Of Food & Celebrations

Happy Durga Puja! Happy Dassera!

That’s Anu’s main festival, and it’s today. I’m gonna post a short picture post about food. Because Anu would almost always come up with some amazing food preparations on festivals and celebrations like these. (She’s just wonderful to have around. I love you honey. And not just because of the food you cook, OK? It’s everything you do…)

But this time, there’s a catch. We’ve shifted to our new house, which comes with only a blasted electric cooker (NO, gas stoves are NOT safe, says the developer). For me, whoever cooks with an electric cooker, don’t know nuts about food. How do you do a proper Asian stir fry with a bloody electric stove?!?!?? I could like heat up 4 friggin dishes, all at one time, in 5 minutes, in our old International City house. Now, the dishes have to take turns, coz if you set one stove top to ‘9’ (hottest), the other stove tops can’t turn on for some reason or other…, and it’ll take at least 3 times longer to heat up the same things as a gas stove. Plus, I wonder how much power we’re friggin using! Hope the electricity bill doesn’t give us a heart attack when it comes…

Anyway, here’re some food Anu churned out and some we ate outside thru the years. …Somehow or other, the outside food always falls short of our expectations, besides being bloody expensive. Here we go!


Last year’s Durga Puja dishes – All that for our tiny family of 4, plus 1 niece. Still reasonable, compared to the 13 dishes for Chinese New Year earlier this year! Among the dishes I can see – chicken parts, mutton soup, french beans in soya sauce garnished with fried onions and a sprig of dill, gundruk salad (a Nepali pickled vegetable), kangkung, fish crackers… (not really Indian, right?)


More Indian dishes… although Anu’s not too fond of ‘em. Yeah, no kidding! In 2007, we stayed in the 5-Star Marriott Lakeside Chalet in Mumbai for 40 days (compliments of the company I was working for then, ahem), and we ate almost every dinner in the hotel's Chinese Restaurant. We dined in the hotel’s Indian Restaurant only once (and that too at my prompting), and she didn’t like it. Here’s some keema matar (mince mutton & peas, one of my favourite Indian dishes), pudina (mint) chutney, pickled onion, salad (the white slices with the red fringe are red radishes) and chapatti (of the instant kind… frozen chapatti, Kawanku brand, of Malaysia). What to do? Anu hates kneading dough…


Here’s something we imported from the North East (of India) – Anu calls them New Potatoes (I call them baby potatoes). These are our chips of choice, and they’re only available in season (winter I think). Fried with a pinch of turmeric, cumin and dried chilli (hope I’m correct)

Moving on to other food –


Rice with prawn & petai sambal – Anu loves petai, and sambal. We love sambal so much now that almost every meal, we have some form of sambal or chutney


Here’s Anu’s version of the Hainanese Chicken Rice that we get in Malaysia, and it can pass off nicely as the real thing! The only problem is that Anu cooks, and she forgets. So the next time you asked for it, she may cook a different thing or it may not taste exactly the same… (hence the pictures, hehe)


And this is Anu’s version of Nasi Goreng Kampung, complete with nice table decorations…


Salad is what we mostly eat at home for dinner for some time now. (We love herbs!) Here’s chicken and sautéed mushroom with kangkung salad oriental style (tastes like the Sotong Kangkung we get in Malaysia)


Fish (I think it’s Sea Bream …or is it Bass?) with potato & lentil salad


Lamb patties with 2 types of salads – Avocado salad (I call it Guacamole Assam-Style, because it has chillies… everything has chillies) and strained yogurt with cucumber and umm… I dunno (I call it Tzatziki ala Anu …Hey Honey, don’t you know that this is Tzatziki? What’s that? It’s something the Greeks eat)


Something incredibly simple, but nice – 2 types of garlic bread, salad and tea for breakfast. 2 types? Ya, one with olive oil & garlic (Anu’s preferred way, she’s psychologically averse to butter), and the good ol’ loaded ones with butter and cheese


