Al Dente

Went to Al Dente Trattoria down at Holland V a week ago, and sampled all their recommendations!

Summary: looks good, tastes not bad, but for the price (worked out to be $110 or so for two mains, two deserts and one starter) I don't think it's worth it. Out of everything the best has to be the pizza, wood oven baked, just the way I like it! Thankfully, Al Dente has a promotion of having their pizzas at $10 after 10pm everyday, so if you're thinking of hanging out one night with some friends drop by there and try their pizza!

I know this is brief, I promise a more comprehensive update next time!

Cold Rock

Went to the Cold Rock down at Holland V yesterday with the class to have ice cream. The Cold Rock has a different concept from most other ice cream parlours - They basically use a special cold rock and then take the ice cream flavour of your choice and mix it with an extra ingredient of your choice - They have things like chocolate brownie, Tim Tams, M&Ms, Rocky Road and loads of other sweet stuff! You can add as many as you like - just pay extra.

There's my butterscotch ice cream + peanut butter ice cream + rocky road + cookie dough mix!

The ice cream costs a bomb though. A regular with one topping costs $6 already. It's all nice and sinful and very satisfying, especially for finicky people. You can always have a different combination at every visit! Mine got very chunky due to two toppings in a regular cup, and very sweet, good for a sweet tooth like mine but some may find it too much.

Ah well, I'm glad that there's such a place around anyway. May be pricey but now you don't have to fly to Auzi to get your fix of Cold Rock!

Secret Recipe Sale!

Secret Recipe is having a 42% off all whole cakes in line with National Day celebrations! The queues for them are crazy and the promotion ends tmr, 10th Aug, so go and grab them while you can! There's different types at different outlets, and it's limited to 3 or 4 types per outlet only I think. Each person is only allowed to buy a max. of 3 cakes and no reservations are allowed.



I have this 2kg cake sitting in my fridge now, with a slice of it in my tummy.

It's HUGE.

And it only costs $26 after the discount!



This one is called Chocolate Indulgence (oh wonder why) and is coated in dark chocolate coverture with loads of cream and chocolate mousse inside, oh it's heavenly! All the cakes are fresh too!

Go and grab yours NOW!

Al Azhar

School's been on and bad. Spending the days with the body present but the mind floating somewhere else... Coming home to slump in front of the com for a few hours before sleeping. Two weeks have just passed by in the blink of an eye.

To more interesting things, been craving a couple of things lately, namely cheese ravioli and prata. Just got them both satisfied in the past two days!

Had the cheese ravioli at Amici yesterday, but due to the place being way too dark for pictures, I'm left with none. Amici is a wonderful place, great service, great atmosphere, located at Holland Village (the place with countless renowned restaurants) serving up Italian food that's worth the money. The ravioli (they only have one type) is stuffed with cheese and comes with pesto cream sauce - one of my favourites. I noted that there was deep fried cheese ravioli with herb sauce as an appetizer too, but didn't get around to having it. Maybe next time :D

Went to Al-Azhar, a pretty well known prata place opposite Beauty World, for prata today after school. Finally! For the unacquainted, there are two big prata shops along the stretch of food shops there - Al Ameen (I hope I got the spelling right) and Al Azhar. Al Ameen is usually easier to spot as it's the first one along the row, but Al Azhar is known for having better prata and service. I've tried Al Ameen once a logn time ago, and today was the first time at Al Azhar!

Mozerella cheese prata, banana prata, mutton muturbak, tissue prata (and not featured: cheese and egg prata)

Milo GODZILLA!

Chicken, beef and mutton satay!

Butter naan

All these shared by three. My stomach is screaming now. Everything is good! The prata is not oily, unlike some pratas that shine with oil upon being served! It's the first mozzarella cheese prata that I've tried too - usually most cheese pratas are just cheddar, with those kraft sandwich cheeses or something. You can really taste the difference in the cheeses int he prata (we could compare since we had a normal cheese and a mozzarella). The mozzarella has a stronger cheese taste that may not suit everyone, but is great to me :D. Ordering the muturbak was funny - they come in different sizes, with portions priced at $3, $4, $6 and $8 if I remember correctly. We went for a $3, and it was already really big! Like, possibly too much for one to finish even. I can't imagine the size of the $8 one. Shall find out what it looks like someday, heh.

