Best Chinese New Year recipes, foods and travel

I forgot that I didn’t make a mandatory post to show off the heavenly, yummy, exotic, traditional, international (add more good descriptions) foods we had during the 3rd food bloggers gathering. I posted on my personal blog but I think this is the most appropriate place to do so.

(Photo credit : Ken of Food POI)

It is not just any food gathering but one that showcased all the best foods from some of the best Penang food bloggers. Hehehe, ‘go in basket, carry self’.

The host Gill and Jason has graciously let us hungry food bloggers to converge at their parents’ home. Their hospitality is beyond words. They provided us a barbeque stove, electric oven to roast a whole chicken contributed by Ken, a cheese fondue with ‘imported from Europe’ cheese sauce, salads, drinks and warm hospitality.

I have a prior engagement at College General, a thanksgiving mass with appreciation dinner but I kept an empty stomach for the food bloggers’ gathering. I brought smoked salmon, homemade focaccia and cream cheese. Initially, I wanted to throw in more exotic cheese and caviar but the price increases told me to ‘ubah gaya hidup’ (change of lifestyle). So, it was just smoked salmon and focaccia. I bought about one kilogram of smoke salmon for about RM75 but I didn’t bring all to the gathering. The thing with foods like this is to prepare just enough or too much will make one sick of the taste. Hehehe, also can save costs, right?

This is how we do it! We snap the photos of the foods from every angles, every sides, every corner. If camera flash light can cook, those foods would be burnt to charcoal.

This is the host, Jason. He introduced us to roasted pork (siew bak) with cheese fondue. It is like the most heavenly thing on earth. His wife, Gill also prepared fresh lemonade with pomegranate. The foods on that night is almost an international dish with Swiss cheese fondue, Norwegian salmon, Korean kimchi fried rice, Malaysian kerabu, China Hakka abacus, Japanese sushi, arrgh…I get hungry just thinking of those foods we had. I will not post photos of the foods here because I had done that in my personal blog and moreover, I didn’t take many pictures because I was more eager to eat.

For more photos and write ups on the gathering, hop on over to these sites:

Criz Bon Appetite

Ken of FoodPOI

Steven Goh

thenomadGourmand

CK Lam

Lilian

Other floggers who attended the gathering:

Min from After Giovanni

Allen Ooi from Yummy Station

and of course our hosts!! Gill & Jason

I copied the above links from Lingzie who organised this gathering. I am now looking forward to the next food bloggers gathering. Things can only get better, huh?

I better go on a diet soon because my godma said I am fat. I told her, “Never mind, Lent is coming, I will go on a vegetarian fast for 40 days.” Wrong reason to go on a vegetarian fast!

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It was raining heavily just now and suddenly, the family is in the mood to eat seafood. So, I did a bit of Googling and read several Penang Bloggers’ blogs to find a new place to go. I stumbled upon Criz’s recommendation for Hock Lye Seafood. Then, New Kid on the Blog and Andrew of PenangFoodGalore also mentioned this place.

(drunken, live tiger prawns, RM35 for 500 grams - nice….)

So, we set off to hunt for this place, after I had jotted down what we are going to order and how to get there, based on the three blogs I linked above. Can you believe that throughout our meals, from around 5.30 pm till about 6.30 pm, we were the only table there? Times must be bad huh? It is only towards the end that three other tables were filled up.

Getting there is an experience because we hardly drive to this part of the island. Hock Lye is hidden amongst local cost flats and the Jelutong Expressway. You get scenic views of the mangrove area, see some nice new esplanade with new houses that costs above RM1 million and at the same time, stumbled on cheap low cost flats that look like pigeon holes. It is one big rojak of new housing areas, old, broken housing areas and lots of cheap low cost flats.

From the look of the area, you know this place enjoys brisk business because everything is big. Lots of tables, lots of parkings, lots of dishes, lots of fresh live fishes, prawns, shellfish, crabs in the tank and they serve drinks in jars.

We started the meal with Emperor Noodle which is thin, egg noodles fried with seafoods.

The marmite chicken is good too because there is no overpowering taste of Marmite.

We actually ate this horrible looking fish call ‘loong tan’ (dragon egg?). It is a very big fish and we had a 400 gram slice for RM32. The flesh is sweet and I love the fish skin. Since it is a big fish, it doesn’t have the ‘fish texture’ but taste like chicken. None of us like fish texture and only a few of my kids eat fish.

