We went grocery shopping with the extra time that we had, because he said that he would cook us dinner. I love grocery shopping, particularly overseas, because I get to see all the different food items that they have. This time round, we didn’t get too much, as we were leaving to NZ soon. We picked up a “few” things in case we got hungry whilst driving in NZ.

We went down to the city for yam cha @ Shark Fin House, and met up with Rex, Preema, her boyfriend Jason, and another friend of theirs. I’ve been craving the prawn salad ever since I left Australia! Funny thing is, like the jam donuts from Vic Mart, it didn’t taste as good as I remembered. The best part was catching up with everyone that we hadn’t seen in ages! It was particularly weird talking to Rex, he looks the same, but instead of talking the same, he now has a strong Aussie accent.

After lunch, we had..erm…tea? Haha, we went to Koko Black and had chocolate drinks. The concept is really similar to Theobrama back in Malaysia, it has chocolate drinks, desserts, etc.

Back at home a few hours later, we sat down to enjoy the pasta dinner that CS cooked for us. Kransky sausage pasta, I think he called it? It was pretty yummy, too. According to Steph, that’s the only dish he knows how to cook, so good thing that he only cooked one meal for us!

And so ended our day 4. We’re off to Christchurch the next day already!

Related posts:

1. Stuffed Mushrooms
2. Melbourne Day 1 & 2 – *burp*
3. Melbourne Day 3 – Eel’s Big Day

After Eel’s hair was done, we took a few shots of us, in her last few moments as a single woman! Doesn’t she look fancy, with her hair all pretty and her super cool outfit?

We caught a tram back to her apartment after that, and the tea ceremony began shortly after. Tsin was delegated the…tea announcer? The person who announces who is serving the tea, and who the recipient is. She had to call out all the family titles in Hokkien, which was quite funny. Eel’s mum had to stand next to her and whisper the titles in her ear. I was assigned the tea lady task, passing the cups to each person.

After that, we went off to Chen Po’s mum’s house for the tea ceremony for his family. Here’s a pic of some of us standing outside his house, waiting to go in. As you can see from the photo, it was really windy that day! I’m so glad I borrowed Eel’s longer jacket, before I went to Melbourne, I told her I had no formal jacket, so I wanted to borrow one from her.

We had lunch at Chen Po’s house, and then there was a break of a few hours before dinner in the city. It was held at Quanjude restaurant in the city, and this restaurant was supposed to be famous for it’s Peking duck. The first course consisted of the various parts of the duck, from the tongue, to the gizzards, down to the feet! There were so many courses after that, but we only got a chance to take pictures of a few of them. Most of the time, we were just too busy eating!

We had tons to eat at our table, especially since two of the people seated with us were the photographers, and they were away from the table quite a lot, as they had to follow the couple around and take photos of them.

There weren’t too many items during the dinner, Chen Po’s mum gave a speech in Mandarin, I think, and Chen Po & Ee Leng gave a speech as well. There were the usual “yam seng” toasts as well, where we tried our best to out-shout every other table, to prove our Malaysian-ness. All in all, it was a really nice, simple wedding, and I’m really glad I flew to Melbourne to attend, especially since I’ve known Eel since I was…11? That makes it about 16 years that we’ve been friends!

Anyway, after dinner, we still had Eel’s car which we had borrowed for the day, so we volunteered to drop Tsin off at her friend’s house at Lygon. After we had done that, we were on the way back home when we saw on the opposite side of the road….the gelati shop was back in business!

I told T to quickly turn the car around, and we made a short pit stop for some gelati. Yes, even though we were still stuffed from dinner! So, here’s me at the end of the day, doing what we’ve been doing throughout the whole trip, eating!

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2. Melbourne Day 4
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Ee Leng picked us up from the airport, and brought us to her apartment, which is on Swanston Street, about 10 mins walk away from Vic Mart. So of course, that was the first place we headed off to. It was so nostalgic, being back in Vic Mart after so many years! The first thing we did was to buy the jam doughnuts from the truck outside. We have fond memories of those doughnuts! For some reason, it just didn’t taste that good this time round. I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s really not that good anymore, or our expectations were just too high.

We also got cherries, dried fruit, yogurt sultanas…and then went off to meet another friend for lunch. There, we had a massive burger at Grill’d and a plate of yummy fries to share.

After lunch, we headed back to Ee Leng’s house to help her make custard puffs which she wanted to server during the tea ceremony over the weekend (which we of course sampled whilst making)! Dinner was at Lygon, where we had a few pizzas and pastas to share.

We made a mistake with the pizza, though. We ordered this pasta, which can be shared out amongst everyone, and you can choose three types of pastas that you would like. Everyone was calling out the different ones, and we ended up with three pastas, and all of them were cream based! Super full after the dinner, but we wanted to go for gelati. After all, how can you go to Lygon and not have the gelati?

