Whisky Tasting by VisitBritain @ Quaich Bar

[This was an invited whisky tasting session courtesy of VisitBritain]

Interesting Fact 1: The Scots call whisky the 'water of life'. If you do an online search on whisky you will realise that whisky is a shortened form of usquebaugh (never mind if we can't pronounce that). It literally translate to 'water of life'.

Interesting Fact 2: In 2010, more Michelin stars have been handed to UK restaurants than any other time in the 35 year history of the gastronomic award.

Interesting Fact 3: Scotland has 15 Michelin-starred restaurants from capital city Edinburgh all the way up to the Highlands.

Interesting Fact 4: International Culinary Tourism Association recently declared Scotland as one of the most “unique, memorable and interesting” places for food and drink on the planet.


VisitBritain recently organised a Scotch Whisky Trail for a few bloggers and I was quite intrigue by it. I don't drink alcohol but I attended it hoping to learn more about Whisky. The session was held at Quaich Bar at Waterfront Plaza.



Quaich Bar / The Whisky Store is opened by husband and wife team, Khoon Hui and Joyce. They have more than 100 types of whiskies for you to try!




Khoon Hui led us through the Whisky Trail, explaining so passionately all about Whisky. I have never drunk whisky before this and I learned so much from the expert.




We were introduced to single malt whiskies in Scotland. If I remember correctly, the major regions that produced them for the whiskies we tried were from the Highlands, Lowlands, Campbeltown and Islay.

Malt whisky is made from none other than malted barley. The barley will then be steeped in water to allow it to get to a point of germination. When the desired germination is reached, it is dried using smoke. Peat like what is pictured above, is added to the fire to give it a peaty flavour.




I was quite overwhelmed by the different tastes and smell of it.
You could actually smell the countryside from one of them. Personally, I like the smell more than the taste!















I tried to recall the difference between them, but I can't recall.
The 46% of alcohol made me giddy though I only smell it. :-)

If you are into Scottish Food and Drinks, you will be glad that VisitBritain has a Scotland Food and Drink Online Supplement. It features Scotland's finest gastronomical fare and its fresh produce.

Featuring Scotland’s Michelin-starred chefs, this supplement draws attention to Scotland’s amazing natural larder, and the importance of seasonality in their menus. Of course, no Scotland food story is complete without a thorough lowdown on whisky, the “Water of Life” as the Scots call it.

Open publication - Free publishing - More scotland

Hope you enjoy this Online Supplement.



Quaich Bar
390A Havelock Road,
Waterfront Plaza, #01-09/10,
Singapore 169663.

Tel: (65) 6732 3452
Web: www.whiskystore.com.sg

Adventure on the Legend of the Seas - Part VIII : Outing to Phuket

This post is part of a competition I am entering. If you think I deserve to win the the Grand Prize which is a cruise 7D5N Western Mediterranean Fly-Cruise on board Liberty of the Seas, please visit http://contest.omy.sg/royal-caribbean/ and vote for me! You stand to win prizes too!

*** Excursion to Phuket ***

One good turn deserves another! We enjoyed ourselves to the excursion to Kuala Lumpur, we were looking  forward to the excursion to Phuket.

Before boarding the cruise, we were presented with an array of choices for the land excursion. Phang Nga bay was the one I picked with Catherine. The night before the cruise, we were told there was a change of plans. The organisers decided my new partners will be Estelle and Christine. (aka the Bikini girls)

* tender *

"Tender", that's a new term I learned on this cruise.

Definition from wikipedia: "A ship's tender, usually referred to as a tender, is a boat, or a larger ship used to service a ship, generally by transporting people and/or supplies to and from shore or another ship"



This was a photo of the tender beside the cruise ship. You can see how huge the cruise ship is!

If you are a photo buff, you should grab your camera and get ready to take photos! I think I took at least 20 photos of the cruise ship while I was on the tender. The first photo above was where the Legend of the Seas anchored in the Andaman Sea.


Everyone on the tender was taking photo, when you stop taking you seemed like the odd one out!

* arriving at Patong beach *

You know you have reach Patong Beach when you see men and women ready for sun tanning!
Sun, sea and sand. That's what tourist come here for right?




