I love those old-school eating places where they sell porridge…and with it, you have a choice of a whole lot of things displayed in those yellow enamel basins. You can pick the salted vegetables fried with slices of pork belly or the taugeh (bean sprouts) fried with salted fish, or the kangkong with pig’s blood or the chai po (dried radish) fried with egg and so on and so forth…and of course, they have a selection of salted eggs with alluring shiny, red yolks, century egg…or thick slabs of omelette…plus canned pickled lettuce, fried dace with black beans, salted fish, fried groundnuts and everything else. We used to have something like this at night at one of the stalls above the old Sibu wet market.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any around here these days and at best, we only have the stalls in the coffee shops selling pork porridge with/without century egg. Thus, for something of the sort, I would have to go to the restaurant at the Garden Hotel here…
…for RM10.00 ++ which I would say is rather expensive and the condiments are somewhat limited. I had that not too long ago and among those things that came with the porridge was a bit of tauju (fermented tofu)…
…which I would not touch but my missus loves it. She has a bottle in the fridge and everytime we have porridge at home, she would take it out and eat with the gruel.
Well, moving away from porridge, my daughter and I stopped by Balkis here the other day as she wanted the thosai…
She was a bit disappointed as they did not give the whitish yoghurt dip as they normally would but this was only RM1.50 a piece. Real cheap!
I had the nasi campur (mixed rice)…
…with prawns and sotong (squids) and I must say that I enjoyed that a lot.
That was a bit expensive though – RM6.00 but with the thosai and the drinks, the total was less than what I paid for the porridge at the hotel.
I guess, in view of the rising prices of things these days, the next time I have a craving for porridge, I might as well just cook my own and everything else that I like to go with it.
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 