Hafnaz Matbax

And so after months and months of hard work, another food venture comes to fruition- Hafnaz Matbax (which translates into 'Harbour Kitchen')- serving delightful 'fine dining at coffeeshop price'. You like right??

Lau Pa Sat
(Update as at 5 Apr 2011)

The signature dish is the Hafnaz Burger but try also the Crabmeat Pasta if you like em spicy or the Pan fried Dory with blueberry sauce and blue cheese or the succulent Tenderloin or Lamb Rack. Maybe something light on the belly like Pan fried Hokkaido Scallops instead? Now how about that 1st-in-the-halal-market snail sausage in our Bangers & Mash or perhaps the chicken bratwurst sausage in our Chilli Cheesedog.

Bring your Chinese friends, your Malay friends, your Indian friends and prove LKY wrong- we are One people, One nation, One Singapore who eat together. Lots of parking space and ample al-fresco seating.

Chefs previously from Menotti Italian Restaurant and KM8 Beach Bar. Combine the two and you get chillax cuisine, complimented by the awesome A&A teh tarik as always.

Quotable Quote from a Customer: "eh you all, cannot la. This kinda food belongs to a fine dining restaurant leh."

(';')

PS: Remember to be our friend on FB too ya!

Teenage Dream

I remember the first official introduction I had, as Hafidz's girlfriend, to his family. It wasn't to his Mum, who is famously particular, it was to his youngest aunt who had just had a baby. I was so nervous when we got to Loyang View but she was warm and welcoming and after awhile I was busy cuddling a little baby girl, a month old at that time, called Sarah Shabanah.

Well, she officially turned 13 on 29 December. Good Lord.. how fast time flies! Together with her cousin, Farhana, who turned 12 on 30 December they begged me to help plan a combined birthday bash to which her Mum sniggered "Hai, si tua dua ekor ni pulak nak buat birthday party!" :D

Well, all that simply means shopping for decor and planning for games that I am more than happy to get my hands dirty with. The good thing is there is a platoon of cousins who are more happy to be delegated with work so all I did was to steer them in the right direction and get them discussing games and food ideas with the respective 'department heads'.

F&B department

Games department (fulltimers)

Games department (freelancers)

Creative Department >.<

On the day itself, the weather was not very cooperative (it being the rainy season) but like true sports, their friends and the Ariffin kiddies came in droves and partied like its 1999 late into the night. Really really past their bedtimes..











At the end of the party, I got lovely sms-es from the girls enthusing about the great time they had with their friends and the cash gifts contributed by the family.

Happy birthday darlings and hopefully you don't lose too much of your heads living the teenage dream.

***

Zoo Adventure

With Sofia getting more and more interested in animals, we thought it a good time to round up the 2 chipmunks in my house and take them on a zoo adventure. A little bit of December rain was no deterrent especially when there's Wet Play at the KidzWorld at the end of the trip anyway.

Thank you to my Aunt Jannah for buying us advance tickets because the hubster and I got a b-a-d feeling when we saw the 1km stretch of illegally parked cars by the road leading to the Zoo. True enough, there must have been at least 120 people in the queue for tickets that mid-morning. Ah well, this isn't the World's Best Rainforest Zoo with 3 Michelin stars (a must-see attraction!!) for nothing ey.

Here we are, living dangerously.

Look how ecstatic Arissa was to be back at the Zoo, this is her fourth trip (what! do I take her here on a yearly basis!?) but this time something was different. The impulsive-obsessive clean gene had kicked in so every time we walked past a corral, she would start retching and made a face loudly exclaiming "Mummy!!! Busuk!!!".







By the time we got to to the Estuarine Crocodile (Sungei Buaya) enclosure, these two were soaked through with sweat..


As were we!

Photo courtesy of Hana Arissa.

A little brunch at the Snake House (least smelly?) of home-packed nasi lemak and fruits and off we are to the petting zoo, where Arissa insisted on searching for a non-existent cow she claimed she saw the last time she was here with her cousins.

I got her interested in petting a baby goat instead and boy, that took me back to kampung days in Muar where Mum and Dad used to drive us to every school holidays to occupy us. Those were the days of showering from a well and chasing baby chicks all over my aunt's backyard and getting hopelessly bitten by mosquitoes at night. No a/c, no telly but lots of happy times with my cousins.


And then the part they loved best! Sofia was almost asleep at this point from sheer exhaustion and having skipped her morning nap but the moment her eyes set upon the Wet Play, she jumped up from her zombie position on the stroller and started pumping her body excitedly.

It was a watering hole for maybe 200 kids and their parents so you can imagine how murky the water was. I was praying the kids won't catch anything nasty from this episode, and they miraculously did not!






We spent about an hour here before making a slow venture back to the startline, with a couple more stops along the way.



..and a show squeezed in between where Sofia fell asleep from sheer dead boredom. I mean, that sealion show has been the same for the past 10 years- script, tricks and all- I can actually remember all the lines by now. Ok yeah, so maybe training an animal isn't as easy as training a kid to do potty in the toilet, for example, but a decade is a long time and I'm sure the poor sealion needs a bit of new stimulation by now. Surely even if you can't teach an old dog a new trick you can re-format the show a little bit! But, hey, that's my TV mind talking..

So to round off a very tiring day, we made a last pit stop to re-charge at Ben &Jerry's where Arissa finally got to see her cow! All that argument with me pointing at the map going "What cow??? There's no cow!!" and she actually was referring to THIS plastic cow!

Bibik!! Let me up!

>.<