For the cooking competition fans, most of you is undoubtedly aware that MasterChef Malaysia is now in full swing on Astro in the following time slot:
For the uninitiated, MasterChef Malaysia is the reality cooking competition that was originally started in the UK and now found its way in dozens of countries. Participants in MasterChef are not professional chefs but everyday people who aspire to venture into culinary industry, or who just really enjoy cooking, people like you and me.
This is the first time we have MasterChef competition it in Malaysia
p/s: there was also a Bloggers’ Masterchef Challenge where I was involved as a judge *bow*
As of writing, there were only 19 contestants still vying to be the first ever MasterChef Malaysia.
There are several things to like in MasterChef Malaysia as compared to other cooking shows. First and foremost, of course, this contests involves everyday people who are just like you and me, and they are all local.
Secondly, you can also learn a lot from this show. Not only from the recipes that can be found on the website, but also some of the skills you can learn from the skills tests as well. The proper way to separate egg white from egg yolk, the way to dice onions, etc.
Finally, MasterChef exudes a very positive environment where learning is encouraged and there isn’t any showboating or stabbing at the back like you would find in many other reality show. There are even tasks where contestants have to work together in teams to get through to the next round.
To me, this is much better than those ME FIRST attitude that is found in other shows.
Chef Kenny and Chef Johari
My favorite chefs from MasterChef are Chef Kenny and Chef Johari. If you’re old enough, you might remember the Baba and Nyonya show (Big Bibik) on TV from eons ago where Chef Kenny was always in drag. I actually didn’t know that Chef Kenny is a chef until I watched the episod featuring him as a guest chef, what a surprise.
Chef Johari almost always encourages the contestants and basically the polar opposite of personalities like Simon from Ameirican Idol. I think with that’s going on in the world, we can have a little less nasties these days. Furthermore, Chef Johari is the most senior of all chef on the judges panel.
As for my favorite contestant, it’s gotta be Felix Tay, who shares the same home town with me – Penang!
I think the guy has got a really good shot at becoming the very first MasterChef Malaysia, and you can’t fault me for supporting a my own hometown boy who has shown flashes of skills in the MasterChef kitchen.
Which brings us to my favorite dish at MasterChef Malaysia thus far – Felix’s dish in the chili invention test. The judges all loved this dish, and what intrigued me in this dish is the ingredients used - guacamole sauce as the bed, fish, and plenty of chili. I’ve never had guacamole with something spicy before and this really looks interesting, don’t you think?
One moment that stood out at MasterChef Malaysia, for me, was the onion challenge in the first round. The situation was very similar to the same challenge that happened in the blogger’s masterchef challenge version – a lot of people accidentally cut their fingers, crying from cutting onions, and then of course, the very first few people who were eliminated at the end of the first episod.
Ultimately, what I want to see from MasteChef Malaysia is how the winner progresses in the culinary field here in Malaysia, will he/she open a restaurant? or have a cooking program on TV? changes entire career path?
And more importantly, will I be invited to have a taste of the winner’s cooking ultimately? 
We can only wait, but in the mean time, MasterChef Malaysia is running a facebook contest starting on the 19th of November, 2011. Be sure to take part on https://apps.facebook.com/masterchefmy
There’s weekly prizes of RM 500 and 4GB MasterChef pendrive, and final prizes of iPad, induction cooker, cash, and more! Do check it out.
Good luck!
Over the first three weeks of October, I was involved in the Malaysia’s First Ever Blogger MasterChef Challenge, an event by Astro Ria to promote MasteChef Malaysia that is currently aired on Astro Ria channel 104.
For those who are in the dark all these while, MasterChef is a cooking reality show originally started in UK and now found its way to a few dozen countries, including Malaysia! The competition only allows amateur cooks to compete, the participants are everyday people who shares a passion for cooking.
You can catch MasterChef Malaysia on Astro Ria, the details as follow:
The Blogger MasterChef event had 40 participants broken into 2 sessions, with the top 5 from each session compete at the final. Together with a professional chef (Chef Ryan Khang) and a representative from Astro Ria (Azlin Reza Azmi), yours truly was also chosen as one of the judges in this competition.
While the TV version has amateur cooks participating in it. Participants from this version are all bloggers.
GROUP 1 – 1/10/2011 – The Cooking House
The ingredients for the first 20 participants was chicken breast. Participants were given 2 slabs of chicken breast, a variety of ingredients, and condiments, a frying pan, and one hour to work with.
Other than the frying pan, there were also oven and microwave. There was no limit in the number of ingredients one can use either.
The above are just four of the 20 dishes, and to be honest I was very impressed. Many of these dishes not only tasted good, they look quite awesome too.
There were dishes with distinctive Malaysian taste, while others looked like something out of a high class restaurant. Chicken breast isn’t one of my favorite, but I took a few extra servings from some of these dishes.
