Hot And Steamy

My RM4.50 indulgence!

Nothing satisfies quite like a claypot full of eggy noodles, and a mish mash of other items that you hope will balance out your food pyramid! It seems to be madness that in the kind of heat that we Malaysians live in, to seek out dishes which are served right from the stove. And yet, this is the taste of home. Our version of fast food. And darn if it is not a hundred times healthier than the Golden Arches! 

This is my ultimate favourite claypot yee mee. Yee mee is egg noodles which have been formed into circular disks, dried and then fried. They are so tasty that I’ve eaten them on their own, like a crunchy snack! 

This cooked version is done by a sweet Myanmar man who runs the noodle stall in the only coffee shop in the pretty bad failure of a commercial area known as NZX. I go there often because the dogs’ groomer is on the same street and it is because of the dogs sometimes being too fond of their shampoos that I have had to kill time by having a drink or a snack here.

The claypot yee mee is really stellar. The soup stock is perfectly seasoned, and the vegetables, pork slices, fish balls and egg is cooked perfectly each time. Complete satisfaction for RM4.50!

Food Porn It Ain't!

I give up. I can cook for the palate, but I sure as heck can’t cook for the eyes! We had Sharon Lee over for Friday dinner and it being a meatless day for me (hence everyone must be meatless too!), I used the new Rubine oven to bake these breadcrumbed  yellow zucchini and these banana-leaf wrapped fish. Tasted great, but boy, are they fugly to look at!!

Grilled yellow zucchini with breadcrumbs and feta.

Fish in red and green capsicums baked in banana leaf.

Gen, Again

I've written so much about Gen at The Legend Hotel Kuala Lumpur, that this time I just want to do a pictorial piece. This is the spread we had when we lunched there recently!

Drink Me Silly

Moderation and I are not close friends. I live life large and unfortunately, I’m getting larger for it! 

Still, most times I enjoy it. I especially enjoy being able to champion small businesses like the one owned and operated by the Kua family in SS2 Mall. I’ve written about them before and I have shared my thoughts on Chatime. No doubt they are all positive, since I keep going back. 

Passionfruit Smoothie and Taro Milk Tea. One was too sweet, the other too...taro.

This visit saw me being introduced to the limited edition Taro teas. Made from Taiwanese taro, the drink is touted to be great for adding fibre to your diet. Fibre-schmibre! The bottom line is if it tastes good. Sensitively put, the taro series has gained the lowest marks in the satisfaction index. It’s not foul, but it is weird. There is stickiness in the texture I dislike. It is a drink, but it feels like pea soup. There is a sandy, grainy texture reminiscent of the mouth feel (though not taste!) of chiku or sapodilla. It feels unpleasureably like a diet shake. I had it with 50 percent sugar. And boy, does it need the sweetness! I think the addition of pearls would have helped a lot, but I will not be repeating the experience! 

The Grapefuit QQ had loads of nice bits!

The Grapefruit QQ with half sugar and full ice was still mega sweet. The boba and the pearls went quite funkily with the pink grapefruit sacs and it was a refreshing long drink! 

The Passionfruit Smoothie was ordered with 30 percent sugar, but even that was massively sweet. I think the fruit series can easily taste fine with no sugar at all! 

The Grass Jelly Milk Tea is the top seller on the Chatime list. And truly, it is a magnificent tribute to the franchise. We had it with 50 percent sugar and it was so good. There is a robust, rich mouth feel, with a lovely creaminess that is impossible to duplicate. The grass jelly is completely like no prepackaged cincau (I know, because Kit has tried buying and melting store bought grass jelly to replicate the silky texture). It needs to firm up overnight in the fridge, so the Kua family sometimes has to turn down customers because there is simply none ready to serve. 

The lovely three-levels of the Matcha and the beautiful symmetry of the milk tea with grass jelly!

The Japanese Matcha Tea Latte with pearls and coconut jelly was gorgeous. It was such a luxurious sight, with the three distinct levels of green, white and black. The bits made it all the more fun, with the caramel-syrupy tapioca pearls being a lovely foil to the dense matcha.

I just can’t get enough of Chatime!

To Market, To Market!

How far I have come! I used to hate markets. Dirty, smelly places, sloshing with fishy water and blood. 

Now, as I progressed much further into food, I realize that you need markets for freshness. For choice, for flavour, for growth as a foodie. 

I’m glad for being Malaysian in this case as I can choose the market at which I am best able to communicate. One good thing about Malaysia is that we have a national language. Not everyone can write an essay in it, but I dare hazard that if someone can count from one to ten in Malay, they can trade in Malaysia. 

The SS17 or Jalan University morning farmers’ market is held each Thursday. There is a plethora of great stuff to be had. Traditional grass roots stuff such as herbs and frilly little ferns to be eaten raw with sambal. Cool clams of different smoothness and colours. Lots of fresh fruit. Even some hamsters and rabbits. NOT to eat! This guy just capitalizes on the kids tagging along with their parents! 

I brought my mum in law and her Indonesian maid to shop there after dropping Erin off to playschool. I wanted a good dinner –something traditional, and bursting with real kampong flavour, and Nas, MIL’s maid, had said she would do it as long as she could find the ingredients.

My biggest bargain on this trip was three amazingly sweet, golden yellow Josapine pineapples for RM2! I am not kidding! They were priced at a Ringgit each, but it was late and the trader threw in one free. Oh, the taste of sunshine! 

After all the shopping, this is what was served! 

Fresh long beans, baby eggplant and winged beans with spicy tomato sambal. 

Jering rendang with tempeh. Jering is a pod-like vegetable with a taste somewhat like petai.

Seabass with turmeric marinade and stuffing, grilled in banana leaf.

Josapine pineapple.

My New Mantra?

