A tribute to Nine

Some time ago, I wrote about my favourite Korean movie so far (and a few others). In that post, I mentioned my favourite Korean drama as well. But it seems that I have never written about that drama before, so this post is to do just that!

The drama is Nine: Nine Times Time Travel. I discovered it in December 2014 when it was showing on Malaysian TV. My mother was watching it, and she switched it on when she came to Penang.

This was how it went at the time (I jotted this down in the middle of watching the drama) :

Hooked on Nine Times Time Travel. It's all my mother's fault. I watched the 16th episode with her, and got hooked. Missed the 17th episode. Caught the 18th. The hook sunk deeper. Sat in front of the TV to wait for the 19th episode. "Beh tahan" and watched the 1st episode online. Again waited in front of the TV for the last (20th) episode. Followed up with the 2nd episode... and more.

As usual, the drama's synopsis is lousy, so let me tell you what it's about. The main character gets nine incense sticks that allow him to travel to the past. He goes back to save his father from dying when he was a boy, but his actions causes ripples in the future, and he has to fix even more things. There are also a lot of complications in the story which make it interesting, and the best part is that the plot is all wrapped together satisfactorily.

The next drama that I found worthy was Pinocchio, which I watched recently, and only because it started showing on Malaysian TV as well. This drama had been publicized quite a lot, so I watched the first episode just to see what it was like. (From the synopsis, I didn't think I would like it.) Instead, I ended up being hooked, because in the first episode, there was a fire and the main character's father went missing. But the reporters accuse his father for running away to cover up his negligence. There was an element of mystery there, as we had yet to find out what really happened in the fire. So I kept watching, and ended up watching the episodes online (original Korean is a lot better than the Chinese dub!).

Then WW recommended me another drama, Goodbye Mr. Black. This one starts off with a bang and never lets up, except when the main character "dies" (no, that's not a spoiler) and we have to wait for him to come back. This one is great as well, with the same lead actor as Nine. The plot is that the main character has his father killed and is framed for murder. So he has to fake his own death so that he can clear his name.

All in all, even though Pinocchio and Goodbye Mr. Black are great and I really enjoyed them, I would still keep Nine at first place! The plot is better written and I don't think there are any loopholes, but for the other two, there were some plot points and "holes" that I wasn't so happy about.

A visit to Ginza

Last night we went to Ginza Japanese Restaurant in Tanjung Tokong.

We wouldn't have gone there but for a Groupon offer of RM30 for a voucher of RM50. Add to that a promotion code for an extra RM10 off, and I decided to get that voucher for RM20!

The place was very nicely decorated (read: classy place that I would be afraid to step into). We were given a round table with a semi-circular seat (almost a semi-circle) that could seat three to four people, with an extra chair just off one side of the rounded seat. There were four of these "alcove" type tables. I didn't think if taking a photo of the tables, though... I didn't even think I was going to describe the table until I started writing this post. 

Here's what we ordered:

chicken teriyaki don, RM17.80

salmon mentai don, RM23.80

tori karaage (Japanese fried chicken), 14.80

Chicken teriyaki don needs no introduction, since it is one of the most common Japanese dishes, chicken teriyaki with rice. (What you see on the left side in the bowl is lettuce.)

The salmon mentai don is the best of the three dishes (and appropriately so, seeing the price!). It is salmon slices with mentai (fish roe) sauce on rice. The salmon slices are very thin, and even though from the top we see that they are cooked (the colour of cooked salmon), the other side is still raw (from the colour; or would that be considered smoked since it has met with a bit of heat?). Anyway, it tasted good; WW praised it to no end, saying that it was so soft there was no need to chew it (melt-in-the-mouth, I guess?)

On top of the salmon there were two pieces of egg. I guess that would be slices of the famous Japanese omelette? I felt it was just like normal egg though. And there's a mound of wasabi with a mound of ginger in the corner of the bowl.

Both rice dishes came with a bowl of miso soup. The miso soup contained lots of pieces of seaweed (I like it!). As for the small dish of pickled cucumber/etc that you can see beside the bowl, it was already there when we arrived at our table. One for each place setting.

As for the fried chicken, there were five pieces of it. Er... I don't think there's anything else for me to say about it. Maybe I could just say that it seems to be chicken thighs, and not the breast. (yay!)

Basically all the dishes were good, it's just that fried chicken and teriyaki chicken are very commonly found, so there is less of a "wow!" factor there. But the taste was still above average. WW complained that the portion was small (the portion of rice, I mean), but of course it is enough for me...

So in conclusion, above-average taste with above-average price. There were a lot of other kinds of dishes on the menu, more expensive than what we chose. Our bill came up to RM70 with service charge and government tax, so without the voucher, it would have been expensive!

