In the middle of the night…

In the 70s, I went to live in Kuching and I had to find a job to support myself. I worked as a temporary teacher in a private secondary school for RM300 a month. It was quite enough at the time to pay for the basic expenses and to supplement my income, I ended up writing so many plays for radio – RM30 each, for the station in Kuching that some people thought that I was working for RTM.

At the time, I was renting a room at a friend’s house…and there was this girl, Jacky, who was also renting a place there. Jacky was a cashier at a coffee house in one of the hotels in Kuching and my friend and I would hang around there quite often. When Jacky finished work at 11.00 pm, the hotel transport would send her home and we would just hitch a ride. Sometimes, upon reaching home – in the middle of the night, we would tell Jacky that we were hungry and she would cook something for us. Jacky was a great cook and would always be roped in to prepare the dishes for birthdays and other special occasions.

I remember how she used to pinch some shrimps…or bits of meat from the freezer and cook soup with ginger and Foochow red wine, adding salt and msg according to taste. After that, she would boil some mee sua (string noodles) to go into the soup…and I can remember it was really nice and we thoroughly enjoyed that for our supper.

So, the other day, I fried two pieces of ginger in a bit of oil and threw in some prawns before adding water and a bit of Foochow red wine. After boiling for a while, I added a bit of light soy sauce and msg and poached an egg in the soup. In the meantime, I boiled some noodles (I found a bit of mee pok left in the fridge from God knows when!)…and served them with the soup with a sprinkling of freshly-cut chillies and spring onions on top…

It was nice though I think I would prefer it with mee sua but it certainly would be worth cooking once in a while for a change from the usual Foochow chicken soup cooked with ginger and red wine…

I remember how that time in Kuching, my friend’s mother would get up in the morning and notice what we had been up to the night before and she would grumble, “Humph!!! The ‘rats’ have been busy again last night!” LOL!!! Those were the good ol’ days indeed!!!