Soon it was midday and time for lunch…but before we headed to where I wanted to take them, I stopped by my regular Malay food stall at Bandong to get them some of the Sarawak specialty – daging masak hitam…
…literally translated as beef/meat cooked black, for them to try and I also bought some sambal petai (stink beans)..
Having got those, I took them to this place – one of my favourites in town. At least, they had natural flowers all over the place…
…and even something as simple as this…
…would go a long way to add a pleasant touch to the whole place…unlike the distasteful plastic flowers that they had here.
We had what I love the most, the belimbing prawns…
…and their special version of the otak-otak…
…which is neither like the Muar ones nor the nyonya ones available in Penang.
Needless to say, they loved both the dishes and my NZ friend, who was not a fan of otak-otak, felt it was really very nicely done. She also liked the Payung rojak that I had ordered for the veg dish…
She was of the opinion that with its own special sauce, it was good and tasted like a cross between gado-gado and fruit rojak and I must say that I would quite agree with her on that.
I asked the proprietor whether we could take out our loot from some Malay stall to eat together with what we had ordered and of course, he was gracious enough to ask us to go ahead. I don’t know if they tried the sambal petai but they finished the daging masak hitam in a blink of an eye…and on our way back, we had to stop by one of the shops to buy 5 more tubs of the ready-made masak hitam paste. That certainly speaks volumes, doesn’t it? No prize for guessing what she would be cooking once she gets back home to New Zealand.
We also had some of the special drinks they had at the place…
…but none of them tickled our fancy but they did enjoy the Sibu’s original, the jelly pisang that I had ordered for them to try…
After lunch, we went to the shopping malls on the other side of town for MORE shopping PLUS a stop at the Malay kuih stall at Bandong – the one that opens in the afternoon around 3.00 p.m. onwards on weekdays (My friend was absolutely delighted that she was able to get hold of some cucur cempedak at the stall at an unbelievable price of 3 for RM1.00!!)…before heading home for a quick rest and to freshen up before dinner that night – their last night in Sibu…
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 