Leading the wild into the ways of the man…
This is Arnott’s Stikko Fingers. It’s great for the times you don’t have time to eat.
I got this from Penny, one of my coworkers. It’s milk vanilla wafer
sticks. I’ve been running around the whole day, and I’m off to another
appointment. Food for people on the go, indeed.
This is chix floss egg roll. I forward a proposal to behead the person to coined the term chix in place of chicken.
Chicken floss egg roll looks like a solid roll of omelet egg filled
with chicken floss. It costs RM 1.70 each at Taka bakery. It’s good for
breakfast, these things.
It opens up to reveal soft a soft bread roll, slathered with that
semen consistency Special Sauce (okay, so it’s mayo :p). The egg covers
the entire pastry, providing a chewy texture to the chix floss egg
roll. The bread roll is covered with mayo and given a generous dusting
of chicken floss at the sides.
It’s divine.
Guylian Opus is the Belgian chocolate manufacturer’s boxed set that
features six distinctive pieces named after the musical creations of
illustrious composers from the likes of Bach and Mozart.
There are two sets of six different pieces of chocolate in the box,
mirrored and held in place in sunken receptacles. The box flips up to
reveal the composer and piece that each chocolate piece is dubbed and
what it contains. I found this unwrapped chocolate box in the pantry,
no one intends to eat it, so I did.
Guylian Opus Taste notes:
Verdi – Aida
Smooth Truffle Filling
The sphinx inspired design looks good. The truffle filling tastes good too, but it’s a little predictable.
Mozart – The Magic Flute
Noisette – Cappuccino – Roasted Hazelnut
This is one of the more beautiful and intricately designed pieces. It’s
a burst of sweet chocolate followed by a surprise hazelnut slice
crunch, with a coffee aftertaste. This one is one of the gems.
Puccini – Madame Butterfly
Crème Orange Cream
The complex light-dark shade and butterfly piece is probably the most
aesthetically pleasing piece of chocolate. The filling is disappointing
though, but that can be attributed to my personal tastes. I don’t like
orange filled chocolates.
Beethoven – Moonlight Sonata
Crème Cappuccino Cream
The design is inspired by the yin-yang symbol and has two musical notes
imprinted on it. It’s really good, the cappuccino cream filling tastes
wonderful!
Bach – Toccata and Fugue
Gianduja
This piece is a simple chocolate block with stripes of white. I don’t know what gianduja is, but it tastes like Nutella to me.
Massenet – Manon
Chocomousse
This is one of the more disappointing offers in the Guylian Opus
series. The mousse is feathery and airy, but it’s not distinctive
enough to write home about. I won’t even consider sending a postcard.
Donizetti – The Daughter of the Regiment
Noisette – Praline – Roasted Hazelnut
It tastes like the Mozart chocolate, but there’s no hazelnut in this
one. The Guylian Opus box has two sets of each and I ate both…and
both are hazelnut-less (is there such a word?). Where my hazelnut?
Gounod – Romeo and Juliet
Nougat – Praline
This gold foil wrapped heart shape chocolate piece looks to be the
premier offering in the chocolate box set, as such wrapped pieces
usually are. It let me down…it’s just a soft nougat chocolate with no
distinctive notes.
There, I’ve finished playing Chocolate Connoisseur. 😉
Jesus, somebody please pass me an insulin shot…
These are individually wrapped niu rou kang from Shanghai,
China. It literally translates to “beef meat dried”. This are the cured
meat slices you see during certain festivities in the Chinese calendar.
The meat is carefully wrapped and lined in a tray, which is then
wrapped again and sealed. Nice presentation, classic style of premium
Asian snacks. Daniel
[blogspot.com], your mom gave this to me when I was at your house
yesterday. Send her my regards and tell her it tastes great! 🙂
The interesting bit about this pork meat and floss is the way they
fuse them both together. Cured meat is something like beef jerky, only
more tender and still retaining the taste of an animal. Floss is
reprocessed meat, usually pork, and is turned into dried pieces
of…well, floss that everyone eats for fun. It used to be all the rage
to put floss on top of buns and then heating it.
This is a close look at this Shanghai snack. Its cured meat slices
fused with liberal amounts of meat floss. I’ve never seen the likes of
it – this one produces an interesting synergy of flavors.
This is the chocolate biscuits that caused a bit of controversy when
it came out. Arnott’s came out with a line of liquor biscuits, the most
popular one being the Kahlua Slice. I just found it
today and realized from the various artefacts that my sister came back
from Christchurch, NZ for a holiday. I just missed her by a couple of
days, she was only here for a while, it’s hard to get leaves in her
line of work (she’s a doctor attached to a hospital).
Well, she brought back these Arnott’s Kahlua Slice chocolate
biscuits made with pure coffee liquor that I’ve heard so much about.
It’s available in New Zealand, though these are made in Australia. The
package blurb goes “Why is your Kahlua Slice moment so special? It’s
because at Arnott’s we make our own real chocolate. We source the
finest cocoa ingredients from around the world and blend with natural
milk products from Australian pastures.”
