Never be the same…

These days, it certainly seems like knowing how to boil water constitutes knowing how to cook. If you enter any supermarket or hypermart, you will see a mind-boggling array of all the different brands of instant noodles in all shapes and sizes with all the different varieties. But when it comes to mee goreng (fried noodles), my favourite would be Indomie…but it seems that these are no longer available. Today, in the shops, we have Ibumie’s Always…

It looks like Indomie, it tastes like Indomie…but it’s not Indomie! Presently, it’s on offer at RM3.80 for a pack of 5, so that would be over 70 sen each…and makes a pretty cheap breakfast, and you can add slices of meat like what I did the other day…

…or if you’re a light eater, that can be your lunch. It certainly is cheaper than going out to eat…but I guess it’s not the same, eh?

I was passing by Chopsticks, my daughter’s favourite chicken rice shop, and I saw that they had curry. It was what we would call “Chinese curry” – very diluted and nothing like the curry that anyone in my family would cook or what you can find at the nyonya, Malay or Indian eating outlets. But it reminded me of what I used to have at Ang Lee Restaurant along Carpenter Street in Kuching in the 70s. I would stop there during lunch hour whenever I could for their curry rice…and for old times’ sake, I decided to tapao (takeaway) a packet home…

They were quite generous with the yummy chicken rice…

…and I asked for one lor-nui (braised hard-boiled egg) and it seemed that they had put a bit of the gravy over the rice, and they also gave a lot of the chicken curry (gravy)…

It wasn’t too bad but at RM5.80 for all that, I thought it was a bit too pricey…though it definitely beats eating those curry stuff in the cans which are by no means, cheap these days…

…but it was not the same as what I had those long-gone days at Ang Lee. If my memory serves me right, they put the chopped pek-sak kay (white boiled chicken) and sliced char siew (barbecued pork) on the chicken rice and poured the curry gravy over all that.

Well, time passes and it will never be the same again…as everything must change…