Not this year…

It’s the 1st of January, 2018, so a very Happy New Year, all.

Everything is  rather low-key for us this year as my dad passed away in July last year and with all due respect, according to Chinese tradition, as it has not been a year, we should not be celebrating these festive seasons and the same goes to the coming Chinese New Year in February.

Anyway, since my girl is gluten-intolerant, we have not been baking cakes and cookies at all these days, never mind what special occasion it may be, unlike in the past. She did bring home quite a lot of gluten-free products from her recent trip to KL and the other day, she tried baking this one…

…and made some blueberry lemon cupcakes that we could eat ourselves.

While she was baking them…

…the fragrance filled the whole house and when she took them out of the oven, they sure looked great…

…on the outside.

Inside, however, there were a lot of holes…

…and the texture was somewhat different from regular cakes. Thankfully, though they were not quite the same as cakes that we are all familiar with, they were very nice and it did not take us long to finish all of them.

On Christmas Eve, we just had dinner early, just the three of us, a simple one with baked salmon, topped with garlic and dill and with a squeeze of lemon juice…

…and roast pork with potatoes and peri-peri sauce…

…plus this salad with egg and crispy bits of bacon added…

…because we wanted to go to church hours before the time so that we would be able to grab some seats. Usually, at all the services around Christmas (and Easter), the churches would be packed to the brim with those once-a-year Christians creeping out of the woodworks..

The next day, Christmas Day, we dropped by the Coffee Garden at this hotel for lunch. I had their set lunch with lemon beef (RM9.00, exclusive of GST, with a complimentary drink and soup)…

…which was all right, not anything that would get me rushing back for more. The meat was all right, tender enough and not tough at all. I thought it would be something like lemon chicken but no, it had a taste of its own and actually, I didn’t think I could not detect much lemon in the sauce.

My missus had their fried kway teow with crab meat (RM10.00, exclusive of GST)…

…and it turned out that there was barely any – only the bits of imitation crab sticks were more prominent in the dish. I guess she was not all that impressed by it as she did not say anything nor did she insist that my girl tried a bit – she would do that all the time if she had anything nice whenever we ate out.

My girl had their mixed grill (RM19.00, exclusive of GST)…

She thought the beef was tough and the chicken was breast but she liked the lamb and the coleslaw and all in all, she did enjoy her pick.

After that, we adjourned some place else for dessert but that would be in my next post.

THE COFFEE GARDEN is located at The Garden Hotel ((2.288894, 111.831139) along Jalan Kampung Nyabor at its junction with Jalan Huo Ping.