X'mas 2013

What I had during the X'mas this year. A nice potluck party at close friend's house. We had good food, we sang X'mas songs, we exchanged presents, and we took lots of photos !!
I prepared tortila chips with dressings to the party. 
Bought tortilla wraps from the supermarket. Cut into triangle, then air fry them with my Philips airfryer. 

          

                                                                               

 Next, I prepare the dressings. To let all the friends to enjoy the crispy torilla chips even more, I made up 3 types of different dressings. 

Dressing #1 -  tomato salsa. Cut cherry tomatoes, capsicum and big onions into small cubes. Chopped fine the parsley. Mixed them all together, added in some salt, pepper, lemon juice, and little bit of sugar. Put in a bit of dried English herbs too. Done. 



Dressing #2 - creamy avocado. Again, cut big onions and capsicums into small cubes. Dig out avocado flesh from the skin and mashed. combined mashed avocado with the cubes, added in salt, pepper, a bit of mayonaise and lemon juice. Done

Dressing #3 - sweet chili. This is an easy one. Just add some finely chopped parsley and onions into a bottle of sweet chili sauce bought from the shop.

See, the chips with the 3 dressings. Glad my friends loved them so much.

The host of the house (they are Christians) prepared  roast turkey for all of us. This turkey weighed 5kg. Nice to eat with the gravy and chesnut as the meat filling. 

Another friend made potato minced pork pie. 



We had alcoholic cocktail with peach and also X'mas tree sweet watermelon.

Party ended at about 2am, and we knocked off immediately when reached home.....

Medditeranean

Today my BFF colg and me had a nice lunch in restaurant opened by foreigner. This place serves Medditeranean cuisine.

At first we thought the food could be expensive, but once we saw the menu, we were surprised the owner price his food at reasonable rate.

We began with Lahmacun as starter.
Lahmacun is a round, thin piece of dough topped with minced lamb and minced vegetables and spices sprinkled with lemon juice. Nice and appetizing. We simply loved it.

Next our main course,Sis Chicken Kebab. We ordered one portion to share. This is a dish which uses a traditional way of cooking meat on a skewer and served with Basmati rice and butter. The chicken was so tender and flavourful, the rice smelled heavenly....really yummy yummy!!

A meal without dessert is always not complete...hehehe

So we ordered Baklava. It is a rich, sweet pastry fulled with choopped walnut and almonds sweetened with spiced syrup. "Wow" is the word I could decribe....  

We were served with a set of Turkish tea too...it was a complementary service from the owner. It was so nice of them. The tea came with a small plate of dried mulberry. Very good too.

Guess how much we paid for all the food we ate?? 
It was only RM49.90... So cheap huh.....Imagine we have foreign cuisine in the KL city....

Tang Yuan

This coming Sunday is Winter Solstice.
My parents were here during last weekend, but dad went home on Monday and mom with godsister are still here at my house. So while both parents were still around on Sunday, mom made tangyuan for us, and as usual her tangyuan are always so colourful and attractive.

The dough

Every lady in the house helped to make the tangyuan including Bb-G





















Cooked the tangyuan in boiling water till all the balls floated on top of the pot

Transferred all the tangyuan into another pot of cold water. This is to ensure the chewy or "q" texture













I suggested to mom a new way of eating tangyuan for this round. Instead of the normal ginger soup,
I heat-up a pot of unsweeten soya bean drink (bought earlier) with dried longan. Added some Gula Melaka to give a nice aroma and sweetness to the "soya soup" 

Once the soup was ready, put in the cooked colourful tangyuan. Yummy yummy...Glad that everyone loved it !

November & December

Aaaalooooohaaaaa again....ha ha ha....
What happened in November? Hmm...it was the month of Papa-M's birthday. I organized a small gathering cum party and invited our close family friends over to the party.

I cooked a few dishes, Papa-M tapao some chicken rice, roast chicken and duck. One friend brought along a homemade cheese cake, one friend brought over vinegar pork knuckles, another friend made us alcoholic mixed cocktail...

I think I forgot to snap photos of the food we ate.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Papa-M!

 

In December....well, I had done some minor decoration to the house. Since I was free during one of the weekends, I drove to a nearby decorative items shop and saw the things that I like and bought them home. This was what I did

Tadaaa....

This is actually a spot at the main door. I did some landscaping by using my existing yellow colour vase and decorated it with some "oranges" on the recycyle dried branches. Next, I sticked a colourful peacock on the wall. Actually by the corner of the vase I put a pot of essential oil burner (can't see from this photo). Imagine everyday when we (Papa-M, myself, Bb-G) open the door and enter the house, a the scent of the essential oil, the oranges which represent gold, and the peacock which represents good luck welcome us home .....ceh wah....ada sikit fengshui u know...hahah

    

   












Next I decorated one wall with photos. Instead of the usual wooden frames, I used stickable photo frames. The photos eventually bring out  some family warmth into the house

Since I have some extra frames and photos, I lay them on the piano too

Oh ya, this piano was sent to us all the way from Papa-M's hometown. Since it was not utilised  back in the hometown, Papa-M arranged it to send over, and expose Bb-G to music. Well, Bb-G did hint to us many times that she wants to learn guitar, she wants to learn ballet...hmmm before any guitar class or ballet class...let her "play" with the piano first at home ...

Last weekend, my sister-in-law came back to Malaysia from Perth. She took along her 3 children back without the husband. The cousins finally met up again...