No, they didn’t kill the big fish to steam for us. The big one is for display only. The one we ate is reared in the sea off the island.

With so many kids, each of them have their own favourite dish. Mine of course is the drunken prawns on the first photo. The tiger prawns, caught alive from the tank is so sweet when dunk into boiling wine soup. Too bad they didn’t prepare the live prawns on our table or you will get a video of prawns burning in hell. Hehehe.

Meanwhile, the above fried dish is the mantis prawns with cereal. We find the cereal too sweet and had told the owner. But my younger kids like the sweetish taste.

Our initial plan was to go out and eat crabs. However, after taking so many of the dishes, we were too full to finish our crabs. The crab is recommended by the lady boss. It is salted duck egg yolk with curry leaves and maybe some butter flavour. We tapau the crabs home and I shall savour it later.

After all the seafoods, there is no more space for vegetables. The total bill comes up to only RM166 which is rather cheap. I like Hock Lye because their cooking is rather ‘mild’ and you do not get jelak from all the seafoods. They also don’t give us those peanuts or cold towel, hence save us from paying for useless things we do not need.

Please head over to either one of the blogs mentioned to get the directions. Hubby took us for a ride to see the RM1 million homes by IJM so I totally have no recollection on how to get there.

Hock Lye phone is 2627524

Service is good too because we broke a glass and they didn’t make a fuss or charge us. Or maybe they did but we can’t read Mandarin so we wouldn’t know if it is billed to us. Well, service should be good because we were the only patron and I brought my DSLR there to ’scare’ them to give us fresher seafoods. Hehehe. It works all the time. The DSLR trick to intimidate restaurants to give better services and fresher foods.

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The joy of baking cookies lies not only in the eating but the baking process. I enjoy doing it because it means a good opportunity for me to bond with my children. This afternoon, a lazy Sunday, my little boy and I baked a batch of cornflakes cookies. Just the two of us doing it because my older children were sleeping. It is their last day of waking up late (and sleeping late too) because school, college and kindie start tomorrow, Monday 5th January, 2009.

I recently bought a cookies recipe book by Alan Ooi. It is found in Popular Bookshop at RM20. It has some cute and easy to bake cookies and since my little boy love the photos of the various cookies, we bought it and start sampling with the recipe.

The cornflakes cookie I baked is adapted from the book call Y3K series. I do not have some of the ingredients mentioned in the recipe and I added some extra stuffs. So, the below cornflake cups cookies is based on the adapted recipe :

RECIPE FOR CORN FLAKES COOKIES

Preheat oven at 170 deg. celcius. Prepare about 90 tiny paper cups (like the cupcakes cup but tiny ones)

PART A - 100 gram butter
80 grams caster sugar

Cream the above till white and fluffy.

PART B - 1 egg
1/2 tsp of vanilla essence

Beat egg with a fork and add vanilla. Add to the Part A above and mix well.

PART C -
150 grams soft flour (soft flour is normal wheat flour but it is better for cookies)
15 grams custard powder (custard powder will give cookies more crunch and yellowish tinge)
30 grams Nestum cereal
50 grams ground almond
1/2 tsp of emulder (it is supposed to give cookies its crunchiness)

CORN FLAKES - About 50 grams, gently mash the bigger pieces

(corn flakes for coating the cookies)

Mix all the above well. Add to the batter of Part A+ Part B. Use your hands to mix well and form a ball. If the batter is too wet and cannot form balls, add a bit of flour. If it is too dry, add a bit of water.

Form into tiny marble sizes and put into the cornflakes to coat the cookie. Put each ball into the individual paper cups. Bake for about 20 to 25 minutes.

Little hands love to help setting out the paper cups on the baking tray. My little boy also enjoyed rolling the cookie dough in the corn flakes and putting them into the paper cups.

He also helped to count the number of cookies (though not accurate because the cups are all over the tray). We counted about 90 cookies.

