Food Holiday

Hmm...been a while since I last blog. Somehow working + baby <> spare time for blogging. Anyway, finally got myself some days off and decided to go for a short holiday with the family. Since I was still apprehensive about getting Zaydeen on a plane, so we decided on somewhere nearby and accessible by car. So off we went to Penang full of anticipation about the glorious food and the sun, sand and sea.

This is Zaydeen all excited about her 1st trip out of KL.

1st stop was a famous seafood town called Bukit Tambun. The restaurant we visited was called Prawn Village which was highly recommended by some blogger, but alas the food was nothing spectacular. We had bamboo chilli prawns, baked crab, bean paste 'juk tan', fried mantis prawn and steamed mantis prawn. Only the steams mantis prawn in egg white and 'juk tan' tasted satisfying while the rest got only a 3 out of 10.

Zaydeen got tired of looking and smelling the food and not getting to have a sample of it.

After lunch, we continued our journey onto Penang Island and Jerejak Island. Everyone and anyone who heard that I was going to stay in Jerejak Island had exclaims "WHY?!!" For those who don't know, Jerejak used to be a prison island of Malaysia and even further back in history it was also a quarantine area for leprosy patients. So I guess that explains why everyone thinks I am a bit cuckoo to have chosen that as my holiday destination. Well..all I can say is...it's a VERY relaxing island (as in there is nothing much to do or eat there) and there's no ghost there!!!! Well at least I was lucky enough not to have met one :S

We got a king-size bed which as you can see Zaydeen absolutely loved it!!!

The rest of the holiday was spent rather stressfully trying to taste all the good food of Penang. And being the peak holiday season, most of the roads were pretty choked with traffic. It didn't help either that me and Aaron were not familiar with Penang road, so I think about 60% of the time was spent trying to understand the map and figuring at exactly which point of the island we were at. In the end we didn't managed to eat all the food that we had wanted to, but I think we kind of lost the mood after trying a few so-called famous ones and went away highly dissapointed with the taste. I think personally my most dissapointed food was the famed Balik Pulau designer durian. Admittedly this is not the durian season but somehow we came across a stall that still had durians growing in their orchard. The durians cost a bomb and it won't have been so bad if it tasted great, but all it tasted like was like bad watery normal durian.

This is Rosy....whiched turned out to be not so rosy afterall.. :(

Luckily Balik Pulau was saved by a great stall selling yummy Assam Laksa served with fresh Nutmeg juice. Ummm..that tasted nice.

Another great sampler from Penang was the Lorong Selamat Char Kuey Teow. Most everyone had advised us not to go to this stall as the stall owner was said to be arrogant and the queue extremely long. Luckily we ignored those advices and gave it a try. The wait was indeed long, and the price was pretty exhorbitant for a plate of fried noodles. Ours cost MYR7.50 per plate for special order of extra prawns. But the prawns were huge and fresh, so we didn't grumble too much. And actually, now it's no longer a stall, but a shop. Guess the owner got rich and decided to set up a shop instead, and in fact she's no longer doing the frying but instead sitting back and just collecting the money ;) And nope she's not some grumpy old lady anymore either but was even friendly enough to pull up a baby chair for Zaydeen when she saw how tired we were carrying her. So guess this taught us to always give someone a chance no matter what others may say about him/her.

And finally the not so great food we had at Gurney Drive. Tasted worse than the ones in KL. Need I explain more?

Merry Christmas and Happy Year 2008 everyone!!!!