What We'd Been Up To

The school holidays last December had been one of the busiest for us. Decembers have always been leisurely for us but last December was filled with events, entertaining of relatives, late nights and early morning outings and lots of food marathons.  Hubby's cousin, Melissa and her new hubby came back from New Zealand to celebrate their wedding. Their ROM was done in New Zealand. The Yaps from near and far came back just before Christmas and the celebrations only ended on 1 January 2020. I have so many pictures taken at the church wedding, hotel wedding, Chinese tea ceremony and all the glorious food that we feasted on that I don't know where to start!  I'll start from early December 2019 at the start of the school holidays.  Here you go:

In Ipoh, mum gave the girls an angpow each for Christmas and they could buy anything that they wanted with the money. While Sherilyn bought novels, Alycia and Cass got themselves a 800-piece and 500-piece jigsaw puzzle respectively from Puzzle Planet and they lugged back the bulky boxes of puzzles plus the frame all the way back to KL by train. They started on their puzzle project the day they came back from Ipoh and Cass completed her 500-piece puzzle of One Piece (a Japanese anime) the next day. Alycia's 800-piece puzzle (scenery of Kyoto) is still left half incomplete.  Cass started to love jigsaw puzzles since she was 3 years old and still loves puzzles and Lego.


Looks can be deceiving - looks easy but ain't easy.  The puzzle pieces are very tiny and it involves tons and tons of patience, mental acuity and lazer sharp vision to sort out and find the pieces to solve the puzzle. I am one who doesn't have such patience. My eyes will go blurry looking at the puzzle pieces making me dizzy.


It's good to turn off the screens and spend time playing with jigsaw puzzles but this littlest brat ignored my instructions for her to sleep and stayed up till 1:30 a.m. to fix the puzzle. Boy was I enraged with her pig-headedness!

Cass' framed up One Piece puzzle. The puzzles are made of plastic and can't disintegrate easily. The frame costs almost the same as the puzzle and the framed puzzle makes a very pretty decor which can be hung up on the wall. The set of 500-piece puzzle and frame cost almost RM150.






Cass managed to fish out two bouncy balls from the claw machine @ Aeon, Kinta Cinty Ipoh this holiday. She seems to have a fetish with bouncy balls and her collection of bouncy balls you see from the photo here are all her winnings from claw machines and cost me  approximately RM20. I told her that I could easily get her these cheap balls from a toy shop but she likes the adrenaline rush from the claw machine 😏



A day after her 16th birthday, I took Alycia to Family Mart to claim her free macha sofuto (free ice cream in your birthday month when you download the Family Mart app on your mobile phone) while I got the Belgium chocolate sofuto for myself, which is the best in the world - tastes better than Haagen Dazs and pretty close to Godiva's as it's not sweet and very chocolaty.



Before dessert, we had Japanese economy rice, which ain't very economical though. A set of 2 types of vegetables and 1 meat with Japanese rice plus a cup of green tea costs RM10.



We were at Sunway University to view a film production showcase, where chosen student works produced that semester were being screened. Alycia intends to pursue a degree in film-making / film producing / cinematography and by a stroke of luck, I befriended a girl at Sherilyn's dance studio who gave us this opportunity to see firsthand what film production undergrads do. This girl who's 19 years old, is a very talented competitive dancer, a part-time actress and pursuing a degree in law. She has friends who are pursuing a BA of film production at Sunway University.















My Harry Potter devout's dream is to own a set of HP Lego worth RM2,000! It will be hers IF she gets straight As in her UPSR exam 😁






On sedentary days, we all go to the gym at night.


The bookworm still hooked to her novels on the air walker.



The view from my treadmill.



Hubs brought us to Nike @ Pavilion to shop for Nike shoes and apparel! It's our annual year-end affair, his  gifts to us for Christmas. Thank you very much darling 💗



Before shopping at Nike, we first had lunch at Simmer Huang.



With a history dated back to 100 years ago, Simmer Huang presents a cross century dining experience through their Qing Dynasty recipes with its first flagship store in Malaysia, located on the 8th floor of Pavilion Elite KL.

The staff first started off by heating up an induction Simmer Pot and melted a huge piece of coagulated vegetable oil, then threw in more than 10 types of vegetables including onions, garlic, celery, sweet potato, carrot, mushroom, etc.. Juices from the vegetables will be slowly released, creating natural sweetness to the base of Simmer Pot. Wolfberries oil, herbs and spices were added in, followed by your choice of main. It can be Tiger Grouper Filler Pot (RM150), Red Snapper and Cod Fillet Pot (RM130), Signature Chicken Pot (RM90), Assorted Seafood Pot (RM130), Prawn And Cuttlefish Pot (RM130), Pork And Fungus Pot (RM110), Australian Beef Pot, Assorted Pork Pot (RM110),  amongst others.



