Monday, March 12, 2012
Indonesian Coconut Shell Carving
The design also has monkeys, if you look hard you can see their bodies and arms and tails. It sits on another carved shell base.
Sometimes these lights are lit by candle, but we put a electric bulb in ours when we got back to Malaysia. It looks pretty cool at night as our master bedroom is dark brown so the light makes the room very moody. I tried to search more on Indonesian coconut shell carving, not much out there on the web.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
POS Malaysia
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Lobster Claw Plants
As I added the photo to Blogger, I remembered I had seen a number of Lobster Claw and Lobster Claw-like plants on my trip last year to Ubud in Bali (see the post here).
So I pulled up some photos I took in the gardens of the Rudana Fine Art Gallery. I guess I only took one of a Heliconia, where the claws go up instead of hang down like the ones I aquired. The garden was so pretty. . .
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Kitchen
We are also very happy about the real Corian we spent the extra money on. It was a much better choice then marble because we didn't have to deal with seams.
The one thing we aren't thrilled about is the Stainless Steel table. While it looks fantastic and fills the space, it gets rusty if you don't wipe off the water. Actually all the stainless steel items (except the refrigerator which isn't really stainless steel but some kind of stainless looking material) get rusty if you don't keep them up. I never had this problem with my stainless steel appliances in New York.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Happy Holidays from Malaysia
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Baby Back Pork Ribs and American-type Barbeque Sauces
I was at Tesco awhile back and was in the separate section they have for the pork and other non-Halal items (you have to pay separately for these items including alcohol so when we are at the grocery stores and go into these sections we have to be rung up in two separate places so as to keep the Halal separate from the non-Halal in the grocery stores. It is a bit of a hassle because the act of being rung up at the register in Malaysia sometimes is a slow process!). Anyway, there was actually some ok looking Baby Back Pork Ribs so I picked them up. I don’t remember seeing them before and thought R might like me to make some barbequed ribs.
Pork Baby Back Ribs from Tesco Seremban 23.83RM
American-type Barbeque Sauces that come in bottles here are fairly limited to Heinz and a few other basic BBQ sauces that have a generic BBQ taste. No fancy gourmet BBQ’s in Seremban although I have seen a slightly better selection before at a grocery store called Cold Storage which has a few locations around KL, Selangor and Mid Valley. But even there, they are overpriced and limited.
So a number of months ago I decided to try making my own BBQ sauce, I was trying to get a good American BBQ sauce taste using ingredients available here in Malaysia. The sauce I’ve been making tastes great, rich flavor and just spicy enough for our taste. And because of the special ingredients like the SOS chili sauce there is a very faint Asian taste that I think makes it a special layered sauce.
Here’s the recipe if you’d like to try it. I use it mainly on oven baked chicken, but I also used it on the oven baked baby back ribs and it was very tasty. I usually cook the meat awhile and then add the sauce towards the second half of cooking so it doesn’t burn.
BBQ Sauce
1 cup Tomato Sauce
1 cup SOS Chili Sauce
1/4 cup Distilled Vinegar
1/4 cup Dark Soy Sauce
1/4 cup Brown Sugar
1 tablespoon Yellow Mustard, like Heinz not dry
1 tablespoon Tabasco Sauce
1/4 tablespoon of Mexican Chili Powder*
1/4 tablespoon of Asian Chili Powder*
1/4 tablespoon of Red Chili Pepper Flakes**
1/2 teaspoon Black Pepper
Mix all of the ingredients in a stainless steel saucepan and slowly bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir regularly. Reduce the heat to low and gently simmer until it turns dark and thick (about 10 to 15 minutes). Transfer the sauce to a sealable container and store in the refrigerator. It should keep for a month.
*Chili powder here is usually Asian chili powder, a bright red finely crushed powder. Mexican chili powder or what in the US we just call Chili Powder is browner and has a different taste so it is important for the recipe to use some Mexican Chili Powder in addition to Asian Chili Powder. MasterFoods Brand Spices from Australia makes a Mexican Chili Powder available here in Malaysia in the spice section of stores like Tesco or Jusco.
