Dubai - the Fast Foods

Dubai is Fast Food heaven. Fast Food and western restaurants seem to dominate the malls and food courts. Prices there are almost tripled, compared to Malaysian prices. Their Dirhams is about 10% lower than the Ringgit (1 Dirham = RM0.90).

Look at the prices of Burgers there:

And KFC there also cost a bomb:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts - I find these too sweet! Middle-Easterners love their snacks & desserts real sweet!

I prefer Big Apple doughnuts any time! Less sweet & more variety!

1 dozen of these cost RM45 equivalent!

New York Fries - fries doused in melted cheese, sprinkled with fried bacon chips & topped with sour cream. This is a favourite in the food courts.

A small cup of this cost about RM13 equivalent.

This set cost about RM28 equivalent

Fuddruckers - this was LL's favourite restaurant discovered in Dubai. Their tagline is "World's Greatest Hamburgers for 25 Years".


I'm not really a hamburger fan but LL swore they really lived up to their tagline! Their burger meat patties come in different serving sizes: quarter-pound, half-pound, three-quarter-pound & one-pound.

The Half-Pounder

The gigantic 1-Pounder

Fried Chicken Loins - aka Chicken Breastmeat!

The yummy Garlic Toast

We ordered extra portion of their Saute'ed Mushrooms

But I love their salads - you get unlimited salads for every hamburger order!

The Salad Bar

Crispy Onion Rings

Grilled Sub Sandwich

Fish & Chips from the foodcourt:

Fish & Chips (cost: RM30 eqivalent)

The posh foodcourt with chandeliers

Dubai - the Local Food

Although Dubai is in the UAE, smack in a total-Islamic country, it is a throbbing metropolis with many international flavours. This is most apparent in its adoption of international cuisine, its bustling city with super-construction everywhere, in its fabulous malls and the floods of foreigners in the city, whether they are workers or visitors.

For more on the city, click http://raynebows.blogspot.com/

Their local food consists mainly of grilled meats, salads and cheese.

Assortment of Grilled Meats

The superfresh Salads

The Pickled Veg

The colourful fresh juices

And oh, not to forget their breads - which are flat and made from wholegrain flours (like the pita bread we get here). Their national snack seems to be the "Shawamar" - pieces of grilled meat and vegetables rolled up in the flat bread into a "popiah" shape.

The friendly shawamar man

The Shawamar

Roast Chicken on the Grill

The shawamar is available in almost every street corner and people there would just stop their cars by the road, wind down their windows and holler out their orders to the shawamar seller!

Tai Thong Klang - Celebration Dinner

Last Sunday, the family gathered for a 3-prong celebration dinner at Tai Thong, Klang. This was to celebrate the birthdays of JJ, Leanne and the wedding anniversary of Big Sis. A room with karaoke was booked for this occasion. Needless to say, it was was a very noisy dinner - not only from the karaoke in our room, but also from the karaoke from the next room and from the main dining hall where a wedding dinner was in progress!

We were all ravenous by the time the Four Seasons dish was served. It consisted of 2 types of fishballs - steamed and the other rolled in almond flakes & fried; green peas & asparagus with snails on a meehoon basket and some jellyfish salad. It's quite uninspiring but everything was polished off.

Next, they served the Birthday Noodles because the kids were hungry. This huge mountain of wantan noodles were braised with pork and mushroom slices with beansprouts. Simple as it was, it was tasty and very soon the mountain was gone!

The waitress served us individual Chicken Soup which had chinese herbs and sea cucumber in it. It was yummy! No photos here as those shots didn't turn out well.

The Braised Sea Cucumber with Mushrooms came in a generous portion. Besides these 2 main ingredients, there were also canned abalone mushrooms, beancurd sheets and brocolli. This is a pretty standard dish in chinese banquets. Although it was a huge portion, it was sadly lacking in taste - probably the cook forgot to add salt in it!

The Steamed Patin Fish was swimming in a sea of blended ginger. The fish was excellent as it was very fresh and succulent.However, the next dish - Butter Prawns was the greatest disappointment of the night. It was completely tasteless - the prawns as well as the "butter" crumbs.

The vegetable dish was KaiLan in 2 Styles. The stalks were crispily stirfried while the leaves were sliced finely and deepfried with pieces of dried cuttlefish. I think this was the best dish of the evening - but then, that could be my biased view because I'm a vegetables lover!

Dessert was some Pink Rolls & Baked Pastries. The pink rolls were just like the ping-pei mooncake while the baked pastries had lotus paste filling. Oh the pasttries came with Sea Coconut & Longan.

On the whole, I would say the food there lacked taste. Possible reasons: it's a busy pre-CNY time and there was a wedding dinner there as well.

