H means HOLIDAY!

Holiday holiday holiday. It was the long awaited week long of Raya and National day holiday. 3 more days to go before going back to the hectic life of a busy working lady. Still cant believe how fast time passes.

Anyway, i was the full time housewife for the past few days. Its a funny feeling whereby you know that you can sleep as much as you can without worry that you might be late for work; whereby an hour before the lunch or dinner and automatically you'll started to think what to cook. And the best of all is there are so much of free time and yet you are not getting bored of it at all (not yet maybe).

For the past few days, i have been watching many episode of The Voice; sewing my pupurin (of course you dont know what it is, cuz i will only reveal it in my next blog); working on my wedding photobook to sent for printing; and cooking for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If this is how's a house wife's life is all about, i think i'm managed well. ;)

So come back to my cooking. I have been reading alot about recipes from food blogs and planning on how to best utilize all the raw materials which has been slowly piling up in my fridge. So this are the dishes i cooked yesterday and the day before.

Breakfast was Omelet with alot of stuff in it like spinach, tomatoes, luncheon meet etc. 

Lunch was the pork with potatoes salad

Dinner was again the pork with fresh leafy vege and kolo mee (all the way from Sarawak)

The pork was inspired by Tables for 2's no-bake-cha-siew, but i didnt cook it long enough until its melting soft. I like my pork a bit chewy. hehehe. 

Yesterday brunch was osmanthus scrambled egg. I wanted it to be a vermicelli dish more than an egg dish, so put more vermicelli than what was required in the recipe. It was alright, nothing fabulous. Maybe it meant for egg dish anyway.

Peter is busy cooking lunch right now, his favorite Italian cookings. The flagrant of the fried onion is filling up my nostrils as I'm writing the blog now. yum, yum... Stay tune cuz i will definitely post up the picture in a while. :)

Happy merdeka day to all!

Official Wedding Photo Pt 1: The Bride

Taking a break from my Taiwan post to give way to some of my wedding photos from the photographer.

I figure out i wont be uploading all the photos onto fb and leaving it there waiting to be tagged or if not rotten as no one will care about it. So am choosing three of my favorite of each theme to share with you all in this blog. So here comes the first, which is me, myself and I.

Hope you've enjoyed it.

Taiwan Trip Part 2

The second day of Taiwan started off with onion pancake (蔥油餅) at hawkers stall at the underground shopping street of Long Shan Temple MRT Station.

Frankly the onion pancake tasted alright, i've asked the aunty to add in pork leg pieces however its still a bit bland to my taste bud. There were alot of this funny leaves (i think its 九層塔- chinese basil leaves) inside which resembles some sort of herb taste and its kinda over powering.

Anyway, back to the Long shan Temple. The temple is huge but not as huge as our Ke Lok Si at Penang, there were many lady monks (do you call them nuns as well?) praying earnestly to the idols and there are seas of people buying the lucky charm and burning joysticks.

The infamous temple is located in a very old part of Taipei city called Wan Hua District. Peter and I were amused by so many old people wandering around the old streets and run down buildings in this area. It actually felt like the other side of the coin of the Taipei City which was never surfaced in those tourist advertisement on the tele. In fact it was a stark contrast of the picture of clean and advance Taipei city which we are more familiar with.

We got to know more about the old district when we went to the next destination which is 剥皮寮. The old district were inhabited by the Taiwanese natives- Bangka or Mongka (艋舺), during those early days, the people build their lives around the tradings of goods with the Han chinese along the Danshui river, and the natives uses canoe (獨木舟) and cows as their means of transportation and that's why the place we known as Bangka (which basically means canoe in their native tongues).

剥皮寮 is one of the oldest street in Taiwan which was restored and made anew in order to preserved its historic value. We were having great fun appreciating its history, old buildings, billboards, displays, and they looked absolutely stunning in digital.

In fact there was this SHE music video and a Taiwan local movie named Monga which talks about gangsterism, underworld activities, sex trade etc. which were being filmed here!

There were many old quarters/ shop houses being converted to living museum, whereby the history was described in details through posters and pictures hang on the wall, on top of that, there is a multimedia room which shows documentary of 艋舺 to the tourists. After we get bored with all the history, we started to do some funny things to entertain ourselves.

We were giggling like children when we took those pictures. It was super funny.

Next stop was the famous shopping street Xi Men Ding. Its a shopping heaven for the youngsters, whereby there were many street performances, concert being held in this busy hippy street across the year.

It was actually kinda hard to believe that we were still in the same wan hua district (its just a station away from the old 艋舺 area) but in Xi Men Ding everything spells of modern and civilisation. Except that they do have one historical building in Xi men ding which is the red house theatre. It was originally a market building and was converted to a theatre. we find that it was kinda boring since we didnt really plan to do shopping, hence we went to have a bowl of the famous "Ah Zong Mee Sua" before we moved on to our next destination.

Well, again, its too bland to my liking. Basically its mee sua in thick sweet soy sauce with some chicken skin strips and corriander leaves. You can see from Peter's facial expression that it was not up to his expectation as well. In fact he thinks that my mom chicken essence mee sua is much better than Ah Zong mee sua. :)

Stay tune for my Taiwan Trip part III post. Gosh, i've written a full post for only half a day of the trip, and i still have another 5 1/2 days of trip to cover!!!

Taiwan Trip Part 1

Going to Taiwan was an impromptu decision.