Scoring on the invention test (the dish) was separated into 2 categories – maximum of 10 points for presentation, and another 10 for taste. For the skill test, Chef Ryan showed the contestants the proper way to make a poached egg (the instructions here), and another maximum of 10 points can be obtained.
This was my first stint as a judge in any competition, and short listing the top 5 from a group of 20 turned out to be a tougher job than I imagined, after tallying and some deliberation, we finally got it. It wasn’t an easy decision.
GROUP 2 – 8/10/2011 – The Cooking House
For the second group of 20 participants, instead of chicken breast, the main ingredient was fresh prawns.
While prawns are faster to cook and perhaps easier to season, the participants had to time their dish properly to ensure that the seafood does not stay on the table for too long before served.
Again, there were a lot of different creative ideas exhibited in this round. My particular favorites being the prawns lollipop on pineapple (pic above, bottom right corner) and the lemongrass prawn paste satay. Good stuff!
Raqim Ahmad from Astro Ria replaced Azlin as the judge in this round, after another poached egg skills test, we arrived at the final 5 contestants for the final round.
FINAL – 15/10/2011 – SACC Mall, Shah Alam
The final for the First Ever Blogger MasterChef was a much bigger deal, the venue was at the entrance of SACC Mall in Shah Alam. A stage was set up with 2 rows of temporary “kitchen” prepared for our 10 short listed contestants, and there was also the famous host, Zainal Alam Kadir from Astro emceeing for the event.
I think the invention challenge of the day threw a lot of contestants off a little, the content of the Mystery Box was none other than the one ingredient most of us had never handled before – Avocado.
Personally I’ve only had avocado in sushi and in Carl’s Junior’s burger (guacamole sauce). If I was competing, I’d probably had to google for a recipe (cheating already, hahaha)
The format of the competition was also slightly different, while there were many different condiments and secondary ingredients to choose from in the first two rounds, there were only 20 different ingredients/condiments in which each contestants was only allowed to choose 10 items within 30 seconds.
The limitation though, brought the best out of the participants.
Check out some of the dishes that the contestants managed to conjure up with. On the top left we have something that looks like a salad but with pancake ribbon (ultimately the winning dish), on the top right there’s the avocado “sushi” using egg as the skin and bread as the “rice”. It was another exhibition of creativity and cooking skills.
For the skill test, Chef Kerlley (replacing Chef Ryan) demonstrated a professional way to dice onion, and the contestants were given 15 onions each to see how many they could dice up in 10 minutes. At the end, no one managed to dice more than 3-4 onions, and 6 of the 10 contestants somehow managed to cut their fingers with the supplied ceramic knife.
I suppose this is to show that these are all amateur cooks, no?
After some deliberation and tallying up the score, Yip Wan Yee was crowned the winner of the First Ever Blogger MasterChef Challenge, and she deserved it! To me her dish was not only creative, but nicely presented and tasted rather good too.
Wawa was the first runner up with her Mini Roti Puri filled with Avocado Custard on top of Creme Patissiere and top with Chocolate Ganache, not because of the longest dish name but for her daring attempt in the only pastry dish of the day, and it worked.
Mohd Zaid walked away with the best MasterChef Buzz blogger award, while the rest of the contestants received consolation prizes.
It was a pretty sweet competition, and really showcase the ability of so many young Malaysians’ cooking prowess. Now let me get back to the kitchen!
I’ve been having Astro B.yond PVR service for a few months now, so I suppose it’s a good time to recap a little bit and run a short review.
First, a list of the important features
The two types of programs I record most would be American sports and cooking shows.
Like the NBA finals that always happen on 8 or 9am on working days. It’s awesome to be able to recap when I come home in the evenings. Watching basketball on PVR is also particularly awesome cos you can skip all the way to the last 5 minutes when a close game really counts. No need to waste any time loh if really busy.
I have all the games recorded, and Miami Heats lost to Dallas Mavericks in 6 games after being up 2-1. I guess James, Wade, and Bosh will have their shots again. James is the only current NBA player that I saw live when I was in the states.. oh well, next year!
As for cooking shows, I mean, how many times have you look at the instructions and then realized you’ve just forgotten something? With PVR you can always repeat till they are pretty much imprinted in your brain. It’s really really useful.
That or you can always pause and play back the show as you cook. I don’t have a TV in the kitchen so it’s actually a walking back and forth affair when I do this (I should joins some contest that wins me a TV!).
To be frank, I’m so spoilt now I don’t know how to watch TV without the freedom of having the PVR services.
And remember the contest I wrote about on this post? The winners are out:
A bit congratulation goes to Nor Iman from http://eyriqazz.com who won the grand prize of a 3D/2N getaway to Sutera Harbour in Kota Kinabalu! The full list of winners can be found here.Congratulations to you guys too. I’m sure you will enjoy the services and probably like me, can’t live without it now. Enjoy!