It looks like a standard Arnott’s product…
…but it really tastes like Kahlua! Arnotts licenced the coffee
liqueur Kahlua to make Kahlua Slice. It’s great! The synergy of flavors
goes very well – this product just might be the one to ursurp Tim Tams
as the Arnott’s golden goose.
There are a lot of dates in the market now since it’s the fasting
month. I saw the now ubiquitous date displays at 1 Utama and something
caught my attention…
RM 13.90 for five dates in a container! That’s about RM 3 dollars
per date! It’s a ludicrous sounding price, since most dates aren’t so
expensive.
I couldn’t resist from getting some though. I just had to taste these expensive dates, just to see what’s so special about it.
I learned that Anbara (also spelled Anbarah) dates hails from Saudi Arabia and is the most expensive premium dates around.
These are very large dates, as you can see – here’s a 20 cent coin
on top of it for a better perspective. It well deserves the title of
king dates indeed. I haven’t seen larger dates around.
It tastes really good too, high sugar content, with very generous
flesh. There isn’t much of a seed to speak of, which is good. Fleshy,
sugar packed dates, full of protein.
Anbara dates. i’m lovin’ it.
I’ve heard of essence of chicken. Brand’s Essence of Chicken is like a household name over here. Essence of fish – now that’s new to me. I’ve never heard of essence of fish before, and was surprised to find one. This is Pati Ikan Haruan dengan Amerika Ginseng or Essence of Fish with American Ginseng.
It lists the popular radix ingredients used in traditional Chinese herb preparations in the contents. Ikan Haruan is written down as Cyprinus carpio which is the common carp. However, some sources translates Ikan Haruan as Channa striatus or Ophiocephalus striatus which is the infamous Asian snakehead fish.
Here’s what the bottle looks like. It’s the classic design which
follows the time-honored form factor of the Essence of Chicken/Bird’s
Nest with Rock Sugar bottles. It’s a thick glass bottle with a tear-off
aluminum top which then reveals a thin cap which can be twisted off
easily.
Notice that this Essence of Fish is made in The People’s Republic of
China. This is supposed to be Healthy Stuff (TM) which parents used to
cram down their children’s throats while they’re swotting for exams.
You ask me, methamphetamine works much better than this placebo shit. 😉
It tasted fishy, as I expected. It tasted very, very fishy. Fishy stuff, revisited. Drink up, it’s good for you. 😉
This 250 gram container is supposed to have kurma segar
or fresh dates from Egypt. Kurma usually comes out around this time of
the year – it’s a customary food to break the day’s fast.
There’s a sticker on the container which shows a local packing
company but the dates are supposed to hail from Egypt. There are two
pharaoh graphics meant to visually reinforce this claim as does the
“Products of Egypt” font. 😉
Here’s what the dates look like – they’re generally large and
discolored. The flesh and the skin has two distinct textures, which is
bad in my book, I like them to be fused. The seeds are rather large,
but there’s enough flesh on each date to compensate for that.
The large seed has a, hmm…decidedly phallic look to it. 😉
There are two leading brands of coffee candy containing real coffee
inside i.e. it have real caffeine and is made of coffee powder/extract.
These are good sweets – they’re marketed as “coffee on the go” and it
really does feel like drinking coffee (if you eat enough).
The market leader is Kopiko, which has been around forever
(figuratively speaking). It hails from Indonesia, our neighbors to the
south and the retail price is about RM 2.40 for a 150 gram packet. It’s
made in Jarkata, Indonesia and imported in. There is a local
manufacturer, but I prefer the imported ones.
Kopiko tastes sweet and I guesstimate that 10 of these little sweets
have the caffeine equivalent of a glass of iced coffee. It’s the most
popular coffee sweets and tastes good, with aromatic coffee notes. It’s
the cheaper one of the two and Kopiko has diversified into making real
coffee – instant coffee and coffee beans.
The other leading brand is a newcomer and is called United Coffee
Candy. Hailing from our neighbors to the north, this product of
Thailand retails for about twice the price of Kopiko at RM 4.40. The
packet is 200 grams though, and it’s imported from Chonburi, Thailand.
United Coffee Candy beats Kopiko in the taste department, from most
taste testers…now, this is one candy that tastes like real kopi peng.
United Coffee Candy is flatter in shape than Kopiko and but packs a
little more punch in the caffeine department. My qualitative estimate
puts 8 United Coffee Candy sweets as equivalent to the amount of
caffeine in a typical glass of iced coffee i.e. 10 mg per sweet,
assuming that a typical glass of coffee has 80 mg of caffeine.
I prefer United Coffee Candy over Kopiko but Kopiko has a large
distribution network, so usually I just get Kopiko. Of course, nothing
can substitute a nice triple espresso, but I think of these sweets as
“booster doses” – something to keep the caffeine levels high throughout
the day after your morning coffee(s). 🙂
I was interested to find out that this shrimp rice cracker actually
has a whole shrimp inside it. Usually, rice crackers only have
flavorings, but these ones are different – the contents actually lists
shrimp and it is fully visible through the rice cracker.
There are two rice crackers in each individual pack, so it’s good for snacks on the go.
Here’s a closer look at the shrimp rice crackers. The rice crackers
are paper thin and crispy and the shrimp is embedded into it. Nice.