Will I return?

Where have all the North Indian restaurants gone too? When I was 13 to 24, there seemed to be a North Indian restaurant in every suburb. In Bangsar alone, there were two in Lucky Garden, one on the main Telawi strip. 

I cut my teeth on the lovely creamy tastes of the North, with what I now always associate as comfort food – boneless chunks of tender meat swimming in rich, vivid orange gravy; glops of green spinach pulverized with mint and spices, with cubes of paneer playing peek-a-boo. 

However, after the decade of The Bangles and Omar Khayyam on Jalan TAR when it used to be completely normal for a family to drive into the city for dinner; and then the decade of Pakeeza and D’Tandoor and for a while, Saffron in Hartamas, the curtain seemed to come down on this cuisine. Crown Princess lost its fine dining Northern Indian restaurant, D’Tandoor closed down.  There was nowhere to go for this kind of food! I have been so hard up I have eaten at the mamak for the taste of tandoor and naan! 

I had one so-so experience at Namaste in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, but the service was so bad that I never went back. 

I was really hard up when I saw Mantra in Sunway Pyramid. I did not really want such a huge meal. But how could I pass up a chance at some Northern comfort? 

Not quite the traditional Indian restaurant!

Mantra's interior.

I tell you, I was so so so hard pressed to keep my ordering to a minimum. It’s a pain to eat as a duo because you just cannot eat all that much. Not even if you have my pit of a stomach.

So I restrained myself and kept to the favourites. I was not very pleased that Mantra served both Western and NI cuisine. I mean, who wants to eat chicken stuffed with mozzarella at an Indian restaurant? 

I truly have bought into the idea that if you’re going to be a food expert, you should know what you’re talking about. Why review sea urchin if you’ve only eaten it once in your life? 

Mantra Platter.

So, I ordered things I knew and could judge from a semi-professional stand point. My starter (why on earth they were on a page headed TAPAS was beyond me!)was the Mantra Platter which is a combination of chicken malai tikka, tandoori salmon and tandoori leg of lamb. RM28.90 gave us overdone fish, tender chicken and gamey if passable soft lamb. Nothing outstanding, but I so missed the orange crust of tandoori anything, that it still seemed to be an old friend (an old friend who visits for too long and leaves talcum powder footprints on the stairs, but still worthy of some semblance of enthusiasm). 

It looks evil, but I love my palak paneer!

I just had to order the palak paneer. It was the first thing I looked for. To me, it’s the best way to eat spinach. It’s probably completely leeched of any vitamins, but oh, it is comfort and it is beautiful, in all its gloopy glory. If tandoori is an old friend, palak paneer is the lover you never quite gave up. It lacked a certain something, but for memory’s sake, it was worth ever sen of the RM15.90, even if ginger was slightly more present than I like it to be in the coriander, garlic and mustard oil blend. 

The rich and saucy butter chicken!

The RM18.90 butter chicken was tender, and orange and rich, just as I love it. Which was such a relief.  The plain briyani was served in a copper pot, and at RM8.90 was really delicious. Fluffy, rich, spice scented basmati was just a joy to eat and it could have been a meal in itself, so fragrant and wholesome, it was. 

Pots of flavour in this briyani!

Bread enough for a lot more than two!

My breads did not fare as well – possibly because there were just two of us and quite a bit of plain, butter, cheese and garlic naan, not to mention some other rotis. At RM16, it could have easily fed four. They were good breads, but they needed to be eaten quickly, before the air conditioning turned them into rubber mats. 

There was a list of cutesy mocktails, but I don’t think I wanted to load empty calories into my trunk, with the kind of food I had to go through already. So I just chuckled at Sun Of A Peach (peach nectar, pineapple juice, orange and a squeeze of lime, RM11.90) and Beach Blanked (not MY typo) Bingo (cranberry and grapefruit juice topped with club soda and ice cubes). 

The view from Mantra.

All things considered Mantra’s food is pretty good. I have issues with the Nasi Goreng on the menu, but I guess in the cut-throat mall food business, one has to offer as wide a breadth of food options. The plus point of the meal was that our table overlooked Sunway Lagoon, which just happened to be either closed or under maintenance. I rather enjoyed gazing down on all that still water after stuffing my maw with so much god stuff.

Fro-Yuck

Style with no substance.

Even if these were comfy, I won't be coming back!

What was the secret ingredient? Cardboard?

The cone was the only saving grace.

Not everything Japanese is delicious. It was a terrible blow for me to find this out, since I truly love everything about their gastronomy - from the chic spartan beauty of a well-cut slice of otoro, to the uniform anality of a bento box, and the kitsch fun of Hello Kitty lollipops.

In the interest of food culture, I forced myself NOT to go to Chatime for a bit of the sweet life when I was in Sunway Pyramid recently. Instead, I persuaded myself that Japanese frozen yogurt was really what I wanted. It was easier, because the Kindori outlet had seating, while Chatime was its usual express counter to go manifestation.

So over I mooched to the deep pink counter. I should have known by the pathetic display of so called 'fresh fruit' that this was going to be a bad idea. Tip: if the freezer is very sparse and populated with more things from a can than real fruit from the vine, take a hike. I did not and lived to regret some thoroughly awful pumpkin ice cream and some watered down, cherry yogurt.


Truly, I never thought pumpkin could taste that awful and cardboard like in ice cream form! And the tartness of cherries just vanished in this awful excuse for a healthy treat. I cannot say enough bad things about the product, the service, the complete inability of the counter staff to sell their wares (or maybe the girl had tried the stuff before and was just holding her tongue) and the sheer waste of money this was. And it WAS pricey. Close to RM30 for a cone and a scoop in a cup!
Never again is a well-deserved verdict, even if the wafer was pretty good!