Later on we went to Sis' place for the Celebration Cakes:

Kheng's Kopitiam - Part II

In my previous posting on this Kopitiam, I said I would go back there for their Iced Coffee. So, last weekend, with my friend SL in town and since she wanted some kopitiam fare for lunch, we headed to Kheng's again.

This time round we ordered new items, besides the iced coffees, of course.

SL had the Nasi Lemak with Chicken Rendang (RM6.50). According to her, it was so-so. The dish came with all the condiments arranged neatly around the rice. I took a bite to try and my verdict is:

* The sambal was clearly made from commercialized "chili boh" (ground chilli) as the raw taste of the ground chilli was overwhelming.

* The chicken rendang - it looked better than it tasted. Somehow there seemed to be something lacking in the ingredients that went into the rendang - it's just not as fragrant as it should be.

* The rice lacked good santan in its flavour.

LL ordered the Fried Mee with Chicken Curry (RM5). The fried mee was, just literally, fried mee - there was NO other ingredients in the dish - not even a strand of taugeh! There was just a sprinkling of chopped spring onions on top of the plain fried mee. Taste-wise, the mee was bland and it was only edible when doused with the curry chicken. The curry chicken was just mediocre - tasted like one of those instant-pack curry paste.

I tried their Curry Laksa (RM5.50). There were taufu puffs, long beans, slices of fishcake and 1 piece of chicken in the bowl of noodles. The curry was quite lemak but taste-wise, nothing outstanding.

SL ordered her favourite Steamed Tapioca (RM2) which came with their bland kaya. We couldn't finish all the tapioca. Likewise, the Sweet Potato kuih, rolled in coconut, was pretty but lacked any "oomph".

Again, I would go back to Kheng's for their iced coffee, if not anything else!

Raju's Restaurant

Raju's Restaurant
Jalan Gasing
Petaling Jaya

It was a blistering day yesterday and my colleagues and I had actually wanted to go for the Ipoh Taugeh Chicken in Jalan Gasing. However, we had a last-minute change of mind after the horrendous jam along that stretch and there definitely was no parking space available there.

So, we decided to turn into Raju Restaurant - no traffic jam and parking space available there. We chose to sit at the al fresco area, under shady trees and giant mist fans and less cooking smoke there! We didnt want to smell like indian food later!

Once we sat down, banana leaves, rice, vegetables & curry appeared on our table. We had also ordered fried Ikan Bulus (RM5 per fish), Ikan Tenggiri (RM4 per piece), Sotong (RM7), Chicken Gizzards (RM0.50 per piece) and Chicken (RM4.50).



Generally, the fried stuff were OK although my colleagues commented the Chicken was a bit tasteless - it wasn't fried till "garing" - it was in fact, a little under-fried.

The fried Sotong was good as it had been very well marinated and there were also pieces of fried onion rings with it.

The waiters went around with trays where plates of various kinds of curried dishes were offered. We chose the Mutton Varuval (RM8). It was more spicy than tasty - I couldn't really taste the flavour of the meat as it must have been pre-boiled for some time.

The waiters also plonked a piece of Fish Cutlet on our banana leaves, without first asking us. When I asked whether it was "Free", he said "Bayar, semua kena bayar" and then walked off. Well, we thought since the thing was on our banana leaves, we tried it and unanimously agreed that we're NOT gonna be conned by this again. It was tasteless, with hardly any fish in it - it's more like some flour paste with spices and it cost RM1.50 for that miserable piece.

Each portion of Rice & Vegetables was RM5 per person. I found their curries lacking in taste - bland. Service was erratic - we had to repeat our request for the Fried Bittergourd several times before it was finally served to us. And what a disappointment it was! The gourd didn't look freshly fried, it was just bitter and not crunchy at all. Although I'm a fan of this stuff, I left my portion of the bittergourd untouched.

On the whole, I would say Raju's is a bit over-rated. The food was not fantastic and the prices are rather steep. For this meal, the cost was RM60.30 for 3 people.

"Rice-Cooker" Chicken Rice

Tired from the cookies baking, we decided to have a very simple dinner at home. What could be simpler than Claypot Chicken Rice – although in our case, it was “Rice-Cooker” Chicken Rice.

So I tossed together half a kampong chicken, Chinese mushrooms and Thai sausages and voila!


The chicken rice was cooked very quickly and our 1-dish meal was a very satisfying dinner :-))

Peanut Cookies - home-baked

Chinese New Year is just round the corner and there’re not many weekends left before the Year of the Rat dawns. So, today I decided to start making some cookies – my famous Peanut Cookies!

It’s the first time I’m using my Fagor oven to bake cookies and the 1st tray put in was a test. The temperature at 200 deg.C was too hot and the top tray of cookies was very quickly browned. Thereafter, I turned the temperature down to 150 deg. and the cookies were fine.

600g of peanuts yielded 4 such containers of cookies!