Next, the sauce, which is the key ingredient to Simmer Huang’s Simmer Pot. There are five types of  sauce to choose from, namely Classic Sauce, Seafood Sauce, Spicy Sauce, Hot and Spicy and Soy Sauce.















Throughout the cooking process, not a single drop of water was added. This is how intense the flavors of the ingredients are. However, non of us really enjoyed the food. I guess we're too used to stir-fried, grilled or fried food.   I think that the way the food is cooked is pretty similar to how some health freaks prep their food - by steaming or simmering their food.  My mum who is a health freak preps most of her dishes this way, without frying.

Not feeling 100% satisfied with his lunch, we had lunner two hours later after shopping at Nike, at Mak's Chee Authentic Wonton. We thoroughly enjoyed the springy noodles sprinkled generously with flavorful 'jor hau yue' fish powder.



Mak’s Chee Authentic Wonton is a quick casual restaurant serving authentic Hong Kong style wonton noodles, using a nearly 100-year old recipe from the Mak’s Family that is originated from a street-side eatery in Guangzhou since 1923.


I hope I'm not too late in wishing all my beloved readers a very Happy New Year! Better late than never yeah? May 2020 be the year that all your dreams turn into reality - and that you actually keep your New Years resolutions 😉

Annular Solar Eclipse / Boxing Day, 26 December 2019

It was a very hot and humid morning today and I was sweating buckets while having lunch with Cass at a kopitiam. During my drive back home after lunch (around 1:30 p.m.), I noticed that the sky suddenly turned gloomy, as if a big blanket was put around the sun partially. We could still see the sun rays but it was eerily gloomy / dark; a color rarely seen in the sky. I commented to Cass that the sky looked very different today - sunny yet dark, all of sudden.  I didn't know that today is the annular eclipse and it would start from 11:20 a.m. through 3:15 p.m.

Minutes later, I received a Whatsapp message from Sherilyn with a picture of a crescent ring. Sherilyn and Alycia were out at Bangsar Shopping Center with the mil and visiting aunt and cousin from Hong Kong.  She had taken a picture of the annular solar eclipse using my old Huawei phone and she begged me to take out the DSLR camera to snap a picture of the eclipse. But the sun wasn't visible at my end and it was cloudy.  She rushed home and managed to snap a picture of the sun using the DSLR camera filtered by a film.


What is a Solar Eclipse?
An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is smaller than the Sun's, blocking most of the Sun's light and causing the Sun to look like an annulus (ring of fire - picture below). An annular eclipse appears as a partial eclipse over a region of the Earth thousands of kilometres wide. The annularity is visible in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam.



Photo below was taken by Sherilyn, at a mall:



Photo below was taken by my friend in Singapore:



Did you manage to witness this rare phenomenon today? The last time it occurred was on 22 August 1998 and the next annular solar eclipse in Malaysia will be in 4163 days on Wednesday, 05/21/2031.

Saturday, 21 December 2019

My parents from Ipoh are in KL to celebrate the birthdays of my niece Raelyne and big brother Raymond on 21 and 22 December respectively.  While my brother and family from Singapore were traveling to KL from Desaru after their beach holiday, we had an eating marathon from morning through evening. However, part way through eating, something bad happened.

Hubs' mobile phone rang. I heard him saying calmly saying "Ok, I will come and pick you up, are the kids OK? Which part of Nilai are you at?  So the ambulance is coming to pick you all up to the hospital, etc etc"  I had a bad feeling that it's my brother on the phone and indeed it was.  Everyone lost their appetite after that fateful phone call.  We hurriedly finished off our dinner, rushed home, hubs took a quick shower and together with Roy my younger brother, they drove to Nilai Specialist Centre to assist my brother and his family.  Hubs only got home at 1:30 a.m. after bringing my brother to the Nilai police station and dropped him off at the hotel.

We were all worried sick after the accident but after hubs Whatsapped me a video of the 2-year old twins, Raelyne, my brother and my SIL, we felt relieved that everyone was alright except for my SIL who had a cut on her eyebrow. I'm not going into the specifics of the accident to dampen the holiday mood, so I'll jump right into the food 😅

Our first stop was at Blonde @ Republik, Bukit Damansara for breakfast.




Opened in September 2019, Blonde is playfully dubbed by some foodies as “the hottest chick in town.  You'll expect long queues on weekends and if you drop by without reservation, you'll most likely be politely told that the place is fully booked and you'll need to wait for at least an hour for a table. It seems the crowd is initially drawn by the chic style of the restaurant but soon make repeat visits for the food. Offering a contemporary take on international cuisine, the food presentation is just as pretty as the setting.  Food tastes 5-star and the price is 5-star too!  Our bill for only 4 items ordered came up to over RM200.

