Mid Year Review

Sometimes I feel like Time and I are in one of those estranged divorced-couple-living-together-for-the-children-think-of-the-children-won't-you relationships where we co-exist peacefully, each knowing the other is off doing their own thing, and where one only realizes the full extent of what the other has been doing when one allows oneself to pause and consider it. For example, I exist, usually blissfully unaware of exactly what mischief Time is up to, and Time exists and tick tocks along with no regard whatsoever to my feelings (he is a bit of an a-hole evidently, which should explain why we are estranged) and then when I pause, I suddenly realize, in no particular order and with varying degrees of panic: I'm 26?! When did that happen? I have friends who are MARRIED? But we're ki- oh wait I'm 26. My little sister is MARRIED?! (Actually this one isn't so shocking, because she has been quite the Mrs Monogamy for most of her dating life.) It's already July?! It's already 2011?! WHEN DID I BECOME A GROWN-UP AND HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP?!

The day I find wrinkles on my neck I am totally breaking up with Time, except I can't really because in this very awkward and not really fitting at all analogy, Time and I are in a Catholic relationship that does not recognize divorce. Or domestic abuse in the form of wrinkles.


As it is now July (excuse me again while I freak out about HOW IS IT ALREADY JULY?!) I shall attempt to take stock of 2011, this 26th year of my life, look deep into and ruminate gravely upon my adult soul, and undertake the all-important task of reviewing all the steaks I have eaten this year. Or at least all the steaks of which I have taken photos.


1. Dish
Goosey's birthday steak Part One. Dish has the best steak ever. Period. The reasons I don't go there exclusively for my steak fixes are: a) eating there burns an ugly, RM500 shaped hole in my wallet; and b) if Goosey and I ate there all the time, we'd have nowhere else to go on Special Occasions. As you might imagine, reason (a) takes precedence over reason (b), because if we really wanted to, we could be totally ironic and go to mamak stalls for birthdays and anniversaries. Theoretically.


2. Jake's
Goosey's birthday steak Part Two. (Yes, I am totally unimaginative and just ply my significant other with steak and various pieces of meat on his birthdays.) Burns a less ugly hole in my wallet, still very tasty, and best of all, their placemats have trivia questions on them! Clearly I am such a savvy foodie that I only deign to eat at establishments that have entertaining placemats.


3. Las Vacas
Formerly cute little hole-in-the-wall butcher's shop in Kelana Jaya; now overpriced and overhyped brand with its own twitter account and a restaurant in Mont Kiara. I DO NOT LIKE GOING HERE. Anymore. Like a true hipster steakster, I liked Las Vacas BEFORE it became mainstream, thank you very much. I mean, Mont Kiara? Really? You sold out, man.


4. Angus Steakhouse
Goosey liked this, and I don't really. I like my steak charred and charcoal-y, and Japanese-style steak just feels too healthy. Which is really the exact opposite of the feeling I am trying to achieve when I eat steak, because I could have just eaten sushi or sucked on a salad instead of ingesting hunks of meat.


5. The Fullerton Bay Hotel
Wagyu steak. I wasn't impressed. I thought wagyu steak was supposed to blow my tastebuds, but after this meal, they still remained very much unblown. Of course, this could be because I am secretly an un-epicurean, because the wagyu that I DID like is below, and decidedly unfancy compared to the FBH's.


6. Kissaten
Wagyu teriyaki burger, aka my true love. I know, I know, it speaks volumes (of the bad kind) that I prefer food court wagyu meat to the 5-star hotel kind. OR does it speak volumes of the kind that indicate this wagyu teriyaki burger is the shiznit? Let's go with the latter.


7. Alexis
If you, like me (before I did, I mean) have never ordered the steak at Alexis, I urge you to do so immediately. Do not let the fact that it is not a steak place bias you. It was lovely and tender and delicious, and if it had one middle finger, I would point it in Las Vacas' direction, because that there below, my friends, is how you do steak.


Right. So now I have gotten all that off my chest, I will continue to freak out about HOLY SHIT IT'S ALREADY JULY. It can't be just me who constantly thinks it's still 1992 and that I'm still 16 years old, can it? (The math does not correspond, I was not 16 in 1992. Subconscious Me, like Conscious Me, is not great at mental arithmetic.)

Meat Buffet; Carnaval Churrascaria

Have been severely neglecting blog as of late. In fact if blogs were children I'm sure I'd be hauled in for some blog neglectment charge and have custody yanked away from me and end up as a distraught working mother who isn't able to juggle the responsibilities of career and childcare. Then again if blogs were children I'd also be a single parent raising a gluttonish plain faced toddler with an extraordinarily precocious vocabulary so maybe there's a reason people don't use that analogy.

