Tokyo Must Eat - Part 1

Japan is indeed a place with excitement and delicious food. I got the chance to visit Tokyo for several times during my employment with my ex-company and fell in love with every bits of this country. Never get bored with it's food and yummy delicious food is found anywhere at Tokyo even just a street food. With recent personal trip to Tokyo again, it was my longest stay period at Tokyo, 10 days. I got the chance to explore many of its nice food. Hope you enjoy the food photos taken although some of it might be look pretty standard Japanese food that we always see at elsewhere.

List of Must Try & Eat 
1. Bento Box
Deemed as one of the fast food meal for Japanese. Often come with various type of cooking style, ingredients and attractive packaging. Always fresh and available at all JR train stations. Normally we will buy this bento box before we depart to a long distance train and we will enjoy it in the train while looking at the nice scenery outside the window. It was really good.
 

                                      Gyu don - Beef Rice Box

 

Buta shoga yaki don - Pork Rice Box

2. Omelet Rice / Omu Rice

Omelet rice is another type of rice that are  popular among the Japanese. I would say it is a rice dish with both mixture of western & asian element in it. Very nice and healthy type of food.

Omelet Rice with Hamburg - Sauce: Mushroom & ketchup sauce. Yummy!!!!!!

3. Donburi

Donburi refer to Japanese rice bowl dish and is  consisting of fish, meat, vegetables or other ingredients simmered together and served over rice. Donburi meals are served in oversized rice bowls and served together with a bowl of miso soup (wikipedia). Some of the common donburi as such as tendon, unadon, gyu-don, oyakodon and many more. It's can be found at any restaurant in Japan such as Yoshinoya. My favourite donburi would be the gyudon & unadon. How about you?

 

Tendon ( Tempura rice bowl)

Buta yaki don (Roast pork rice bowl)

Airline In-Flight Meal

Some people say that in flight meals often very bland in taste and it's just another microwave heated food. I'm quite disagree with this statement as I tasted a "yum" in flight meal before when i flew with Japan Airlines 3 years back. I had a delicious & authentic taste of the gyu-don during my flight back from Tokyo. =)
During my trip to Tokyo end of last year (Nov 2012), we took up a flight with Cathay Pacific from Kuala Lumpur and stop over at Hong Kong. Although it is a long haul flight, but overall the service of Cathay Pacific was great and the in flight meal were delicious as well. Just have a look with the pictures below:

                                                                 Asahi Beer

                                                      KUL- HKG: Chicken rice

                                                     KUL-HKG: Omelet with sausage

                              HKG - NRT: Pasta with cheese with Haagen Dazs ice cream!

 

HKG - NRT : Black bean chicken rice. Yum!

                                                 NRT - KUL: Gyu-don with Kit Kat

                                   NRT - KUL: Spring onion with ginger chicken rice

                                                       Forgot the name of this meal :)

Stay tune for my next post on Tokyo Must Eat! :)

CNY 2013 Reunion Dinner

This Chinese New Year 2013 will be my first year celebrating with my lovely husband. It's also the first time for me celebrating CNY at abroad. I really miss the moment when we are celebrating CNY back in Kuala Lumpur with my family and my beloved Shih Tzu, Mickey.

It's been a tradition for every Chinese family that there must be a REUNION dinner on the CNY eve. Though we are Melbourne, we still keep the tradition going on and week before I have been to the Asian wet market to stock up some fresh ingredients for the dinner. We are considered lucky staying in Melbourne, a city filled with lots of Asian. Therefore, it's not a problem for us to get the Chinese cooking stuff. Most pleasing of all is we managed to get some CNY cookies from Malaysia, at least a little relief for our homesickness to hometown CNY snacks and CNY atmosphere.

 

Reunion Dinner Menu (clockwise): Roast duck, braised beef brisket, fresh scallops with broccoli, mushroom with sea cucumber & fish paste.

CNY Cookie from Malaysia

Snake Year 2013

Happy Chinese New Year 2013 to everyone! 

This year will be my first time spending my Chinese New Year at overseas (Melbourne) with my husband. Although the celebration in Melbourne is not as merry as back in Kuala Lumpur, but still it's not that bad. There are still alot of Chinese New Year activities around the city. We still can get some our favourite Chinese New Year cookies in Melbourne and manage to catch a glimpse of Lion Dance at Crown Casino too. What a blessing! :)

During times in Melbourne, we learnt to appreciate what we had. We really miss the family gathering that we used to have during Chinese New Year, collect ang pow, eating Chinese New Year snacks (mandarins, bak kwa, cookies & yee sang) and a little gambling sessions with our cousins. Nevertheless, it always not too late. We start doing something to appreciate people around us. Wish everyone have a blessed New Year ahead. God bless you!

Nespresso U - Capsule Coffee Machine

Looks familiar to you? =)

I suppose everyone would like to maximize their time on their bed before getting up to get prepare for work. A cuppa nicely blend latte or long black definitely will give a "Boost" of the day especially on the Monday blues.

Capsule based coffee machines are getting popular in these days especially for coffee lover that would like to have a cuppa good quality coffee but do not have time for it. There are many coffee machine players in the market that have start looking in this technology. Some of the popular are like Nespresso, DeLonghi, Nescafe and etc.

I was introduced to this coffee machine by a good friend of mine which he bought a Nescafe Dolce Gusto for himself. That time i was wondering how this little capsules after plugging it into the machine and can make a great nice of coffee. I was pretty impressed with that. Later when i came to Melbourne, Nespresso is doing a great job in promoting their new capsule machines. They even have their own classy look boutique setup just to sell the capsules. REMINDER: Each capsule are proprietary to each coffee machine brand. Means that, you can't use a DeLonghi capsule in a Nespresso machine. This is how the coffee make make profit! What a great business!

 During the XMas, we saw a great deal on the Nespresso U coffee machine and we immediately get ourselves one. The coffee machine come with a separate milk frother & FREE 16 coffee capsules with different taste. We love the machine to MAX!

~ Merry Christmas & Happy New Year ~

Wish everyone Merry Christmas & Happy New Year! More post will be coming. Mean time, i just started a page on owl pillows. Do drop by and have a peek (hoots4u.blogspot.com)

Disneyland - Where Dreams Come True

Its been looong looong time i did not update new post to the blog. I was back to my home country for wedding preparation and now yes, i'm back to Melbourne again.

This time i would like to share some of the pictures that we have taken during our trip to Tokyo soon after our wedding. The first must visit for us in Tokyo is the Disneyland theme park! It's actually not out first time to Disneyland Tokyo, but we never been bored about it. It always been new attractions that bring us there. In Tokyo, there are 2 theme parks under Disney, which is the Disneyland and Disney Sea.

Disney Sea Tokyo is the only ONE and only one Disney sea-based themepark in the world! You should visit it if you happen to be in Tokyo =) In fact the latest attraction in Disney Sea has make us more eager to visit the park. Disney Sea just launched the "Toy Story Mania", a latest 3D technology ride that is based on Toy Story theme. Please be early to the park as it was always filled with long queues. We waited for about 2 hours before getting to the ride. Another way to save your time, is to get a 'Fast Pass" for the ride. Fast Pass is actually a special pass that allows you to get a shorter queue to the ride at a specific allocated time.

Toy Story Mania:  IT IS A MUST GO RIDE IN DISNEY SEA!