virgin perm

Got my hair permed for the first time while I was in Penang. 

Goodbye straight hair!

It took about 3 odd hours in the salon and I couldn't be more glad cuzzie was there with me, it did help that the hairstylist was such an easy and honest person to talk to too.

A day later.

Was instructed by the hairstylist to get rid of all my combs and start twirling my hair with my fingers more often now. 

I hope the curls will stay for awhile, I quite like it.

more love each time

I have more and more love for this place each time I visit. My last trip to Penang was more than 2 years ago so I thought it'd be a good time to go visit my family when Jetstar ran a promotion in early February (S$70++ to and fro!).

I love my hospitable relatives who would bring me round and round for good food and great fun. It's really a joy to catch up with aunties and cousins whom I've not seen for some time, and of course, my cute little grandma too.

I think it's no secret that Penang people love to eat, and it's not hard to see why when there's so much good food around. I feel really blessed to have relatives who know where to find all that delicious food around the island they call home.

One of my favourite aunts (and my cousin) recently opened a new restaurant that offers food of fine-dining quality in a casual setting, and I've been hanging out at their shop everyday for the time I was there. It's located conveniently somewhere within Gurney (to be more exact, it's Pulau Tikus) and it's been opened for almost a month now.

My aunt has been bringing me to this particular kopitiam in Pulau Tikus for breakfast because it's really near the restaurant, and the food's good too:

Having breakfast with the locals

The usual sight on a weekend morning.

Didn't make a note of what this lady was selling, but I'm loving those colourful pails at the bottom! Greatly contrasts the zinc/aluminium gray roof.

And here's some of what I've been putting into my tummy (from this Pulau Tikus kopitiam) during my short stay here this time round:

Popiah - Wetter (deliciously so with more gravy) than what we usually have back home, and you can find shrimps in them too. No traces of annoying coriander leaves make it extra satisfying.

Assam Laksa with a spoonful of hei gor - People usually have a love-hate relationshi p with this one, more hate than love if they're too used to the lemak version that they've been having nearly all their lives. I love it though, because I find the sourish taste (from tamarind) very appetizing (not too fond of the mint leaves though bleagh). I feel very excited whenever I manage to find chunks of fish flakes in my soup. Anyhow, the texture of the noodles used here is totally different from our thick bee hoon; it's softer and much more chewy. It's a pity that I haven't been able to find rice noodles of such texture outside of Penang so far.

Curry Mee - My absolute favourite amongst all the Penang hawker fare I've tried so far. 

Even though it's still coconut-milk based, I find it less lemak than the curry chicken noodles we can find in Singapore. Less on the coconut milk, more on the curry spices. That sort of makes it less cloying on the palette. I love the ingredients that comes in every bowl of curry mee: cuttlefish, cockles, tau gwa, shrimps and most importantly, pig's blood curd! It's such a pity that we've stopped selling that in Singapore now... I never fail to 'catch up' with it in my bowls of curry mee whenever I'm in Penang to visit. 

After having such filling breakfasts, cuzzie brought me out for dessert at Penang Road. 

PCK and Rosie were here too.

Business was bustling despite the hot weather; people didn't really seem to mind standing under the scorching sun to queue or have their bowls of chendol.

A nice, cold treat in hot weather. Yummy indeed, but maybe slightly overrated. Worth a try nonetheless.

And now, a break from hawker fare. Let's look at some of the offerings of my aunt and cousin's newly-opened restaurant.

The shop front. Named after the year my cousin was born in #somuchmotherlylove

It's basically converted from an old house; heard my aunt say that it was in a terrible and run-down condition when they first took over it from the landlord and they had to spend quite a bit on renovation.

The interior, pre-lunch hours. Very simple and down-to-earth setting and atmosphere, but a great place to chill out and enjoy fine food and wine with family/friends nonetheless. 

Cover page of their menu.

They specialize in a range of European-influenced cuisines as that was what my cousin learnt at culinary school some years back. And offerings on the menu include the usual courses like starters, main courses and desserts. I helped out with the menial tasks in the shop (e.g. wiping water stains off the shiny cutlery, plates and glasses, editing the Description of their Facebook page and new menu for the month of May - that's what an English major is good for) in exchange for some of my meals :p

For Starters, I had the Parma Ham and Rock Melon as well as the Niçoise Salad with Tuna Tataki.

