Birthday of General Chiang

Get a bucket ready before you go on reading. Required to collect saliva drips.

On the Saturday of the infamous Bersih 2.0 rally, TY was in town. We made our way to PJ where his parents are staying at, and the roads are clear. Drive was breezy and we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the hotel called Ee Chinese Cuisine in conjunction with Uncle's birthday :)

Table condiments - boiled groundnuts, pickled papaya, chopped garlic and pickled green chillies. 

 Our first course - roasted crispy duck! Well, Roasted crispy duck skin, more like. When they brought this bird out, I was completely fascinated by the beautiful sheen of the roast. Drool. Then a few of the staff started slicing the duck, but only removing the crispy skin. These are then wrapped along with julienned zucchini and onions in a sort of Chinese-style tortilla lol. No idea what they're called. 

 The taste is absolutely OH-EM-GEE. The sinful layer of duck fat melting in your mouth but not before your teeth sink into the crispy and fragrant duck skin..... sigh....

 Oooohh! Another one of my favourite. Deep fried crispy yam with mixed vegetables. I've always loved this dish at any Chinese restaurant/wedding dinners :D Just something so satisfying about the fried yam.

  At the moment, one of my favourite vegetables has got to be the siew pak choy (uhhh white something something veggie kot). Simple, stir fried.

Roast pork belly. Meat was bit tough and mentally I was imagining the layers of fat I consume to quickly converge and pool in my veins @@

  More meat! Pak zham kai. Uhhh salted boiled chicken or something like that heheehe. At this point I was like, too much meat but otherwise the chicken was very tender. 

My favourite spinach soup with century eggs!  Larrrvee :D Can never get bored of them I think I can eat this every meal, every day and I prolly won't complain ;)

And Aunty's special dessert, walnut cake with brown sugar. It was lovely. Every bite gives a nutty texture and the brown sugar gave just the right amount of sweetness to the cake. Shiokz!

Trumpeting Trotters

 Backlogs of photos that have not made their grand entrances in this blog - Guess what's cooking in SP, uh, about a month ago?

Tu kha chor! That's literally vinegared pig trotters :D As gross as it sounds, I assure you, the taste is so heavenly and easy to cook!

Ah well, of course Tua Ee was the master chef and I did the no-brainer assignments like chopping, peeling, swatting off flies......

Tu kha chor has four basic but essential ingredients. Pig's trotters, vinegar, loads and loads of ginger (smashed) and dark soy sauce. I've never really been a big fan of this dish, nor had any of those infamous cravings. But after this round of excellent tu kha chor, I'm a complete convert!

And the other ke-le-feh.... Tua Ee's stir fried cauliflower with beancurd skin and carrots. Yummers!

The end product! Mum wanted to add Chinese groundnuts along in it, which is a great option for the others like me who don't really eat pig's trotters. Psst.... heard that trotters contain large amount of collagen ;) Still, I love the gingery-hot and sourness of the broth!

And also Tua Ee's honey chicken... ahhh.... I love my aunt :D

 

 This shot makes me homesick! Home-cooked soup and hearty servings of great food... :(

 K, end of this relatively useless post :D

Fishes and Chipses

This post has been sitting and molding in my Drafts folder for a long time now. Haven't had time and haven't gotten into the mood of blogging but here I am, bored on a Saturday -.-

Back in SP for the weekend, again, for a sort of belated Father's Day (yea that long!). Since the last time we were in Straits Quay, it was a relatively short visit as we tried to squeeze in lunch and then to the airport, we decided to go back there this time, and take our own sweet time exploring the place. (and so that Mum can brag to her friends hehehe...)

Reached a little before 12 noon (that was after my ortho's appointment kekeke). Browsed the directory before deciding to go for this place called Blue Reef that serves fish and chips (dad's a fish person).

Place is already close to packed. Must be good food here. Ah well. Not quite.

On one wall, kids' sketches of the Blue Reef are hung. I say kids based on the scrawly-looking masterpieces hehe. 

 One side effect of procrastinating your blog posts is the inability to recall exactly what it is you took pictures of. I shall take a random stab at this. Me thinks it's a green pea and codfish soup. Not bad really.

 Also ordered tomato bruschetta. Errrrh also not bad. I think.

Me Pop :D Happy Father's Day!

The soup on the foreground is mushroom soup. Had chunks of mushrooms in it.

My main - Fish in beer batter with chips. Portion was quite huge. I had option of different types of fishes to choose from and I selected Spanish mackerel.  

  

Mum's chicken cordon bleu. It was just bleargh.

So yea, they serve pretty big portions here and this table just next to us ordered this magnanimous platter which they couldn't finish and there's still half lying around on the plate when they left lol. What a waste of food!

And finally Dad's grilled salmon with vegetables on the side. I wanted to get this initially but since Dad ordered it so I thought just get something else loh :( It was not bad also this one.

Blue Reef is not bad a place to eat in at Straits Quay since the prices are still kinda okay, compared to the other restaurants in the area, this one could be considered as appropriate I suppose. Bill came to about RM111 or something like that, which in my opinion, since we had a couple of soups, appetiser, and two courses of salmon and mackerel, is a pretty fairly priced.

TY has gone to the states for 2 weeks or so and I shall not have anyone to bug! Think will spend my time a lot blogging. 

*grumble

Million Dollar Smile

I used to have crooked front teeth. Like the jongang kind. Hated them so bad, I begged Dad to let me have braces fitted. Best decision ever. It was suffering while it lasted, but worth every tooth lost, all that torture. Too be fitted with braces, I had to have two first bicuspids extracted on the upper teeth, and two more on the bottom - ouch. I had to go through two sessions of extraction, first one to remove one side of the upper and lower first bicuspids, then next session for the other side.

Undeniably, the extraction doesn't hurt as bad as when I had my impacted wisdom tooth removed. But it was traumatising nevertheless. Four good teeth gone in four days! Sigh.... On the second session, the dentist, Dr Fong in Penang, started fixing braces on both me and my sister. Man, the pressure from the braces was so bad that even the slightest touch to the front tooth was enough to send waves of torment through the entire jaw...

After diligently visiting the dentist every month for one-and-a-half year, finally I got my braces removed. Such joy to bite a whole apple without having to chop the apple into bite-sized pieces. 

So anyway I was just calling up my old orthodontist (literally old) and so asked the nurse if I could go over and get an extra pair of retainers for safekeeping/backup, just in case the current one break or something. And I found out from her that Dr Fong is retiring by end of July!

And thus, the paranoid in me booked flight tickets back for an overdue check up hehe.

The torment chair. Nothing has changed, not even the nurse! Hehehehe. Well, can't say it brings good memories though. Maybe only that one time when I had those steel things removed :D

The good ol' doc who has brightened many smiles....

Anyway, long story short, I didn't get any backup retainers done because ortho said it wasn't necessary... though he did give me something else in 'exchange' for it...

The old teeth mould! They were moulded pre-braces!

 They are kinda gross (it didn't help either that the moulds are yellow in colour!) so I thought I'd resize them real small to reduce its gross factor kekekek. SE's the one on the left and mine on the right!! Ahh... wonders of science....

Pickles think they're gross too! :p

On the way back, I was showing TY my old teeth model and he was all silent with an 'eww' look on his face. He used to have braces back then, and so I probed him, what if we kissed and we both have jongang teeth back then?  And he said..... got a lot of noise loh -.- lol! Yucks!