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!!!
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 