Parma Ham and Rock Melon - A dish you can never go wrong with; sweet and savoury at the same time. This version was served with some rocket and balsamic dressing.

Niçoise Salad with Tuna Tataki - Rocket, quail eggs, red radish and sweet cherry tomatoes served slightly-seared tuna slices. 

Other starters that I've tried but forgot to take pictures of were the Mushroom and Minestrone Soups, Rocket Salad with Goat's Cheese and Poached Pear, Pan-Seared Scallops with Leek Veloute and Lemon Froth.

For main courses, I had Beef Tenderloin with Glazed Vegetables, Roasted Potatoes and Red Wine Jus, Linguine with Clams, Capers, Olives and Chili, Fettuccine Pomodoro, Baked Fish with Saute Cherry Tomatoes and Fennel Salad, as well as Braised Chicken with Red Wine and Mashed Potatoes.

In addition, I also had a taste of the ribeye that will be up in May's menu. Tasty, tasty red meat that goes well with those roasted potatoes.

Linguine with Clams, Capers, Olives and Chili

Baked Fish with Saute Cherry Tomatoes, Orange Segments and Fennel Salad. I'd thought initially that the fennel slices were raw onion slices -_-

And finally, for desserts, I tried the Gratine Sabayone with Mixed Berries and Home-made Vanilla Ice Cream as well as the highly popular Chocolate Banana. 

Gratine Sayabone - Someone stole a spoonful of it before I took this picture. This is torched custard made with Italian Marsala wine and mixed berries (underneath!); rich and sweet, but not to excess.

Chocolate & Banana - Textured frozen chocolate made from the luxurious Valrhona, served with coffee-infused crunch, brandy, banana espuma, mint leaves and home-made banana ice cream. This was really good.

Having such rich and hearty foods on a daily basis is quite an indulgence really. I've volunteered my proof-reading and editing services to my aunt for their monthly menus in exchange for more free meals when I visit them again in future. Looking forward to having more great food!

Anyway, if you're interested, you can take a look at their Facebook page here. Do drop by for a meal and say Hello to my aunt and cousin when you visit Penang anytime in the near future too. It'll cost about RM100 (plus minus a little) for a full-course meal and food quality's definitely assured.

My aunt also brought me to try some Penang Bat Kut Teh while I was there.

Bat Kut Teh along Gurney's beach front. There were so many of them and it somewhat reminded me of our very own Bat Kut Teh stretch along Balestier Road.

Gek Hui.

Sour and Spicy Fish Soup with Rice Noodles.

This is what I call chockfull of ingredients; meat-lovers would love this. The soup was really good too!

Headed down to Teluk Kumbar for yet another seafood feast with the rest of my maternal relatives one fine evening. 

Look at the fabulous sky that we were blessed to have witnessed that day:

Lovely colours that make me smile.

Our table. As we were busy eating, mozzies were busy feasting on our poor feet too :(

Fish braised in a big ceramic pot basin. It was so delicious when hot!

We spent the rest of our dinner time cracking lame jokes, asking riddles and making fun of each other. I had so much fun catching up with my beloved cuzzies.

And this is a drawing that one of my talented cuzzies did (it was printed into a postcard and given to me by her mum):

According to her, that's the three sisters in her family; eldest (purple), middle (that's her in green) and youngest (blue). I couldn't help but let out a WOW when I saw it - it's such a beautiful drawing and done by my cousin who's only like what, 15? The kids in their household are really talented - great academic results, they can sing well and paint well too; their mummy must be so pleased with them. I'm sure all of them will make it big in future.

Catching up with the relatives back my my Grandma's place. Times like that make me wish that I'm much closer to them (physically) so we can meet up and do more crazy things together on a whim.

Somewhere in the middle of the trip, I came to the conclusion that Penang to me is about 2 things: Family and Food.