Most disappointingly, the gelati shops were closed for winter! The sign said that they would re-open mid August, though, which should be around now. We tried to have dessert at this new place called Koko Black, but the queue time was 25 mins, which was just too long for us, especially standing outside during winter! So, we made our way back home for the night.

The next day, we went to Vic Mart again. I wanted to pick up a pair of tights for the wedding. I planned to wear a short dress, and I wasn’t about to brave the winter with bare legs! We walked around for a bit longer this time, and tried out some of their fresh yogurt. They had this stall which sells different flavours of yogurt. I swear I wasn’t planning on eating more, but the lady was so friendly, and offered us some to try. It was really yummy, so of course, I ended up with a cup. The top flavour was passionfruit, and the bottom was mixed berries.

For lunch, we had Jap food at one of the many Japanese stalls around the city, this one was called Sushi Sushi. Original name, eh? It wasn’t that fantastic, the rice was really cold, and some bits were hard. Probably because it was an open area, and the cold winter wind was blowing inside.

After lunch, we walked around the city a bit more, seeing all the new places that have sprung up since we left, like QV, and the new Melbourne Central. We were walking alongst Swanston Street and we saw this wood building, and wondered what that was. In turned out to be the newly rennovated Melbourne Central! Well, when i say newly rennovated, that’s because it wasn’t done yet when we were there 6 years ago.

Of course, we had to make a stop for Boost Juice at Melbourne Central! Here’s me having my juice, on the funky chairs that they have all over the place (we’ve had about 3 Boost Juices already since we arrived!).

Let’s see…after that, we went for dinner, although we weren’t remotely hungry yet. Melbourne’s become a lot busier than I remembered, it was pretty difficult to get places to eat. We ended up at a pub for some pub food. I half expected to get carded, and had my hand on my passport all ready to show them that I was legal, but surprisingly they didn’t ask me my age. We had a big plate of nachos to share, and mains all around. So, as my blog title says… *burp*!

It’s now two days later, and I’ll blog about Ee Leng’s wedding another time, but everything else I’ve done, revolves around food. Is it a wonder that my pants are starting to feel tight?

Related posts:

1. Melbourne Day 4
2. Melbourne Day 3 – Eel’s Big Day
3. Melbourne / Christchurch – Day 5

T’s mum was in charge of the decor, and she did a really good job! The theme of the night was yellow, for prosperous-ness, or something like that? So, every table had a little flower arrangement of yellow and white, which looked wonderful!

It was buffet style, amongst the food offered on that night were chicken and mushroom soup, some starters, roast beef, olio pasta, roast lamb, italian fried rice, and of course the desserts. Me being a dessert person, started with the desserts. There was mixed fruit (which I didn’t have until the end, why waste my stomach space with fruits!), chocolate cake, brownies, cheese cake, creme brulee and bread and butter pudding.

And a close up of the desserts that I started off the night with:

My recommendations (if they serve the same desserts on their normal menu) would be the cheesecake and the Creme Brulee, much yummier than the others! As for the mains, there wasn’t anything truly yummy (hence the lack of photos), but I’d say the roast lamb was better than the rest.

T’s sister also brought her contribution for the night. She’s been learning baking, and brought these gorgeously decorated mini-cupcakes. PS: she’s also taking orders, so if anyone in interested, let me know!

I sure walked away stuffed from the dinner that night…

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I got pretty tired of eating KK doughnuts after awhile (do I hear gasps of shock?), especially after Mr T had a project in Sydney and flew there a couple of times over a period of a few months. I think the last time I had a KK doughnut was in Dubai, when I was there transiting on the way back from Egypt.

We’ve been Krispy Kreme-less in Malaysia for a long time. When the doughnut craze was picking up all over the world, the only doughnuts we had were Dunkin Donuts. And then, Big Apple / J. Co opened, I can’t remember which one came first. The queuing lines were crazy at first, then after awhile, it kind of died down. Personally, I would never queue up that long, just for doughnuts! Perhaps 5 – 10 minutes at most, but an hour? I’m not that crazy over it…

I heard from a few people that Berjaya had bought the franchise quite awhile ago, but I hadn’t heard any news of an outlet opening. Until today. The first outlet is opening at Berjaya Times Square and they’re having a promotion! On the 27th of April 2009 at 10am at the main entrance of Berjaya Times Square, these will be their promotions:

- 1st customer gets a Golden Ticket (1-year supply)
- 2nd customer gets a Silver Ticket (6-month supply)
- 3rd customer gets Bronze Ticket (3-month supply)
- 4th till 100th customer gets a month supply
- 101th till 300th customer gets a mug

I wonder how they quantify one year’s supply of doughnuts. One a day? You get free doughnuts every time you go to their counter? Anyway, I’ll definitely go and check it out (probably at the Midvalley branch when it opens, it’s closer), but you’ll not find me queuing up for the free doughnuts!