Peter and I were browsing through Airasia website to purchase last minute tickets to Bali/ Phuket for our honeymoon and we accidentally discovered that it only cost us RM40 more per person if we are flying to Taiwan instead of Indonesia/ Thailand. Well, I've been to Hong Kong and China (Shanghai and Chong Qing) before but Taiwan remains the mysterious virgin land to me, so i'm quite excited with the idea of changing the plan. However what surprised me was that Peter was also keen to choose Taiwan. Well you need to understand that he never really showed that much of interest when it comes to the Chinese culture nor the "Chinese-ism" deep rooted in me which pretty much who i am for the first 20 years of my life. When it comes to Taiwan, what reminded him was always the image of lala mui or lala zai (bimbo girls and guys) and the Chinese entertainment show which i find extremely funny such as 棒棒堂 or 我猜 but is perceived as retarded by his standard. Being an Eurasian, marrying a Chinese girl and having in laws who only watch Chinese channels on the tele was probably something he least expected in his life. LOL

Anyway, my point is it was totally something which is unplanned for and spontaneous, but we were happy when we finally pressed the "Puchase Ticket" button on the website. And heck i was already started to look forward for the honeymoon trip the moment we did that (more than the wedding itself). And i have to say we have no regrets making that decision at all. Taiwan is definitely a FUN place to travel to. There are so many places to see and new things to experience. However, i must say that THE famous Taiwan food which we very much looking forward to was not up to our expectation. It's good but not great enough. There are not much of varieties and if you have tasted food from 1 night market, you have probably tasted all.

Now this bring us to our first night at Taiwan, which is the visit to ShihLin night market. You can tell how eager we were trying to get a taste of the Taiwan food as we literally ran to the so called biggest night market in Taipei once we checked into our lodging place. Frankly, we were expecting like a mile long of street food hawkers but i have to say that our Ming Tian food court at Taman Megah is probably better than ShihLin food stalls. There were not much of varieties and the stalls were serving the same food at every corner. And to make it worse, the smell of smelly taufu is everywhere. I described the smell as shit smell, Peter thought that it was a rotten carcass smell.

Ps: The smell will stick to your hair and Peter literally forced me to go shower and wash my hair once we back to the hotel.

However overall, it was a great eating experience as i have finally tasted "big sausage wrap small sausage". There were so many flavors such as garlic, spicy, wasabi etc., and do you know that the big sausage is actually the sticky glutenous rice?

I think no ones does chinese sausage better than Taiwanese ;)

This is something like a torayaki which filled with different fillings like Red Bean Paste, Carrot slices and butter, and it only cost like RM3 (T$30) for 3.

This is the famous O-ya-jian at RM5 (T$50). In my opinion, Malaysian version better. The taiwan version has to many gelatin like material which the texture is like jelly except it has no taste.

This is another famous pastry which called big pastry wrap small pastry. it wasnt physically appealing so we give it a skip.

We saw some other interesting food like this sausage stall which sell scallions (green onions) wrapped in bacon. This reminds me of Hannah's version of bbq must have- Shitake wrapped in bacon.

Guess what is the most satisfying meal at the end of the day which drew the biggest smile from Peter's face after being tortured by hours of the infused smell of smelly toufu.

It's Yoshinoya's beef rice (T$780). The beef was tender and it tasted heavenly with teriyaki sauce and some ginger mince. Can you imagine that Yoshinoya in Taiwan opens for 24 hours, its 7-11 equivalent. It was truly a fast food restaurant whereby you need to go to counter to order and take your own food and the best thing is the food was served within minutes of ordering.

See how long is the streaky beef strips.

Anyway, thanks to Yoshinoya. the first night of food hunt was ended satisfactorily. Stay tuned for my next post on Taiwan Trip.

Back from Taiwan

For those who didnt know, I was off for honeymoon, and i'm back now! * I hope that justified why i am so inconsistent with my post nowadays *

I have tons and tons to blog about. And Peter just 'softly' reminded me that i have promised to write so much, yet i've posted so less. yeah yeah, i have a whole list of pending posts:

1. My serious writing (which i am seriously contemplating it at the moment)

2. My Liverpool photo-blog

3. The official wedding photos and slides

4. My Taiwan Honeymoon trip- *newly added to the list* :)

Anyway, Taiwan trip is a BLAST! went from City to village, from hotspring to hill, from Gold mines to harbour. I CANT WAIT to share with you all my first hotspring experience, in an open air hotspring bath!

*NO nudity k, nonsense.

Memories from Liverpool

This is an out dated post.

Received a pleasant surprise gift a few days ago before my wedding day. It was a round poster tube with printed UK address sticking on my door grill.

The cover of the envelope was labelled as "Hope to bring your some memories of Liverpool". It was a poster of the Liverpool-European capital of culture poster from a very dear friend of mine in UK who cant attend my wedding day.

My oh my, it indeed brought back so many memories. In fact I was nearly in tears when i saw some of those familiar places which makes me reminiscence on those older days.

Clockwise: The Gormley statue, Crosby beach; Albert dock; Anglican Cathedral, Royal Liver Building

Kim, Ky, Jv and Chek, I wonder would you gals feel the same when you see the photos of all these familiar yet faraway places?

I think i am going to start a series of blog posts to describe the places i have visited previously in Liverpool. It will be fun to see the picture of these beautiful places with me actually in it. ;)