Pasta! Ala Anu. One of my favourites – with chicken, mushroom, black olives, pasta sauce, a few dashes of soya sauce, black pepper, chilli flakes and parmesan cheese…


One of the many quinoa dishes Anu makes. This is black quinoa with lamb chop. We usually have white quinoa with chicken… She also makes couscous & salad with salmon, but I don’t have any pictures of that


This is the best paella I’ve eaten. Far better than the ones we’ve tried outside. Maybe it’s the white wine that Anu uses?? Plus, there’s chutney! Radish chutney…

Now for some outside fare…


Quesadillas and burger at Chili’s, the Market, Dubai Investment Park 1 (DIP 1) on Durga Puja 2017


Seafood buffet at the Crowne Plaza, Deira on Anu’s birthday in 2016, a nice treat from niece Karishma – How’s the lobster?


And this is one of my favourite Arabic dishes, Chicken Mandi from Al Mandi & Al Madhbi House – all this for AED 13 at the Abu Dhabi Petrol Stations between my Project and our head office in Dubai. Can’t get anything more value for money than this nowadays, here in the UAE

That’s all for today folks. Enjoy your puja! (And for those who're not celebrating, ...just enjoy!)

Petra!

The Treasury, Petra, Jordan

Finally. The Petra photos, after 4 long years of sitting in the friggin hard disk drive. (We visited in Dec 2015). This is a continuation of my recent post on Jordan.

Petra has always been in a place I wanted to visit. Since I saw it in the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade movie, way back in the 80s. And I’m not waiting for some crackpot terrorists (like the Taliban or ISIL) to come and blow the place up for absolutely no reason. No, although Jordan is absolutely peaceful without a hint of trouble, I’m taking no chances, so Petra here we come! That was 2015. Here’re the pictures, hehe.


The first view of the Treasury… after travelling thru 1.5km of a narrow crack of a walkway called the Siq (that’s Anu trying to take a picture of the treasury with her phone). The Siq is definitely one of the main allures of this place. Just imagine you being some medieval traveller (or better still, Indiana Jones) and you were trying to get to Petra for the first time. You see nothing, only rock hills, and then you enter a narrow chasm in the 300 – 500 feet high wall. The narrow path, squeezed between the towering mountains, is dotted with mysterious chambers on its sides. And then, lo and behold, you emerged onto this opening with the Treasury in front of you!


Papa and little 1 year old Jayden at the Treasury. No, you can’t enter the Treasury. There’re guards there. But I heard that it’s empty, so what are they guarding? The Holy Grail? (as in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). The Matrix? (as in the Transformers Movie, Revenge of the Fallen). Those horse carts in the picture are for transporting tourists from the ticket counters to the Treasury thru the Siq, and back, if you choose to do so. (You have to pay extra). Otherwise, it’s a 2km walk, with 1.5 of that in the mysterious Siq. We chose the horse-carts. We’d have walked if we weren’t with the kids. Justin pinched his nose the whole time we were in the horse cart (c’mon, it ain’t that smelly). Justin’s just not a fan of animal rides…

We spent the whole friggin day in Petra. We reached at about 9am and left only at 5pm. Some people do just the Siq and the Treasury, and zoom off to another place. We met 2 Malaysian ladies (in another place in Jordan) who did just that! Petra in 30 minutes. Heck, what sort of tour is that? We, on the other hand, packed our bags full of food so that we could picnic in Petra. Most people on group tours do a one day trip from Amman, the capital. They’d typically get on the tour bus at 7 in the morning, trudge thru 3 hours of bus ride to Wadi Musa (where Petra is), see Petra, and then trudge through another 3 hours of bus to get back to Amman by 7pm. We’re not big fans of group tours. We had screwed up one too many to try another group tour again (we’re serial late-comers), at least not until the kids grow up a bit! The last time we successfully did a group tour, was when Justin was a wee 5-month old baby, in Cappadocia, Turkey.


