chinese new year in penang

we took the aeroline to penang. everything was good except for the movie which they blasted through our eardrums throughout the whole trip! how inconsiderate to the passengers who don't wanna watch the movie. i couldnt sleep bcoz of the noise.
we went to visit Damien's family home in penang and his kitchen was awash with the aroma of baking pineapple tarts. made from scratch by his mum!

his dad and brothers took us to "minah's" which has really really good malay food. we had the fried fish with sambal petai [i dont ussually like petai but this was yum!]

this kerabu of tauge and 4 angled beans were good too. I dont know what goes into it but it's tasty.
this beef... rendang?was so flavourful. the kurma was delicuios too but i was too busy eating to bother taking a photo of it.
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after a heavy dinner of hokkien mee, orchien and kuehteow thng we had a 2nd dinner of nasi dalca at a sidewalk.
it's a fragrant rice with various meat curries and vegtable curries. yummy.

homemade ice cream

I bought this ice cream maker named "snowy" from sunbeam and tried a vanilla custard ice cream. I didn't follow the recipe that closely and put less sugar, boy was that a mistake!
the ice cream mixture is much less sweet when frozen so one has to overcompensate when making the mixture. anyway that was fixed by adding the caramel sauce over it.
it tasted rich and creamy, not like the commercially sold ones here that're made of hydrogenated vegtable fat. this is real ice cream made from cream and eggs.
this was just a simple vanilla ice cream recipe, heaploads of which can be found on the internet.

gav and i decided we ought to eat more malay food now that we won't be getting it for a long time. I only ever saw indonesian restaurants in sydney. there was a malaysian one in melbourne but it was so expensive.
this nasi campur we got at the subang SS15 market was only RM4.50. the ayam masak merah was delicuios, and the ikan bilis stir fried potato cubes were tasty. the wilted choy sum wasn't so good but that's because we came at 2.30pm and lunchtime was over long ago.
gav had ayam paprik freshly made. the spicy gravy was flavoursome and perfect with the vegtable bits.
greens cooked with salted fish is always good.
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now this is SS15's best kept secret~! there's a stall at restoran FOH FOH [opposite secret recipe] that sells taiwanese beef noodles and they are exquisite!
big chunks of beef and springy noodle with radish slices in a rich aromatic herbal soup served with chilli flake oil. she's not stingy on the tender beef chunks, in fact I often feel that there's too much beef in relation to the noodle.

she makes a killer pork stuffed fried "jiao xi" as well, and we order it quite often.

jln alor

i think this restaurant is a tourist trap because it's the first one on jln alor and the pricing is super high. my frog porridge was RM10! and this chicken curry with noodles was RM6.90
a bit pricey for an outdoor non airconditioned place. but it was full of tourists so i guess they can get away with it

tea party

I had a lot of fun with these ready made puff pastry squares. i made savory cajun spice fingers,
chocolate puffs,
olive snails and almond-macadamia puffs and arranged them all on my wedding cake stand.
yuenching made egg and tomato sandwiches.yum!
a bit of rosemary in the mayo makes a big difference in flavour i think.

hummus and kofta

it's been 9 mths since gav got back from qatar so he's finally able to stomach a bit of arab food. we made this meal together and it was great fun smooshing the chickpeas to become hummus! it doesn't look pretty but this dip is yummy. we added so much garlic our breaths smelled of garlic afterwards. they say in arab-land each family has their own recipe for hummus. well ours is full of garlic and sesame seeds with a tinge of lemon and chilli powder. I won't give you an exact recipe but basically you put the cooked chickpeas in a blender and blend it up with olive oil, cumin, tahini, bit of lemon juice and lotsa fresh chopped garlic. chilli powder is optional.
this is lebanese garlic sauce which i didn't like because it's way too pungent.
we had it all with some olives and raw onion [Mmmmm] this is the ultimate bad breath meal!
to make the beef koftas, first we chopped up some garlic and red onion.

then we mixed it into the beef mince with salt and pepper, ground pine nuts, cumin and cinnamon powder. ours was not very tasty because we omitted some ingredients which we didnt have/too lazy to get, like parsley, breadcrumbs and egg.
then we shaped them into these sausage shapes and pan fried them until cooked. they're sort of like burgers. then we lightly toasted some flatbreads. the real arab flatbreads are really flat. these ones were from mydin and they were leavened so uh...not very authentic.
a meal like this at tarbush would've come up to at least RM20 a head i reckon.
overall it was a very satisfying and tasty meal but i don't recommend eating this too often or you'll get a sorethroat.

sundays are eating out days for me, they alway have been since i was a kid. i guess it's because we go to church in the mornings so we eat out after church, and too lazy to cook at night so we eat out too. also it was the maid's off day [when i was a kid] even now we eat out with our friends after church every sunday. this time we tried this new noodle place in SS15 called "Face to face"it's quite successful I think because i've seen it elsewhere. there're so many new restaurants that close down in SS15 so finally having one popular one is a surprise.
but, it doesn't disappoint! this pork pan mee was very good. I don't recall the exact name but it was number 106 on the menu. tasty stuff.

hubby had the classic pan mee that came with lotsa ikan bilis and pork and a nice half cooked egg. piling on ingredients on top is important, it makes the customer feel that they're getting their money's worth!
the white coffee here is very good too, I wonder if it came from a mix! pricing is reasonable, portions are the right size. plus there're heaps of different types of chilli sauces/pastes to add on the heat if you're so inclined.

in the evening we went to "old taste" and had their white coffee which wasn't very good. too .... dilute/bland/bitter/weird. it didn't have a good balance of flavours.
but the nasi lemak was okay i guess. the fried mantou is popular here, with curry.

i suppose one can't go wrong with nasi lemak since everything is unhealthy and full of salt and fat! yum!

food glorious fooddddd

this orchien at tanjung tokong in Penang is fantastic. huge oysters with tasty fried egg and lotsa onions and lime juice. it may be served in a dingy place but the taste of it will transport you to taste heaven. a different place of orchien somewhere near batu feringghi. also good and not as oily as usual. i wonder though where the oysters are from since they don't really fish in penang..at least, i hope they dont as the water's so dirty!

we went to pak hussein's again at bayan lepas and had the usual malay fare. loved it all but portions were too small [it's our fault, we ordered most dishes for one]


telur bistik is always good, although so simple.
and tomyam of course! we love tomyam putih better than the red tomyam.

the following pics were taken in ipoh at some place called low shi fun which sells [of course] low shi fun. yummy.
fried wantons.
meatballs fishballs and fucuk!

yummy rat tail shaped rice noodles topped with meat sauce.