Crazy Pre Mid Week Celebration of Food and Speed

What happens when you have a couple of friends who are bored with work and nothing to do on a Tuesday night? Well first it starts of with hey lets have a Pre Mid Week Liquid Theraphy. Basically it is a big word to say lets go minum beer lar. So we started out planning to meet up for some drinks at Royal Oak Jaya one. Then the topic changed to road trip for my bachelors trip and then finally 30 min after this conversation started, it was decided we will go to Bukit Tinggi for dinner tonight and after that head to Genting for Coffee and Cheese cake.

Most of us left office around 5 to 530 and then Jack, Allan, Amy and myself met at Allan's place at 7pm and we met Chong at the BHP after Gombak toll 30 minutes later. There Amy and myself shifted to Chong's car and off we went to the restaurant. We arrived at the restaurant around 8pm and this is what was ordered...

This is a tofu dish which is basically soft tofu at the bottom swimming in oil and soya sauce and topped with a friend egg. It is almost like tofu with telur mata kerbau. All I can say it, it is FANTASTIC combo and I have never seen it anywhere else before. Next from something soft we go for something spicy...

It is green chili that is lightly fried and then has some sauce which I cannot identify. It is not spicy at all by the way as the seeds have been taken out. It taste almost like pickled chilis and it was good as well. All these green and soy products must be accompanied with some white meat...

They call this roast chicken with salted fish or something like that. Oh man the sauce is super exquisite and the chicken is so succulent that is drops off the bone. This dish is a totally must and to think we almost gave this a miss for their new recipe which is the "pak cham" kai. White meat is not complete without some dark meat. So bring on the dark meat...

This is one of the BEST LAMB dishes I have ever had. The meat is so succulent and juicy that it feels like the lamb has been steamed. However this is a roast leg of lamb complemented with this sweet mint sauce. Combination is just might blowing. I am drooling as I type this. We felt that there was too much meat, so we decided to order some more veg so bring on...

This was actually an interesting dish. They cooked it with chinese wine and it taste almost like "siong tong" lala but with mushrooms. It was good after all the meat but the guys wasn't finished. They realised it might be too little food so being meat eaters and the fact we were washing down our food with...

They thought it was only appropriate to order...

Stir fried beef with bitter gourd. This dish was pretty good as well. The beef is also very tender and taste pretty good. It complemented the bitter gourd but I only had one bitter gourd. Apparently we missed out their most famous dish which is the Seafood boat. However we didn't have enough people. So we will come back the next time. After all the food, drinks and laughter, we paid the bill...

The Lamb cost 100 bucks and the chicken was 50 bucks. That was the bulk of the cost and I think it was pretty reasonable. We then proceed to Genting on a BMW 330ci convertible. My friend Chong was driving and with the top down, it took us only 16 minutes to get from the restaurant at the foot of bukit tinggi to Coffee bean.

Check out the car we came in. The yellow beemer behind is Jack's yellow submarine. It is on top of Genting where Amy and I lost our virginity....

Planking virginity lar. Dun think so much ok. Hahahahha. So we sat down for some coffee to metabolise the adrenaline from driving up Genting at high speed and took a group picture for remembrance.

So next time you are feeling down on a Tuesday, get some crazy friends and go for a Pre Mid Week Celebration of Food and Speed. It is an experience of a life time. Haha

One Epic Post

This is going to be one epic post because I think we laughed so much that night that we almost had an accident. We laughed so much in the car on the way home I couldn't drive straight anymore. Anyway the night started off by the Mangkuk's meeting up for dinner at Kota Damansara to celebrate KC0001 (initial carrier of mangkuk-itis virus). I had dinner already pre-arranged with another group so we joined up with the mangkuks for drinks at....

When Amy and I arrived it was still happy hour so without delay we ordered...

See how happy Amy is with her Hoegaarden. The mangkuk-itis joined us sometime later and then begin lar all the stupid talk and laughing. However the main event of the night was of course the celebration of KC0001's birthday. There is nothing better to celebrate a birthday other then having cake with candles and a birthday song.

It was a nice mango cake that Saw Wen got from Australia Confectionery in Sea Park.

Without much fanfare, we sang a birthday song, KC0001 blew the candles out, made a speech and then cut the cake. This is where suddenly things took a different twist for the "worst". First Sharon decided to crash a 21st Birthday Party right beside us. A lady was turning 21 and her family and friend had a section all for themselves but most importantly they had some helium balloons as decoration. Sharon being herself decided to crash the party and ask for a baloon. I tell you that lady had muka as tebal as a nuclear bunker. 