Here’s our home for the first part of our day. A chamber / cave directly opposite the Theatre. We had to find a suitable room / place to breastfeed Jayden. There wasn’t a lot of people there at that time. …Later, (after we left, thankfully) swarms of tourists would clamber all over the many caves / chambers… This was not the first time Anu had to breastfeed in a cave. She did it with Justin in Cappadocia, Turkey


The Theatre… See those steps there like those of a stadium?


The crowd’s coming. Let’s go explore another place. Justin, holding our picnic mat, climbing up the stairs (to the High Place of Sacrifice). I think Justin enjoyed the most in this trip. He was looking for treasure. Every box or chest that he saw, was a treasure chest to him…


Finally, the High Place of Sacrifice (left of the photo, it’s just a broken wall)) …this is the view looking down from where we came from. Far in the distance, you can see the houses of Wadi Musa


View of some of the Petra Tombs (yeah, they’re all tombs… scary, huh?) from the High Place of Sacrifice. We made another picnic stop on the way going down… lunch, and breastfeeding the baby


Camels at Petra – Justin, do you want to ride on a camel or donkey? No, Papa, they’re smelly! But the Monastery is quite far away, and it’s up lots of stairs. No, Papa. OK, then let’s give the Monastery a miss (…but, but, that’s where they found the Matrix in Transformers!) Nope, we didn’t make the trip… (the adults were also tired walking, hehe)


Bedouins in Petra, guardians of the donkeys and camels, that Justin turned down…


Let’s just hang around and explore something on ground level, OK? – Anu and the tombs, Petra – It was a pretty windy afternoon, as you can see from Anu’s hair


Colonnaded Street, Petra


See everyone’s on donkeys, sure we don’t wanna go? Alright, let’s go to that tea shop ahead then …Emm, how do we keep the blasted sand off our coffee?? And my shoes are full of sand!


The mouth of the Siq – Back at the Treasury, waiting for our horse cart to go back


Wadi Musa, where our hotel was – See you Petra!

The Folks at Home

Finally, downloaded the photos from our recent (July) trip back home. We’ve only taken about 3,000 photos, so it shouldn’t take yours truly too long to go thru them, …ummm, a year should be enough.

Anyway, here’re photos of the folks we met, the old folks in particular.


Siblings reunite – Dad, Tuapek (eldest uncle), Jiko (second aunt) and Jipek (second uncle) at the Evergreen Old Folk’s Home, Kg Simee Road, Ipoh – This is where Jipek stays. Tuapek and Ah Mm (elder uncle’s wife) stay in another old folk’s home called, Moonlight Care Centre. Jiko was on a short trip from KL, by special request from yours truly, ahem… (What to do? We didn’t have time to visit KL!) We also bumped into Tuako (eldest aunt) separately, in the Ipoh house, but she disappeared so quickly, we didn’t have time to catch up or click some photos

This was our Old Folk’s Home trip. We spent more than half of the time in Ipoh in old folk’s homes or visiting people. That was our main agenda in Ipoh anyway. On the way, we met cousins from Thailand and Singapore. So, you could call this a pretty fruitful trip!


From Bangkok, cousin Alan and girlfriend; from Singapore, cousin Emily and hubby, Martin (yeah, they’ve shifted from the UK to Singapore a couple of years back), Ah Mm and Ah Mm’s sister (right most) in GP Food Court, Ipoh Garden East, Ipoh


Here’s another take of the same scene, with additional actors (Tuapek, Anu and the kids)


And for breakfast, why not some dim sum? – Martin and Emily having some quality time with her dad – Ming Court Dim Sum, Leong Sin Nam Street, Ipoh


Dad, Hazel, Anu and the kids, Ming Court, Ipoh


JUSTIN!!! Stop putting that bush on your head! ….Oh, what the heck! – At a flower pot shop – Thowlee Pottery Shop, Kuala Kangsar Road, Ipoh


