Imagine…

I do believe that when it comes to cooking, all it takes is a bit of imagination and creativity to be able to whip up something that is really nice to eat. I know people with stacks of recipe books but will only end up cooking those few dishes over and over again…and I’ve watched those cooking shows whereby the preparation prior to cooking a dish looked so tedious that I would not even bother to give it a second thought.

Well, it was Friday – my no-meat day, so I had to cook fish for lunch and dinner. Looking into the freezer, I found some of those smaller kind of fish – kembong or a variety in the same family, whatever it is called. Drats!!! They were not cleaned yet – my missus did not as the fishmonger to do that for her when she bought the fish (they would usually do that for customers)…and she did not do it herself before stuffing the whole lot into the freezer. Tsk! Tsk!!!

Well, after cleaning the fish, I stuffed the mid-section of 3 with some home-made freshly-pounded chilli sauce and rubbed the outside with salt. The other three, I stuffed with tom yam paste (bottled) and rubbed the outside with the same. Then I tied pandan (screwpine) leaves all around each fish and used toothpicks to hold the leaves together. Finally, they were ready…

I put them in the oven for about half an hour and then turned off the heat, allowing the fish to continue to cook in the oven for another half an hour. While it was cooking, the whole kitchen was filled with the nice fragrance of pandan and the fish and I was already quite sure at that point in time that it was going to taste good. When I took the fish out to check, they were ready to be served…

They certainly looked quite good, don’t you think?

I tried the one with the tom yam paste and it was really great…

…and the one with the chilli sauce was equally nice too…

The fish went very well with the cincaluk (fermented shrimps) fried rice that I cooked…but that will be in the next post. Make sure you drop by, okay?