RMCO Day 75 ~ Sunday, 23 August 2020

This morning hubs brought his Charlie's Angels to the Datuk Lee Chong Wei Sports Arena Sentosa to play badminton while I stayed home and burnt calories doing chores.  Hubs used to bring the girls to the park to play or to our condo's pool to swim and play water guns when they were younger.   And not forgetting the many trips to the indoor theme parks and kids' gyms where hubs would sacrifice the entire morning to have fun with them. He used to be the fun daddy who would play and be crazy with them. But when our pre-schoolers turned into tweens and then teens, these outings got fewer and then stopped as they no longer like theme parks and playgrounds. Plus daddy has always been super busy with work.   Fortunately there's something that the girls and their dad like to do together at the court now besides eating. Besides badminton, the girls like to play basketball, just like their dad who's a basketball fanatic. They sometimes follow hubs to the basketball indoor court to watch tournaments.

After badminton, we had lunch at Banh Mi Cafe, a new Vietnamese street food cafe at our neighborhood. 

Pho with tender pork knuckles and beef, BBQ squids, grilled quail and lemongrass turmeric frog.

Beef Pho, rice noodles salad with BBQ chicken, shrimp spring rolls and pork banh mi.

The Vietnamese desserts knocked my socks off and well worth the calories!   I love every one of the unique dessert as they are all served with thick, luscious coconut milk while not being overly sweet.  Diet be damned!

What an epicurean street feast we've had that was to be our lunch and dinner. As usual, hubs ordered too much again and that filled us up the entire day.  Food was a delight and everyone enjoyed it.  Prices of all the dishes on the menu are reasonable and definitely a bang for your buck. We'll definitely be back again soon!

After lunch, we segued next door to another newly opened coffee place - ZUS Coffee and took advantage of the buy-1-free-1 coffee promotion.  I chose the pandan gula melaka coffee which hit all the right notes for me.

Banh Mi Cafe

266, Jalan 4/109f, Taman Danau Desa, 

58100 Kuala Lumpur, 

Phone: 03-7971 6527

ZUS Coffee

No 11-0-10, Jalan 4/109F 

Danau Business Centre 

Taman Danau Desa,

58100  Kuala Lumpur

Our Teenage In-House Chef

Her love for cooking and food is uncontainable.  She'll go the extra mile to cook something yummy (complete with food aesthetics) for herself, any time of the day. She would wake up at 6 a.m. to prep her lunch box for her breakfast and lunch in school before leaving the house at 7:15 a.m.  Earlier this week, when she got home from school at 2:30 p.m., she darted straight to the wet kitchen for a quick prep of sweet potato dessert before savouring the yummy bowl in front of the PC whilst she attended online tuition class.

This is just so not me for I'm not a food lover, don't like cooking and don't like washing dishes 😂.

Sherilyn reminds me of my mum who has always loved baking and would bake delicious snacks for us several times a week when we were growing up. I was always her assistant. Thus, though I don't like baking, nonetheless, I still know the basics of baking.  Mum was a teacher and she would bake snacks in the evening for our teatime and  our recess the next day.  I miss mum's char siew pau, sardine puffs, sausage buns, chicken pies, bread pudding, sago pudding, pandan chiffon cake, steamed sponge cake and the list goes on and on. If only mum stays near me!

Purple and orange sweet potato boiled with ginger and Gula Melaka with chewy sweet potato cubes that she made two weeks ago.

And she cooked Japanese style garlic fried rice at 9 p.m. so that she could bring it to school the next morning:

She cooked extra so that Cass and Alycia could have it for lunch the next day.

Restaurant Eight Treasure @ Taman Connaught, Cheras

Today hubs was in the mood to venture a little further out of our neighborhood for lunch.  Since the start of the Recovery MCO, we've only been eating out at our neighborhood or places near our neighborhood. Today hubs brought us to Cheras for an indulgence in sublime homecooked style Hakka dishes.

The Yong Tau Foo platter was so good that we ordered another portion for takeaway for our dinner tomorrow.  As Maria only comes in twice a week now, I take every opportunity to tapau food back so that we don't have to cook.  Cooking = washing = oh. my. poor. hands. 😖  I'm still nursing a painful right wrist that cannot be turned at most angles. Though recovery is slow, it's getting better. I have to be careful not to overuse my right hand.

