Healthy quick and easy dinner on 14/07/2009

On 14/07, both of us felt somewhat tired and not in the mood of cooking our dinner. So et suggested that we buy salad from Jusco and have that for dinner.

Since salad is not a bad choice, after all it's probably time we eat something really healthy, we decided that salad it is for our dinner.

Et got the boxed Caesar Salad from Jusco supermarket. Or at the least, it's labeled as Caesar Salad, seeing that it does not even have the typical ingredients of croutons, eggs and parmesan cheese.

Here's what Caesar Salad are supposed to be like, according to Wikipedia.

What we did after getting home was to add more ingredients into the salad, to add variety and make it a more complete meal. We added the following ingredients:

• Hashbrown
• Egg
• Tomato
• Carrot
• Olive Oil
• Honey apple vinegar (from Eu Yan Sang)
• Parmesan cheese powder

The salad, together with miso soup, was a nice quick and easy dinner for us. Really healthy too :)

Sensible post against the smearing of a fish

Couldn’t resist highlighting the following post which is a really sensible article touching on the smearing and slandering of the sutchi fish, aka pangas/cream dory/swai/patin/cobbler/etc.

 

http://mattsteinglass.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/thou-blackguard-thou-slanderest-my-fish/

 

Excellent parody on MACC and Malaysia’s BN government

There is an outstanding video clip that parodies the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) on its recent debacle in the tragic death of Teoh Beng Hock.

The video clip which can be found in youtube has now attracted close to 130,000 views and the view count is still increasing.

I could be mistaken, but me thinks the video clip uses excerpts from the movie Valkyrie, which starred Tom Cruise among others, and the added subtitles are referring to the current hottest news item in Malaysia. Whoever had done this, was brilliant as the story perfectly correlates the tension seen in the movie.

Many laugh-out-loud moments in the movie, most especially the part where the lady purportedly said “don’t worry, we still have Khir Toyo” …. hahahaha.

Enjoy…

Good PDF suite, with freeware, payware and free online tools

For times when some PDF documents are needed to be converted to Office documents such Word or Excel, I find that nitroPDF’s family of online PDF tools are very useful. Just like Acrobat, nitroPDF’s software also enable the whole range of tools for PDF files.

I’m in no ways whatsoever related to nitroPDF. Am just a satisfied user of their online PDF tools, which IMO is one of the best out there.

For more information, here’s nitroPDF website.

And to go straight to their online tools section, you can go here.

 

 

Quick home made dinner on 13/07/2009

With both of us working now, there is often little time for cooking dinner. I'm sure this scenario is a common thing seen among our modern society. We do try to make 1 or 2 home-cooked dinners every week, aware of all the benefits one get from having homemade meals.

For Monday 13th July 2009, we made pasta. We regularly make pasta as it is one of the quickest wholesome meal to prepare. For the day, we made Linguine Carbonara with Oyster Mushroom, Chicken Sausage and Sutchi fish.

Sidenote: Linguine is commonly misspelled as Linguini, as highlighted in its Wikipedia entry.

We stir-fried the mushroom, sausage and the sutchi fish together in EVOO (Extra Virgin Olive Oil) before adding in the carbonara sauce. Lastly, pour the mixture over linguine cooked al-dente.

Results, one yummy wholesome dinner :)

Vietnamese Cobbler as Cod

A few days ago, an article was published in UK’s online edition of the The Times, www.timesonline.co.uk regarding a fish called Vietnamese cobbler being sold as cod by some fish and chips restaurant in the UK. Those found doing so are being charged by the authorities there as fraud cases. Here’s the article link.

The Vietnamese cobbler goes by the scientific name Pangasius hypophthalmus. Sounds familiar?

This is the same fish imported from Vietnam and being sold as dory fillet by Carrefour in Malaysia, though mostly being called as sutchi fillet in other hypermarkets. It is also being called pangas and swai among others, depending on which part of the world you’re in. There has been earlier blog posts about the fish here and here.

I wonder if similar fraud cases are happening here in Malaysia…

The rain continues…

It is indeed pouring rain at the moment…

As was mentioned in this earlier post, first there was drought. But now, it’s the opposite.

Today my Gmail contains a mail from IBM China’s HR department, offering to interview me for a position in IBM China.

3rd job interview offer in 5 weeks! After the barren drought, this is soaking wet period.

However, since I have secured a job here in KL and considering the position on offer in China is one that I have no prior working experience in, this decision is one that won’t be too difficult to make.   

Necessary Blogger updates

Although seeming to lack updates since last week, actually there had been changes to this blog site in the background. Mostly the changes are to rectify the problems of duplicate meta description and duplicate title tags. In other words, each and every post has the same description and same post title. Google’s Webmaster tool had been highlighting the problems for a long time.

While the problems are not much of a worry for a personal blog site, it is an irritating thing to have to constantly see issues being highlighted by Google Webmaster tool. And even more irritating that Blogger do not have a simple method to rectify the issues.

So, finally decided to tackle the issue. Went to search for solutions for the problems of duplicate meta description and duplicate title tags. Found and implemented the solutions. But will have to wait for the Google index to slowly reflect those updates over time.