Outside Blonde. I had to bribe this rascal for a photo of herself, specifically with "you have to give me a nice smile!" 😕


Feeling like his tummy was still empty, we segued a few doors away into Tasty Chapathi for some really delish North Indian cuisine. The first time I tasted the food at Tasty Chapathi was exactly a year ago, when my childhood friend, Jenn came back from Seattle and we had our gathering there.

We had something healthy as appetizer - mash of chickpeas with low fat yoghurt, spices and mint puree:



Toothsome Sangam Platter (meat platter) and mutton masala:


Curry naan, garlic naan and chapathi with dipping sauces of Palak Paneer (mint with Indian cottage cheese) and butter chicken:


Dessert of Ladoo and Patisa, which are too sweet for my liking:


The adults loved the Punjabi tea with cow's milk (LOVE the taste of cardamon in the tea) and Masala tea while the kids had mango lassi:



Priced reasonably, Tasty Chapathi is one Indian restaurant that we'll revisit again and again for our fix of North Indian cuisine.



Dinner was at Restaurant Sai Kee @ Jalan Syed Putra:

Ipoh Trip (8 - 11 December 2019)

We made a trip back to my beautiful hometown of Ipoh without the hubs this school holidays. He's been too bogged down with work and had to be around to ensure that all his functions run glitch-free. Sometimes without the boss around, the staff tend to snafu things up. In the food catering industry, once a function is screwed up, it's hard to gain the confidence of the client again.  Imagine your event being screwed up by your caterer. How do you like it? Would you call him again for future events? Most likely no.  And this is why we can hardly go on holidays with the hubs as he can never leave his business behind. We were actually planning a short holiday to Penang or Pangkor Island but had to cancel the plan due to hubby's work commitments.   So it was just me, the girls and the mil, by ETS (Electric Train Service) from KL Sentral to Ipoh.

We've not traveled by ETS to Ipoh for almost a year and thus, have not eaten at McDonalds @ Sentral for this long too and I didn't know that orders are now done on a touch-screen computer outside the restaurant. You then get a number and collect your order at the counter when it's your turn.  We took the 9 a.m. ETS and the girls had their brekkie of McD in the train.




Upon arrival at Ipoh, papa was there to fetch us. The 5 of us had to squeeze into his car (6 plus papa). We had our lunch at the Stadium Food Court, my favorite food court in Ipoh where I can find almost all my favorite Ipoh hawkers food here.







The next day was the mil's 74th birthday and papa treated everyone to a sumptuous dinner at Kok Thai Restaurant and bought a cempedak cake from JJ Swissroll, which is the mil's all-time favorite cake.









I wanted to sleep in the next day and mom baked some very yummy low-carb gluten-free bread for us for breakfast. The only time that I can wake up without an alarm clock without an iota of worry of having to do house chores is when I'm back home, where I'll be treated like a princess 💓



We spent the entire afternoon at the shopping mall. We had our first lunch at Sushi King, a restaurant that the hubs wouldn't bring us to back in KL, but the food was so unsatisfactory that we left after just a few plates of sushi taken from the conveyor belt. We walked round and round the mall trying to find something nice to eat and finally settled for Secret Recipe - again another restaurant that hubs wouldn't bring us to back in KL 😆



After lunch, we watched Jumanji, a movie that we thoroughly enjoyed. I watched the first Jumanji over 2 decades ago, starring Robin Williams, who'd passed on several years ago.




Can't believe how much grown up and lady-like my fashionista drama queen is. She's always been one very fashion-savvy girl, always dressed up like a peacock and accessorised like a Christmas tree since she was a toddler.


After Jumanji, we shopped for X'mas presents, courtesy of mom. Alycia and Cass both wanted jigsaw puzzles whilst Sherilyn chose novels.






A trip to the mall will never be complete for Cass without a few tries at the claw machine at the arcade.  This time I spent more than RM10 for 2 bouncy balls and rubber ducky. Seriously, these would have just cost a few Ringgit from a toy shop but Cass says she loves the adrenaline rush when she tries clawing a toy out of the water.



When we got out from the mall, we saw a beautiful rainbow in the sky!



We had the smoothest tau fu far from papa's favorite roadside stall. The girls love tau fu far and so do I but I've been avoiding soy products (estrogen) ever since my gynae detected a fibroid in my uterus, which was removed via laproscopic surgery two years ago.


Cass had a RM13 only hair cut at Orchid Salon, a no-frills hair salon at Kg Simee, a salon which the girls normally have their hair cut since they were a year old.



Our dinner on our last night in Ipoh was Ngar Choi Kai (bean sprouts with chicken) at Bercham.