Ikea Meatballs, North Indian Thali, Banana Muffins, and Brunch at mOre

This post basically encompasses the last couple weeks, during which Ankit (my first cousin on my mom's side, currently in uni in India) has been staying as a guest. Naturally, mom has felt the need to take him to nearly every mall in Dubai, bring him along wherever she goes (grocery shopping included), go out to eat every weekend, and just offer him all sorts of food in general to keep him busy and entertained. It doesn't help much that he isn't very vocal about his wants and needs, so she feels she needs to offer everything to him since he would never ask. Of course, I don't have any problems with getting to go out to loads of places, but I admit I get antsy when I feel there's too much food or we're indulging ourselves too much.

The first outing I went along with them for was to Festival City, which is yet another mall in Dubai. This mall visit was more exciting thanks to the fact that we'd never been there, and that there is a massive Ikea complete with a restaurant and their famous? imported Swedish Meatballs- which I had to take home and try. The photo is a bit blurry cause I haven't quite mastered using our crappy digital camera's macro setting.

My next go-along outing was in Karama. We were planning to go to our usual thali/dosa place- Sarvana Bhavan- but mom wanted to try out Venus Restaurant (which we went to for thali last summer). Mom and Dad got the South Indian Thali while Ankit and I got the North Indian, because I often find the South Indian has too much coconut for my taste. I though it was just all right, the tandoori rotis were wonderfully puffy and soft, the palak daal was good, the bindi was okay (I like mom's better), the dahi and yogurt were yummy (freshly cultured!), and the oily gobi subzi was good but seemed really unhealthy. There was also some sort of curry that was sort of sweet and didn't really appeal to me. It also came with some mithai, which was very good- probably cause they made it with lots of ghee. Overall I regretted overeating cause I didn't feel it was worth it.

I somehow found time to make (low-fat) banana muffins at 8 PM to bring in for 1st period girls' choir. I didn't bother with experimenting with whole wheat flour (I only did 1/2 cup I think) or whipping egg whites, but I did reduce the butter even more than written in the recipe (last time I put only a little less than the recipe called for, and the bread was TOO moist!). I made special walnut ones for mom, and they turned out looking good! (According to mom they tasted good too.)

Finally, today we went for Friday Brunch (a huge thing in Dubai) at mOre cafe, one of our favorite breakfast spots. We initially looked in to brunch at Certo, an Italian restaurant with great reviews, but that was only set-menu (for which we had no guarantee of vegetarian options and we knew would be too much food), and at Pergolas in the Murooj Rotana hotel, which mom and dad had taken Julie to while I was in Boston, but that was somewhat pricey (about 180 dhs) and overwhelmingly excessive (according to mom and dad), as per the usual Dubai style. I can only imagine what the 500 dhs brunches are like. The mOre brunch had plenty of variety, but it was nicely manageable. I tried everything that looked appealing to me (spread out over about 5 "courses" punctuated by digesting breaks- walks around the cafe and Gold & Diamond Park), and didn't feel completely disgusting and overly full at the end. The stand-outs were the pineapple-mint salad (with tomato and onion, a seemingly strange combo that was really refreshing), gloriously flaky croissants with jam, fresh orange juice, eggs cooked-to-order with brown bread, sausages, ravioli pasta, tender lamb in some sort of gravy, and carrot cake. The umm ali was also good, but it lost points for being guilt-inducingly rich and heavy, expected seeing as it was made with croissants and swirled with chocolate.