Good food, bad food and food I miss...

Here's a sight I miss when I go to a supermarket in London - the abundance of greenary in the vegetable section! Vegetables in Chinatown don't really match up ... mainly because I'm going to have to pay a bagazillion times more for one measly bunch :)


I know I was on holiday but I couldn't resist cooking. I was actually looking forward to it...itching to get my hands on some raw ingrediants and creating a mini feast...a nice salad ;) There Jo and I had been in KL all of 3 days and we had eaten our way through quite a lot of food. And I mean ALOT of food! Big Chinese meals with my father, meals with my mum, snacking with friends, secret cake trips to Delicious... hehe... well, it had taken a toll on us and I just wanted a nice, 'clean' salad. So here we have it - Thai inspired seared beef salad.


The usual salad greens with de-seeded tomatoes, cucumber, red onion and lots of herbs - mint, coriander, Thai sweet basil, lemon grass. The dressing was made with lots of garlic, lime juice and zest, Thai sweet chili sauce and oil. Pretty simple stuff but lots of cutting. The beef was a thick juicy rump steak ... my sister laughed when I told her I had bought rump... what do people have against rump? I rather like it..price wise ;) and taste and yes, even texture wise. I seared the beef in a hot pan without any oil... perhaps I could have cooked it a while longer as it was still rather red in the middle. Yes, red as in the cow has JUST moo-ed it's last 'moooooooo' :D Red enough for my sister to stick her portion in the microwave for a few seconds...

Bad food.... McDonald's nuggets! I like McDonald's nuggets...just not these ones. Feeling a little peckish after our 'clean' salad, Jo and I headed to a 24 hour McDonald's at 2am. Food-wise...what a waste of time!!! If they keep a store open the whole day, they could at least serve some semi-decent food! The nuggets had obviously been cooked some time ago and had been sitting around for some time. The fries were limp and dry and cold... but I wasn't up to complaining and just ate it..haha...I wasn't going to leave it!!!

Yup, the next day we just went and stuffed ourselves even more with my sister :) It was a 'bit of this and a bit of that' lunch, which means we end up with wayyyyyyyyy more food than we can ever eat. Some yong tau foo, which means stuffed beancurd but today translates to ... anything you can stuff with fish paste. Here we can see some (left-right) bittergourd/bittermelon, pork balls below it, deep fried tofu, deep fried fresh tofu and aubergine/brinjal/eggplant below.

I can never resist pork balls (which aren't actually stuffed with any fish paste but it's always to have some non-stuffed food on the menu) and just had to have some. The non-fried tofu in the soup was to make us feel better about ourselves. Cheating our little brains into thinking that we were eating good, healthy food ;) And of course some good deep fried beancurd sheets..to make up for our portion of healthy tofu! Don't worry... we did also have a 2 person portion of wat tan mai fun (deep fried rice vermicelli with an egg-y sauce of vegetables, meat and seafood) and some 'side dishes' from the 'mix rice' stall. Those photos came out really blurred so I won't bother posting them.

With all that food we just had to go walk it all off, so off we went shopping at Pavilion. I'm still sore from the fact my beautiful old school was pulled down for this monstrosity but the shops are rather good and makes for good browsing, espcially when there's hardly anyone around. But energy levels do drop and for a 'little pick me up' we headed to a little cafe specializing in matcha (Japanese powdered green tea). I'm not a 100% certain but the cafe might actually be called ... Matcha :) I had a matcha ice-blended which tastes exactly like green tea ice-cream and my sister had the same thing but with extra azuki beans (red beans) added before they blended the drink. I have an intense dislike for red beans and stay well away from it! My 6 year old nephew also came along and he was surprisingly well behaved throughout :) His treat? Hot chocolate with no matcha in sight.