Lubs.

yummy way to get started on the topic of pie charts

Looked through the photos in my phone earlier and came across this; it was taken in the last or second last maths tutorial for this semester and I'd almost forgotten bout it till today and it's a little incomplete actually.

Guess the main trouble you'll face is preventing your kids from eating those M&Ms before the pie charts are constructed and calculations are done.

Useful in revisiting Percentage too!

curly wurly ~

Guess who's got ~ ~ ~ hair now!

(wavy lah, just in case you really didn't get the ~ thing)

still around

Submitted my final assignment last Friday (woohoo!) and got Mumsy to try out Penang Kitchen along Tanjong Katong Road with me after catching a glimpse of the shopfront sometime ago. 

Came across this cute picture on the wall as we walked from the car park to the eating place:

Mumsy would usually have the final say if the food at Penang eateries (in Singapore) we visit is passable since she's the only in our family who's born and bred in Penang. And it's usually not that easy to find good Penang food in Singapore... Assam laksas are usually too diluted and would be too sour if not too sweet, the broth of Hokkien Mees would usually not be 'prawny' enough. It's easier for Char Koay Teows to have a slightly greater resemblance to their Penang counterparts though.

Hokkien Mee (S$8.30)

Penang's version of the Hokkien Mee is very different from Singapore's version that we're used to. The first and most important difference is that Penang Hokkien Mee is soup-based rather than stir-fried like Singapore's Hokkien Mee. The ingredients used though, are quite similar in many aspects - yellow noodles, beehoon, eggs, shrimps/prawns, fishcake and sprouts. There's no lard in Penang's version though, and it's also not served with sambal belachan but with another type of slightly more running chili. The stock is usually rich with the taste of prawns/shrimps (I realized that smaller shrimps, rather than the juicy prawns are used more often in Penang's version) and boiled to a certain level of sweetness.

Char Koay Teow (S$8.30)

Another 'same-same-but-different' dish; it'd be exactly the same if not for the fact that dark, sweet soy sauce is not used. The prawns used in Penang's version are usually much smaller, unlike what can be seen from the picture actually. I thought this version was quite good; the wok hei lent a distinctive char-flavour to the dish and made the well-tossed koay teow even tastier! 

Mumsy's verdict: It's a Pass! It's probably one of the better Penang eateries around, though definitely not the cheapest. Guess we'll be heading back again soon when Mumsy has her cravings for Penang food.




In the same week, the primary school clique also had a belated birthday celebration for Robin at Peperoni's (Hill Crest Park). Atas neighbourhood ambience aside, I found the place to be really cosy and the pizzas yummy. While you are waiting for your pizza to cook in the furnace, crayons are provided so that you can doodle on the huge sheets of coloured paper with your friends. We had a few rounds of Draw Something and had a few good laughs over Siao's stripper that we did not manage to guess correctly.

There are a few sizes in which you can order your pizzas - regular, medium and monster (I think that was the nickname we gave to the largest-sized one), and we had the monster one of course! It's really huge; takes up about three quarters of the table top's surface.

Half Peperoni and half mushroom-ham.

We were trying to show how big the pizza is but I think putting our hands there created a counter effect instead.

In addition to this monster, we also ordered a regular-sized half-seafood, half-salmon pizza. The pizzas were awesome. One of the tastiest pizzas that I've tried in Singapore, not to mention largest! It does help that I'm quite fond of thin-crust pizzas; I will even eat the crispy burnt bits :p

To conclude the bit on dinner, yummy pizzas ftw!

Post dinner, Robin drove us back to Siao's, but not before we got ourselves some ice cream from Ice Edge. Ice cream flavours for the night were Bak Kwa (yes you read it right, it's bak kwa!) and Chocolate Crunch (or something to that effect). 

Bak Kwa ice cream might sound a little very strange/unacceptable, but I've probably made you very curious about its taste just by mentioning it. It tasted surprisingly like Bak Kwa (duh) and I love it when people come up with such wacky food ideas (especially if they're good), so it was a Yes for me. Can't say the same for the rest of the primary school clique though, seemed like they were a little reluctant to finish it up - guess it got a little too cloying towards the end.