Milo Godzilla is really, like Godzilla, the king of the Miloextinctanimals series. First there was the milo dinosaur - iced Milo with extra Milo powder on top for extra oomph, and then it gets better with the Godzilla version: iced Milo with extra milo powder, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and of course the cherry on top! It's a nutritious drink, a desert, a fruit (uh.. the cherry...) all in one! Good.

Satay is pretty good, I think the chicken one is the best. Beef ones were pretty chewy, not that great, but the sauce is really chock full of peanuts! They also serve a wide variety of naan, this bread that's good with the curry.

Sorry for the rushed and not fully detailed entry, rather shagged from the week of long days! Overall: Not for the faint hearted, calorie counting female. For everyone else, it's really a place you must go to, and will likely come back again and again and again. Cheap food (we spent $8 each or so), great service indeed (the waiters are all super funny and joking with us and being really attentive and patient when we couldn't make up our minds on what to have!) and a really good place for comfort food. It's open 24/7 to boot, so you can literally go down anytime! It's ultimately still in the open and not air conditioned, but the food more than makes up for it.

As though we weren't full enough, we ordered this:

Soursop with jelly balls on shaved ice

Sweet sweet sweet.

Lunch Packs for the next Month.

lunch pack for tmr

50 Quaker Chewy Granola bars. 40 "mini-cartons" of Florida's Natural sweets. 30 rolls of Florida's Natural sour sweets. 15 tetra packs of 100% fruit smoothies. Nature Valley's crunchy granola bars. Chocolate malt.

It's official.

I love my parents.

KUISHIN BO

YES. YES. I have finally, finally, FINALLY managed to get a chance to go and eat at Kuishinbo today! It's been a year and a half since I was first introduced to that place, and after many delays and procrastinations, I finally managed to eat there today!!

I don't know if it is the extremely high glucose-in-blood-stream level talking or it's just me, but it was AWESOME. Maybe we were a bit too excited, ate so much that I felt really sick afterwards and had to keep quiet cause talking hurt. Too.. bloated...

There's way too much food to remember everything. I promise that had to be the most expensive meal that I've paid for this year (not from the Parents). It is $39.80++ for weekend dinners, so the whole thing worked out to be around $47 per person. Ouch.

I'll let the pictures do the talking:

the buffet tables

They serve EVERYTHING Japanese! Kaminabe (paper steamboat), kushiyaki (Japanese satay), sashimi, seafood, sushi, tempura, chawan-munshi, different types of soup, sweet cold prawns, their signature dish of snow crabs (free flow and only available at dinner) and many, many more! You'll simply be overwhelmed with choices there and there's too much to even try and stomach one of each item available!

sweet, sweet, sweet.

uh. salty, salty, salty.

The Guide on How to Enjoy a Sumptuous Meal. Not very useful, if you ask me. What may be more realistic may be: Eat. Just eat.

The softest mochi I have ever eaten! Absolutely delightful, it may have been the best thing from the desert section! Now I know what it means by "melt-in-your-mouth" mochi. They have it in two flavours too - green tea and peanut. I can't decide which is better. My suggestion? Eat them both, and as many as you can.

And Guess what this contained! -

Tea, anyone? But no! It actually contained soup!

A very rich stock to boot. When you open the teapot, you'll find ingredients like mushrooms and prawns inside! What you're supposed to do is pour the soup out from the teapot into a bowl and then drink. Trust the Japanese to think of such cool concepts.

The paper steamboat! For the unacquainted, the paper steamboat is a Japanese dish that is, well, a steamboat like any other, just that it comes in a paper bowl that's made of special waxed paper that doesn't get burnt by the fire beneath. Kuishinbo is really generous with the food they provide, and the steamboat was really good! There's fish, prawns, mussels and everything. The best part of it though, has to be the soup stock. Nice, strong, flavourful, and a tinge of seafood sweetness. Mmmm! (They look so pretty too!)

