Don’t Give Me Good Food Now…

… not when I’m sick…? But it seems like good food was what I got last weekend, during our belated Mother’s Day celebration. We had a wonderful dinner at Erawan, in Kota Damansara thanks to my sister. Erawan is a cosy little Thai fusion restaurant with decadent furnishings, right down to the heavy silver cutleries you use. The dining atmosphere here is lively and warm, mainly due to the owner who walks around to give little anecdotes about each dish that he serves. Was so glad that I made myself able to attend the night’s festivities even though I was feeling like crap.

Four angle bean salad which was really yummy. Tip : don’t pour all the sauce in one go over the salad. I think my mom poured only 2/3 of the sauce in and it was just spicy enough for us! Lovely salad, check out the luscious looking squid and the boiled eggs! How do you get eggs to look like that?!

A rather expensive dish, IMHO, but it was a unique experience for us. Halved rose apples (aka gajus), to be coated with Erawan’s special topping made out of prawn paste, peanuts, cashews and other wondrous mysteries.

There you go… you should be more generous because you’ll definitely not be able to finish the entire pot of topping.

Chicken galagal soup, which the owner informed us was a soup specially created by the Thais to replace the tom yum soup that foreigners found too spicy for the tongue. This tasted like normal cream chicken soup… not spicy at all.

Cute way of serving us our rice!

Spicy softshell crab that was AWESOME! Best dish of the night, but I’m biased cos I love softshell crab. This is a MUST TRY in Erawan!

Very fishy otak-otak… At first we thought 2 would not be enough to go around… and that might be true if I was feeling more upbeat. As I wasn’t, the fishy smell was a bit overwhelming, so my sister ate most of this. But it’s really, really excellent otak-otak… maybe I’ll come again when I’m feeling better.

Normal stirfried broccoli with shrimp.

Australian beef green curry that was also lovely. My father really loved this dish!

Traditional Thai dessert “Red Ruby”… I didn’t try this as I was too full. Wasted! But I tried Red Ruby before in another store, but didn’t like it.

All in all, really nice place to eat at. Romantic too… might bring Tron here another day. Cost for the entire meal (plus lemongrass tea drinks that were refillable) is RM290. About RM50 per person only. (My sister paid, hence the obnoxious usage of the word “only”).

Since I’ve been feeling down, I had a lot of time to catch up on my reading. Plus, on Saturday Tron was busy with work stuff, so I was left alone, lying on my bed and feeling a whole lot of sorry for myself. Of course, I did get out to eat my lunch… in fact I ate so much lunch at Jojo’s Little Kitchen that the store owner (that semi knows me and Tron) said, “For someone who has gastric, you sure ate a lot today.” -____- Anyway, I managed to finish reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett and The Blue Notebook by James A. Levine.

The Help is a story about how black people were treated in Mississipi back in the 1960s. This was a time when black women “were trusted to look after the children of white people, but not trusted to not steal the silver”. It’s a heartbreaking novel about 3 women who work to overcome boundaries in order to change things. It was a riveting book (I finished it in less than 24 hours), heart breaking and the anecdotes on how ignorant some people can get was really really juicy to read. Hahahha. I could never even begin to imagine how I would feel if I was maligned in such a way. It makes those racist statements made by our government look light (though I’m not trivialising it in any manner). This book isn’t really fiction as the author drew on her own experiences as well as real life stories in order to flesh out this book.

My main grouse with this novel is that Ms Skeeter was not so much as trying to help the maids as she was trying to help herself. No doubt she took risks… but it seemed like she was only willing to take those risks in order to be able to make it as an author. So I kind of felt that she was a hateful person. Mimmy Jackson was definitely the person that I liked reading about the most in the book. She was just so colorful, and so lively and vivacious… it’s so easy to picture her. Kathryn Stockett did an amazing job fleshing her out. The ending was appropriate and now I can’t wait to watch the movie when it comes out! Emma Stone is playing Ms Skeeter, and I think she’s too pretty for that role. I don’t get why Hollywood keeps casting Emma Stone in the “reject” kind of roles. She is soooo freakin’ pretty! And Hilly is supposed to be another pudgy devil… why did they cast Bryce Dallas in that role?!

I thought The Blue Notebook was non-fiction, but as the movie got gradually more and more dramatic, it was evident that it wasn’t, though the author says that what he wrote about is based on real-life stories from child prostitutes in India. Yes, in short, that’s what this novel is about – child prostituition from the eyes of a 15 year old prococious child named Batuk. She describes how she was sold into the sex trade, what goes on in her daily life and culminates into an event that leads her to leaving the Blue Notebook with us.

It’s sad to imagine that stories like hers are actually a dime a dozen in certain parts of the world. I can’t say that I don’t understand why a father could sell his own flesh and blood away, but when faced with starvation and the fact that selling one child could feed your 7 other children, these are some harsh decisions that some people make. That things like this goes on in the world is undeniable and if you want a small insight, then pick up this book. It’s quite short, you could finish it in less than half a day.

I can’t comment further without giving the novel away, but I can say that this novel will have you sitting with your legs crossed…

Oh yes, I also went for Tron’s colleague’s baby’s full moon. If that is a mouthful, then basically — Tron’s colleague gave birth recently and the baby girl is now 1 month old! His colleague is not from the same department as him, but somehow their cubicles are next to each other. When I first met her, she said, “Argggh your boyfriend is so annoying!! He always annoys me!!” Hahahha.. but I think they both really like each other. After all, Tron is the only one from his department that she invited to this event. =) Sadly, the baby was asleep throughout the celebration, but we enjoyed a lovely Indian buffet dinner and chit chat with each other. Had fun despite my gastric… sigh. The food was really yummy, and I LOVE spicy food. But due to my condition, couldn’t even go for more than 1 round, what a party pooper.

Tron and I standing behind…. in front all the finance ladies…

And because I had no choice but to use my expiring Groupon… we had ice-cream at 100 Yen shop in SS15… it’s a new branch next to Jojo’s Little Kitchen. When I first bought the coupon, I thought that it would be darn easy to use it because we used to go to Jojo’s ALL THE TIME! Now, we rarely go there, only dropped by 100 Yen shop after a day out in Subang Parade because coupon expiring ady. The coupon was RM4.90 for RM10 worth of snow ice and other stuff from the 100 Yen shop. So basically, after the snow ice (which costs RM4.90) you can get another RM5.10 worth of stuff from the shop, and it will only cost you RM4.90. In the end, I just treated it as a buy 1 free 1 deal and both Tron and I had Snow Ice there. Cos I’m craving for snow ice for the longest time ever!!!

Tron had lychee while I had strawberry… somehow I remember the snow ice from the Taipan shop tasting yummier… but that can’t be right.. haha… since it’s all the same ingredients. Anyway, to be on the safe side, next time stick to the mango snow ice!! I loved that one..

By the way, I started a new blog just to talk about all my pharmaceutical buys and I’m also using that for ad income and shits. I don’t want to clutter stuff on this blog even though this one gets more hits, but I figured since I would be writing about products without getting any $$ on the other blog, I might as well put on some ads, wtf. It’s here if you want to check it out, but really not writing a lot of stuff as evident from the first entry… hehehe.