That's just some of the foods that I've been trying in the last week.

Currently in Penang right now, and nursing a bad throat after downing some many pieces of crispy, deep fried chicken skin from Gurney Drive 2 days ago.

before i'm too old to use anymore cutesy stuff

I saw this little backpack on gMarket today and I couldn't help but click "Buy":

Came across it for the first time when I sat in for the kindergarten-enrichment class sometime in Feb and I couldn't forget how cute it looked (together with its chubby owner). Came across it a second time at the a shop specializing in toddler needs in the newly-renovated Katong Mall but thought it was a little expensive and I couldn't think of a use to justify its price.

Managed to get it at a slightly lower price from gMarket and I'm thinking of using it as my camera bag when it arrives! I'm probably going to get a lot of weird (if not amused) stares when I bring it out, but what the heck, I'm still going to do it anyway.

And as I was looking through the endless list of things for sale on the website, I came across something else that's really interesting too:

Dress your baby up like an edamame,

too cute.

it took awhile, but i'm finally back

My absence and lack of commitment in windsurfing during the past year would have rendered me a terrible, terrible backslider if I were to liken it to a religion. I came up with more than enough silly excuses to stay away from ECP, e.g. too busy with school-work/life (when it's just really poor time management on my part), bad weather conditions (the list goes on).

Doesn't take a genius to figure out the more I stayed away, the more terrible I became at the sport, so it's not really surprising that I've not really been making much progress in my windsurfing journey. In fact, it's more or less come to a standstill after I hopped back to use the longboard. Since I came back from HK last year, I've been trying to get myself better acquainted with SK's longboard. It's a whole new cycle of learning all over again. Sigh.

Things were quite bad when I tried to be regular again. There were (and still are) many instances where I lost my balance every time I tried to do my tacks/gybes, and it got really tiring when I had to up-haul over and over again when I dropped my (freaking heavy) sail into the water. I'd lost whatever sense of balance I had back then, and I lost the strength that I used to have too. :(

I sustained new bruises from carrying the equipment each week and they make my already-horrible-looking legs look even more unsightly. And there was a nasty one too when my left rib rammed into the boom after the rig was catapulted by the wind.

All that failure was disheartening, to say the least...
And it felt awful to feel disconnected with friends whom you were great with once upon a time too.


But I'm not quite ready to give up on windsurfing yet.

It's given me some of my best friends in and out of university, and helped me form a sense of self-identity I never had prior to getting acquainted with it. Through it, I got a taste of what it feels like to win a competition after putting in much sweat and effort (literally, physically) for the first time in my life. Victory was sweet, with strong hints of saltiness. I think it'll take me a long time to forget how I clambered back to shore, exhausted, but relieved and the hug I gave to my mentor, after ending a few rounds of nail-biting races.


And so, I'm desperately trying to make up for all that self-induced lost time now.


To kick-start things, I signed up for the basic instructor course when I got an invite in mid-February. We had to pay a handsome fee for it (in addition to the other requirements), and that's my expensive  reminder to stay committed this time round. It helped that school's nearly over when I attended the lessons.

Over the past few consecutive weekends as the lessons were being run, I tried to squeeze in a bit of surfing whenever it was time for breaks from the lessons. As luck would have it, the wind's been blowing rather nicely (by Singapore's standards); we even had a sunny South-West on one fine Saturday! It's rare to have the wind and sun appearing at the same time because good winds usually imply impending storms. So, that's a good sign!

After putting some consistency in place, I'm slowly (but surely) getting used to the equipment and the elements again. I've been regaining my sense of balance and a bit of that strength needed for holding onto the rig while it's up, and I can do (chicken) tacks and gybes without falling into the water most of the time now (at least for light wind conditions!). Progress for beach starting is slow, but I think I've somehow felt what the 'correct version' should feel like. Chubs also pointed out my mistakes so I'm looking forward to work on them again soon.

Honestly, I know that I still have a long way to go on this path and that there'll be so many more problems to face in future. But I'm ready to make a commitment for the first time in a long while, so AJ, make it work man!


ps. No new bruises sustained over the last weekend. Another good sign, surely!