Recipe ideas

I was at Ikea with my folks yesterday and while I was in the kitchen section, I suddenly realised that it’s been a while since I cooked anything!

An idea popped into my head. The kitchen utensils were my muse!

Pan fried pieces of chicken breast topped with a creamy coriander sauce on a bed of flash blanched asparagus spears.

Another idea popped into my head.

Poached salmon fillet with bouquet garni topped with a mild beetroot puree served with a side of roasted baby potatoes with sea salt.

Mmmm!

Later, after the BKT dinner I wonder if it’s possible to make a reduction sauce from BKT soup (with a hint of rice wine) and serve it with pan seared pork loin chops? I could serve it with a side of tau-pok, hehe. I wonder how would that taste like?

A new place in the block

There’s a newly built commercial block nearby my place, 5 minutes walk away. New shops have been mushrooming at a steady pace. The first restaurant that was undergoing some minor renovation teased me with their signage that reads: “Spice Garden: A Classical Indian Food”. Ok, not so much of a tease because I was 97% sure that it was going to be a mamak. The 3% balance was teasing, but that doesn’t matter.

My dad was optimistic saying that it could be Northern Indian food. I told him that it’s going to be your standard mamak that every housing estate will have on. It’s standard, lah.

When it opened, true enough it was indeed a mamak. Heh.

My dad made an observation and said that mamak is weird. I asked why. He replied saying that it’s too empty (tables) and too clean. So I told him, this is probably the best time to go before it become the ISO standard for mamak restaurants to be dirty. He agreed but still made some comments on the emptiness of the restaurant.

Ai-yo-yo, dei!

Well, good thing is I don’t have to starve on weekends anymore. I can just walk over and have a bite.

I’m irritated!

I don’t understand why some people like to give too many options. For example, this simple situation that got out of hand.

An ex-manager of mine is coming to visit Malaysia with his wife for a few days. An email was sent out and in it, he says that he wants to eat. So we were supposed to bring him to dinner the next Friday. The to-list in the email was just a few. A venue was suggested – The Lookout Point in Ulu Kelang.

Then someone had the bright idea to add in more options. Suddenly in the next email, there were more email addresses in the to-list! Next thing you know ideas started pouring in for where we should take our ex-manager to dinner. Most of them were located around the KLCC area. Dinner time was planned for 7pm. You do the math. It’ll be jammed – not any ordinary jam, but FRIDAY FLAVOURED JAM: which is the worst!

When we started to nominate where we should go, some actually replied to everybody andwhined that this is not good and that is not good. Yada, yada, yada!
That’s when I got really irritated.

After receiving more emails about where we should eat and where we shouldn’t eat, there was no resolution at all. The best part is that the woman who suggested initially that everyone pooled in more options suddenly took the “follow the majority” stance. A few others followed. So clever, you! From a more or less concrete idea, we are now left “wondering” where we should have dinner. Perfect!

FFS! When a decision is made, everybody makes noise, everybody un-decides. When no decision is made, everybody follows the leader.

Everyone wants to meet him, and honestly, I think these people really lost sight of that. With so many people involved, it’s going to be hard to cater for everyone’s taste. Crap is bound to happen. Did you guys forget that it’s going to be the company’s that’s more important than where we fricking eat? We can be a Lafite or Soo Kee’s Beef Noodles Restaurant or some mamak restaurant in some god-forsaken housing estate, would it really make so much of a difference if the company was all that mattered?

I’ve more or less decided not to go. Stuff them! Decide, undecide and criticize away. I bet that there will not be a place to go for dinner come Friday evening itself. I seriously do not give a flying f*ck.

Instead, a few of my closer friends (previously ex-colleagues) intend to have lunch with the ex-manager.

Whatever, man.

Picking up a new hobby, almost.

I’ve been meaning to pick up a hobby. I think I’ve been spending too much time on the TV playing video games.

I used to paint little miniature war figurines (Warhammer Epic 40,000) when I was younger and I thought I’d revive that. After searching the Internet for resources, I was disappointed to find out that there are very little shops that sell paints and miniature kits. I also realised that, once I’m done with painting them, who am I going to play the game with? So this idea was scrapped.

I was also thinking of assembling plastic model kits of cars since I like cars a lot. However, after looking around, the cost to begin this hobby would be close to RM1k! This idea was scrapped as well.

I think I’m just going to play with Photoshop and see what happens.

A satisfying Thursday

This morning, I woke up to nice cooling weather as it rained the night before. It made it even nicer to sleep in under the sheets. I decided to wake up anyway as I didn’t want to waste the day.

