Cheese Wiz

I have a kid but I don’t particularly like kids. I’m not one of those naturally mothering mothers; that band of women who swoop to kiss and cuddle any unsuspecting tot. So I surprised myself when I found myself inviting the two nieces of the family next door to come for a tea party with Erin. 

Like Kit said, “I don’t know what kids eat! What do I know what to make?”  Taking into account the fact kids eat less (and sometimes nothing, if the food is not something they like) and that they are not gourmets, I whipped up a batch of supposedly deliciously moist chocolate brownies early in the morning. While baking it looked promising. It felt good too. When the skewer went in they felt moist and fudgy. 

However, when cooled, the final product was hard and biscuit-like – if you can imagine a whole tray of square biscuit. A blooming waste of some really good chocolate it was! And no way I was going to serve that, knowing my fragile ego and the harsh, honest opinion of kids! 

I decided that the sweet part of the meal would just have to depend on prepackaged stuff – chocolate teddy bear marshmallows and gingerbread thin alphabets. I was not too keen on frying corn fritters (I’m nursing a burn on my thumb already), so I played about with the recipe for fried corn fritters and christened the little muffin pans my mother in law gave me so long ago. 

My knocked-together formula of a cup of self raising flour, cooking margarine, four eggs, a can of sweet corn kernels and a mix of mozzarella and cheddar, grated, turned out pretty darn fine.

As implausible as me having a kid, is my spooning little bits of mix into teeny muffin pans, but that is what I did, and I have to say I am pretty pleased with the little raised bun-like thingies. Even though the younger of the girls spat out her bite in horror because it had “CORN! I hate corn!) in it. 

Can’t win ‘em all.

Once More At Cha

Although I am in the midst of an austerity drive (think KFC instead of TGIF, Sushi King instead of a standalone Japanese restaurant), I am more willing to give up the food pleasures than this particular drink. Well, maybe I can give up the drinks, but it will make me feel as if I am giving up on the Kua family. 

Yes, it’s the Chatime kiosk in SSTwo Mall again! Like Cheers, I go there because everybody knows my name. They can’t draw me ‘my usual’ because I am drinking my way through the product line. Yet, each time, I come away heartened by the hard work and the chance that Mr Kwa is taking to ensure his kids have something to call their own. 

Aside from great drinks, I also get good conversation, and I like finding out how things are done in some aspects of the retail business. 

This foray’s trio was the ever-present Grass Jelly Milk Tea, the Caramel Latte Coffee with pudding and Tiguan Yin Latte with pearls. You know by now, of course, that the first one always gets a thumbs up. The coffee was a bit too robust, although the pudding helped. It’s a great drink when you need a caffeine jolt, but not if you want a leisurely slow-build to perk you up. 

The Tiguan Yin is a classy little drink, very smooth and polished, with a nice fragrance. It’s something you order your mum-in-law (perhaps without the pearls as they may be a bit hard to handle with her dentures!), but not a happy-happy-joy-joy kind of drink. It feels a bit too prim and proper for me, even though it is really a good cuppa. 

It sometimes feels like a waste not to really get into what we’ve ordered, but in this way at least I can narrow it down to what I really like!

Meat Market

There is a dearth of places to buy good salami and pepperoni and the like. It seems when Kit wants to make pizza, the biggest challenge is to find somewhere which will provide great toppings. We used to go to Cold Storage at Subang Parade for pretty decent pepperoni.  When they stopped selling cold cuts and crammed the chiller in front of the ice cream freezers with assorted crap, we moved to the Cold Storage at IPC. 

That outlet soon also discontinued the products and we went to the non-halal section in the IPC Cold Storage when we bought some amazing chorizo and salami, but ended up spending over RM150 for them. 

Abandon hope all who enter here!

My father spoke enough times about the butchery in Lucky Garden which was part of the TMC group of shops. While TMC has been bought over by Giant, it still retains its own name and identity and has managed to also offer a wine and spirits shop in the same row as the original shop. 

Looks like a deli, serves like a bad Subway.

It's not point braving the mad traffic for bad product and dismal service.

So off we went, Kit and I, to brave the Saturday traffic to TMC Butchery. The offerings looked pretty good, but the service was lousy. We waited a long time for the lone guy who took about 20 minutes to slice some ham to turn around to wait on us. A Caucasian lady came to buy some bangers, asked about another sausage and was completely ignored by the Chinese lady who was serving the sausage counter. In the end Madam Expat went off with just her one order. Without even getting an answer about the other type she was looking at. Lost sale! 

The time it took for the Myanmar boy to slice my 200 grams of chorizo helped me change my mind about trying any other salami. Another lost sale. 

Good help is really hard to get these days, I understand, but truly this is the worst way to run a business. The original owners of TMC, the Teng brothers, would have been very, very disappointed. 

Postscript: we were also very, very disappointed at the chorizo we got. It was awful. It tasted like Chinese cured sausage (lap cheong) gone wrong. Massive fail!