Good enough…

We were out and about that morning and we dropped by the hypermart here and I saw these pies…

…and this box of lasagna…

They only have two choices – beef or chicken and of course, I grabbed all the beef.

They’re Malaysian-made – the address given is somewhere in Shah Alam, Selangor so of course, they are not as expensive as anything that is imported from abroad. If I remember correctly, they’re all over RM9.00, less than RM10.00 each.

I was wondering about the names of those pies though – I called all of mine shepherd pies, the ones where I used mashed potatoes for the pie cover…until somebody corrected me and said that those were cottage pies, seeing that I used beef for the filling and for shepherd pies, it has got to be lamb. Ok, so now I know!

However, both the pies that I bought were beef and they did not have any lamb and the only other option was chicken. Never mind the names – the test of the pudding or the pie is in the eating so we heated them up to try. The so-called cottage pie had slices of potatoes on top…

…nothing like any pie that I had seen before but it tasted great! There certainly was a lot of meat in the filling…

…and I could detect the use of some herbs in the cooking. As a matter of fact, I did find some bits of bay leaves in it. My girl was not all that fond of the peas (and the carrot and the corn kernels)…

…in it though. Like the frozen ones we get here, they were kind of hard, maybe not so hard but no, they were not soft enough.

The so-called shepherd pie had mashed potatoes…

…as its cover and yes, the mashed potatoes were very nice – not over smooth and over-blended like some that I have had here and there and the filling…

…was great too. No, the filling of the two pies did not taste the same – each had its own and both were nice. I think if I had to make a choice, it would not be based on the filling since we liked both of them equally but most likely, it would be toss between sliced or mashed potatoes…and the latter would win, hands down.

The lasagna…

…was like lasagna, very nice too…

…and as for the taste, what can one expect from the tomato-based bolognese sauce? That was exactly what it tasted like. My girl liked it a lot and if it was good enough for her, it was good enough, period. For one thing, the only place where we could get to eat that does not seem to be serving it anymore – probably at RM18.00 for one not-very-big serving, it does not go down too well with the general public so they’ve probably taken it off their menu…and of course, since they started using those imitation crab sticks for their seafood one at the franchise pizza place here, my girl has not bothered going back for that one.

I checked the expiry dates and they are good till the end of 2016 so we may just go back there and pick up a few more to stock up in our freezer. Here, if we can get to buy something nice, we may not get to see them again…ever, like those bangers that I enjoyed a lot. That’s the way it goes.

In the meantime, this very pretty Christmas card, postmarked 18th December (Ipoh, not Taiping), came in yesterday afternoon…

Thank you so much, Yan! Despite your very tight and hectic schedule these past weeks, you managed to take a little time off to send me a card – that is truly so very sweet of you. Bet you all had a wonderful holiday and your girls are getting all geared up for school when it reopens next week. All the best for 2016, all of you…and God bless always. Cheers!!!