Glamorous aunt with bush for hat (thanks to the kids). No, the flowers aren’t real


With Tuapek in our old swing in front of the Canning Garden House, Ipoh


The House of Leaves – That’s Aunty Nancy, our neighbour in Canning Garden. Her house is completely covered with leafy plants


And this is the House of Dogs – That’s what dad calls my Ipoh Granny’s house. She has ummm… 5 or 6 dogs in her little house. Meet Pho-Pho, my 94 year old maternal granny. She’s as old as Mahathir, and she can still walk and talk like Mahathir. She just has trouble remembering who the hell we are…


We also met up with Jason in Penang – Lunch at Queensbay Mall, Penang


The kids with cousin Stacey – at a Japanese food festival outside Queensbay Mall, the organizers named ‘Bon Odori’ Festival. Just Wiki’d it, Bon Odori is the Japanese equivalent of the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival which is celebrated widely in Penang, but it ain’t in July? That’s a month early! …Just a marketing gimmick I guess, but what the heck!


And finally, somebody I dunno, but my sister knows. He’s a Hong Kong actor, Philip Keung Ho-Man. We were in a seafood restaurant in Tanjung Bungah, Penang called Tsunami Village. (Yeah, that’s the real name. Who names a restaurant after a disaster? Imagine a restaurant in Africa named Ebola Village Restaurant). Hazel told Jayden that the uncle sitting two tables away from us was an actor, and Jayden went straight to the uncle holding his mommy’s phone and asked “Are you an actor?” “Can I take a photo with you?” And the uncle obliged, and one of the actor’s friends took the photo with Anu’s phone!! Piece of cake. How I wished I had his guts!

Fun in the Sand

Family Handprints – Dubai, International City, June 2018

Hmmm… I’m gonna continue on International City. Haven’t found time to write anything new. Yeah, even though I’m doing project close-outs now, it is still pretty busy. (More so after I moved myself back to the head office. Am enjoying alternate Saturdays off now, …shhhh. Enjoy it while it lasts. Never know when I’ll be moved back to site!)

Anyway, here’s a little more from our times in International City. Here’s how we made the best out of an Arabian summer. Wake up reeeeaall early in the morning (like 5am), and go for a walk, a jog, whatever, in the desert of a site, next to where we stay. See for yourself.


Tyre tracks in the sand – Looks like we’re deep in the desert, huh?


Not really… The kids, drawing in the sand!


And there we are. England Cluster is just down the road


Justin in his brother’s little trike. Justin was actually riding his go-kart but parked it near the access road to the site, to go jogging with mommy. When we went to retrieve it, it was missing! Some scumbag of a bus driver ferrying workers to work, took it! But, thank God, we asked some workers and they contacted some people and later called us to return it to us, on the same day. Bless their souls!


The mosque at England Cluster, International City, Dubai


Another sunrise picture from our England Cluster apartment – we have a ton of these. Our apartment windows face the east, and we had to wake up real early to get the kids ready for school (and yours truly ready for work, ahem)


France Cluster, International City, Dubai


The mosque in France Cluster – The buildings behind are part of the CBD (Central Business District), International City – Mosques are popping up in International City only recently. Wonder what took the authorities (or more likely the developer, Nakheel) so long. International City has been around since 2005 I think. And they only started constructing the mosques in err… 2015? Yup, after we moved into the area! A far contrast from Malaysia. The first thing you’d see in a housing development in Malaysia, would be a mosque!


The mosque at Dragon Mart, the oldest mosque in the area (I think, completed together with DragonMart 1 in the mid 2000’s) - seen from the roof of the Annex Car Park Building of DragonMart 2. Behind is Dubai Textile City and International City


The empty unused car park of the Annex Car Park Building of DragonMart 2. I dunno how long it’ll survive. Shops are closing left, right and centre in DragonMart 2. Is this a sign of things to come?!?? Some worrisome thoughts for us to ponder…