Anyway! Went to Singapore, ate gratuitous amounts of food, and caught up with my mother and assorted other family members. Because I forgot to upload Singapore pictures, however, this post will not be about the food consumed in Singapore.

Instead, here are pictures from Goosey's favourite restaurant in the world. Before you get any misleading ideas about how fabulous this restaurant probably is to deserve such a lofty title, you should know that the only reason it is his favourite restaurant is that it is: a) all you can eat, and b) an all you can eat MEAT BUFFET. Which means you have many chunks of meat, on skewers, presented to you at your table (so you don't even have to walk, which makes it BETTER than a regular buffet, at which one is regrettably forced to keep getting in and out of one's seat in order to get more food).

I can't remember how many different types of meat I had because I am unable to say no to most foods and so just said yes to all the skewers of meat offered to me and thus completely lost track of what I was eating, but curiously enough given that the place was practically an abbattoir, I remember that their garlic bread was particularly good. Or maybe my stomach just couldn't differentiate between chicken and beef and lamb anymore and became unusually grateful when it met up with some carbs.





This rampant carnivosity reminds me of that line in Watchmen (yes I apologize, I cannot stop talking about this darned film, mostly because it left me intrigued and dissatisfied as to its overall message. Did it INTENTIONALLY blur the lines of morality to the point of complete obscurity or was there a message that was lost in translation from comic to film? Was it condemning or condoning violence as a means to an end? What the hell IS it saying about humanity and which character was the closest thing to an everyman protagonist and once you pin down which character it was you then open up a whole new can of wormy questions about what the film says about mankind, because pretty much every character was royally and sociopathically messed up and devoid of compassion. It's like the whole movie went round and round arguing with itself and beating itself up--and oh, the violence and gore and how it was juxtaposed with all the hippie counterculture music that was the soundtrack, cue more brain confusion--and I'm left dizzy and wanting to watch it again), where the Nite Owl tells Rorschach, "No, no, Ozymandias" (who, by the way, for the smartest man in the world funnily seemed to have overlooked the fact that the poem that was partially transcribed onto the base of the Egyptian statue in his lair in the Antarctic, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my my works, ye mighty, and despair!", is an ode to hubris and the impermanence of glory. Which means that, duh, you are asking for trouble if you have it engraved on a symbol of power in your evil hideout) "isn't a bad guy, he's a vegetarian!" And Rorschach is like, well, Hitler was a vegetarian.

That aside actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the pictures I posted. I just wanted to talk about Watchmen, which, despite my very long and bracketed rant, I am very much intrigued by. In fact most of the time, if I like something, I will be intrigued by it and want to argue about it or with it endlessly (other examples of this: feminism and my boyfriend, respectively). If I have no bone to pick with it, I probably do not like it. Curiously contrarian perhaps, but you have been forewarned.

Now I have gotten the Watchmen off my chest and can resume my day. As you may resume your activities also.

Kimberley Red Ribeye Steak; Prime, Le Meridien

There were like fifteen billion different types of steak at this house of carnivorousness! By fifteen billion I really mean... five or six different types, but since you can pick the sizes (12 oz. of meat too much for you? No? Then how about 16 oz?), doneness (which apparently really IS a word, but is used only in reference to cooking meat) and how many days the steaks are aged (between 80 to 200 days), I bet if you did the math and multiplied that all together it'd come up to fifteen billion.


Also they had three different kinds of butter, two different varieties of bread and five different types of sauces! Factor THAT into the how-many-options-does-this-steak-restaurant-have equation. In fact, if Prime were affiliated with a US political party and stance, it'd be a vehemently feminist Democrat! (Cause it's so pro-choice! Get it? See what I did? No? It was lame? I should leave political references out of restaurant descriptions? I'm sorry, it's the lack of food in my system)


It was all so classily cooked that I feel bad reducing it to such vulgar terms as "that yummy quarter-kilogram slab of medium-done meat". But that is what it was, and it was delicious. MMM slab of meat covered in truffle sauce! Thank you goosey! My stomach appreciated it. Observant and grammatically-anal readers will notice that that sentence was rendered in the past tense. Because my stomach does not appreciate remembering what steak tastes like at this very moment because it is fasting and starving. Sigh. And no I will not stop complaining about this... another 20 days to go of blog posts that will detail how hungry I am when I post. Lucky you.