A little bit more…

The other day, in my kantong post, I mentioned this guy called Ah John who, in my younger days, used to push his covered tricycle past my house, selling kantong and also rojak. Much later, I started making my own using prawn paste from Penang…but lately, we can buy the rojak mix in plastic bottles, all ready to be eaten. That will save one the trouble of mixing everything in the correct proportions but personally, I find that it is not as nice as it should be. So if I have the time, I will usually add some crushed khong therng (peanut candy)

…and mix that with the rojak paste…

…and I will also squeeze into it some of the juice of the kalamansi lime…

Blend all that together thoroughly and you have the perfect rojak dip to go with your pineapple, cucumber and the works! You can add a bit of attap sugar if you want it a little bit sweeter…

Not a fan of rojak, are you? What about doughnuts? Were you one of those queuing up at the Pavilion in KL or even the Spring in Kuching to buy those doughtnuts? Actually, I’m not really into those kuih gelang (bracelet) as the Malays call it but the ones they sell at the stalls in the kampung here are really very nice…

I wouldn’t call them gelang as they’re very small, more like cincin (rings). You can compare them to the 50-sen coin that I’ve placed beside them in the photo. I quite like these as they’re somewhat rich in taste and not too sweet…and the best part is they’re only 10 sen each – 10 for RM1.00. It certainly is hard to find anything that costs 10 sen these days.

Well, this next photo has nothing to do with rojak or doughnuts. I just want to show you what I cooked for myself for breakfast…

Have you had yours yet? LOL!!!

Colour my world…

It does not look like it’s going to be an entertaining show on American Idol today…or at least, I reckon it will not be to my liking. The theme this week is the Rat Pack…

…so it will feature songs from those guys in the above picture. I like Frank Sinatra’s karaoke favourite – My Way, and Let me try again…and maybe, Strangers in the night as well but I guess they will have to sing songs from around that era – songs like Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife which I never really fancy. Dean Martin? Everybody loves somebody, Sway (Yup! That same song revived by Michael Buble/Pussycat Dolls!)…and Sammy Davis Jr’s “Mr Bojangles” (…or what some people may sing, “Mr Bo-Cheng-Kho”! LOL!!! It seems that they expect Adam to do this one!). It certainly does not promise to be very exciting…

Anyway, to get on with today’s post, I have another music quiz for your mid-week entertainment and the theme is COLOURS. All you have to do is to complete the song title by filling in the blanks with a colour. Here goes:

1   ………. leaves of summer

2   ………. rose of Texas

3   Long cool woman in a ………. dress

4   ………. rain

5   The grass is ……….

6   ………. eyes crying in the rain

7   ………. flag

8   A white sport coat and a ………. carnation

9   Don’t it make my ………. eyes blue

10 That ……….-haired daddy of mine

Have fun and good luck!

Better this time…

I’ve tried eating it before in my younger days but I did not like it at all. I guess it is an acquired taste and not everybody can appreciate it. What I am talking about here is tapay,or tapai as some may call it…

I got some for my mother from the Bandong stall that I frequent at 4 for RM1.00. It is actually fermented rice wrapped in leaves and it tastes something like tuak, the rice wine made by the ethnic people in Sarawak (…and don’t some people call that tapai too? In Sabah perhaps?). That’s all there is to it – rice to which some yeast has been added to make it ferment… 

I wouldn’t say that I didn’t like it this time around. As a matter of fact, I thought it tasted all right. It left a lingering sweetness in the mouth, and that was what I particularly liked.

It certainly does not have the offensive stench and strong taste of belacan (dried prawn paste) which can turn off those uninitiated individuals who have never had the chance to try it before. When I was in the UK, everytime I cooked curry, the English kids walking past the house would go “ooh” and “aah” – they loved it! But whenever I was frying something with belacan, they would go spitting away, wondering where that horrible smell came from. But don’t we all love belacan regardless whether we use it to fry vegetables like midin or kangkong or as a dip for our ulam?

Anyway, getting back to the tapay, I guess I would regard it more favourably from now on but given a choice, I think I would opt to just stick to my piansip kampua mee pok…

What about you?

Lucky…

I was just wondering what people in western countries have for their tea breaks. Biscuits? Cakes and cookies? Scones, bread and buns? I bet they do not have anything really substantial and heavy like what we normally have here. We are really spoilt for choice here with our varieties of noodles and other stuff along the same line… 

or all the kuih-muih, be it Malay…

…or Chinese…

…or whatever…

This is just the tip of the iceberg and the list just goes on and on and on… Boy! Aren’t we lucky to be living here? Anybody wants a panggang! Goes best with susu cap gantung junjung…

ROTFLMAO!!!…

What I say…

I was teaching Shirley Geok-lin Lim‘s “Monsoon History” in my Form 4 English class the other day and in a desperate attempt to arouse some interest in Literature, I decided to draw on their knowledge of Malaysian History. After all, they had just sat for their PMR Examination and all of them scored an A for Sejarah.