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Step 1, wash the mushrooms and cut off the stalks, and fry them for a short while. Now, here’s the first mistake Mr T. and I made. I asked him, “So, how many should we cook?” His response was…”All of them lah, otherwise what are we going to do with the rest.” Normally, stuffed mushrooms are an appetiser, where you probably eat no more than 3 – 4, right? We ended up with this many….

The next day, when we we were telling my extended family about it, I estimated the number to be about 20, and Mr. T said no way that it was 20. Well, I counted from this picture, and it’s 22!

Next, we fried up all the other ingredients, garlic and bacon and some tomatoes, and heaped them onto the mushrooms. This was a teeny bit difficult, as some of the mushrooms were so tiny. I was also unsure whether to use the mozarella cheese as a base and then pile everything on top, or whether to pile everything first, then drape the mozarella on top. So, as a compromise, we did it half – half. Yes, I’m a cooking newbie…So anyway, at the end of the exercise, here’s what we ended up with.

It looks a bit messy, but it was hard to stuff everything in there! Also, by this time, it was about 9, and we were pretty hungry. So it went into the oven like that (pre-heated at about 200 C), and it baked for about 15 minutes. And here’s our finished product!

Presentation isn’t great, but hey, I’m a developer, not a designer! :p As long as they’re on the plate and cooked, that’s what counts, right? They tasted pretty good, obviously nowhere close to Dave’s standard, but definitely a success. And hey, my mum ate two, and considering that there’s unhealthy CHEESE on the mushrooms, that must mean that she liked them! We were oh-so-tired of eating mushrooms by the end, it was just so many! And because the finished product picture didn’t look that great, here’s a close-up of one of the mushrooms before it went into the oven, it looks really yummy and juicy.

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1. Moonshine @ Laundry

Well, in my last post I was saying that I wanted to start doing different things with T during weekends. That night, I started going online to see what other things we could do. I found a waterfalls site which is actually pretty good. It lists down all the different waterfalls around the area, and rates the difficulties along with comments about how easy / tough / commercialized the waterfalls are. T didn’t seem too interested in that, he said that it wouldn’t be fun with just the two of us. I don’t know what’s the difference between going on holiday vs waterfalling with just the two of us. Seems the same to me!

Anyway, I asked him to suggest something different, and he said, ‘Let’s go jogging!’. Ugh..I’m so not a jogging person, but I agreed anyway. So, early the next morning (it was Thaipusam), we got ready to go jogging at the TTDI park. When we reached there, I started jogging for about…five minutes, and I got tired. Heheh, I told you I’m not a jogging person! I ended up walking briskly for three rounds of the park. Hey, it’s still exercise, right? I kept telling T to jog ahead of me and he could catch up to me in the next round, but he insisted on sticking with me to keep me company, which I thought was rather sweet of him. Overall, I guess it was quite a successful outing. Now, the only thing I need to do now is to get my stamina up!

So, the next thing that was on our list was making my version of CNY cookies. I didn’t want to make cookies, because there are lots of cookies during CNY. Instead, I googled for a chocolate cornflakes recipe, which can be found here.

Ingredients needed:
One bar of baking chocolate (I used Van Houten, yummy!)
About 3/4 of a big box of Kelloggs cornflakes
A few tablespoons of butter
A cup full of honey

Step 1 is to melt the chocolate. I didn’t want to melt it over the stove, because I kept on reading about people burning the chocolate, etc. The easiest way was to break the chocolate into smaller pieces, and microwave it for about 1 1/2 minutes. Easy peasy!

Then, add the butter, honey and chocolate into the pan and stir until it’s well combined. Those are T’s helping hands, btw!

When it’s well mixed together, add in the cornflakes, and mix once more!

Finally, just put little blobs on the foil covered plates, and leave in the fridge to cool (I wanted to put the cornflakes in those mini paper cupcake holders, but T said it was too much work. I thought that since he was already helping me, I wouldn’t push my luck too far!). For those of you with a sweet tooth, this is a really good recipe, and it’s so easy and fast to finish. Everyone who tried it loved it, and my dad even had two pieces which is the ultimate compliment coming from him!

