Gathering with Friends

One more day before it's TGIF! Almost the end of 2nd week and I'm feeling the stress for the year. New goals, new targets and not forgetting venturing into new markets. Well, work still needs to be done, so hopefully I'll keep a positive attitude :) Still clearing backlogs - gatherings with friends!

A meet up with Huaiqin, Sheena & Kaiwei @ Brussel Sprouts. Baby Kaela was still inside Mummy Sheena and by the time I'm blogging this, she's already almost 7 months old. She's such a darling baby, so adorable! More on her next time, as soon as I get the pictures from her dad's camera. Kaiwei brought along his kindle & showed it to us, but I still prefer holding a book in my hands and flipping through the pages.

Meetup with Wanling @ Bali Thai. She's also quite a busy bee, with her hands full from marking & CCAs. Think the only chance I can catch up with her are during her school holidays :) Nothing beats catching up with each other over food and drinks.

The long awaited Councillor meetup! Tiongwee recommended a thai food eating outlet near his work-place and it was fabulous! Quite authentic thai food :) Looking forward to another meetup soon!

Seafood Paradise

Surprised by the frequent updates recently? heehee! We're working very hard to sort out all the pictures, consolidating them into their respective folders - it was quite a chore when you have pictures all over the place, in hard-disks, cameras and laptops :( We'll get it sorted out, somehow!

We have done up the pages (consolidated records) for our wedding journey and renovation at the side bars. I'll update the links as the posts get published on blog too. Taking a break for some seafood feasting :)

Colin told us about seafood paradise and insisted that we must pay a visit~ so off we go on a wkday night for awesome seafood! Even though they are located at Defu Lane - which sounds awfully ulu to me - the place gets packed as night approaches. We left it to Colin to order, as he's a regular of the restaurant. The chilli crab was superb, one of the better ones that I've tasted!

Hoping on the bandwagon of Seafood Paradise's promotion, we visited the place again on a Tuesday, where you get 30% off crabs! This time round, Claris came along too! We ordered 2 types - butter crabs and chilli crabs, with lots of other side dishes. For the prawn lovers, go on Thursday, where you get 30% off prawns items. Pay with citibank CC and get an additional 5% off prawn items - while stocks last!

Food Tasting @ Grand Park City Hall

1 month before the wedding, we had our food tasting @ the hotel. This will be the only time that Leecher & I get to taste the items served during the dinner.

Beloved bro and GF, who have been very supportive during our wedding preparations.

With Leecher and coincidentally, dressed in the same colour combi.

Venue for our food tasting

with soon-to-be-my-new-family

Feedback form

Complimentary parking coupons for the drivers.

Jasmine tea to kick start the event

Suckling Pig Combination, which includes suckling pig, jellyfish, salad prawn, baby octopus and roast duck. We changed baby octopus & jellyfish to deep fried silver fish & spring rolls.

Braised Shark Fin Soup with fish maw and crab meat

Sauteed scallops, asparagus with macadamia nuts in XO sauce. A tad salty, but love munching on macadamia nuts

Deep fried large prawns in wasabi sauce topped with sesame seeds - a refreshing dish that you don't get to see in other hotels. Well-balanced quantity of prawns & fruits.

Steamed red garoupa in teochew style, a must-have for all teochew family.

Roast crispy whole chicken topped with fragrant minced garlic. We almost thought those were fried 金珍菇, but was actually stripes of garlic.

Briased Ee Fu noodles with seafood and mushroom, thankfully wasn't soggy.

Yam paste with ginkgo nuts and pumpkin - a twist to the traditional oor nee. Another must-have for teochew family to end the night on a sweet note :)

Wedding Invites

The next item to do was to select wedding cards for our guests. We went to T-dragon for the selection. Some couples are particular about their wedding invites and would want it to be customized. For us, we don't see the need to spend extra money as most of the times, these cards will end up in the dust bin after the wedding. So, we stick with the selection that we are provided.

The final ones that we have shortlisted from 2 booklets.

The final selection, in purple and pink. Purple as it was Mummy's dearest fave colour and pink for Leecher's mummy.

Collected the wedding cards, envelopes and map from T-dragon. We printed our inserts in JB, henceforth, we needed to make a trip across the causeway.

We printed our wedding inserts @ T&T Instant Printing, located on the 4th floor of City Sq. You just have to choose your layout & wordings, no additional charges for icons (so add as many as you want!). Wait for 1h to view the artwork, so we went to Old Town for lunch.

My my my! Rem our bad experience with Old Town in Singapore? JB's version is so much better & we ate more than usual! They even have a 15 min challenge, where you can get a free voucher if food is not served within 15 mins. We went back to T&T to view our artwork and all ready to be sent for printing, ready for collection in 1 wk.

Writing wedding cards took more time than I imagined! Leecher took charge to tie the inserts while I did everything else. We took almost 1 week to finish everything and sending them out to our relatives and friends.

Porn's & Tom Palette

** All pictures credited to dear FMQ & her trusty DSLR :)

Extremely backdated, trying to make it onto the blog before the GF celebrates her next bdae this year, haha! The usual meetup session @ Porn's by Pornsak.

This suggestive name also got Leecher conned, as he was expecting an atmosphere similar to Hooters, LOL!

We went to the branch @ Liang Seah street

The normal menu vs the CNY menu - speaking of which, CNY is around the corner! haha, a bit not looking forward to it this year as I need to give out angpaos :( heehee!

Lemongrass drink & the all-time fave thai ice tea.

Pornsak was there in person in person too. His bubbly personality remains the same off-camera.

Refer to FMQ's food blog for a full review :)

Always fun to hang out with the GF, even more so now that she's back in the area! Yeah to more lunches :)

Crossed over to Tom's Palette for ice cream. I've heard raves about this place and finally got the chance to visit it. Lots of media coverage decorating the board. The traditional homemade ice cream is made from scratch using fresh ingredients, and they introduce seasonal flavours to suit the occassion.

We did a lot of sampling before we decided on 2 flavours each. My fave is Granny's favourite (gosh, what an old name!) which consisted of malt, cookie dough and chocolate. It tasted a bit like Horlicks too :) We even gotten a special ice cream cake for the dear friend who celebrated her bdae during that wk and soon, she'll blow out another candle on her cake in another few weeks time.

Ivan & Yuxin's Bdae celebration

A new year means that my backlog of entries are piling up, though I was trying to document our wedding journey as fast as I could in December :) Thank god that Leecher was on a few days leave in Dec and he kindly made up for his lack-of-contribution-on-blog to doing my share of housework (except ironing, this guy can still pick and choose what he wants to do!) so I have more time to blog! Wa ha ha, I love it when Leecher's on leave :)

Anyway, bdae celebrations of Ivan & Yuxin.

Celebrated Yuxin's bdae @ home ground this year, with a meal @ MOF. Their bento sets were quite tasty, though I can't say for the rest.

Ivan's bdae celebration @ Hard Rock. My 1st time going to Hard Rock! Yuxin chose this place as it was near his workplace, but mainly, it was to tekan Ivan, lol!

Being called on stage to present him with his bdae sundae.

Think it's easy to earn a complimentary sundae?

See the long thin straw that the guy is holding in his hand? Ivan had to use that to blow off the candle on his sundae, haha!

Finally, back at the table with his well-deserved sundae.

Picture for remembrance of his wonderful time on stage.

Not forgetting the 2 oldest friends who made it happen!