And for the highlight of Kuishinbo...

The LOBSTER. Every 45 mins or so, you'll realise that the normal Japanese music stops playing, only to be replaced by the music that has to be Kuishinbo's strongest trademark " Dong dong dong, 1,2,3, we are Kuishinbo." It's such an annoying tune, such a stupid song, such a retarded ad, and it achieved what any advertising gimmick is supposed to - stick in peoples' minds. Ah. I'd call it a sucessful advertisement. Everyone I know remembers the song. The best part is, in the TV ad, the song also adds "Suntec City Level3" in that annoying tune, so no one can forget where it is! How wonderful does it get!

Okay, back to the point. Once that tune starts playing, you'll see HORDES of people running to form a queue somewhere along the buffet spread, near the paper steamboats. What for? Lobsters. There's only 40 pieces of them at every round, and one person is only allowed to take one. If you miss it, you'll just have to wait for the next round. There's two types of lobsters, and they alternate the type at the rounds. One is the cheese covered lobster, and the other is a soy-and-thai-chilli one. Heck, both are good.

Standard of food wise, it's not bad. It's definitely better than what you'll get at Sakae Sushi or Seoul Garden or anything. Not top notch, I believe you'll still have to go to proper Japanese restaurants to get the best quality food - no buffet can ever have the highest quality of food, considering the large amounts of food they have to prepare and leave out in the open. For buffet food though, it's of considerably good quailty. Great, friendly, warm ambience. You can stay there and eat for hours (dinner is on from 5.30 to 10) and catch up with friends. While we were there a birthday song played multiple times too - they will willingly read out birthday dedications at your request!

One thing we realised though is that the majority of the staff doesn't understand English, so it's really tough asking for help if you need anything in particular. To make your money worth it, you'll really really want to eat everything, so by the end of it you'll have gained a kg or two and vow not to have breakfast (and possibly lunch too) the next day. It'll also stop any cravings for Jap food for a long time I believe.

Oh and some good advice to heed: skip all rice/carbs at any buffet, they fill you up too fast, so you won't be able to eat the nice and expensive things. Ha. Stupid trick by restaurants.

Burp. I think I shall go and digest the food. By watching tv, yes.

Chocolate fun + breadsticks

Got back home, swore to do homework, and...

Went to make chocolate clusters.

So much for determination and self control. Was craving the chocolate clusters we made at the chocolate workshop, and thus decided to very quickly replicate them. Being at home, and with no need to share (wheehee!), it meant that I could use bigger cups! I'm guessing these paper cups hold twice as much each as the ones we made at the workshop.

Simple processes, and voila:

+

equals

Just tasted one of them. Then I tasted another, just to be sure they tasted alright. Then I took a third one..

Got to thank Nat for passing me some real good milk chocolate today! Shall bring some of these milk chocolate clusters to school tmr :D Too bad I don't have more exotic ingredients at home, or else I could make more types! So fun, unlike homework.

In other news:

Bought some breadsticks off the Cold Storage shelf the other day -

These are from Waitrose, the large supermarket chain from the UK that doesn't actually have any outlet here, but which products can be found here and there. Now, breadsticks are also known as grissini, which is an Italian word I believe (since they originated from Italy). They may be called bread, but they are really crispy and dry, something like croutons in long pencil-like form. I don't really remember seeing them being eaten much in Singapore, but it's good to know that the supermarket stocks up on some.

I got the plain ones (the other one has sesame seeds), which are great for dips. Have it with garlic butter, salsa, tomato dips, avocado dips, cheese dips, anything you fancy! I took one and started poking it around various jars I had at home (even Nutella) and it all tasted quite good. They're too plain for me to eat it on it's own though. They're pretty healthy, low on the calories (we're not including dip here), and come in packs of 20 or so sticks per box.

Ooo. They may be good with soups too, come to think of it.

Maybe I should go try...