**I think I mentioned before Red Chili Pepper Flakes are hard to buy here, so I get mine from the extra packets that are delivered with Dominos Pizzas. Then later use the packets of Red Chili Pepper Flakes for cooking because cooking with out Red Chili Pepper Flakes at times is nearly impossible! OK Dominos Pizza isn’t great at all but thank goodness they do deliver to my house in seremban when I can’t cook for whatever reason and thank goodness for those pepper flake packets they are like gold in my house!
Friday, December 9, 2011
Orange Berry Palm
I snapped these shots at the Sri Menanti Royal Museum (I wrote about the place here). Not sure what kind of Palms these are but the berries are beautiful and would look great in my garden as I am trying to include as much orange as possible.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Taugeh Hijau
I was at Family Store buying my vegetables for the week, there wasn't a great selection because it was Sunday and the Family Store by my house gets really busy on Saturday and to a lesser degree Sunday morning. So by the time I rolled in there, the selection was pretty grim. I got what I could and looked for anything else that might be worth buying. I saw this small packet of some cute little greens called Taugeh Hijau so I put it in my basket.
The Taugeh Hijau sat in my crisper for a day or two and then I noticed it and thought I better do something with it before it spoiled. I looked online and found "green bean sprouts" for one translation and on a blog another suggestion that Taugeh Hijau might also mean snow pea sprouts or pea sprouts, that they are the greens for peas. The Taugeh Hijau I bought looked kind of like other pea sprouts images. It seems they are usually cooked in Asia. I didn’t need to look at the recipes, I could tell by the finished products that it’s more of that stirfry-lightly or blanch them type of preparation done here so often in Asia especially Malaysia... similar to the preparation the baby ferns I recently prepared and other greens.
But I was serving cold chicken and vegetable pasta for dinner and so cooking these didn’t appeal to me, I thought maybe I could add the sprouts to the top of the salad raw. I found one entry online that said they could be both cooked or served raw and that raw they tasted good. So I tried a stem. Sure enough, it tasted good. In fact it tasted an awful lot like alfalfa sprouts which I love and aren’t available at family store and are quite expensive when they are available at Jusco. So here I have another sprout alternative! R was skeptical but I cleaned them and placed them on top of the pasta salad. Guess what, he liked them and I did too. Very nice taste and cool texture- a crisp bite in the mouth and it made the salad look pretty fancy.
I’m going to have to get them again and try cooking them too.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Wall Lighting in Living Room
I had nearly given up, but finally found something useable from Avalon Light Fixtures in Senawang not far from Seremban. I liked the curved part and the contemporary look. I wasn't sure R would like them so I took a photo and shared it with him first. Surprisingly, he liked them. I was, at that point, prepared to spend some money on the fixtures, I mean not 14,000 RM, but more than I had initially wanted to as I figured they were in an important room of the house. But to my delight they were with discount only 40 RM each!
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
King's Palace
While my parents were here we decided to go to the Sri Menanti Royal Museum or as we have been calling it, the King's Palace, located in the royal state capital about 40km East of Seremban . I listed it in my "Places to Visit and Eat in Seremban and Negeri Sembilan" post awhile back here.
R and I had seen photos of it and were really interested to drive more inland towards the middle of Malaysia to see this place. Trying to find out exactly how to get there from Seremban wasn't that easy, all directions were vague. The best way to go, or the way we went, was to look for signs in Seremban town heading to Kuala Pilah on Federal Route 51 going east. Federal Route 51 East takes you from Seremban to Kuala Pilah. The road quickly leaves Seremban and takes you on a breathtaking climb over some mountains covered with trees and palms... really beautiful. Then, still traveling East on 51 you start to get local. You see local stands selling fruits and some grilling meat right there on the road. It's pretty nice. Before getting to Kuala Pilah you see signs to turn right to Sri Menanti on to N29 (south) which takes you to the royal town and then a roundabout towards the King's Palace. The place is pretty surreal and cool. The drive might be better than the actual 'palace' though. But it is fun to walk through. The building was built from 1902 to 1908, there are supposedly 99 pillars each at 65 feet and there were no nails or screws used to construct the place. Climbing to the top level was a steep ladder climb, fun.
As seen in the photo above and on the outside of the building, the main color theme here is YELLOW. There are tons of yellow bulbs all over the palace, we would have liked to stay into the night to see it lit up, but we decided to go back up to 51 travel further east to Kuala Pilah which on a quick tour produced not much interest and too much traffic. Maybe another day, because there are supposedly many old shophouses to see that haven't been torn down.