I love covered ice-cube trays

Like I said in my previous post, I went to the Sungai Ara market. I bought half a kilo of prawns there, and after shelling them, here they are:

Well, almost. A tiny bit of prawns have been put aside for immediate cooking. :P

As someone who uses only small amounts of prawns at a time, it is usually a pain to store prawns in clumps so that they don't stick together. You either use lots of plastic bags, or you have to use boxes in which your prawns are lined up along the sides and in the corners. So there would be a lot of empty space in your boxes...all of which will take up space in your fridge.

And then one day I bought an ice-cube tray with a cover (to freeze wine, at the time). I soon realized that it would be good to freeze prawns too! After the prawns are frozen, I transfer the prawn-cubes to a simple box (since they've been frozen "individually", they won't stick together unless if they get thawed) and each time I want to use prawns, I just take out the number of cubes I need.

I seldom buy prawns (largely because WW doesn't like them), but nowadays when I do, I will freeze them this way first. (I believe this is only the second time I've used this method :P )

I'm using an ice-cube tray with a cover, so it's like a box in itself... but I just thought of another thing that may work: simple ice-cube trays with cling wrap or aluminium foil to cover it. After all, the freezing is just for a while before the prawns (or whatever else you want to freeze) are transferred to another container.

Fried eggs with a twist

I went to the Sungai Ara market this morning. Wanted to get some fish and prawns... and there's a wider selection at that market (compared to the one in Relau).

I stumbled upon a new stall selling some Japanese pancakes (if you've seen it before, it's the two flat disks about three inches wide, with some ham or whatever filling in the middle), and quail egg skewers.

I didn't even really know what those quail egg skewers were like. All I saw were five blobs on a satay stick. Five blobs that looked like fried batter. But there was a pan with small holes there, like a takoyaki pan but with smaller holes, and a box of quail eggs on the side, so it was easy to guess what was in the balls. One skewer cost RM3 (two for RM5.50, but I decided to stick with one, just to try it).

Only after buying it, did I see what the other side looked like.

Basically it is fried quail egg with a slice of sausage inside. So now you can imagine the other side... it's just like the underside of fried eggs, but in a ball-shape instead of being flat. That's why I thought they were blobs of fried batter instead of just egg.

The taste? Again, you can guess. Fried eggs with sausage inside, you can try making it yourself too! Oh, and the yolk is hard, fully cooked. No gooey runny yolk here, unfortunately.

Edit (6 June 2016):
A friend said that this looks like scallops with cheese. Come to think of it... it does! On some of the pieces, the sausage looks like the charred top of cheese.

A simple investment

We sometimes have birthday celebrations in the office. And every time, someone will be asking around for a lighter to light the candles on the cake (or cakes). Some days are easier than others, to find a lighter...

The last time that happened, I asked myself, why do we have to go through all this each and every time? So I decided to invest in a box of matches. At least the next time someone looks all over the place for a lighter, I can offer an alternative.

my 40-sen investment

May it bring many (happy) returns.



(Psst. Hope you got the pun!)



(Psst. Many happy returns of the day, to wish someone a happy birthday. And return on investment.)

Two recommendable Korean movies

Nowadays (and since quite a long time), TV9 is showing a Korean movie every Sunday night at 10pm, in the original Korean language with Malay subtitles. Korean movies are generally a lot worse than Korean dramas; for some reason the plot is usually too silly for me to enjoy or appreciate.

I remember watching Jackal just because I heard that Song Ji Hyo (from Running Man) was in it, and I wanted to see how she acts. (I had never seen her in a movie or drama before) The movie was silly, and I was thinking rather disappointing, until the very end where there was a twist and made me appreciate the movie a bit after all. (It was about a bumbling assassin, by the way)

After that I didn't really try to watch any Korean movie... and then one day I saw the beginning of Montage on TV9 (my brother had the TV on, since he sleeps late and likes to flip channels to see what is on). It started off with the statute of limitations expiring on an old case, and the criminal managed to get away from the detective right before the expiry. I decided to continue watching it, and seriously, I have never been so pleased with a Korean movie. It is even in the top ranks of all-time, any-language movies, in my books.

After that, I took a look at the movies each Sunday to see whether there was anything interesting. Mostly there weren't, but another time I watched Confession of Murder, and found it pretty good as well. In this movie, a murderer publishes a book detailing his murders, after the expiry of the statute of limitations on his crimes. (hey, I love mystery and crime, so it's no surprise that the two movies I like are so similar in theme) I would still say that Montage is better, though.

So for now Montage is my first-ranked Korean movie, and Nine is my first-ranked Korean drama (more on Nine in another post... I hope!) It's like every new movie or drama that I watch will be compared against them... will try to update if there's a new number one!

Edit (28th June 2016) :
Added link to the post about Nine!

All about shrimp

Last weekend I was taking out some dried shrimp to cook with my vegetables. But amongst the shrimp siblings, there was an intruder... or maybe a cousin.

