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 .....

Chinese Herbs database

Occasionally, we use Chinese herbs in our cooking and quite often at times, get stumped on the English name for those herbs. I'm sure we're not the only one.

Here is a website that provides a database of Chinese herbs, sorted by its English name.

Useful site for the occasional referral for those herbs' names in English.

Herbasin

Long time no see...

Oops ... it's been a long time since the last post here.

There had been certain things in real life recently that put some dampers to our blogging effort.

However ... as they say, service is now resumed :)

We had done a DIY trip to Taiwan recently, and are now looking to share details of our trip soon.

Besides that, we have compiled some reviews on restaurants we've been to, mostly Klang Valley's. Those experience will be shared too, in time.

Lunch and Dinner on 03/07/09

Today we remained indoors, not having any agenda to go outdoors.
That means we had home-cooked meals for the day's breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Breakfast was pancake made by et, but no photos taken this time.
We had the pancake together with peanut butter, honey, and banana. All eaten separately together with the pancake, rather than one big mix of everything.

As for lunch, we had Tom Yam Noodle. For the Tom Yam, we used Tom Yam paste, onion, tomato, chicken frankfurter, chicken meat, cauliflower, carrot, bell pepper, and mushroom. Unfortunately we had no bird eye's chili nor red chili to get the extra spicy kick. Nonetheless, we used chili flake as substitute which did a decent job. For the extra sour kick, we used lemon juice.
The result as you can see in the first photo, the amount of ingredient overwhelmed the noodle until the noodle can't be seen. lol



The first photo was taken before we 'attacked' the meal. The second shows et's bowl after she 'assaulted' her bowl. :)




Since we had some of the Tom Yam soup left from lunch, we decided to make Tom Yam Fish with the tom yam being more like gravy rather than soup. Into the Tom Yam, we added mixed vegetables, chicken frankfurter and fish slices. The fish slices are of the Pollack, marinated with some salt and pepper and pan-fried before being mixed with the Tom Yam. The photo below shows the resulting dish. The dish was ok, as the Pollack still retained some of it fishy taste. Sutchi would have been better, but lately we are less inclined on the Sutchi (aka Dory to some, erroneously). You can refer to this post for the reasons.


The 2nd dish for our dinner was Stir-Fried Cauliflower with Carrot and Bell Pepper. Other ingredient was onion and garlic.


Well, we managed to have our meals today with whatever we had in the fridge. Good to have some stuff in the fridge. Beats the hassle of going out just for meals.

Chocolate Cake

It has been close to a year since I last baked cake from scratch (scratch means not from cake mix :p) I fall in love with baking while relo in US, I started with cake mix, and slowly decided to try making cake from scratch. I got myself a small tabletop oven many years ago, it's still in service now. Hehe, good investment :) Anyway, I am not diligent enough in baking, sometimes not doing any baking for months.

Early of the year I bought a cup cake recipe book which comes with baking kits, so I decided to do some baking with the new toy (silicone muffin pan). And here it is, chocolate cup cake:

Dinner on 03/05/09

Tonight's dinner was home-cooked again. We had Kung Pao Chicken, Sambal Kangkung (water convolvulus) and Old Cucumber soup. The Kung Pao Chicken was done following a recipe from a food magazine. Turns out to be quite a good recipe. I, however, had put quite a lot of dried chilli which results in quite a spicy dish! Just the way I like it :)

The Sambal Kangkung was cooked using our own sambal belacan that was prepared by et.

Dinner on 03/02/09

Our dinner on Monday was delicious :) Two thumbs up for cw who prepared the food :D

Dish #1 is Butter Prawns. This is the 1st time we cook prawn dish at home and it turned out to be very nice, both the look and the taste...


Dish #2 is Otak-Otak. Otak-Otak is a popular food in Muar. Its main ingredient is fish paste, wrapped in banana leaf and grilled like Satay. This particular Otak-Otak was bought from Parit Jawa, a well-known seafood village near Muar town.



Dish #3 is Lily Bulbs Egg Soup. Hehe, it is an instant soup, but tastes good too...


Dish #4 is mix vegetables. We do not have any fresh vegetable in fridge, so frozen vege is our only choice.