Saturday, September 28, 2013

Austria: Naturhistorische Museum in Vienna

Saturday, September 28, 2013 1 Comments
Indeed I have been putting off my last blog entries for the last leg of my Europe trip. So here goes one of the places I went and that was the Natural History Museum in Vienna. If you have read all the books on Human & Animal Evolution as I've had then you will find the museum pretty boring. Extensively boring, that is. There are halls upon halls filled with moon rocks, stones, marble samples, hold nuggets, crystals, semi-precious stones and outer space rocks (boring, since I have been following Nat Geo and Discovery since I was 10, plus my favorite scientist is Michio Kaku) The whole museum is poorly lighted and even poorly ventilated so it's hot and stuffy in the summer that the guards had the large windows opened to allow in some air. Also the museum looks pretty old, in need of some good renovation I say. OK, criticism aside the museum wasn't half bad. They charged me EU 14 per person which also included the access to the human plastination exhibits which was on tour in Vienna. In my opinion, that was the highlight if the museum tour. And also the Venus of Willendorf. Alot of the artifacts and stones were on loan from NASA and the US; especially the moon rocks and meteorites. I also had the chance to see an outer space diamond which was pretty cool

So here are some pictures after the jump, on a scale of 1-10; 10 being the best this museum ranked 7



The Kunsthistorisches Museum opposite the Naturhistorische Museum

Note the banner promoting the human plastination on exhibit


The grand staircase and the mural on the ceiling as well as a painting of Mozart on the wall

This kind of reminds me of the marble samples at my husband's workplace

Pink Crystal

More stones from all around the world

I liked the cobalt blues and glow in the dark colors on this rock


What a juxtaposed composition of colors

Semi precious gems

Semi precious stones and gems

Pink crystal slabs cut in half

Cut stones taken from Moon

Stone specimen from the Moon

More of them, in fact the heaviest moon rock in the world is housed in this very museum

Well, not the real thing it was just a mechanical T-Rex that moved at a regular interval

Again, not the real thing but replica

Remember the time when scientists discovered that these things could fly and crawl at the same time? It was as if they discovered the time-space continuum theory




Ah, one of the highlight of the museum; the Venus of Willendorf. And to think that I nearly overlooked this exhibit! The horror!


The Venus temple

The Venus herself. You know you can buy the same size fridge magnet from the souvenir shop, which I did but because my mother in law would find this sort of thing vulgar I had to bring it back home where my parents are more open towards culture and art


This here is a placenta 

















My favorite plastination exhibit!

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Chili Labneh and Zatar Labneh Spread on Bread

Saturday, September 21, 2013 0 Comments
If there was one thing that the dill of Arabs got right, it is the labneh. I absolutely love it, and it's edible in so many ways. You could use is as bread spread, chips dip and even eat it on its own. Its thick as hell, even thicker than your run of the mill yogurt or my mum's home made yogurt.

So anyways I had two flavors of labnehs lying around in the fridge; the olive spread and the chili flavored spread so I used them both on the bread loaf that I have into bite sizes partially because I know my husband wouldn't touch it with a foot long pole if I had used it like jam on the whole bread and also because I wanted to finish the whole lot today, and I was too lazy to cook a meal knowing just how filling the labneh is


Thursday, September 19, 2013

All In one Food Reviews

Thursday, September 19, 2013 0 Comments
I was going thru my hand phone and found a lot of old images of the food I have cooked. Being lazy as I am today (probably due to prowling in the gym fir 3 hours) I will just put up all the images and write a short description of everything that I've tried cooking and how it fared

Vege Chicken Drumsticks and Vege Nyonya Asam Cod Fish

The Asam fish was ready made and came with its own sauce, I just have to thaw the packet out, add in some water, chilli sauce and soya sauce to give it an additional taste. The drumsticks required more work, I made a coctail of chili and tomato sauces and added in the deep-fried drumsticks. They were good. I think the drumsticks made all the difference. Mental note: buy this brand when I go back Malaysia.





Simit with Vege Rendang Curry

My husband loves these easy to cook mutton and chicken curries, they come in this silver packets and they cook fast. He is a messy cook so they come in handy. Anyways I had two day old simit from my return stop at Istanbul (yeah, the review is long over due) so I decided to experiment a little bit. I cut simit into bite size and let them cook with the mutton curry sauce to soften it. The whole thing turned out really tasty and the husband loved it

For this recipe I used the mutton curry


The simit bread. Really just Turkish bagel


Made In EU Mock Meat

You have to give them some credit, they don't use preservatives, coloring and MG wildly like how we do so their mock meat tastes bland, but it gives you an opportunity to add in your own spices to taste it to your liking. Which is why after so trying so many of their mock meat, I decided the only thing I liked was their burger patty.

The only thing worth eating from Fry's



Oh my god, this thing literarily tasted like cardboard slices. It was that awful

The wieners were passable, I chopped them into small cubes and fried them with noodles

Mix vegetables

I stir-fried the vegetables and added in the mix vege cooking paste; a bit of water and voila~ Mix Vegetables