Oh no…

Not again! On the 1st Day of Chinese New Year, some visitors were leaving my place and I went out with them to see them off. There were at least 6 inches left in the drain outside the house and I told them, “Gosh! Many parts of Sibu already tenggelam (drowned)!” True enough, this was what I saw on alexallied.com the next morning…

If you are interested, you can click the link and hop over to his blog to see all the photos that he has in his post.

Anyway, yesterday, somebody called to say that he could not get out of the house and was not able to drop by as his area was severely flooded. He mentioned that it was getting worse, so I went out to have a look…

…and true enough, the drain outside was filled to the brim. It got even more serious last night as you can guess from the situation outside my house this morning….

After the flood in the first-second week in January, the nincompoop in charge of natural disasters and stuff had said that there would not be any flood during Chinese New Year as the King Tide would only be 5.8 metres high compared to 6.2 metres the previous time around. Now he is keeping mum over his earlier statement…and of course, the newspapers would not dare to dig into their archives and publish again what he had said earlier. Sigh! I do wish that some people will have enough sense not to try and play God! Talk less, do more!

UPDATE 1: At 11.00 a.m. today. The water is overflowing onto the road, my neighbour’s driveway is already submerged. Stanleycarter, your father’s not going to move his car? LOL!!!

As always, there is a lot of mud-slinging and finger-pointing with emphasis on localised issues such as the silting problem in the Rejang River and the sinking swampy land in Sibu.  They have conveniently chosen to ignore the fact that other parts of the state are similarly affected. No doubt those causes that they harp upon do contribute in one way or another but the main problem is the drastic climatic changes that the whole world is experiencing as a result of global warming. I saw somewhere the other other day a photograph of land in Antartica. The ice has melted, the sea level has risen and we are getting torrential rainfall  (and in the temperate countries, severe winters) unlike what we had had before. There are speculations that if the situation does not improve, some coastal cities e.g. Shanghai in China may be drowned into oblivion like Atlantis!

UPDATE 2: 11.00 a.m. The water is creeping onto my driveway. I can imagine the situation in some parts of the town now.

For one thing, do not expect others to do something if you yourself are not bothered to even lift a finger to change. Last night, the weather was good…and the fireworks were booming away polluting the atmosphere with their toxic fumes like there was no tomorrow! Gee! Don’t parents teach their kids anymore…or don’t tell me the parents were the ones playing? (No wonder we have kids like those we find in the schools these days!) Aren’t they aware of the current pressing problems of global concern?

I want to break free…

If you’re wondering why I’ve chosen this song as the title of this post, it is actually in reference to a person’s condition when he has been eating too much meat and not enough roughage or fibre. LOL!!! This is very often the case around Chinese New Year time when the tables will be laden with pork, chicken, duck, beef and all that, while vegetable dishes are more often than not, a rarity.

When I was young, one thing that I would look forward to was the bak kua or barbecue meat. It was not available locally then and my father would order it from Singapore (together with the menglembu groundnuts – I remember the brand; there was a picture of an old farmer carrying a stick on his shoulder and bunches of groundnuts hanging from the stick). The meat would come wrapped in layers of white paper with the label (a piece of red paper with gold lettering) stuck on top.

Today, there are the local ones, as well as those vacuum-packed ones  brought over from West Malaysia e.g. Woe Lai Yeh or the Kiew Brothers brand…

Now they even have the chicken or beef varieties, not just pork , in all  kinds of flavours including black pepper, and as you can see in the photo, they not only come in squares these days. These are round…like gold coins in the hope that one will enjoy good fortune and lots of money in the year ahead.

Sitting around entertaining guests and munching on the bak kua or while waiting for visitors to turn up is definitely detrimental to one’s bowel movement, especially after having already eaten all that meat during the regular meals. Thus, after two or three days into the festival, I would usually yearn for some simpler, less rich food  like porridge…

…which I had yesterday with salted fish…

I did not get the chance to go to the market to get the long kiam hu but these were good enough for me. I also love salted eggs and century eggs with my porridge but there weren’t any in the house, so I had to do without those and instead, I had this steamed pork with cincaluk that I had featured before in an earlier post…

Chris of i-anakapai.blogspot.com tried cooking after seeing it in my blog and her whole family sang its praises and licked the bowl clean! LOL!!! I also fried some thinly-sliced french beans with egg and with Marmite (or sometimes I would have Bovril) added to my porridge, I must say that I had the most delightful lunch indeed. Yum! Yum!

Anybody else having porridge? LOL!!!