The braised yam with pork belly was a delight and the sauteed brinjal with minced pork tastes like the one cooked by the MIL.

Steamed pork belly with prawn paste and red chillies (very tasty but a tad salty for our tastebuds), steamed tofu with homemade fish paste (perfect!), braised chicken with ginger and wine and sauteed 'lai park' veggie.

Eight Treasures serves very good 'Pan Mee' too but when we were there at 11-ish a.m., it was already sold out.  

The menu isn’t diverse enough to please those who expect to see a thick menu with at least 30-50 dishes but it reads as a strong statement that the food is modest traditional Hakka dishes. Eight Treasure doesn’t pride itself on inventiveness or fancy presentation but the food exudes the quality and taste, as can be evident from the steady stream of patrons walking in and a full-house eatery by the time we left at around 12-ish noon.

Today's lunch is definitely well worth venturing out to Cheras. Thankfully there was no sight of the usual traffic crawl along the highway. After lunch, we went to our favorite bakery to get low-sugar chocolate cake and chocolate chiffon cake for the girls to bring to school tomorrow.

Restaurant Eight Treasure

20 Jalan Waras 1,

Taman Connaught, Cheras

56000 Kuala Lumpur

+603 9130 1066

RMCO Day 64 ~ Wednesday, 12 August 2020

I have just submitted the 10th and last article to my online boss and the euphoria feeling is akin to completing my last paper in the SPM exam😁. When my online boss told me on Monday noon that she's got a large batch of articles to write and gave me 10 topics with a deadline of Thursday, I had little confidence that I could meet the tight deadline. I told her that I'd return the unfinished articles to her by Wednesday to enable her to find other writers. And for the next 2.5 days,  my butt was glued to my work chair and I kept typing and typing till I have blurry vision and stinging eyes now.  Add on a gassy stomach too from stress and loss of appetite from all the rush 😐.  As I'd mentioned before, I always work better under stress. My brainpower seems to only get properly fired up when Cortisol floods my system, which has its pros and cons. 

After two days of staying home to complete the articles, I really need to go to the supermarket to stock up on groceries and fruits. And I need my fix of  Nyonya kuih  to help me de-stress 😁.   I'm going to run for an hour at the park tomorrow morning to get my dose of Endorphins to zap away the stress hormones in my body. Running and exercising give me a high and IF I had more time for myself, I'd put the time into exercising.  This will be my retirement plan - exercise twice a day! That's how I find my zen.

I'm back at eating an egg a day after eating rather unhealthy food for breakfast for the past few months during the MCO. During the house quarantine, I was craving for junk food (to de-stress) and you'll be shocked to see my kitchen drawer stocked up with Twisties, muruku, Mamee and other 'healthy' snacks in packets.  My girls were in disbelief each time I got back from groceries shopping 😂.  My junk food crave is satiated now and I'm back to healthy eating again, with the exception of Nyonya kuih, my ultimate kryptonite. 

Snacks of crispy bread biscuit and kaya which I bought from a street vendor this morning to support him, to give to Maria, our part-time helper who's coming in today.

RMCO Homecooked Meals

Lately I've been posting many photos on the delectable food dished out by hubby's chef as we've been eating a lot of these.  Before the MCO, we ate mostly homecooked food as we have Maria, our part-time helper to help us wash and clean up 5-6 days a week. Now that she only comes in twice a week and I've overused my right hand till the wrist is inflamed, I try to take the easy way out with takeout from hubby's shop. Since his chef cooks everyday, why not get him to cook extra for us?  The Mil can take a respite from cooking too and my poor hands get to rest.  Although my right hand needs many days and weeks of rest to fully heal, it's not quite possible not to use it. The best I can do for my wrist is to try not to turn or twist it at certain angles, avoid carrying heavy things, rub deep heat cream and stick Salonpas on it. 

Thus, the mil only cooks about 3-4 times a week now.  I plan the menu and shop for the ingredients. These are some of the dishes that she dished out this week:

One pot chicken rice with yam, long beans, dried shiitake mushrooms and Chinese sausage. My kind of meal!

My all-time comfort food - roast pork bones porridge with carrots. 

Stir-fried French beans with fried 'foo pei' and Mugwort ('Ngai') omelette:

Fried 'Loh Sue Fun' with homegrown mung bean sprouts, prawns, fried 'Foo Pei', crab balls, eggs, French beans and pork. We had this for lunch and dinner today.