Well? Do you see it?

There is a mini-crab among the shrimp (top of the pic, in case you really can't see it). I soaked it in water together with its cousins, but it didn't get softer, so I threw it away. I'm not even sure whether it was an empty shell or not...

In an unrelated incident (that is to make it sound like breaking news, in case you didn't make the connection :P ), I was offered a cucur udang for free. And not for the first time.

There is this stall selling cucur udang (prawn fritters) near my place, at the area where I usually buy my dinner. I don't know what time they start selling, but they will close shop sometime around 7pm. Once I wanted to buy one piece, but they had only two pieces left so they gave me the second one for free. It was rather a dilemma to not say no, because I didn't want to eat that much (I was going to have my dinner too!), but they obviously wanted to get rid of the last piece, otherwise they would have to sit there and sell the single remaining piece.

Then today it happened again... I wanted one piece, but they told me I could have the second one for free. It's rather embarrassing... in the end I gave them RM2 instead of RM1.40 for the one piece I wanted.

I gobbled down one piece once I got home... and then thought to blog about this, so here's the second piece.

The batter that makes up the base has some mengkuang (and other stuff/spices) inside, which makes it better than most cucur udang (which only uses flour, I think). Previously they sold it on a table by the roadside, but today I saw that they had graduated to a dedicated van. The strange thing is their banner shows Cucur Udang Kuala Gula, but another signboard says Kuala Kurau instead.

And typing that led me to make a quick Internet search... turns out that Kuala Kurau and Kuala Gula are nearby places in Perak. There is even a blog post dedicated to Kuala Kurau's cucur udang. Now I know...

Book haul (again)

In early April, the Big Bad Wolf came to Penang (I mean the book sale, of course).

This time, despite trying not to look for new books (I was only looking for my favourite authors), I still ended up with ten books.

Four Jeffrey Archers, two Lisa Gardners and two Jodi Picoults. Added to that, Gone Girl which had an interesting synopsis and had been made into a movie, so I decided to give it a try, and the last book, My Secret Sister, which had actually caught my eye at the previous BBW sale too, and it attracted me again. This time I noticed that it was actually a true story (about twin sisters separated at birth), and that it was written by the sisters themselves. So I decided to pick it up this time.

It will take me some time to finish these, but maybe it will be considerably faster than books from other authors... I'm already itching to go and pick up the next Jeffrey Archer book. :P

Discovering satar in a different way

When I was back in Kuantan, we went to the market to buy some afternoon snacks.

Among the Malay snacks, we had our eyes on otak-otak and satar, but as we were walking back to the car, we stopped at another stall selling various kuih. There was something that looked like fish (sardine, maybe?) wrapped in crispy popiah skin. We would have walked right past, but then my mother saw someone preparing a whole lot more of it (wrapping it up to be fried). So we asked the seller, what is this? She said, satar goreng. She said to go ahead and try it, so we tried one. Turns out it is the satar filling wrapped in popiah skin to be fried.

So we bought some home.

One side of the wrapped filling is a little reddish; I think they put some chilli paste while wrapping the satar.

On another day, we went to Manhattan Fish Market to take advantage of their promotion (order two dishes at a lower price). The three of us (my parents and I) shared two meals:

Scallops Fish Chicken

Deep-fried scallops (scallops goreng tepung :P ), fried breaded fish, and grilled chicken breast (not sure if it's always the breast)

Small Flame

The "special" part is the flame-grilled prawns, which were flamed almost in front of us ("almost" because the waitress had to use the blowtorch away from our faces, hence away from our table) We thought this was supposed to come with calamari too, but it didn't have calamari. We were debating whether to ask, but then dug in first and suddenly, it seemed that if we asked, they might say that we had eaten the calamari before asking...

The dishes came with fries and garlic herb rice, so it was actually quite filling, even for the three of us! (small eaters...) We added a mushroom soup too, but it wasn't that special. It came in a huge coffee cup (at least that's how it seemed to me), but I didn't take a photo.

Journey to the south

There is a War Museum south of Port Dickson town. We went there on a Tuesday, and unfortunately it was closed (it's closed on Mondays and Tuesdays). But we could still enter the compound. There were a few uniformed soldiers there and they allowed us to take photos before leaving.

Even further south, there is the Wan Loong Temple.

the two archways are one fish, and one dragon (see the top of the arches)

there is a pond (on the right) and a Guan Yin statue

another archway in front of the temple itself

In the temple, there were some newspaper articles about a huge tortoise that had lucky draw numbers on its shell. This was the biggest tortoise we saw there... maybe it is this one?

There are lots of other tortoises as well

When we turned around from the pond to walk back to the temple, this big tortoise had pulled its head into its shell.

In the garden in the back, there are some statues of characters from the Journey to the West.

And that is all for the Port Dickson trip! It took some time, but I'm glad it's all written now! :P