Blessed…

In 1973, I was in Singapore staying (renting a room illegally) at one of those HDB flats with an elderly couple. The husband worked as a labourer and the wife was a housewife. They had a daughter who was already married and was living with her in-laws…and a son who was hardly ever home. The couple lived a very simple life – eating plain rice and one not-very-appetising looking vegetable dish every day throughout the year. But when Chinese New Year came, they cooked so much food – braised pork leg, five-spice duck, steamed fish, roast chicken and of course, they could not finish all that by themselves. So they kept asking me to join them for their meals and every meal, they would be eating those same dishes…..

For one thing, the Chinese belief is that they must have a lot of food – some, like fish, are exclusively mandatory – so that throughout the coming year, they will be abundantly blessed and will have a lot to eat. I do not strictly prescribe by that superstition, but come Chinese New Year, we will have some special dishes to celebrate and will cook more to share with anyone who happens to come by the house…but just enough to last a day or two.

To start off, we will have the longevity noodles the first thing in the morning in the hope that we will be blessed with very long lives…

I love Foochow mee sua (thread/string noodles) served in chicken soup cooked with ginger and lots of Chinese red wine, so usually I will have quite a substantial amount as you can see in the photo.

This year, we had roast duck…

…and ngor hiang (golden five-spice meat rolls)…

…fried udang galah (giant freshwater prawns)…

…salad (no photo of that) and stir-fried mixed vegetables…

…and being of mixed parentage, we would always have a few of our nyonya/Malaysian specialties. This year, we had chicken curry…

…and homecooked satay beef…

…and nasi minyak (ghee rice)…

My missus did all the cooking. I only cook on ordinary working days with my shortcuts and simplified recipes and kampung-style cooking. She, on the other hand, will go through the trouble of preparing all the added ingredients to make the dishes taste even nicer, not me!

So there you have it – what we had during Chinese New Year….ample to go round, and let’s hope we’ll be blessed with ample good fortune throughout the year as well. Oops! She did not cook any fish! Hahahahahaha!!!

Good vibrations…

Actually, you do not have to pay through your nose to get some lion dancers to come to your house (…and scare the living daylights out of the kids…like KNB! ROTFLMAO!!!) in the hope of attracting some good fortune…

I read somewhere that if you have a lot of happy visitors to your house, the good vibes will bring good feng shui to your household and you can be assured of a year of bliss. Well, Penang blogger faisaladmar‘s friend, Arjun Rampal Ajil, spent the night at my place on the first day of Chinese New Year…

The poor fella has been posted to teach English (though majoring in BM and Social Studies) somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the Dalat district where there is no handphone coverage, no radio or tv reception and no piped water. Luckily, they do have electricity there, unlike some other worse places.

Well, Clare of Kampua Talk got to meet Ajil when she dropped by with Cheryl – my ex-student from my English tuition class sometime ago…

Kpenyu happened to call at that time and was eating his heart out as I got to spend my Chinese New Year with sweet and pretty young girls. LOL!!!

Pollie and her family also came to the house…and friends in the teaching line e.g. Lim who could get hold of some “poomba” sometimes and would always spare me some. This is a photo of his son, Bryan, who was somehow rather shy when at my place (Perhaps he was intimidated by my size and my stern looks! Hahahahaha!!!)…

…ex-students including the one who is now a lawyer (KNB will know whom I’m talking about!) and my in-laws, of course.

Some bloggers jumped the gun and came in the evening of the 2nd Day instead, like Wongpk and Alexallied…

…and Bongkersz brought along his better half…

Kongkay wanted to drop by too…but was unable to do so because of the flood in his part of town. Well, next year perhaps…

Those who came “at the right time” later in the evening were in for a treat as they had the opportunity to sample my missus’ cooking; my culinary skills are good enough for ordinary days only. Sorry, Clare…you came a bit too early and all you got were “free smells” (like Famous Amos at Sg. Wang). Well, one good lesson to be learnt here – precise timing is very important! LOL!!!…..I will be posting on the food that my missus prepared in my next post, so make sure you all come back to have a look!

Some of you are back in the office already today, probably grumbling away. Don’t! Be happy, smile a lot and say nice things…at least, till after Chap Goh Mei (15th Night) to make sure you’ll be happy the whole year through. Looking at the bright side, be thankful you still have a job to go back to. Many don’t…

Come on over…

It’s the 2nd day of the Year of the Ox…and some parts of Sibu are flooded, so the ox is probably swimming around. Yesterday, I dropped by my parents’ place and also my in-laws, that’s all. The rest of the time, I was at home and I had a few visitors but I’ll blog on that in another post.