Had my daily dose of video games in the morning and a short game of Dawn of War with my brother. I beat him once and he beat me twice. Grr.

When I got a little sick of losing (pathetically) all the time, I decided to finish watching Borat: Cultural Learnings of America. My dad then came by and asked if we wanted to try to dim sum promotion at Eden (only at the branch in Subang Parade and The Curve) where a selection of dim sum only costs RM1.99. We agreed and today became a family affair.

So we got ready and hit the road. I was close to the Subang exit along the NKVE when I told my mom…

I was in Vietnam?

I had a strange dream this morning. I dreamt that I was being holed up with a bunch of other Vietnamese folks in a house. There was a girl who was telling me stuff like how to get around the place and how to make calls. I saw all my stuff on the bed – my toiletries and opened luggage. Before you know it, I was downstairs it looked like some old empty warehouse. I was immediately asked by someone if I knew how to operate firearms. I said I do and all hell broke loose. We were being assaulted by people from the outside. Guns were blazing and people were screaming.

That was probably the last scene of my dream that I can remember before being woken up by the alarm in my phone.

Ok. No more watching stupid B-grade movies (over dinner, very similar to my dream except that the acting by the actors and actresses were horrible) and no more zombie survival games at night.

Dinner was good

Last Friday on the 20st of April was SW’s birthday dinner event and a big group of us decided to have dinner at this new Italian restaurant called Il Divo. I like the setup, it’s very simple and minimalistic. There were two huge vases with flowers in them all nicely arranged. That added to the environment very well.

Our party trickled in over time and we began to order starters then our mains. We ordered 4 types of starters (you may refer to sooyin’s blog post- can’t remember most of the starters we ordered).

The clam was delicious, but I think my favourite would be the beef carpaccio. No wonder they’re so pricey (for paper-thin slices of cured beef, yeah?)!

Not wanting to pay premium for H2O, I decided to order a glass of pineapple drink. Well everyone else was ordering fruit juices, why not?

My main of Angus beef tenderloin arrived after moments of chatting with everyone else on the table. When I saw it on my plate, I thought to myself, the serving is so small. Looking at the other orders of main on the table, I was a little regretful of my choice (kiasu, mah). However, on first bite, I didn’t feel regret anymore instead felt delighted. The meat was perfect! Cooked exactly the way I liked – medium rare with blood and juices still running with every stroke of my table knife. Juicy, tender, tasty! The wild mushroom that came as the accompaniment was very good too, woody and tender. After relishing the last morsel, I was satisfied. The size didn’t really matter, in fact, it was just nice.

The Angus beef tenderloin at Il Divo is now my favourite!

I didn’t order dessert as I could take no more. I did however became the FCT (Food Clean-Up Response Team) and tackled some of HL and Lamb’s home made pistachio ice-cream which I thought was pretty good.

The restaurant owner gave us two bottles of Muscato on the house! The drink is very nice, like champagne but sweeter.

Most of us adjourned to Somo later for a round of drinks where SW’s TRIAD roots surfaced throughout the night, it was hilarious!

An analogy on work

Today at work, while I was idling I asked my colleague N how her piece of assignment was going. She said it was almost done. I had a look at the report output and was amazed with the sheer amount of data that was presented. So I told her, that’s an amazing report, very well done. She being modest said DG, my other colleague did most of the work. I told her this is not true, and the words that follow is my analogy on work (phrased in context with the scenario):

You sowed the beans and DG toiled the soil and watered it. The plant will grow into a big tree thanks to yours and DG’s effort and will soon bear fruit for our manager to pluck and savour the flavour of the fruit.

Haha! I’m so easily amused.

My PC’s back from the dead!

I rushed home from work today because I realised there was something I could still do for my dead PC.

After swapping some parts from my sis’s (who’s away in Singapore, heh heh) PC, I managed to narrow down the problem to the power cable.

Great! My PC was firing up again. I left it on to test it and see if it’d go *ZAP* again. Thankfully 1 hour passed peacefully and nothing happened. I installed the new hard disk I bought yesterday, 160GB of space, yo! My old one is more or less dead (it’s somehow generating a strong magnetic field on the base, could this be why it always dies half way?) and a replacement hard disk was inevitable.

I got everything loaded and am now trying to setup my PC to contain the bare minimum required to get me going i.e. the wireless connection to the Internet and Firefox!

I’m now salvaging whatever I can from my old hard disk. This will take a while.

I owe my sister one power supply unit and one power cable.

New layout!

I was getting bored of the old blog theme, so I decided on this new one! Doesn’t look too bad, eh?