Sabar Due To Saba!

I was having a really bad day and my head was full of negative energies and it was such a welcome distraction when my GF asked me to pick her up from work so we could have dinner. I have recently started skipping dinners, in an effort to manage my weight and burgeoning belly (it actually does help by not eating dinner, not so much starvation as a gentle fast of solids, because I do take a light snack during tea time to tide me over until brekky the next day), so it was kind of struggle to convince myself to actually have dinner with her. But, could I actually turn down food?

Obviously not! I found myself barrelling down the highway to Cyberjaya to pick her up where she then directed us to a restaurant nearby. She has been here twice within the last 30 days and wanted me to try something from this place. The place honestly doesn't look like much, devoid of a unique identity. If it weren't for the throngs of multinational customers this night, one could have mistaken this corner lot for a busy night at a Mamak stall.

Now that's somebody raring for honest to goodness food! She knows her way around the menu quite well now, considering she has already eaten here before. She took the Chicken Hanith and I was suggested the Lamb Hanith. To help it all go down better we ordered a side of Arabic Salad with mineral water and lemon juice to wash it all down.

Not being particularly savvy on Arabic food, I later found out that Hanith is a method of cooking using moist heat, where meat is marinated in spices (usually the classical finely ground concoction of black pepper, cloves, cardamom seeds, cinnamon, and coriander mixed into a paste using tomatoes or lemon juice) and wrapped in cloth (or nowadays, aluminium foil, as was the case with this restaurant) and steamed for hours until everything is full cooked and falling-off-the-bone tender.

I must say that my Lamb Hanith was suprisingly good, albeit its unimpressive looks. The fragrant oils of the spices seeeping deep into the meat, saturating it with that Briyani spice headiness. The texture, whoa, the texture was something altogether. Fork tender and yielding to the slightest pressure. Even the bones were rendered tender, allowing me to really munch out the sweetness. I suspect a pressure cooker must have been employed somewhere in the long cooking process.

However, the true star of the night (apart from my GF) was the rice. I dub these Super Basmathi! Extremely long grains of rice, longer than any basmathi I have seen, was superbly cooked, each grain of rice remaining separate despite the rich ingredients used to flavour it. It wafted the wonderful aromas of saffron, meat stock, and mayhaps, spiked with a bit of rose water.

The Arabic Salad was a hastily chopped bowl of fresh tomatoes, iceberg lettuce and onions drenched in oil and tart lemon juice.

As we were about to leave, we saw a runaway watermelon! Trying to escape the juicer, me thinks.