Well, my house is still open today (and the rest of the week…or in fact, anytime at all)…

…and you can help yourself to the cakes…

…the traditional biscuits such as kuih bangkit…

…and pineapple tarts…

…or this gold-nugget look-alike version…

…and these romantic looking white-chocolate biscuits…

So, anybody around these parts, do come over. I should be home all/most of the time to welcome you…

Tradition…

It is the tradition for members of the family to have the reunion dinner together on Chinese New Year’s Eve. We did not have the chance last year as my missus and I flew over to Penang for a few days to spend the festive season there with my daughter who came over from Sungai Petani in Kedah. This year, we decided to stay back and so we were able to sit down with my parents at this very significant once-a-year meal.

We had one of those dinner “packages” from the Sweet Family Restaurant that I have posted about here and here, and among the items on the menu was this Five Treasures dish…

…and of course, their signature dish – the Philippine pork leg…

…and fried snowfish, fish being a must-have on the menu for every reunion dinner as in Chinese, the character sounds like “have” and hopefully, one will have a lot of material gains in the coming year…

…and herbal chicken, as well as this dish of prawns…

…and a plate of fried sharks’ fins with egg and stuff, a broccoli and mushroom dish and this pineapple tart-like dessert, but we were all way too full at the end of the dinner, so nobody wanted to eat it. That was why the clingwrap had not been removed…

My father bought some sea cucumber soup and Foochow fried noodles from the Y2K Restaurant which is, in fact, a pretty nice place to dine in Sibu but I have not had a chance to drop by and post on it yet.

My sister asked somebody in the kampung to cook our Malaysian delights – chicken curry…

…and ayam masak merah, another Malaysian curry-like dish…

I must say that I enjoyed the last two dishes a lot more than the other dishes so you can bet that I had more than just a few helpings.

For one thing, there was way too much food for the 5 of us – my parents, my sister and my missus and me. My daughter’s not home for the celebration and I can barely recall the last time my brother (and his family) in New Zealand was home for Chinese New Year. But anyway, with the few of us around, I guess my parents were delighted enough and in our small way, we had managed to keep tradition alive.

Then, of course, there is this tradition for which everybody would have to wait till 12 midnight. Well, I had no part in it! I went to sleep early and I did hear “the war” raging but I could not be bothered to get up to have a look. I can’t stand the noise and besides, the toxic fumes would make me feel asthmatic. I did get up though – at around 1 a.m. to look for something to eat, but it was all over by then. Anybody interested to see what had transpired in the witching hour can hop over to alexallied to have a look at his pics. This photo taken this morning shows the aftermath outside the house of one of the culprits…

This fella was obviously trying to keep clean and set off his firecrackers in his rubbish bin. Well, looking at the mess, it did not help much…and I can imagine where his good fortune would be going to in the coming year – into the rubbish bin! ROTFLMAO!!!

Anyway, I’ll just mind my own business and once again, here’s wishing one and all a Happy and Prosperous Chinese New Year!

Let’s get together…

Last night, I went to this bloggers’ get-together at Lot 9 Cafe here…

Victor Kiu was the meet co-ordinator (right) and with him in the photo was James from Miri…

…and willchua from Sarikei (left) and rubberseeds were there…

…and so was bongkersz (left), with wongpk and alexallied (blurred as he was moving at the time)…

…and the camera-shy Bengbeng (so he was not in any of the photos) who was recovering from his serious foot injury. Clare was not able to join us as her uncle took her family out for dinner after the sunset mass but Yan managed to drop by to say hello after her family dinner at another venue…

So what did we have to eat? There was this dish of fried mihun garnished with fried anchovies (ikan bilis) which was not bad…

…followed by this plate of salad chicken which was quite nice too…

…but I did not like the curry fish head. I’ve tasted better elsewhere and even my own home-cooked version with A1 Mountain Globe brand instant curry mix (seafood) is much better…

I liked the sourish Thai-style midin (wild jungle fern). I thought it was nicer than Ruby’s – they had strips of ginger in theirs and I did not like the fuss of having to single them out one by one.

The butter/cereal pork ribs dish is worth a try. Everybody enjoyed that…

…and this dish of tofu was quite a hit, but I’m more a meat person…

…and very much preferred the Philippine pork leg which could be comparable to Sweet Family’s…

I did not touch the chicken feet/claws though! Eyew…

All in all, the bill came up to around RM300 for so many people, inclusive of rice and drinks and each person had at least two or three. Rubberseeds brought a bottle of wine – Shiraz and they had that but I didn’t touch a drop! I was a very good boy! LOL!!!