Juliet our tour guide was waiting for us at the floating platform. Our very chatty lady who loves to talk! She can tell you story after story to keep you entertained. Her family owns a durian plantation too! She said the next time we visit her, we can go to her place to have durians!

The moment we touched land, we were quickly escorted off to a nearby van. We were like stars!  Omy and Royal Caribbean folks shielding us from the paparazzi waiting for us. The van then quickly drove off!

That was my imagination. The reality is that we were hurried up the van by the tour guide because our itinerary was jam packed! In total, it was over 3 hour ride on van and a 2 hour ride on a long boat. We were driving out of Phuket Island!

We must be lucky to have Juliet as our tour guide. Her chatty nature entertained us on our arduous long journey.  She even had quizzes for us!

Something we learned about the Thais from Juliet, she said the Thais each have their own personal colour. Their colour is the day they were born. How many of you even remember the day you were born? I remember the date, but not the day.

Thai people's personal colour is as follows:
Monday - yellow, Tuesday - pink, Wednesday - green, Thursday - orange , Friday - blue, Saturday - purple, Sunday - red.

The current King of Thailand was born on a Monday, that is why yellow is the King's colour, you see Thais wearing yellow shirts on the King's birthday month!

* Suwan Khuha Temple *

Our first stop on the excursion was to the Suwan Kuha Temple. It's locally known as Wat Tam. It means Temple in a Cave. Inside the cave is a 15 metre long reclining Buddha.

I will post the photos of it in my Flickr later. It will be disrespectful if I post I post the photos of Buddha with the photos of people in different stages of undress in this blog post.

* Koh Panyee *

We also visited Koh Panyee also known as the Sea Gypsy Island. It's a village built on stilts with a giant rock as her background. I will also load the photos I took here on Flickr later.

I found the visit to Koh Panyee boring though. I think it's more meant for tourist from outside of Asia who have not seen life in a kampung. It's literally a kampung.

* Phang Nga Bay *

The highlight of the trip was to Phang Nga Bay. Phang Nga Bay is a 400 km² bay between the Andaman Sea and between Phuket and the Malay Peninsula of southern Thailand. (In layman language, between Phuket and the tiny strip of land above Malaysia that connects with Thailand)

For the trip there, we sat on the long boat for over 2 hours. The area has 42 islands and we probably saw more than half of it during our long boat ride.




Some folks that joined us on our excursion was the crew from Omy and Royal Caribbean Asia.
The two guys  Alvin and Wei Ding are from Omy. The ladies Nicole and Phyllis are from Royal Caribbean Asia.





Oh, this huge camera and Jack the camera man followed us everywhere! He's the real paparazzi!
If you want to see the videos he took and scripted by Alvin and Wei Ding, view it all at: http://project.omy.sg/royal-caribbean/media.html





Our boatman who navigated the complex waterways around the rocks. This bay is quite shallow, so we all depended on him to navigate us throughout thePhang Nga Bay Marine National Park.




This area was declared the a protected Ramsar Site in 2002.
Curious clickers, you can click on this PDF file on the Ramsar Website and check out site no 1185.

The area is filled with limestone cliffs with caves, mangroves, sea caves with the most beautiful natural interiors. It's like a real live version of the geography textbook!

Look at this low lying sea cave, we entered it!



This was the other side that we exited.

I was day dreaming again and imagined we were being chased by Scaramanga. He discovered that we had the Solex Agitator with us. Christine and Estelle were spies and had made a fool of Scaramanga. 


Do you know where Solex Agitator was hidden, it was inside Jack's video camera. If you scroll up to Jack's photo, you notice that watch, that's the rolex watch lookalike from "Live and Let Die". 


Now that we are all in the dream, let me tell you, the blue camera that Phyllis is holding, that's not a camera at all. In the movie, the golden bullets were stored in a cigarette packet. How old school. In modern day, the bullets are hidden in the camera. 





Introducing the Bond Girls / The Spies / my partners in crime for the excursion. Estelle and Christine.

Spending a half day excursion with them, hey, these girls are so brilliant and intelligent not at all bimbo girls that you might think they portray!





Scaramanga's Island in the movie.
Ko Tapu the limestone rock around 20 metres high in the geography books.
James Bond Island to silly billy tourist like us.

All the long journey, we finally saw the tiny islet! James Bond Island!