It’s been a while since this blog featured a movie review, with the last one being Inception some 10 months ago. I guess there just wasn’t a movie I like enough to be writing a review since then.. until I managed to catch Source Code a few days ago.
The movie currently score a pretty good 7.9/10 on IMDB, pretty good for a relatively low budget scifi. This movie sort of took Jake Gyllenhaal back to his Donnie Darko roots after the semi disaster that was Prince of Persia, Like Donnie Darko, this is another sci-fi film that has something to do with alternate history/universe theme. Something that the geek in me love seeing on big screen.
This is the second full featured film from Duncan Jone, the other being Moon, which was another sci-fi film with an even lower budget, but a must-watch if you’re a fan of hard scifi instead of space soap opera.
This review is going to have some spoilers/discussions, so for those who hasn’t watch the film, go watch it now!
the co-star is pretty cute!
Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Captain Colter Stevens wakes up in a train and found himself looking at a “stranger” female who clearly knows him, and when he went to the toilet, the person in the mirror wasn’t himself.
He attempt to get to know what happens, but 8 minutes later, the train to Chicago blew up, killing everyone on board…… and he woke up in a bunker strapped on a chair with a woman name Goodwin on the screen trying to explain to him what happened.
Apparently Colter Stevens was in the Source Code, a program that puts him into someone’s mind over the last 8 minutes of his life. In this case, 8 minutes in the train that got blown, his job was to find the bomber.
The plot is covered on wikipedia, so I guess I shall not repeat the story.
While started out a little slow, the pace of the movie worked out pretty well at the end. I love the premies of the story even though it was as almost as far fetched as space aliens hanging out with human breathing the same atmosphere and being able to have hybrid children.
The one part that I wish to be different is perhaps the way the film ends. I think it would carry a little bit more of an impact if the movie ended at the freezing frame where everyone was laughing on the train listening to Russel Peters with Stevens and the girl kissing.
While the ending in the movie works well on the many world interpretation quantum mechanics postulate, it left a bit too sweet a taste and a bit too Hollywood for me.
This is a must watch movie for all geeks, and while you’re at it, get a copy of Moon and watch that too!
For those of you who are following the NBA, the playoffs are finally here!
First round Eastern Conference would be Indiana vs Chicago, Philadelphia vs Miami, Atlanta vs Orlando, New York vs Boston, and Western Conference match ups are Memphis vs San Antonio, New Orleans vs Los Angeles Lakers, Portland vs Dallas, Dallas vs Oklahoma City.
I am gonna admit that I like the Miami Heat and want them to do well. I watched Lebron James live in Washington DC while he was in a high school all stars games. The second round match up could be Miami vs Boston, and that’s gonna be mighty delicious!
I think Miami or Chicago’s gonna come out from the East, and Lakers might represent the West again, though I hope OKC or San Antonio (might be too old) can spoil it.
The problem with basketball games is that often time it is only interesting at in the last half an hour or so, and that American time zone isn’t very compatible with the one we’re in either, so Astro B.yond PVR to the rescue!
I’m gonna record all the games and make sure I don’t miss the important moments!
Ladies and gentlemen, today we’re going to talk about asparagus. Now most of us associate asparagus as sort of a Western style vegetable, something you find in a fancy restaurant sitting pretty next to your steak (such as this side dish at Mandarin Grill), or being wrapped in bacon and BBQ-ed (ala BBQ Addict’s menu).
You will be right, but I’ve always known asparagus from Sambal Belacan Asparagus, one of my favorite dishes from childhood, a Hokkien/Penang Nyonya specialty of sort.
ingredients for sambal asparagus – sambal, garlic, ginger, dried shrimp
This dish is also surprisingly simple to make, but it is mighty handy if you’ve already have some ready made sambal belacan. For instruction on how to make a jar of wholesome sambal belacan, click here – sambal belacan fried rice.
Anyway, here’s the ingredients:
the secret is the steaming
Cooking this dish is fast and simple too!
Instructions:
a few prawns go a long way
The secret to cooking asparagus is really the steaming part, since the vegetable can be a little tough if not properly cooked, but frying it too long will get the outer layer burnt. So there you go, another recipe from yours truly who reignite the cooking passion ever since our kitchen is renovated.
I’ve recently gotten Astro B.yond PVR installed at home too, and check out what sort of programmes we have recorded.
Yes, mostly cooking shows. It’s brilliant, I can’t tell you how many times I missed out crucial part of cooking show just because they go over it a tad too fast. With the PVR’s record function this problem is a thing of a past. Of course PAUSE and REWIND function comes in mighty handy too.
I’ll be reviewing the PVR’s function soon too. In the mean time, happy cooking!
