come in at 12+. So I guess they didn’t tell us because they expected we would have finished eating by then… (which we did)

Shaved ice at MyKori

We went to MyKori Dessert Cafe. We were there for waffles (introduced by Snorlax), but actually their main item is kakigori, which is Japanese shaved ice.

The waffles arrived first.

chocolate strawberry waffle with pandan coconut ice-cream, RM17.50

chocolate salted caramel waffle with vanilla ice-cream, RM14.50

The waffles were nice and fluffy, and slightly crisp on the edges. The middle couldn’t be crisp because of the ice-cream…

We could even choose the flavour of the ice-cream. The ones without additional charges were vanilla, milk chocolate, and pandan coconut. (there were three others on the menu that were struck out, so we couldn’t see what they were) Then there were other flavours that would be additionally charged RM1, 2, or 3, so we skipped those as well. 

As for the flavours of the waffles, they didn’t really stand out much. We felt that adding RM3 for some strawberries wasn’t really worth it. :P They also had plain waffles with ice-cream…maybe that would be enough for us?

Then here’s the kakigori.

chocolate tiramisu kakigori, RM25

They had a whole lot of flavours to choose from, and we selected chocolate tiramisu.

It came with a small jug of coffee to pour onto it.

My father and I dug in first, and since we aren’t coffee-lovers, we left the jug aside. The flowing bit on top is some sort of cream (whipped cream?), and it’s not really flowing…it was steadily stuck there until we scooped at it. The shaved ice was fine and snowy, with a milky flavour. It was really good, this is my favourite of all the things we ordered. I think I would have liked it even better if it was only chocolate :P

After we had a bit, my mother poured the coffee over it. I took a photo from the other side so that the bowl would look untouched.

Before pouring the coffee, there was only cocoa powder on top. With the coffee mixed with the chocolate, it tasted more like the tiramisu that it was supposed to be.

In the middle of the bowl, we found that there were small chocolate balls (chocolate beads?) inside the ice. And at the bottom, there were some soaked cake/biscuit pieces (the kind we find in tiramisu). I think that they actually put the coffee at the bottom of the bowl and then the rest of the shaved ice on top…then we were supposed to pour the additional coffee over the top to “finish” off the overall coffee flavour.

The waffle pizza arrived last (when we ordered, they said that there was a 20-minute wait). The edges were crispier than those of the dessert waffles, but the pairing with the pizza topping didn’t match that well. My mother and I weren’t impressed. :P Snorlax, however, liked it, just as I expected he would.

cheesy chicken slice pizza waffle, RM19.50

Looking up

Look up!

I took this photo in our company car park. The staircase in the office building may have looked nicer, but I didn't want to take the risk of someone seeing me take the photo...it would have looked weird :P

In the car park, it is "safer" because as long as the lower floors are not filled up, no one is going to go to a higher floor, and therefore no one will be using the stairs above this floor!