We landed at Khao Phing Kan island which consists of two forest covered island with steep shores. It's the main island where tourist will arrive from the boats.

There was a group of Korean tourist and they were taking turns taking photo at the slanting rock. Heard that they were filming a new Korean drama. It's called Sea Cave Sonata. Look out for it!




The Singapore contingent saw the Koreans filming and Jack the Cameraman said let's start working.
Our Bikini girls Estelle and Christine started to pose with the famous Ko Tapu.

Click here if you want to see the video that was produced!

Some of you saw a similar photo on Business Times, Straits Times or MyPaper. For those of you who saw the supposedly saw the photo of me between the two girls, it's doctored lah. See this photo shows I was not there. LOL...




When our dear girls started to go into the water, look at the expressions of these people!
Our tour guide was in total shock! She was speechless? Priceless photo!




Techie talk again:

Everyone was sleeping on the trip back! I was bored and what do techies do when they are bored?
They turn on their phones. I was contemplating. Should I roam? It's only $15 per day.


Bored beyond description, I decided to pay for my entertainment! First thing I did was to find out where on earth I am! Turn on google maps and 'tada!' I felt so comforted although that does not change anything. 

It was one over hour of checking email, tweeting, whatsapping again. What an addict!
The signal is not '3G' though, sometimes it is faster at 'E' (Edge) and sometimes 'O' (GPRS).

* food *

We were really hungry and our first Thai meal!
It was a Buffet Lunch at one of the local resort. We were joined by the rest of the Royal Caribbean tourist.

Thai food in Thailand just taste good! It's probably the ingredients right? We always hear of Thai folks saying it's not easy to find the exact ingredients for some of their dishes here.




Thai Beer. You could pick bottled water or Singha Beer. Guess what everyone picked?

* bye bye Phuket *

After the early dinner, it was another long ride on road back to Phuket Island.





I was so glad I decided to turn on roaming. Since I know it was $15 max a day from my provider, I was not going to waste any cent of it! Did u all read by tweets that day? 

We stopped by a tourist shop on the way back to get some Thai goodies. Oh man, I bet everyone could tell we were from Singapore! We bought enough to be packed into boxes! The van brought us back to Patong Beach with so many boxes of junk food!

It was another great excursion out! I heard the rest who went on other excursions enjoyed themselves too! Head over to http://project.omy.sg/royal-caribbean/ to read all about it!

Adventure on the Legend of the Seas - Part VII : Outing to Kuala Lumpur

*** Excursion to Kuala Lumpur, Part II ***

The clock struck 11 and the KL blogger friends magically appeared at Lot 10!

Aha! Familiar faces! Mei (@agentcikay) and Meena (@llemongrass) appeared separately while Catherine and I were fiddling with some 4G broadband by YES! (What else would techies do? YES was some super fast broadband just introduced in Malaysia)


This was so funny:
Meena and Mei gave each other a hug when they met. But when they walk towards us and wanted to give us a welcome hug, we gave the 'ahem, we are not the touchy, feely, huggy, kiss kiss type' people. They got the hint. LOL...





We met up with the the three other food bloggers later. We got into their cars and they drove us all the way to Restoran Sek Yuen at Jalan Pudu. They decided to bring us to somewhere with some old school charm, something not so easily available in Singapore. More importantly, somewhere with great food!




Sek Yuen happens to be one of the oldest restaurants in KL. One of the places that has not been torn down and rebuilt. Things are done the traditional way including using firewood to cook!

We entered via the backdoor and saw new stock of firewood being unloaded. Wow!

* the KL food bloggers *

Let me introduce the KL bloggers we met. There were 5 of them who met up with us.
The @names in brackets are their twitter ID. Follow them to find their blogs names and other interesting details that is tweeted out daily.

That's Jon (@alilfatmonkey) with the camera with Meena (@llemongrass) and Nigel (@nigelskelchy).
Guess what they are doing? They saw a standee of the famous TV personality Jason and they were so eager to take a photo of themselves with him!




The famous baker also known as Fat Boy Bakes (@fatboybakes). See the book he is holding, that's a cookbook that he has a few recipes in it. He was autographing the book for me!




This is Mei. (@agentcikay) She recently visited Singapore with her husband and we brought them to Tiong Bahru Food Centre for lunch.



This is Nigel. (@nigelskelchy). He's the heavenly cake man!