I asked them who ruled Malacca before the British and somebody said it was the Portuguese. I told them that was wrong and all attempts to get another response failed. Eventually, a girl said that she could not tell me the answer in English. When I asked her to give me the answer in Malay, she said, “Belanda.” By jove! She’s got it!…Glory be! Praise the Lord!

Then I told them that eventually the Dutch exchanged Malacca with some place in Indonesia with the British. I definitely was not surprised that they could not tell me it was Batavia (Java)…and that they did not seem to know anything about the Perjanjian British-Belanda or what I studied as the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824…and THAT was some 30-40 years ago. The issue here now is not the language. They studied Sejarah in Malay and just look at how much they know in less than a year after the examination. 

amirahsyuhada‘s photo from http://www.flickr.com

Then there was this part of the poem that goes: “…Where termites built their hills of eggs and queens zoom in heat…” and the pathetic Science stream students did not have the slightest idea as to what the “duties” of the Queen ant are and that the hardworking ones are all male. Come to think of it, I wonder why the all-girl school in Sibu has chosen the ant as its mascot…assuming that it is a female one – the Queen! LOL!!!…Oops! Sorry I digress!

Getting back to what all this is leading to, I received this from a friend via email quite sometime ago. Look at the following translation of English words into Malay:

hardware – barang keras
software – barang lembut
joystick – batang gembira
plug and play – cucuk dan main
port – lubang
server – pelayan
client – pelanggan

Now, try and translate this into Malay:
That server gives a plug and play service to the client using either hardware or software joystick. The joystick goes into the port of the client.

This is what you may end up with:
Pelayan itu memberi pelanggannya layanan cucuk dan main dengan menggunakan batang gembira jenis keras atau lembut. Batang gembira itu akan dimasukkan ke dalam lubang pelanggan.

Muhammad Haji Salleh in his poem, “si-tenggang’s homecoming“, wrote: “…the knowledge that sweats from it is…from one who has learnt to see, think and choose between the changing realities…” Catch the drift? But then again, as they say, there is none so blind as they who will not see…

Have a nice day, everybody!

No more (2)…

No more! There was nothing left, nothing at all! Not one single thing, believe you me! When I went to the Bandong stall yesterday morning, the lady told me that everything had been literally selling like hot cakes. Normally, they would prepare around 30 packets of nasi lemak and yesterday morning, she said there was a huge order for 100 packets. By the way, it was RM1.50 a packet and not RM1.00 as I had mentioned in my earlier posts.

Then she asked me, “Are you STP?” LOL!!! She must have read my post on the place. So I probed, “Who told you about my blog?” Well, it turned out to be Kongkay‘s brother and sister-in-law. Hahahahaha!!! Talk about blogs being influential, eh? Well, she seemed to be of the opinion that my recent post had given them the much-needed publicity and that was why business had improved by leaps and bounds. She even asked for my residential address so she could deliver some of the ayam penyet Bandung to my house since I do not usually go out at night, but you know me lah! Nei-ah! Nei-ah! I just told her that I would drop by one of these days to try…

Well, sometime ago, I bought a few slices of bread pudding from the stall…

Oooo…I love bread pudding. Everytime they had that in the hotels for breakfast or for dessert, you can bet that I would have more than just one or two helpings. But these were a bit different. You do not get to see the slices of bread embedded in the milk custard and they do not give you any maple or whatever syrup to go with it. But as they say, looks can be deceiving! They were VERY nice! I could taste the bread and the richness of the milk in the custard and I think they used sweetened creamer, so it was sweet enough without the syrup and it certainly looked like they glazed it with caramel. The best part was it was RM1.20 a slice but she sold it to me at only RM1.00…and that was before she found out about my blog! It must have been my friendly and pleasant disposition! LOL!!!

I also bought their Penang laksa to try…

It was nice…but I can’t remember the price though. You’ll have to find out for yourself should you decide to go there yourself and try some of the things that they sell…

The heat is on…

Omigawd!!! It is so very hot here in Sibu. It has not rained ever since I got back from Kuching on Sunday – not even a drop…and I am oozing sweat from every pore! And as if that is not bad enough, this afternoon at around 12.30, I spotted this in the distance… 

Thick smoke was bellowing into the air somewhere from across river. I wondered whether there was a fire somewhere – maybe on KNB, TOC and Kpenyu’s land? LOL!!! By 4.00 p.m. when I went for the tuition class, it did not seem to have abated, not in the least…

Was there a fire? Or was it a blatant case of open burning by some unscrupulous individuals? Where were the authorities? It had been raging on for 4 hours and the sky was shrouded with smoke, the sunlight had turned a sickly red…and nothing had been done? There would be no difficulty at all tracing the source and slapping a hefty fine on the culprit to teach him one really good lesson that he would never forget as long as he lived. What were they waiting for? Another horrendous haze like the one in 1997…and then blame it all on the Indonesians?

