Eating Out 7 - Ikea Restaurant

Ikea is one of our favourite weekend lepak places. There are at least 3 Ikea stores in Shanghai and the nearest one to our home is just a few Metro stations away. Every time we miss home, we will just head to this Ikea and imagine we are in Mutiara Damansara haha! After all, the sight, the smell (especially) and the Ikea feel are the same everywhere :p

Dining here is something that we always look forward to. Besides the usual Swedish stuff, they have localised flavours (rice sets) to suit the Chinese palates as well...

The dinning area is HUGE! 

Children's play area

We usually order this Family Set, which comes with 2 mains, a kiddy meal, a salad and 2 refillable drinks. RMB59 (RM30)

Ikea's most popular... Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam and mashed potato, RMB15 (RM8)

Salmon and spinach lasagna... we love this! (not sure of the ala carte price)

Poached salmon, RMB29 (RM15)

Hot smoked salmon (thoroughly cooked) with veggies and pasta, RMB23.50 (RM12)

Kiddy meal, RMB12 (RM6+)

Braised pork rice, RMB18 (RM9+)

Vegetarian rice, RMB16 (RM8+)

Mushroom rice, RMB16 (RM8+)

Assorted fresh fruit juices (blended on the spot)... RMB10 (RM5+)

Refillable coffee RMB5 (RM2.60)

Ice cream parlour

Quite pricey at RMB15 (RM8) per scoop... but very rich and delicious!

Clean plate every time we dine here.

Snack counters... we only buy 1 thing from here - the RMB1 (RM0.55) sundae cone. The hotdog sets are available here too (but we've never tried it). In Ringgit, all these are at almost half-price. Pretty cheap! Too bad, no curry puffs :(

Our must-have, even in winter! ^^

The Evils of Ngaku Chips

I am not a food person and eating is not the most important thing to me. Even when I'm hungry, I never bother to look for food/snacks. During this year's CNY, while both daddy and mummy over-indulged in food and suffered horrendous 3-day and 7-day diarrhea respectively, I "under-indulged" and ate a lot less than them. Very often, mummy had to shove cookies and other CNY tidbits to me and tell me to "EAT!" Well, she shoved almost everything to me except this...

Ngaku (arrowhead) chips... my favourite! I think this is about the only festive snack that I ate without being told to :p

Last Sunday, the 3 of us munched away half a container of ngaku chips and few handfuls of muruku in one sitting. Mummy should have known better. I am very prone to throat infections whenever I take fried food. The same thing happened in previous years too. After eating chips --> developed sore throat and fever. This year, although mummy did try to balance things out a little by making me eat one whole cucumber before taking the chips, the inevitable still happened. I developed a high fever of 39C+ after coming back from school on Monday evening. Sigh! This persistent fever lasted 3 days and I had to skip 2 days of school :(

No thanks to you... you bad, bad ngaku chips!! 

Ngaku chips and other junkies that we hand-carried all the way back to Shanghai (almost half of these were shared with daddy's colleagues). 

Despite the high fever, I did not see a doctor. Mummy diligently made me cucumber and fruit juice and voila... I got well without any antibiotics (only took some paracetamol to keep the temperature under control). 

Sick... looking all flushed with rosy cheeks :)

P.S. This is the first time I fell sick in winter and it is no joke. I shivered in the cold although I was wrapped up like a mummy and the heater was on. It was difficult for the fever to subside because I couldn't sweat. I hope I won't fall sick in winter again!!!

Puke Princess and Her Justification

In our recent flight back from Hong Kong to Shanghai (we flew Cathay Pacific and had to transit in HKG from KUL), I played "Puke Princess" again after having this meal on board...

I enjoyed the meal very much (especially the dim sum from mummy's tray)...

However, I started feeling queasy towards the end of the flight and as the plane was "circling in the air" preparing to land, I did it again. This time around, the air sickness pouch was already on standby so it was a mess-free affair :) As mummy was putting away the partially-filled puke pouch, she teased me...

Mummy: See, you wasted the Haagen Dazs ice cream and all the nice food. They are all inside here now *pointed to the puke pouch*

Me: No! I've already tasted and enjoyed it so it is NOT wasted. Even if I didn't vomit this out, later when I poo-poo, it will also come out of my body wat...

Mummy: ..........

Makan-Makan in Taiwan

Taiwan is a food heaven, or so they say. However daddy and mummy aren't foodies so they didn't have the enthusiasm to hunt for the best food in town. We ended up eating whatever that tickled our fancy within walking distance from our hotel. Even with this "limitation", the choices were aplenty and we did not even have enough days to sample everything we saw!

Here are just some of them...

Seafood noodles on a cold and rainy night...

MOS Burger

We miss the rice burger!

Porridge is one of Hsinchu's specialty... we had seafood porridge, mushroom & chicken porridge and beef porridge. Mummy liked this a lot but not me. I didn't like watery porridge like this and preferred those grainy and lumpy ones cooked by mummy.

Beef and century egg porridge...something different that we have not tried before. Nice!

HUGE serving of black pepper squid and chicken rice

Fried rice 

Spaghetti set

Rice kuih...tastes like radish cake with sweet and savoury sauce

Noodles with special sauces

Deep fried fish fillet and chicken chop rice...sinfully unhealthy but delish!

Those were what we had for dinner with daddy every evening after he returned from work. For lunch, it was always just mummy and I in the hotel. We ate mostly fruits and takeaways from convenience stores...

Yummy sushi with oat drinks and fruits

Fanciful bread, cakes, yoghurt and milk (the papaya milk is nice!)

Cup noodles (cooked in the hotel's ceramic coffee cup) and some colourful veggies

Salad, bread, milk tea, egg, cheese and more veggies

And more fruits and raw veggies for my health freak mummy...to balance out all the junkies we have been eating :p

Homemade preservative-free mochi bought from a roadside stall... quite expensive (RM11+ for this box) but delicious! It came in 3 types of fillings - black sesame, peanut and red bean.

Cute bread and Doraemon-shaped cake

These were complimentary and replenished daily by the hotel (plus soft drinks and beer in the fridge but we left all the soft drinks untouched). 

We indulged in tea instead.... 2 cups every day! 

Eating Out 5 - Yunnan Restaurant

It was just one of our casual jalan-jalan cari makan weekends and something in this restaurant attracted us to dine here... 

Also curious to sample some Yunnan cuisine so we thought, why not?

The highlight of this restaurant (to us) has got to be its menu with crappy but amusing English translation :D Some of them were so funny that they had us in stitches. Reading the restaurant menu seemed to be more enjoyable than the actual dining itself haha! Here are just some of them...

Now, here's what we ordered... the food here was quite good, surprisingly (although it might not appear so in these pics)...

Crossing the Bridge Noodle... the soup was very tasty (something like Chinese herbs). Just put everything into the piping hot soup (hot enough to cook the raw egg). Then just mix and eat. Nice :)

Soupy fish slices with black fungus, ginkgo and bamboo shoot served in a bamboo "bowl". 

Greens with mushroom

Fried rice... very fragrant and I loved this!

Some vegetarian saucy noodles... delish!