All of them grow up fast ya....hopefully this will be a yearly gathering and I can take their photos every year to see how they grow and change ^_^  

Photo taken last Sunday @16 Dec 2013

Photo taken in Oct 2011

 

October

Aloha ~~~
Now I am jotting down what happened in October

Hmmm....macam tak ada apa apa special yang berlaku lar...Oh ya...I almost forgot, we went for a day trip to Tanjung Sepat with our usual gang of family friends 

It was a day trip for 3 families. We started our journey at 8.30am. 1st destination was to savour a bowl of seafood mihun kueh in one of the famous shop which I could not remember the name. But the shop was a homebase business. We could choose what type of seafood we want, and the "chef" will put into our soup. 

After the breakfast we walked to another shop selling homemade fish balls. We bought some back home too. Love the fish balls so much because they were fresh.

The worker was frying the fish balls

 Next, we walked to the coffee factory. This uncle is a Hainanese and while he was frying the coffee bean, he talked to me with the dialect too...hahah...luckily I know a little and he was surprised too...
We also bought some coffee powder back.

We spent roughly half an hour in the coffee factory and we drove to the mushroom farm. Many types of mushroom could be found, and I bought few packs of dried lingzhi for its health beneficial properties.

 




















At the jetty near the mushroom farm. The kids, Bb-G is the youngest child among all....

 
















It was about noon and all of us were hungry. So we drove to the famour Hainan bao factory. We were very lucky to reach there at the right timing, the bao just came out from the piping hot steamer.
We bought all types to try and my favourite was the "mui choi pork bao"

Workers were kneading the dough

Before going back, we stopped at a Chinese restaurant for a good seafood lunch. Ordered quite a number of dishes,but I couldnt find the photos in my folder.  

Overall it was a nice one-day-family-outing

  

September

Aloha~~~
I really abandoned my blogspot.com for so long. Today I am going to write and write and write....


Many things happened for the past months. Lemme start with some of my encounters when I went to Korea in September...

It was a trip to visit beauty exhbition in the city of Goyang, Korea. I went with my manager. We took the night flight and reached Seoul early in the morning around 6am. This trip was organized and partly sponsored by an organisation (which I do not want to disclose here). The organizer or so-called our "tour guide" did a bad job to lead us , and even gave poor instructions on what we should do, what do we need to do, what could we expect ...since he was in-charged to arrange business meetings for us during the exhibition. 

Case#1
Reached airport at about 6am. The organizer , let's call him Mr X,  gathered all of us (a total of few representatives from different companies) at a bus waiting area (out from the airport building), and then told us to wait for him while he went to collect our shuttle bus ticket at the counter. We waited for him under the cold wet weather for almost THREE hours! Mr X was nowhere to be seen. All of us lost our patience and some of the representatives (mostly men) went to the airport and look for him. One of the them even lead us back to the building for shelter. Finally Mr X came back to us, and he apologized saying that the company had sent our bus ticket late to the airport, and the bus driver was still asleep...etc...etc.... What the heck!

Case #2
After he passed us the bus ticket, he annouced which hotel we supposed to go and stay for the rest of our days in Korea. We thought all of us would stay at the same place, but it was not. Some represtatives were sent to the hotels in the Seoul city (which would take them 1 hour journey from the hotel to the exhibition centre), while some of us (including myself with manager) were given hotel in the Goyang city (which took us 10mins to the exhibition centre).

By the time our bus reached, it was already 10.30am. According to Mr X, the bus that took us back to the hotel in Goyang needed about 30mins to reach. But eventually it took us 45 mins! It was about 11.15 when we arrived 

Case #3
Very very unfortunately, the bus driver did not logde us down at the lobby of the hotel. He just dropped us at the bus stop about 200m away from the hotel. And it was raining!!!! All of us in the bus were too shocked and due to communication problem, nobody could tell the driver to drive us into the lobby. And the driver was so rude and took out and dropped down our baggages on the floor and off he went.

Under the rain, we pulled our luggages and quickly walked towards the hotel. Luckily we were spotted fast enough by the hotel crews, and they immediately came towards us with large umbrellas....

Case #4
OK,...once we reached the hotel we were told that we could not check in. All of us were so wet. We thought we could go into our hotel room immediately to take a hot shower. We could only get into our room at 3pm! And guess what, I have a meeting with my Korean supplier at 12pm..I couldn't even change into a proper attire for the meeting. Luckily my supplier was very thoughtful and got to know what had we gone through since we arrived. He apologized on the behalf of his country and took us for a sumptious buffet lunch in the hotel. That was consoling....He even took us to Myeongdong to shop and to the Seoul tower for sight seeing and another nice buffet dinner.

Many uneventful happenings during the trip especially we met up with few rude drivers and because of them, I was drenched few times. This had make me fall sick in Korea...What an experience!

Anyway, despite all the above, I really really enjoy every single meal I had in Korea. I loved the food so much. They were all very tasty and authentic. And I managed to buy a true Hanbok for Bb-G. 

____end of Korea story______

Problem

One big reason why I never update my blog for so long is because I have difficulty to compose and to upload photos.
Eg, 
Normal time - I can just click a new post, and start to write freely. I can upload any photos I want to. 
Abnormal time like NOW -  Once I click into a new post , I cannot type at all. I tried many ways but unresolved until I clicked on the "Insert Jump Page" icon and I was able to type. But even if I can write, my photo upload still have problem... and while I am typing, and I cannot backspace, and I cannot copy and paste,


Haiz....so many problems and I am lazy to continue ......bye bye for now....until I find out what is wrong with my system....