I have two blogger-friends from the Philippines – bluedreamer and Ishmael Ahab…and I’ve found that we have some similarities in our languages. After all, aren’t we all under the same sun?
Correct me if I’m wrong but we call a chicken “manok” in local Sarawak Malay and also in the ethnic languages and so do they…and our bean sprouts or taugeh, they call “to-ge” while our”siew mai” is “shoh mai” to them…and male is “lalaki” in Tagalog, almost the same as our “lelaki” in Malay….and I just learnt the other day that jackfruit is “nangka” in both our languages. Amazing…but true eh?
Well, I was watching Tablescapes – the Filipino food, cooking and travel show and I saw an old lady cooking balao-balao fried rice. Wait a minute! Balao-balao is in fact, fermented shrimps or what we call cincaluk…and we do have that here as well. It had been quite a while since I last cooked my cincaluk fried rice, so I decided to have that to go together with my baked pandan fish that I had featured in yesterday’s post.
These were the ingredients that I used…
– sliced onions and finely-chopped garlic, thinly-sliced chillies, prawns and two stalks of serai (lemon grass)…and of course, some cincaluk or balao-balao.
I fried the onions and garlic in oil till brown, added the chillies, serai and prawns and stirred till the prawns were cooked and then I added two tablespoons of cincaluk…plus half a tablespoon of sugar to counter the saltiness of the cincaluk. Next, I added the rice and mixed it thoroughly with all the ingredients. Finally, I broke two eggs into the wok and blended that into the rice and added half a teaspoon of msg.
After giving it all a really good frying in the wok, the cincaluk fried rice was soon ready to be served – with a sprinkling of chopped spring onions on top…
Looks good, doesn’t it? Tasted good too… LOL!!!
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 