It certainly was nice getting together to chit-chat and get acquainted with one another better. My pleasure meeting you, Victor (who was a student in my former school but I didn’t get to teach his class)…and I really liked his t-shirt…

Ooo…William Shakespeare! “If music be the food of love, play on!” Luckily Victor’s not even half my size or he would have gone home without a stitch on his back! Hahahahahaha!!!!

Stay awhile…

I had lunch with Bongkersz yesterday. He managed to crawl through that section of the Bintulu-Sibu road around Tatau that had collapsed owing to a landslide. I understand that they have prepared a temporary bypass for light vehicles to use but at a snail’s pace. Needless to say, the queue was extremely long and those concerned would need the patience of saints.

We went to Rasa Sayang Cafe for the kampua noodles that Bongkersz enjoyed a lot that last time we went there together. I think people in Miri, like Goolooloo for instance, have been feeding him very well as it seems that he has put on a bit of weight…

Here’s a photo of him with his Lin Dai pose! ROTFLMAO!!! Blogger Alexallied , an ex-student of mine, joined us for lunch too…

He certainly looks better than the last time I saw him around Chinese New Year 2008 with his very Ah Beng Sepilok-escapee hairdo (It was dyed in a colour that reminds me of those primates at the rehabilitation centre, you see! LOL!!!).

We had the kampua noodles, of course but as it was almost 1.00 p.m. then, they had run out of pian sip (or kiaw in Kuching and wantan in West Malaysia), so we could not have the soup. Instead, I ordered this mixed meat platter from the chicken rice stall there…

and this plate of “lor” (braised) hardboiled eggs…

I must say that you can get better fare at the barbecue/roast meat stall at Mei Le Cafe or the Chopsticks chicken rice shop at Pedada Commercial Centre.

By 2.00 p.m. Bongkersz had to take his leave to proceed with his journey home to Sarikei to spend Chinese New Year with his parents. Gee! We have to stop meeting like this, Bong – like some hit-and-run kind of thing! Perhaps next time, you will stop and stay awhile…?

My wish…

Well, it’s Friday today and that means the weekend’s here and then, the Chinese New Year holidays. That, of course, also means that those of you who only blog from the office will not be online until you get back to work – the earliest on Wednesday, the 3rd Day on the Chinese Lunar Calendar. That is why I am posting my festive greetings today instead of Sunday, Chinese New Year’s Eve…

So, here then is MY WISH for all of you…

Gong Xi Fa Cai.
A very Happy Year of the Ox to all, and may you enjoy good health and abundant wealth and lots and lots of good food too…

This is STP’s fusion breakfast – the typically-western egg and bacon (from Australia, courtesy of Stella) and our local mi poh goreng! Yummy!!!

Have a great time, everybody!

Hello! Hello! I’m back again…

I’ve had a post on this food stall along Bandong Road here that sells very nice Malay delicacies at very reasonable prices. For one thing, it is along the way when I come home from my parents’ house around noontime after spending the morning there keeping my mother company. So, on the way, I can conveniently stop by to get a few things for dinner and because of that, I have not been cooking for quite sometime now.

The other day, I bought RM3.00 of their chicken kurma. I did not check to see and when I got home, I discovered that there were only two pieces of chicken…

That means it was RM1.50 a piece. My missus said that at the hospital canteen, they sell their chicken dishes at RM1.00 per piece but then they only use breast meat there…and the food is not as  nice. The kurma I bought from the stall was absolutely delicious – full of flavour and definitely the best I have ever eaten, so much so that I was actually scraping the bottom of the bowl for the gravy to mix with my rice! I wonder how much they will charge if I order by the chicken; if it is not too expensive, perhaps I can get them to cook for me for Chinese New Year.

I also bought RM3.00 of this – cempedak muda masak lemak (Young cempedak cooked with santan/coconut milk)…

…and RM3.00 worth of this pineapple dish…

Other than that, the generous proprietor insisted on giving me a bit of this variation of the pineapple dish to try…

The gravy was thicker and sweeter. Very nice…and the best part, of course, was – it was free of charge!

Imagine RM9.00 for dinner for two persons, and there was enough of the cempedak and pineapple left to be kept for dinner the following evening. With such affordable food selections easily available, you can be sure that you will not find me slaving over the kitchen stove for a  long while – until I get sick and tired of it all, at least.