Well, since it was so hot, I decided not to cook…lest I would be dripping in sweat and my dishes would turn out extra salty! Hahahahaha!!! So I stopped by my regular Bandong stall and bought RM10.00 worth of their chicken kurma…

…and their pumpkin and cangkuk manis masak lemak for RM2.00…

By sunset, the smoke was still visible… Sigh! When will they ever learn?

Sign of the times…

I saw this notice at the hotel where I was staying in Kuching the other day…

…and I imagined the whole function room filled with cats. I wonder what they would discuss – royalty payments from Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber? Or maybe the male ones would just go, “Maaaaahuuu?…Maaaaahuuuu?” Then the female cats would respond, “Tak maaaahuuuu! Tak maaaahuuuu!!!” LOL!!! But seriously, I would think that should read “Sarawak Cat Lovers’ Club”

Then there was this other notice… 

I wish they would make up their minds whether they wanted to use English or BM…and it was a course on English proficiency some more.

Now, I’ve seen this one in many hotels…

The sign says, “In case of fire, do not use lifts.” Now, I would think that it means I must not use the lifts so that a fire would not break out. The advice below that in smaller print states, “In case of fire, use staircase.” Are they telling me that I should use the staircase as otherwise, a fire might break out? I wish somebody would tell them that they should say, “In the event of a fire, do not use the lifts.”

Are these the sign of the times, I wonder?

Until it’s time for me to go…

I had a call from Kongkay soon after I arrived in Kuching and we agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning, Sunday. My flight was at 4.oo p.m. so I had ample time to loaf around.

He came with his missus and son and took me to Tabuan Jaya for Penang prawn mee…

I cannot recall having eaten that before. I could have tried it in Singapore in the early 70s or later elsewhere but it did not leave a lasting impression. What I do know is that some people really love it, so I was eager to give it a try.

It was nice but when you have eaten Min Kong’s RM20.00 a bowl freshwater prawn (udang galah) noodles in Sibu before, everything else will pale in comparison…

But I really loved the chee cheong fan…

I have eaten that elsewhere in West Malaysia but none came close…and even the ones made by the Shanghai chef at the Mitsu Tea House here were a bitter disappointment! That was why I was never into that stuff as I had never had any that I thought was great. But the one at this place that we went to was really good and I wouldn’t mind going for that again the next time I go to Kuching.

We went to stroll around The Spring shopping mall for a while after that and we dropped by MPH to browse around. I saw copies of this on the counter…

…and I was positive that I had heard somewhere that they distribute it free of charge. So I asked the girl cashier, “Excuse me. Are these complimentray copies?”

She replied sweetly, “No, it is free.” LOL!!!

Upon checking out of the hotel, I went over to C4STPs’ house where I saw these packets of nasi lemak that Anissa had bought for her sons for lunch at RM1.20 each…

Gosh! The portion was so small I could have finished it in one big gulp unlike our nasi lemak here in Sibu…

…sold at only RM1.00 a packet at the Bandong stall that I frequent, or this RM1.50 packet from the Kuala Penyu lady along Delta Road…

Boy, am I glad that I live in Sibu? Well, at around 3, they sent me to the airport…and pretty soon, it was time for me to head for home sweet home! Gee! How time flies when you’re having fun!

It’s my party…

Well, actually it wasn’t my party…but a farewell gathering for Cooking4STP who would be migrating to Perth in Australia in search of greener pastures. That was the main reason why I flew over to Kuching over the weekend – to attend the function at the relatively-new Four Points by Sheraton where we had the buffet cum barbecue dinner at The Eatery, one of their food outlets…

Upon arrival at the place, I was greeted by one very excited ex-student, Jordan, who certainly did not expect to see me there. He’s presently doing the TESL overseas twinning programme like my daughter but he is fortunate enough to get to do it in Kuching…and not Sungai Petani! Some guys have all the luck…

We had booked one big round table for all of us…

Photo through the kind courtesy of whatthefiq

There were lots and lots of things to eat, no doubt about that. I had one helping…

…after another and then went for the dessert…

We certainly had our fill of the food and laughter…

Photo through the kind courtesy of whatthefiq

There were 17 of us altogether – two had left and whatthefiq was taking the photograph. In the snapshot, you can see the regulars on my blog – KpgNangkaBoy, TheOtherCousin, Gundot, Gerrie, Sophia, Pollie, Cooking4STP…and the silent readers – Lindy and Anissa.

We were there from 7.30 till past 11.00 p.m. when some of us adjourned to The Sarawak Club for a karaoke session. I most certainly had a great time that evening…