However she did managed to get a baloon and she decided to pay KC0001 back for all the hardship he has put her through.

Yup she decided to tie the baloon to KC0001's neck and shame him for the whole night. First he was not too happy and struggled with his new "collar". After a while he gave up and decided to live with it...

Then after a while he got to liking his new partner and started too appreciate it by first taking a picture with it...

Then kiss it...

Then Lick it...

 

Then use it to hang himself...

Finally after a good 30 min he decided to live with it as an extension to himself...

Not before he tried to get some help from Saw Wen to help him to get rid of it...

Saw Wen also failed so we decided to instead start to tell lame jokes. This was sort of a torture for KC0001 who missed my rom and hence missing out the lame joke-ness. One thing that continue to surprise me is how one lame joke and extend to many other lame jokes especially when alcohol is involved. However with the influence of alcohol part of the lame jokes also gets forgotten. Here is a clip of them trying to remember some "pau" lame joke.

After we got going, John really came into his elements and told a few "pau" lame jokes of his own. I was pretty surprised at that. Now after all the lame jokes were over, this is where it got really strange. I cannot remember why but suddenly there was a cake fight that broke out right in front of us between Sharon and KC0001. They were throwing cakes at each other and all I could do was stand back, laugh and continue to take a video.

They were throwing cake at each other until Sharon got some on her hair somemore. I tell you they are like 2 married couple fighting. This Amy pulak dem funny lor. She actually took the camera all the way into the girls toilet and recorded Sharon washing the cake out of her hair. What she forgot was she was in the girls toilet and well uh recording shouldn't be allowed in the toilet.

Now you would think nothing can beat the cake fighting between Sharon and KC0001 right? Well you are so wrong because when we all got into the car, we decided to ask KC0001 to inhale the helium from the balloon and say something. First 2 tries was a failure but when it happened, we almost had an accident because I was laughing so hard I couldn't concentrate on driving. We actually stopped by the side of the road and laughed for a good 5-10 minutes before I recovered enough to continue driving. The video of the incident is with Steph. Steph, you got to upload that video and show it to the world. Oh by the way, I laughed so much I was actually crying.

It was a seriously fun and well a little dangerous night. We almost got into accident not because of alcohol but because of Helium.

After a Tiring Day

On Friday Amy and I finally got phase 1 of our wedding stuff completed. We went for our pre-wedding shoot which started off with some pretty nervous weather. When we woke up and I first opened the sliding door, I was greeted with some cold wind and the smell of rain. Looking up at the skies, it looked like it was going to rain and I was pretty sure it would and we would be shooting some pretty gloomy weather. Lucky the weather was on our side and I think we had a successful whole day cam whoring session. First time in my life I cam whore so much.

This is how happy Amy is after our successful cam whoring session.

After the cam whoring session, we decided to celebrate a little and head to Ben's General Store for some dinner

The food and decor that is place is really nice. They had decked out the place like a farm house.

They are even kind enough to put on a wall a dessert recipe...

Looking around the place, there is this sign that really caught my eye...

Now I didn't know that. Enough with the decoration now lets talk about the food. Since already taken pre-wedding photos, so can makan a bit more a bit lar. :) However we decided to order something unhealthy and something healthy. For the healthy portion, we saw the Cesar salad and it looked really good so we decided to get it.

What was interesting about this salad is well it ain't a normal Cesar salad. See that yellow biscuit looking thing on the bottom left of the picture? That is actually some melted Parmesan cheese. Normally it would be sprinkled all over the salad. Same goes for the "bacon", in this case it is again beef bacon. If you see the top right you will see a brown potato chip looking thing. That is the "bacon" which is usually cut into small pieces and sprinkled all over the salad. Last but not least is the croutons, instead of small little squares, we got big piece of bread. Amy didn't like this new rendition of the Cesar salad but I kinda like it. It was new and refreshing.

Next comes the unhealthy bit which is the pizza....

Last time I was here with some other friends we ordered the Il Carnivore. Basically it is a pizza with chorizo, chicken sausage and lamb meatballs. It taste superb but it think it would taste even better if it was uh with some uh pork. Hehehe. The good thing about this place is they provide....