Banana cupcakes (with ground almonds) baked on Tuesday and marble loaf cake baked on Wednesday, by MIL:

My 100% flawless Cameron Highlands avocado, bought from a family at the park. It's jumbo sized and only costs RM7.30.  I hope the seller has Camerons avocados again next week.  

This vegetables seller lost his job when the pandemic swept the world and shut it down. He's another new kid on the block at our neighborhood, joining the dozen who had to resort to selling vegetables and food by the roadside during the MCO.  His whole family comprising his wife, aged mother and two young sons (aged about 13YO and 5YO) tag along to the park to help him sell vegetables. His stall is always swamped with customers (mostly senior citizens) who go for their daily morning exercise at the park.

A stone's throw away from the park are two new pop-up roadside stalls selling Nyonya kuih, biscuits and traditional Chinese desserts. One vendor used to sell ladies clothes and bags at the night market and another vendor used to be a tour operator.  Covid-19 is like the Black Death for micro businesses and tour operators.  I've been patronizing these stalls regularly to give them all the support that they need right now so that they can continue to place food on the dining table for their families. 

RMCO Day 54 ~ Sunday, 2 August 2020

Hubs still had the Oriental Group vouchers that he received when he applied for membership at the Oriental Cuisine Club late last year.   He was too busy with work back then and didn't have the time to bring us to dine at participating restaurants. Then came the sodding virus that kept us grounded and catapulted our lives upside down for many months. Now that we are all allowed to go out together as a family for a meal, hubs quickly utilized the vouchers before they turned void. 

Our lunch today was at Oriental Treasure @ The Sphere, Bangsar South.  The last time we had dim sum together as a family was half a year ago. The girls used to sulk whenever their dad said that he's bringing them for dim sum as we were having dim sum pretty frequently back in the good days, until the girls got disinterested. Now that they've been grounded for so long, any meal in a fancy air-conditioned restaurant seems to be a luxury to them. Sometimes all we need is a misevent in our lives to press the reset button in us; to make us appreciate the things that we are blessed with instead of taking things for granted.

We also ordered two trays of char siew pau for takeaway. And the bill was only slightly more than RM100 for all these after utilizing the vouchers.  What a great deal!

New norm at restaurants:

Face masks are only allowed to be removed when we eat or drink, else everyone has to mask up 😷

RMCO Day 52 ~ Friday, 31 July 2020 (Homemade Sweet Potato Cubes / Balls)

It's Hari Raya Haji and a public holiday today.  Our baking queen decided to play with play dough and doughed out something that she'd wanted to make for a long time - sweet potato cubes / boba balls! And mil decided to make Jiao Zi (dumplings).  Grandma and grand daughter sat alongside each other at the dining table, kneading dough - grandma made savoury delight and grand daughter made dessert delight. It's like a scene from a Chinese restaurant where kitchen staff are hard at work kneading dough to churn out dumplings for hungry customer waiting impatiently outside the kitchen.

Purple, orange and yellow sweet potatoes were steamed, mashed, mixed with tapioca flour and  a sprinkle of sugar and kneaded into  addictive chewy cubes and balls -- cubes for Taiwanese dessert bowl and balls for 'tong sui' and bubble milk tea!

Kids and adults will find it hard to say NO to these colorful chewy cubes that go inside their dessert bowls filled with red bean tong sui, shaved ice cream and grass jelly.

These precious babies are stored in Ziploac bags in the freezer.

Sherilyn's creative ways of savoring the sweet potato cubes and balls:

Added into red bean + lotus seeds + Mandarin peel tong sui with swirls of evaporated milk (to replace fresh santan):

Added into boiled ginger and Gula Melaka water:

Taiwanese sweet potato cubes / Taro balls dessert bowl, composed of red bean tong sui, shaved ice-cream potong (red bean flavor) and sweet potato cubes. Would be good if we had taro/yam too, for the cubes and balls.

This one is without red bean tong sui but with grass jelly:

Sherilyn's homemade sweet potato balls and cubes are so addictively chewy and delightful that I think she should produce them in bulk to sell. It's a way healthier alternative to commercial boba/pearl balls.  This is another item on her 'to sell wishlist' which she can produce to sell during the long school holidays.  This girl is overflowing with creativity and ideas and I'm just so amazed at what she can make and do!