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We took a First Coach bus down. We normally take Transnasional or Plusliner, because it’s cheap, but it’s such a hassle to go down to Pudu. A one way ticket from First Coach costs RM45, and it drops you at the Novena area. At first, we thought we had to leave from the Bangsar office, but when we went there to buy the ticket, we found out that they’ve launched a new service which departs from the new IBM Building near One Utama! See, that’s why they should have a better site with more information. :p

Anyway, the trip down was pretty uneventful. The hotel that we stayed at was not too bad, my one comment is that they ‘trick’ people with their description! It says it’s a 3 minute walk away from Orchard Road. So, on our first day, we started walking. 5 minutes, and we still hadn’t reached the shopping area of Orchard Road. It took almost 30 minutes to get there! So, we concluded that it means 3 minutes to the START of Orchard Road, which is freakin’ long. They’re not actually lying, but they’re misleading people with their description. Hehe, newbies like us couldn’t be expected to know, I guess.

Favourite things I like about Singapore:

Back in Malaysia, I had no mood to do work at all! It’s so hard to go back to work once you take a long break, especially since it was nice and drizzly this morning, all I wanted to do was the go back to sleep…

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T and I went to the new restaurant for dinner first, The Apartment (that took over Slippery Senoritas). It’s a pretty cool concept, the whole restaurant looks like an apartment, there are sofas, bookshelves, beds, etc. I don’t think I would want to get a table where you sit on the beds, though, I observed most of the people that sat on the beds took off their shoes and had their feet all over the bedsheets.

We ordered a starter called…Vin’s Portobellas, I think. That was good, mushrooms with pesto sauce, yummy! For mains, I had the English Lamb Curry and T had a sandwich, something about a Double Decker. When T’s sandwich came, it was two slices of pretty big bread. When he opened it to have a look inside, the only ingredients inside were pickled onions and cheese! It was so hilarious to see the look on his face. The description said something like ‘Generously built sandwich…Tuscan bread and cheese with pickled onions’. He assumed that because it said generously built, it meant lots of meat. That was a totally overpriced meal, it was RM20! While eating it, he said, “I eat this for breakfast every morning.” A piece of advice from me, don’t order it if you go there. My curry was not too bad, quite tasty, but a little bit too much salt for me.

I wanted to try the desserts, so we ordered a Strawberry Mint Parfait. Mainly because we saw the table next to us order it, and it looked quite unusual. It was strawberries in a glass, with sponge fingers and mint cream. It’s not my first choice for dessert, but it was quite original. For a starter, two mains and a dessert, it came up to about RM55, not too bad, I guess (if only the sandwich was better!).

After that we walked over to Laundry. There were four acts that night, first up was a band called Otam, then Mia Palencia followed by Reza Salleh, and to round it up was Hujan. When Otam started, the sound system was pretty bad. I thought that Laundry may have improved the sound system, because now they had a proper stage with TVs, but I guess the sound system wasn’t upgraded. Poor guy, since he was the lead act, it took some time to get the kinks ironed out with the sound. It was hard to tell, but I don’t think he was that great. Mia Palencia and Reza were their standard selves, pretty good.

After Reza finished, the crowd suddenly swelled, and people started flashing their cameras and screaming. I was wondering what on earth was happening, but it was apparently all for Hujan. I’ve never even heard of them before, but it looks like they were REALLY popular! It was amazing, the amount of attention that they garnered. There was a projector near the table where we were seated, people even stood up and took photos with the images from the projector! We left after the first song, their music really wasn’t to my liking. I couldn’t even understand any words from the lead singer in the whole song.

Later on, I heard that there were even stage dives after the performance, and a table got broken as well! I don’t think Hujan will be invited back to Laundry anytime soon. As for me, I don’t know whether I’m old or what, but I doubt I’ll be going back to Laundry for Moonshine anymore. It’s just too crowded, with a bad sound system. I’d rather pay a cover charge and go to somewhere like No Black Tie.

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When we reached there, it didn’t look like what I expected. I thought it would be a high-class restaurant with candles, etc. but instead, we got a normal middle-class type of place. OK, so maybe the food would be great! The menu looked promising, mainly western food at very reasonable prices. I ordered a 7 cheese lasagna, which was award-winning and highly recommended.

It took pretty long for my food to arrive, when the waiter brought the plate over to me, he dropped my garlic bread on the floor. He picked it up, looked at me, and said, “Umm…so you want me to get you another one?” Of course I want another one! I don’t want you to put a garlic bread that you’ve dropped back onto my plate! Anyway, he went back into the kitchen, and as expected, never came back with my fresh garlic bread. I didn’t want to call him back and remind him, just in case I ended up with spit on my bread. :p

T’s cousin ordered a Southern Country Fried Chicken, and she gave some to us to try. I cut it open and it was so red in the middle, which meant it wasn’t cooked properly! We called the waiter over, and he said, “Yes, yes, country fried chicken fried in batter is like that.” Hmm…with all you hear about bird flu, you would think they’re more careful in preparing their food! Anyway, the next thing he said was, “Next time when you come back, it won’t be like this.” Yeah, right, as if there’s going to be a next time!

So, my advice to anyone thinking of going there, DON’T!

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