Stick it in…

I’ve featured this dish many times before…

*recycled pic*

Everyone in Sarawak would know right away what it is, of course. This is a plate of cangkok manis fried with egg. Cangkok in local Sarawak Malay actually means grafting like when you want to plant a tree, you would need to get it grafted if you cannot plant it from the seed and manis means sweet. We also call it lakia chai (Dayak vegetable) or mani chai in Hokkien. I do not know what mani means but because of the pronunciation, some people call it money vegetable…in the hope that people who aspire to be rich would eat it frequently.

They have the same vegetable in Sabah and they call it sayur manis (sweet vegetable) but theirs is very small. We can also buy theirs here, tied in a little bundle, probably from their very commercialised vegetable farms in Kundasang, near Mount Kinabalu. Initially, I thought their plants must be very small…or they pluck only the young shoots but I had the chance to see it when I was in Sabah once – it is in fact a big plant…just that the leaves are small.

Some of you over in the peninsula do not seem to know what kind of vegetable this is while a few appear to be quite familiar with it. I’m sure that if the farmers there do not grow it themselves, the vegetable sellers would have “imported” the miniature version from Sabah for sale. For one thing, it is very easy to plant.

Once you have plucked all the leaves to cook, you cut the stalks to make them shorter and stick them into the ground or soil like this…

After a few days, young shoots would appear…

…and the leaves would grow bigger and greener…

…as the plant grows taller and taller. It’s not a very tall plant – maybe around 1 metre only but of course, if you want to have a lot to fry, you would need to plant more than a potful like what my missus has done. These would come in handy when she wants to cook the kampung-style sayur rebus or masak lemak where she would only need a bit of the vegetable and she would have too much if she goes and buys one whole bundle of it from the market.

I really wonder how true it is when people tell me that this vegetable is not grown in West Malaysia or they can’t buy it at the market or they have never seen or eaten it before. I’m sure if somebody brings some of the cuttings back, he or she would be able to stick them into the ground and can enjoy the vegetable anytime he or she likes. It’s that easy to plant, really…