* the super old school restaurant *

Some photos of the old charm restaurant. Look at the big mirrors. That old clock on the wall. The tables and chairs...

Don't you think it looks like the set in the "Growing Up" series? The super old Mediacorp series is still being shown on Channel 5. If you watch that series, do you remember a character who stammers named Ah Guan? He happens to be acted by Darren my roommate on the cruise!




You will notice that they walls are all stained with soot, that's because of the firewood they use.
Soot, steam, grease.... somehow produces exotic and delicious food!




Keeping the fire going...

Everything is old school, except for this uncle's shoes! He's wearing sneakers! Wah seh, with reflectors some more!

* the food *

I read somewhere that in the early days in KL, when Chinese wedding dinners were held here, they were the envy of the town!

The KL folks ordered so many things! It's almost as if it's a wedding banquet too!
Here's what we ate:




I have no idea what's the name, but I remember when I was young, I remember eating this.
I think we call it Imitation Sharks Fin Omelette when we were young.
(Imitation i.e. no sharks were killed for our sake)




It was a great dish! Eggs, crabs meat and glass noodles and some other ingredients. It was so fragrant. I wrapped it 'kacang putih' style with the lettuce leaf and pop them in my mouth. Simply excellent!




The next dish was the deep fried fish head with lots of hidden treasures. You can see the fish head that's split into two and the cavity filled with the 'treasures'. The fish had lots of flesh so it was fun picking with your chopsticks.



Another angle to let you see it's really a huge fish head on the metal plate. The treasures inside were onions, ginger and mushrooms. The savoury gravy poured over the crispy fish made it so wonderful. The fish is still crispy, yet not so dry, the gravy gives it that extra uumpph!




Oooo... Deep fried Char Siu. It's char siu that's has not totally lean, so that mean it has more flavour and a nicer bite. It also means it was not dry when you eat it. Deep fying it gives it a crispy outside and that extra drool appeal to the dish, don't you think? Bite a piece and you might feel out of the world!

Talking about out of the world, look at the UFO like dish it was served in! Do you all remember such serving dishes?




This was the Eight Treasure Duck we ate. You got to pre-order this. Our friends pre-ordered it the day before it seems.


So sorry to show you the backside of a duck. Because the duck's bishop nose was facing me, when the duck was finally surgically opened up, I unfortunately pick that bishop nose and put it in my mouth. Ooo. it was so fowl! Arrgh. I quickly but inconspicuously spit it out. I think none of them on the table knew it. I was thinking to myself, how can you call this fowl thing nice? Sigh, why did I pick that 'duck butt'? Yes, laugh at me.



It was until I pick a piece from the middle that I started to appreciate this dish. The duck was lean and tender. The treasures and the duck seemed to have lived a symbiosis relationship that their flavours of each ingredients have enriched each other.

The gravy was the kind that you pour on rice and you can wallop the whole bowl without eating anything else! Just pick the right part of the duck to enjoy it!




The mixed vegetable dish. A simple homey dish that I think most mums will prepare at home. The only difference, most mums do not have access to a wood fired stove!

I think they used the wood fired stove to cook it?  For I saw they had those huge zhi char gas stove as well.

Black Fungus or some call it Jews ears are good for lowering cholesterol. Perfect for the dishes we were eating.




Some minced meat (probably prawn mixed with something else) wrapped in tofu skin and deep fried. I am just wondering, there's one piece that is different from the rest. Why?

Was it because it was reserved for the 'queen'? Meena's know as their queen. I don't know the full story, but they always joked about it. ;-)




We were so full. We were kind of glad when we were told this was the last dish. Roast Chicken served with Keropok! Of course with keropok to end the whole meal, it had to be good!

After the long meal filled with laughter and such nice fellowship, we headed back to Lot 10 area. Our drivers zig-zagged across the busy streets of KL and got us back in time, in fact we had extra time that we could have a drink at National Geographic at Lot 10!

I was so glad we picked the 'on your own' option for the excursion with Catherine. It was fun! 
What an marvelous meal we had too! Thank to the KL bloggers for the treat! Come to Singapore and it will be our turn to feed you. :-)




Restoran Sek Yuen
313, 315 Jalan Pudu
Kuala Lumpur

Tel : +603 9222 9457