The bottle on the left is olive oil with some rose mary herbs soaking in it and the bottle on the right is olive oil with chilli. The chilli one goes real well with the Il Carnivore as because it is meat and a little of spice goes a long way on the palate.

Our second unhealthy order was the nutella milkshake, I tell you this milkshake is really to die for...

It feels like they threw a couple of ferrero roche and blended it with milk and some decent vanilla ice cream. We were pretty satisfied with the food.

Now after we have praised this place so much comes the uh little bad news. One thing I do not like about this place is the service. This is my 3rd time here at Ben's General store in Bangsar village and on my 2 previous visits here, we were actually told to leave the restaurant as because they were closing. I always feel that at a nice restaurant, no matter what they shouldn't tell their patrons to leave. They can always indicate it by bringing the bill or cleaning up but never ask people to leave. 

On my second visit, we ordered 3 beers and we saw the beer bottle sitting out on the counter for a good 10 minutes without it being served. We actually were 3/4 the way through our meal and the beer still wasn't served. Finally I asked them and they said they are waiting for glasses from their sister restaurant on the outside. It left me wondering, it is only a 1 min walk across, get someone to do it instead of letting the beer get warm and your customers waiting.

This time on my 3rd visit again I was disappointed by the service. We ordered warm water and when the water came it was cold water. I told the "manager" that served us and he just conveniently said they didn't have warm water. Why did he not mention it when we ordered it in the first place? I also saw a lady walking in with a baby in her arms and 2 "managers" attended to her but not one of them thought the lady need a baby seat for her baby. She had to ask for it then only she got it. I think this is not the type of service I expect from a place like this.

We wrote a feedback card and said the food and ambiance is great but service really needs some work. That is the unfortunate part. I would come back for the food if they increased their service level.

Penang Again

Yup it is our yearly pilgrimage to Penang for nothing other then Balik Pulau durians. I still maintain they have the best durians there and the best thing of all is that it is way cheaper then what we get here in KL. About a month back while Dr Ooi was back we had 5 fruits which cost us 180 bucks. In Penang we had 8 fruits + water + tea + manggis + rambutan and only cost us 130 bucks. Now that is what I call a steal.

This time going back to Penang I was armed with my Macro. I know that my bro's place has a nice lotus pond in the vicinity and I wanted to capture some lotus. However before we did that I took a picture of a little critter in the house first.

That is my brother's pet prawn. He is quite into aquarium and them prawns are not for eating but they actually clean the tank up a bit of algae and dirt. Next I went outside and a caught sight of....

I first saw this flower in Seremban back about 5 or 6 years back. It is really cool because of the filament of the flower. It makes for fantastic macro shots.

After that we walked to the lotus pond and we were disappointed. All we had were....

Last time we were there, I didn't have my macro with me and it was kinda like the rainy season so there were even mushrooms. This time around nothing interesting to take at the Lotus Pond other then the standard water shot...

On the way back there were some cat whisker lalang. At least I think it is called cat whiskers lar...

 Walking around a bit I saw....

Only managed to take a couple of pictures and it flew away. Only got one that is remotely sharp. It started raining in the afternoon all the way to the evening. Once the rain stopped, I once again took my camera out to maybe and hopefully get some pictures of water droplets. Didn't get much but got some flowers again...

The only difference between this set and the previous set is that if you look closely enough you can see water in between the flowers which I thought was pretty cool.

Next day we went for some Durians and after we had our durians, Amy and my sister in law were admiring the pond full of Japanese Koi and guess what? The guy working there told them that the fish also eat durians. Last year when we were there we saw them feeding their dogs with durians. I think dogs still ok lar but feeding durians to fish is a little too much right. I didn't believe it until....

I guess at a durian farm, they do not have alot of things but they have a heck alot of durians. Since the owner and the patrons are durian crazy, I guess their pets should also be durian crazy. :)

Just as we were about to leave the place, I saw some really nice flowers and out comes the macro again.

Wah beautiful..... Right beside it there was another one but a little bluerr...

The only problem with this shot is obvious, there is a fly right in the middle of a sea of yellow color. I could not decide if it is the way the flower gets its nutrition because there was some sort of liquid in it or it is just a very unlucky fly.

It seems not only do humans, dogs and fish like durians apparently little guys like durians as well..

Again another successful year of having some super good Balik Pulau durians. Now back to KL to get some expensive durians. :)