Accidentally in love…

I am free on Tuesdays…but that means I will have to cook dinner. Anyway, before I get to that, I had to go to the bank yesterday – the one in Upper Lanang Road. It used to be in Rejang Park and was not that inconvenient as it was near my house…but sometime ago, they closed down that branch and moved to the other end of the town. Well, I’m not going to deliberate on that but while I was in the area yesterday, I spotted a stall in one of the coffee shops selling kolo mee…

Somebody should tell them that just because they dump in some minced meat, fish balls and veg, it does not become kolo mee. It still tasted like kampua mee but with the extras. Just like the pseudo-authentic kampua mee I had in Auckland (at NZ$8 per plate!)! It was nice but it just was not the same. I feel that they should just leave it to the people concerned. If you want to eat kolo mee, go to Kuching…and if it’s kampua mee that they want, then they can come to Sibu!

Now to get back to what I was going to talk about, I had to cook dinner yesterday so I must decide what I would like to eat. I did not want to cook ladies’ fingers as I would need to use sambal kering (dried prawns) and I think I should stay away from that for a while…

Besides, Bongkersz cooked that recently and he might call me a copycat…but to be frank, if you take a look at his post, it did not look at all that appetising! ROTFLMAO!!! Anyway, I did not have to cook the main dish as we still had some leftover ikan tapah masak kunyit (Tapah fish cooked with tumeric) that my missus cooked a couple of days ago…so I had to tolerate my craving for some lemon chicken for a bit…

In the end, I settled for pumpkin instead. I had cooked half of it last week, sayur rebus style…so I still had half of it in the fridge.

Normally, I would cook it with udang kering (dried prawns), the same way that I would cook ladies’ fingers, but it looked like I had to do without that. I pounded two shallots, four cloves of garlic and three chillies, and fried that in a bit of oil, adding one stalk of serai (lemon grass) to that a while later. I also put in one teaspoon of sugar, to caramelise it, as Kylie Kwong would say…and then in went the cut pumpkin. After mixing the pumpkin with the ingredients thoroughly, I added water and left it to simmer until the pumpkin was cooked. Finally, I added a teaspoon of ikan bilis (anchovies) stock, threw in a few curry leaves for additional fragance and continued to simmer it till the gravy thickened.

So this was the end result. It certainly looked mouth-watering and when I tried it, it was really very very nice! I loved it!!! Somehow, it reminded me of the chilli crabs I had in Singapore in the early 70s at places in Changi or Bedok. Ummm…have I accidentally stumbled upon the recipe they used at the time? Well, I simply must try it out one of these days…but that will have to wait till I am absolutely sure I will not end up with another gout attack…! LOL!!!