Be healthy…

My foster-cousin gave me this sometime ago…

Some native workers at the construction site where the husband was working gave it to him but he and the daughter would not eat it as they were quite put off by the colour, so she gave it to me.

This is the rice that they planted themselves in their padi (rice) fields, quite recently harvested and not totally polished – that explains the colour and it is supposed to be a lot healthier than those white rice sold commercially. When I was young, my mother used to buy from the shops and cook for us and I had no problem eating that (Ah well! I guess everybody knows that I do not have  a problem eating most things, hence the shape and the size! LOL!!!) but if I remember correctly, what we had when I was young was of a very much darker shade of red than this. Perhaps, this was partially polished, not completely unpolished…so that some folks would not find the colour too different for their liking.

For some reason known only to her, my missus just left the bag of rice sitting there on the kitchen table and did not bother to cook it at all. Eventually, I decided to take things into my own hands and took a bit of it to cook some sweet potato porridge for breakfast the other morning…

I think I had a post on cooking the porridge sometime ago, I’m not too sure now but anyway, it is very easy to do so. I just used the rice cooker – one cup of rice to 6 parts water…and I added some sweet potatoes, cut into cubes and two slices of ginger. You may wish to add more if it pleases you but I, for one, would not like things with an extra-strong ginger taste. What I do know is that when my mum cooked sweet potatoes in syrup (water, sugar added) and pandan (screwpine) leaves, she would add a bit of ginger. She said that it was to counter the “coldness” of the sweet potatoes. Do keep stirring and when the water has started boiling, you must leave the lid open a little bit so that it will not boil over and make a miserable mess. You may wish to add a bit of salt and msg, according to taste or a chicken or ikan bilis (dried anchovies) stock cube or granules. I would have put in some pandan leaves for added fragrance but unfortunately, when the people came to do the renovation works on the house recently, they had to remove the plant at the back of the house and right now, I am still in the process of re-planting but it is not big enough at the moment.

I would prefer my porridge to be a bit mushy but I was too hungry and could not wait any longer. I had it with some salted egg and leftover canned stewed pork that I found in the fridge…

…and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed that sumptuous breakfast which I had that morning.

Now, I do not think this is all that healthy but on another morning, I had some prawn curry left. I usually buy that from my regular Malay food stall at Bandong and they are very generous with the curry gravy. Well, rather than letting it all go to waste, I thought I could boil some noodles and eat it with the curry and I did…

I did add some fish cake that my sister-in-law gave us, thinly-sliced and I also added some salt as I thought that once the noodles were added to the curry gravy, it would render it somewhat bland.

So, was it nice? I’m sure anyone can tell from the look of it that it most certainly was… Yummmmm!!! LOL!!!