This is the crunchy, really scrumptious corn flakes cookies we baked. I use red paper cups as red is a much favoured colour for Chinese New Year. My boy said he is going to bring the cornflake cookies to kindie tomorrow. We bought him a lunch box and he is so excited about bringing foods to kindie. This will be the first time he is going to kindie so I am keeping my fingers crossed that he will enjoy school as much as he anticipated. Pray there is no tears or separation anxiety because he is such a baby to us, being the youngest in the family. From past experiences, excitement before going to school does not equal the same kind of excitement when they are really in school.

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Pak Lah has his nasi kandar shop. Eat already get sleepy. Tun Dr. M has his bakery. Eat already, tongue and mind also sharp like Tun. I wonder what kind of shop will our future PM opens? Pomegranate shop? Eat already get rosy cheeks and ruby lips like him?

After our trip to the Langkawi Geopark Cable Car ride, we stopped by the marina or what they call Telaga Harbour. Here you can see how the rich and famous play. They have awesome yachts berthing at the marina. I even bumped into Dato’ Azhar the famous round the world sailor when I was there. Too bad I was too scaredy cat to ask for a photo with him. He was every bit the sailor, with sunburnt skin, white sailor outfits and sipping coffee at one of the super expensive joints.

The Telaga Harbour reminds me of Lake Como in Italy. It has the same kind of staircases lined with flowers. But of course, it is nothing like Lake Como.

We went in to The Loaf which we have heard so much. We look around the range of buns, breads, cheesecakes and other yummy looking desserts.

My little boy bought a mask bun. I whispered to the other sons, “Eh, don’t touch anything, ok? Too expensive…..Wuah…one bread RM18! What the…. Faster, cepat blah (get out).” And we slithered out of The Loaf.

Yes, we are cheapskates. The only other thing we bought from The Loaf is this tiny cup of cheesecake. Both the mask bun and this cheesecake are just normal stuffs you can get from other bakeries. There are other more exclusive things at The Loaf but we feel it is too expensive for us to indulge in. There goes my plan of having expresso and eating dainty pastries, watching the yatchs bobbing in the water.

In the end, my kid also never finished the mask bun, such a waste. It was dry and tasteless.

We then drive further and went to a small pasar. Bought some really scrumptious Malay apom balik or ban chean kueh. It was so nice. A piece costs a few cents only and we bought several because there were 10 of us in the group. To quench my thirst, I bought a can of Carlsberg because it is about the same price as a can of 100 plus.

So, a trip to The Loaf tells me that we live in different world, Tun M. Poor rakyats like us enjoy life with apom balik. Rich people like you have your own Japanese bakery for enjoyment. Sigh….the disparities in our lives.

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I wonder if anyone knows where I can buy seeds to grow my own herbs? I have checked some of the supermarkets here and cannot find any herbs seeds. It will be nice to have pots of fresh herbs, ready for the plucking.

I normally buy a few types of herbs and keep them in my fridge. It doesn’t matter if the herbs dried up in storage because they still smell as good. Some of the herbs I use in cooking are :

BASIL

Basil is good in pasta. You can slice the basil, add some dried chillies, olive oil, garlic to boiled pasta to make a nice aglio olio. Or you can buy two small bunches and pound them with some nuts (like pine or walnut) to make pesto sauce.

The rest of the photos here are taken from a poster I found in a restaurant. The poster is from Genting Garden. You can also find out the use of the different herbs in cooking on their website.

DILL and MAJORAM

I like dill because the fine green leaves look like Chinese fatt choy. Moreover, it is beautiful when used to garnish foods. You can chopped up majoram and use it in your omelette.

THYME

Thyme and Sage are two hardier herbs, the leaves being rough and hard. They have stronger smell, just like rosemary. So, I use them in seasoning chicken or lamb for roasting. They also imparts a nice flavour in stews as well.

SAGE

Sage leaves has a rough texture and usually, I cook them whole or tear them roughly (instead of cutting it finely).

ROSEMARY

I also like rosemary and it is lovely with some lemon and butter seasoning, use in roasting chicken or lamb. Rosemary and garlic make lovely pairing. I also have a packet of rosemary tea with licorice bark. It makes a calming herbal tea.

All these herbs are rather expensive but I find them indispensable in preparing Western dishes. So, I normally stock about three types at one go. I store them in my chiller, purposely allowing them to slowly dry up. These dried up herbs still taste better than those bottled, dried herbs found on the supermarket shelves. The smell is milder and nicer.

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