There are plenty of sites out there offering solutions for the problems. One only needs to go look, and get a little bit comfy with manually edit the template page. 

Why is Nescafe Gold worse than Nescafe Rich??

We have no idea.

All we know is that both of us don’t like it. We are referring to just the 3in1 version.

We both like Nescafe Rich, but Nescafe Gold is just beyond us.

From lacking enough creamer to weird tasting coffee, the Gold scores on all the poor points.

Actually even for Nescafe Rich, I usually add 2 teaspoons of creamer to make the coffee … creamier, as a matter of preference. But no amount of tweaking can help the Nescafe Gold. It’s just plain lousy coffee charged at premium pricing.

‘Dory fillet’ from Carrefour

Recently we bought ‘dory fillet’ from Carrefour. Price was RM3 for 500g.

This fish is really getting cheaper in the retail market. A year ago, you could get RM60 per 10kg that comes in a box if you bought from a wholesaler.

 

Noticed that Carrefour labels the fish as ‘dory fillet’?  At worst, this is just plain mislabelling. At best, it’s not too far from the name ‘cream dory’ that are quite popularly used to describe the fish fillet. But calling it ‘dory fillet’ is misleading and insult to the actual dories of the world, especially the delectable John Dory. Most of other hypermarkets in Malaysia are using ‘sutchi fillet’ to label the fish fillet. There are a few packaging that uses both the labels for the fish fillet!

 

What exactly is the origin of ‘sutchi fillet’?  The fish is scientifically known as Pangasius hypophtalmus, or Pangasius sutchi. It is sold under many different names depending on where you happen to be in world:

• In Malaysia, it’s ‘Dory fillet’ for Carrefour, and ‘Sutchi fillet’ for others. Locally it’s also known as ikan patin in Malay.
• ‘Swai fillet’ in the USA.
• ‘Thailand catfish’ in Taiwan
• oh, and United Nations Food and Agriculture (FAO) is replacing the name catfish sutch to striped catfish. Mentioned here in the French version of Wikipedia (translated).

The French version of Wikipedia has better information on this fish compared to English version here.

There have been some controversies surrounding this fish, mainly perpetrated by these 2 sites though both articles are similar:

• http://www.dietmindspirit.org/2008/01/30/why-you-shouldnt-eat-this-fish-pangas-pangasius-vietnamese-river-cobbler-white-catfish-gray-sole/
• http://www.whytraveltofrance.com/2008/01/30/why-you-shouldnt-eat-pangas-fish-in-france-or-anywhere-else-for-that-matter/

I believe the article was overly provocative and contains many factual errors.

However there’s no denying that (on average containing 82% water, 15.5% protein and 2% lipid) the fish fillet itself does not have much nutritional value other than offering a good taste, which was the reason it is so popular besides being cheap. I had also mentioned the nutritional value, or lack thereof, in this earlier post.

So, when buying this fish fillet, I am aware of the lack of nutrition. It’s just that it’s easy to prepare and tastes good. Being conscious of that fact, we usually try  compensate with other nutritious food ingredients for our meals.

 

Test post with Windows Live Writer

Decided to create new Windows Live account for use at work. Incredibly, my first choice of the username for the new account is still available. Surprising, since Live had been around for some time.

Selected the option to download Windows Live Writer while customizing for the download of Windows Live Messenger.

At first look, seems relatively bare-bones. Hopefully it could ultimately entice me into long term usage.

Besides this post, I’m also trying out the map insert feature that comes with the program. I’ll select the map of Taiwan since I’ll blog about the recent Taiwan trip soon.

Taiwan country map

Introduction to Taiwan trip

As we'll start to share on our Taiwan trip soon, let's introduce Taiwan first.

Roughguides.com describes Taiwan as "... the most underrated tourist destination in Asia". It is not hard to understand why. Initially, even I had wondered if Taiwan is worth going. Answer is yes. And would I go again? The answer is yes too.

Overall, it was a good trip with the weather in mostly good behaviour during our visit between 23/5 to 30/5, which is slightly atypical as that period was when the rain season should have begun.

Accommodation and transport wise, we did our planning and budgeting. Mostly was et's effort as there are limited Taiwan sites with English version.

We bought a Lonely Planet book on Taiwan from Popular bookstore which cost me RM104. Plenty of interesting stories, tips and guides as can be expected from a Lonely Planet book. But ultimately, it is still just one source of information. It's better to have multiple sources of information, especially if it is a DIY trip and not a tour.

The following link is a great start as it contain a lot of links to the places of interest in Taiwan..

http://eng.taiwan.net.tw/

When it rains...

Everyone knows how the idiom goes... "When it rains, it pours".

Today got called by a recruiter for a job somewhere in Cyberjaya. This is her second call. The first call was to ask me if i'm interested to apply to that particular job. Having expressed my interest, I had not heard from her until today, 3 long months since the first call. This second call is to let me know of the interview offer for the job.

Now since I started my current job 3.5 weeks ago, this is the second interview offer. Last week, I attended another interview for a job in Technology Park Malaysia, Sri Petaling.

And this is after months of silence on the interview front after loads and loads of job applications.

When it rains .....