Christmas 2008

Christmas is always one of my favourite festive of the year. With holidays, great sales, family reunions, presents exchange, and most of all, FOOD for Christmas!! yumm ~~~

This year, I celebrated Christmas back at home with my beloved family and relatives. Nothing extraordinary though, but as always, it's about catching up with each other and simply homely themed.

On Christmas day, my cousins decided to prepare a Christmas feast at their new home in Puchong ^^ A Christmas celebration cum mini house warming for the new house. My cousins are like superwomans loh. On that day after our service and lunch session at church, they baru started to buy the necessary ingredients and started to prepare around 3 pm. Not to mention almost half of my cousin family were sicked and still recovering from fever and flu! And there we go, a wholesome and yummilicious feast for the day of Christ birth. 

The line up for the feast ~~ fresh from oven ^^

From left, Shepherd Pie (with choices of beef and chicken fillings), pasta celeries with olive oil and herbs, and fresh veggie salad with custom Penang style salad dressings ^^

The beef Shepherd Pie with chessy toppings and gravy flowing fillings. I took 5 rounds of it. It was my favourite !!

Roast chicken with herbs. 

This year we did not get Turkey as the market price for Turkey sky rocketed to around RM40 per kg if not mistaken. Last time where got to so expensive wan. Definitely will cost us a bomb if we were going to prepary Roast Turkey for 30 people loh. So yeah, we bought and roasted 4 chickens instead =)

Pasta salad with green onions and ham tossed with olive oil and herbs.

And fresh veggie salad with Penang style dressing (according to my Penang cousins lah).

Noticed the container with the silver spoon? That's the mayonesse dressing, special as it is tossed with celery and some X-factor stuff (forgot the other ingredients actually =P) that made it tasted like sour cream that fit just right and nice! You should try it too ^^

Last but not least, all the way from Penang, Tom Yum style fried bee hoon.

A hot selling item of the night, extraordinarily popular among the ladies!!

As the year 2009 is coming to an end, I wish everyone Happy New Year 2009!!

Hope you had a good 2008 and wish you a great year ahead =)

Cheers ~~

Merry Happy Christmas ^^

Merry Christmas People !!

Hope you all have a great time out there ^o^

This year I'm celebrating Xmas at home, with my family and relatives =)

May all your wishes come true.. hehe...

God bless you and have a great time!!

Fellow Diners, Beware!!

*note: unusual content ahead. proceed at your own risk. adviced to read it without full stomach.

Life is full of surprises. 
I've learnt that very well recently.

It occured to me during a normal working day.

I was having dinner with my fellow colleagues in a local Chinese restaurant.

We always go to that restaurant as the food there are quite good and reasonably priced.

The restaurant is also quite famous for being 'efficient' as food is served promptly (within 5-8 minutes) as well.

So, as our food is served, we happily makan and makan lah.

As we are half way through our meal,

Suddenly, one of my colleague paused and pointed to her plate.

"Ewwwwwwwww...... Lipas......"

O.o

O.O

o.O

That's our first reaction.

Without second thought, I quickly re-check what I have on my plate and scanned for anything 'alien'.

None... Phew... 

I looked at my colleague's plate and found that there is this little dead roach (cooked till roasted with soy sauce) was lying there. 

I was like "wtf... if I were to be less cautious, I might ended up gobbling down that piece of thing, thinking it as just another chunk of protein'....

Of course, we raised our hand and anxiously waiting to see the restaurant's staff reaction when they discovered that little extra dish. The waiter (some foreign worker) came by. He looked at it, took my 'victimised' colleague's plate, and headed to the kitchen (the little roach is left on the table, not on the plate).

... ... ...

Then he came back with another plate of white rice.

WTF. Is that the way to handle this situation?

Getting upset, we quickly summoned another restaurant staff (a chinese lady).

She came by. We showed her.

She did not look as shocked as I expected.

Rather, she kept quiet and looked at us.

And asked, 

"So what do you want to do? Get a new one for you guys?"

(What the heck? Not even a word of apology?)

We were quite 'de-appetized' by this incident already. 

So we said we don't want a new one, and asked her to take away the dish.

Logically, the restaurant should either replace a 'clean' dish or cancell the order payment to 'compensate' for this kind of incident. Come on, if this restaurant were to be a registered class type, people would have caused a ruckus on sucn thing, to the extreme of going public and defame the restaurant until gulung tikar. 

I think even we have been really 'tolerant' for this situation and did not alarm any other diners around the restaurant. The place was quite full house during the incident by the way.

And so we called for the bill, expecting to only pay for those "healthily served" dish. 

Dim ji when I check the amount, we were charged full, including the 'tainted' dish. 

whaaddaafakkkkk...... not even a apology, and we have to pay in full like nothing happened???

We were furious and demanded for not paying the dish served with the roach. The waiter that handled the bill was giving us the kurang ajar look, and I saw the reaction of the restaurant boss when his mah jai informed him of our demand.

Mana tau that restaurant boss just show his long black face and reluctantly instructed his staff to proceed with our demand. So we ended up paying for the 'clean' food and left the restaurant with anger, dissapointment and frustration.

I am so regret that we did not make a scene for that situation. I think even a 3 year old would know how to handle this situation better. I think at least an apology for the blunder will be enough, and there is no need to give free meal or unreasonable compensation to remedy this matter. 

Lesson leart: To beware and watch what you eat while you dine outside. Life is indeed full of surprises.

Post blogging note: I chose not to disclose the restaurant name as I just want to alert everybody as the title quoted. I think there is no need to create public dispute on somebody. Just be carefull in everything.

A year has gone by

I've just read one of my friends blog about her recent stay in UK. It made me recalled something that I tresured in my life.

Come to think of it, it's been more than one year since I came back from UK. Though I was there for around 4 months, till now the memory of England still resonate in my mind strongly. There are still many things that I missed about UK.

~I missed the summer in Sheffield. It was only 3 weeks of hot sun during summer in the city. Other than that, it was nice and cool, just like Fraser Hill in Malaysia.

~I missed walking around the city and never have to sweat a bit even though I have been walking around for hours, as the weather is just too nice to let the body to sweat it out.

~I missed enjoying chocolates in UK. Holding the dark chocolates on my hand and no need to worry about it getting melted, as the weather is just too good to be true. Really.

~I missed the beer session with my buddies. As quoted by many, alcohols are cheaper than mineral water in UK, and no, I did not get drunk in UK. Never happened.

~I missed the summer sales in UK. Even non-shopaholics like me also can't resist the offer of getting branded goods like Topman at price that is cheaper than Marks and Spencer (or maybe Topshop is commonly a different class of brand compared with M&S?).

~I missed walking around the street alone and not afraid of being robbed and assaulted.

~I missed hanging out the local casinos daily and contributing nothing to it, but earning freebies and some real good stuffs in return =)

~I missed clubbing in UK. Missed the weekly entrance offer to Embrace, where I can get free entrance with 5 pounds worth of voucher for drinks. So it's like spending zero to have fun *huge grin* Where to get such thing in Malaysia?

~I missed travelling around UK. The classic beauty of old England in Cambridge, watched a game in Old Trafford, hang around London and experienced the office rush in underground subways, visited the scenic Scottland, and step around the streets of Manchester, and many many more.

And the list will continue on and on...

Well, those are just shreds of memento that I wanted to share to you all. The picture collection at the right side of my blog will tell more of my time in UK. Maybe if I'm free, I will post something up that relates to my stay in UK.