Starry starry night @ Starry Thai

We got a voucher from R for jake's birthday. SO we went to the city to have our thai dinner.
For entre,we tried the satay chicken. It was pretty nice.

Next, we had the soup, the portion was small but tastewise was okay.

Jake had the duck curry.

This is the other soup we chose.

I chose the sizzling rack of lamb.

For dessert, we had the deep friend ice-cream.

Verdict: Tastes okay but portion was on the small side.

Chocolate devil's cake

I made this cake to share with my life group in winter. It's a dense and heavy cake. I made it in my silicone bundt pan and here's the recipe.

1 3/4 cups self raising flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
3/4 cups cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
1 cup mayonnaise (I use full fat)
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups milk

Preheat oven to 175 deg c. Sift flour, cocoa, baking soda and baking powder into large mixing bowl and stir in sugar.

Add egg, mayo, vanilla and milk and beat together on low speed until combined, increase speed and beat at medium for 2 minutes.

Pour into a lined 23 cm cake tin and bake 40to 45 minutes or until cake springs back when lightly touched.

Note: since I use bundt pan the cooking time was extended to about 1 hour 10 mins.

Best eaten with vanilla ice cream. Also tastes better after it sits for at least half day.

Olympic fest at work

Work had a Olympic adopt-a-country thingie during the Olympic month.

Some departments were thoroughly into it and they had home made captain American skin suit and their pods were transformed into Madagascar etc

Several of us dressed in our adopted. country attire- S in sari, B in Nigerian attire although she's from Zimbabwe, R dressed up in color of GReat Britain flag and IB dressed up in his French beret and baguette under his arm pit. We had office wide shared lunch . It was good fun.

Pasar Malam aka Night market

In our last trip back, jake made sure he went to the pasar malam.   They went there with my dad.

Daffodil day @ BDK

Noel's kindy celebrated Daffodil day in late August.  Check out this link where Noel and his friend is making their daffodils.

Lunch @ Wang Xi Lou

We had lunch with Jake's family at Wang Xi Lou.

Biker Boys

15 minutes before Medan Mall closing time, the boys got on this bike and rode on it.

Dinner at New Fortune

In 2001 before I came to NZ, I was singing with the Wesley Methodist English Choir, and we went to sing at the Nyelong Park Methodist Church.  I remembered we had to sing 3 songs and one of them was Wonderful Grace of Jesus and the other one was the classic hymn Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Anyways, after church service, the whole choir of about 40plus people had lunch at The restaurant in Sarikei.  This Restaurant is 'the' one that people would hold their wedding receptions back in the olden days or one where all the 'big' caterings will be done. I remembered that lunch was very nice.

I only remembered roughly the location, and of course being a small town, we just drove around until we found it.

We were the first customer for the evening (only nearly 4 30pm or 5pm)
We told the lady and guy at the restaurant we drove all the way from Sibu so we had to have our dinner there:P


We ordered lemon chicken

This was pork ribs (pai gu wang)

Of all the dishes, we thought the fish was the least liked. it's not the restaurant fault. We asked them if they would do something different and they suggested this 'thai' version or some version, and it had so many ginger on it.

This was 'kou rou to be eaten with man tou' -sorry I am on a different laptop and had no chinese application on it.

We ordered char mee (wet) since the boys love noodle. We had RM5 worth of noodles and it was a mountain of it. 

This is bakulung juice. (some local fruit)

This is sayur cangkuk manis fried with eggs

I think this is either sea cucumber soup or tofu soup.

This is the restaurant from outside.
Verdict: It is still as delicious as it was 11 years back and if we go to sarikei again, we will definitely be back. It was less than Rm100 for the meal and there's even leftovers to be doggie back home.

Father & Sons

Abel was in his own world 

Climbing frame

 

 

 

 

 

Skills developed: motor skills (using those arm muslces) and confidence and risk taking

See saw time

Wonder what was Noel talking about?

Abel came to join in the fun

Sarikei part 2

The weather was not too hot and the boys had heaps of energy to burn so we let them check out the playground at the sarikei 'waterfront' area. 

 

 

 

well, it is still too hot for mom, so she stayed under this 'gazebo' thingie.

Noel driving the train..

Sarikei

Sarikei is another 15mins drive away from Bintagor.  It has population of 50,000 plus people. It is famous for its pineapples and pepper, hence these big pineapple statues.  The one above is near the jetty.

The jetty has lots of speedboats and also express boats (far back)

The main road.

This is the newer development (where the 'mall' is) and guess the developer put another landmark pineapple there.  Mum and dad and the boys.

Rojak @ Wong Hung Ping

Everyone tells me to try the Rojak in Bintagor. It wasn't too hard finding this place.  It was on a stretch of stalls - single storey, and there was a big Sign showing "ROJAK" and there are numerous newspaper articles pasted all over the walls. So we sat and ordered jienluk and rojak.

 

Here's the jien luk close up- it is different from the Hoho ones.

Rojak is like a fruit/veggie salad with a shrimp sauce.  It is both sweet and salty, and the ingredients used are usually cucumber, ban-guang(Turnip??) taupok, and pineapples with the shrimp sauce (hay ko) and lots of crushed peanuts. It was delicious. The "hay ko" usually determines how nice the rojak is.  Another important point was the ratio of all the ingredients. You can't have too many ban guang or too little taupok :P

We also ordered the Jiu Her Eng Chay.  Basically it's cuttle fish (boiled) with kangkong veggies with the hayko.

On the same strip of stalls was Malay stall and Jake bought this rice packet that has masak merah, masak hitam and curry egg.