Cooking again

After leaving the UK for about two years now, I hardly ever keep myself updated with new food recipes. The only few times I stepped into the kitchen to cook was for fellowship dinner. Many time I do feel quite rusty in my cooking, so I decided to use up the mushrooms and pasta I bought from Italy from my last business trip to cook me and my mom some dinner.

Pasta used to be the easiest food for me to cook when I was in UK. For some reason, cooking it now seems to be much more of a challenge. Maybe a sign that I need to practice my cooking more... sigh... Anyway, after much effort, this is what came out of the pot.

Verdict:
Presentation - 40/100
Taste - 70/100

(as judged by myself and my mom =P)

Some yummies from Japan

I love Japanese packaging. Not only does their food taste great, even their packaging looks fantastic, that is why it is so hard to resist buying some back home to eat. This mocchi is supposed to be a high class mocchi brand with a variety of really nice flavours. The sales person at the counter even asked how long my flight was so that they could freeze it with dry ice to keep it fresh until I reached home =0. No wonder it is so expensive. The cake at the bottom is a green tea cake. I love green tea, and the cake looked really good, so I bought some home to try, It was really soft and tasty, not too sweet, just purrrrrrrrfect... Yummy!

 deliciously soft mocchi (best i have had)

green tea cake... gotta love it

And what do we have in Midvalley...

Pei Yee and I went to Midvalley last Saturday and guess what we saw ... wait... words just can't describe it, lets just see the photo:

- located just beside Pizza hut -

Yes... it is true, the nation wide domination has begun! =P

Return of the Kreme

we waited for its arrival...

This post is a few weeks too late. I was supposed to put up a post when I had my first taste of the Krispy Kreme invasion into Malaysia, which was the FIRST day the shop opened in Berjaya Times Square..hehe =) (imagine evil laugh with annoying grin).

Just in case you are wondering ... No I did not queue up the whole day on Monday just to eat it on the first day. Soo Aun was the kind brother who offered me a box that he bought on his way back from work. As you can see from the two "missing" doughnuts, I was obviously not patient enough to wait for the picture to be taken before I started digging in.

finally it has arrived...

So how was it? Was it as good as the first time I had it in London? ...... Well it wasn't AS GOOD, but it came pretty close, and it was delicious! The melt in your mouth texture of the doughnut is just so SEDAP, HO CHAK, OISHII NE!

It was so good that my parents went to Time Square the following Saturday and bought back another box. This time we finished it before I even got to take a picture of it =p.

Of course, I had to go to visit the place for myself, so this time I went for the Big Daddy of them all - the one dozen assorted variety deal.

sigh... it is almost impossible to take a photo with all the doughnuts untouched

Welcome to our country Krispy Kreme

I can't believe it... when Pei Yee told me that Krispy Kreme is actually coming to Malaysia, I was like ......... K ............ KR ......... KRIS ............ KRISPY ......... KRISPY KR ............ KRISPY KRE ..............

!!!!!! Krispy Kreme !!!!!!

- image from www.krispykremeaddicts.com -

Well all I can say is this:

Finally! Tan Sri Vincent Tan.

Prayer meeting

Whenever we have regional prayer meeting, there is always good food to look forward to. Why? Because KGC's very own Iron Chef is 'in-da-house'! Cooking up delicious meals is a matter of "white peanuts" for aunty Tan, just look at what we had for our last meeting... Yummy!


So on behalf of all who attend Uncle Hong Boon's house for prayer meeting, I would like to apologize for keeping aunty and her prayer meeting specialties exclusively to our side of the regional prayer meeting. =P

Morel

If you have never heard of morels, I suggest you that you should try it, because it is absolutely delicious. It has a very strong earthy mushroom flavour, almost nutty and with a sponge like texture that is just wonderful. The first time I came across this type of wild mushroom is from a comic book of all places. Ever since I was intrigued by this mysteriously weird shaped delicacy. I finally found it in a very small corner in the supermarket which is apparent since morels are considered to be quite expensive. As always I just cannot resist buying them and trying them for myself. The result, a fantastic mushroom fragrance not just on the plate, but the entire kitchen. YUMMY!

For those of you curious as to where the morels are in this dish, its at the left side of the plate, the brown textured thing. This was a chicken dish, the morels were used to make the sauce and since I dun like to waste such an expensive food, I served it as a side dish.

Pancakes

 Yet another adventure in the kitchen, This time just plain pancakes. To be honest I only made this dish because of its aesthetics of it rather than taste. I always wanted to make the HUGE pancakes that you see in comics and cartoons with beautiful big round brown fried marks on it. =P

Spanish feast

There is something about paella that just seem to put me of this dish. Maybe because I had a bad experience eating it for the first time in this spanish restaurant which really didn't cook it well. The only reason I decided to try my hand on this dish myself is because of a food program which just made it look so good. So for this dish I had two of my "firsts". My first time cooking a spanish paella and my first time cooking with the most expensive spice in the whole world - saffron. Why all the trouble and cost? Because I believe paella is a much better dish despite my initial impression of it.

粽子(Dumplings)

Ever since I saw my mom made these dumplings years ago, I knew I had to try to make some myself one day. A word of caution: Anyone who wishes to attempt this is in for some really hard work. It took two people a whole night just to make a few batches of small dumplings. Was it worth it? Well, after eating what you made yourself, it is always worth it.