Turn on the heat…

Some of you may recall that I had some renovation works done at my house not too long ago and I had the squat toilet downstairs replaced with a seat one…and the other day, I got somebody to fix a hot water shower in it as well. This cost RM310.00…

…and for all the plumbing and wiring works (plus I also got the guy to change a bit of the wiring elsewhere), the total came up to RM480.00. Now, one would not need to bathe using the icy cold water in the huge plastic tub and a “kong” (scoop) the old fashioned way – actually we are keeping the water in our downstairs bathroom cum toilet just in case the water supply happens to be interrupted for some reason or other but thankfully, no such thing has ever happened. Touch wood!

I have been very busy myself too – doing some massive spring cleaning works in the house. We have one extra room upstairs unused and all these years, we had been dumping everything inside. In other words, we were using it as some kind of a storeroom. Well, I’ve been clearing up the mess, throwing away all the useless unwanted stuff and cleaning up the dust that had settled everywhere in it over the years. At this point in time, I am still at it but at least, the bed has come into view now…

…and that means that should anybody care to drop by our little ol’ town, I have room for two more guests, 5 altogether as the other room can take in 3.

I will be getting a nicer thicker mattress for the bed, of course…and I have to get rid of those back cushions from my old sofa that I had discarded a long time ago, replacing them with proper pillows – we have a lot of extra pillows in the house so there will not be any need to buy new ones.  However, this room is extremely hot as it gets the morning sun as well as all the heat in full force in the afternoon, so I will have to get an air conditioner fixed but that will have to wait till I’ve got everything done 100%. Progress is very slow – each day, I can do just a little bit before it gets too hot for me to bear but I’ll get everything done…sooner or later.

Anybody coming this way anytime soon?

A little bit left…

After cooking the Singapore mee siam the other day, I had a little bit of the mihun left so I decided to fry it one morning for breakfast…

These were the ingredients that I used…

The usual suspects – the sliced shallot and two or three cloves of garlic, some kunyit (tumeric), pounded and a stalk of serai (lemon grass), end bruised, sliced chili, a few of the Thai or Vietnamese basil leaves from my garden…

…and bottled tom yam paste.

I decided to use sotong (squid) so after I had fried the shallot and garlic slices till golden brown, I added a tablespoon of the tom yam paste and a sprinkling of sugar (to give a bit of sweetness to the sourish and spicy taste) before throwing in the sotong and mixing everything well and stirring till the sotong was cooked. Then I added the leaves and the sliced chili and also the mihun and mixed it all thoroughly and kept on frying till everything looked nicely done and had a pleasant golden colour. Finally, I added a few dashes of fish gravy/sauce (in place of salt) and a bit of msg…and then I broke an egg into the wok and mixed it with all that was inside…and that was it! Done!

There you have it, my fried tom yam sotong mihun…

…with a sprinkling of some chopped spring onions on top. How did I feel about it? Well, it was very nice – I wouldn’t mind cooking this and serving it if I had some guests over for a buffet party and that was how good it was. But personally, I felt that it would taste even better if I had used prawns instead of sotong. One disappointment was that the chilies I found in the fridge and decided to use were not spicy hot at all – at best, they were good only for giving the dish some colour. Had I known that earlier, I would have used some cili padi instead.

Other than that, there wasn’t any sign of the Thai/Vietnamese basil leaves at all…

…and if at all, there wasn’t much hint that it was used. Next time, I must remember to put a lot more…and maybe some curry leaves as well.

Ah well, we learn new things every day and no matter what we do, there will always be room for improvement. Agree?

As good as it gets…

After the not-very-satisfactory one that I had here, I had been wanting to cook my own Singapore mee siam from scratch but somehow or other, I never got round to doing it. The main reason, of course, was the fact that I was too lazy and furthermore, I took the trouble to browse through some of the video clips on Youtube to watch some people cooking it and I was horrified by the amount of ingredients that one would have to prepare and some did not seem like the real thing even, for instance, they did not use tau cheo (fermented bean paste) and things like that.

Well, the other day, I finally did! I cooked my own Singapore nyonya-style mee siam…

You see, when Melissa was home for the holidays sometime back, we spent a lot of time together and among the things that we did, we went window-shopping and roamed around the shopping complexes and supermarkets and imagine my delight when I saw this at one near my house…

– the ready-to-cook sauce for mee siam, “an authentic Singaporean dish that will tempt you with its fragrant aroma” – that was what it said on the box.

I noted that it was made in Singapore…

…so I decided to buy it and give it a try but unfortunately, it did not come cheap – one box cost over RM13.00 and there was supposed to be enough for 2-3 servings. That means that one serving would be around RM4-6.00…but never mind!  I simply had to have it, period.

There were four sachets inside – the paste for the gravy and the one for frying the mihun (rice vermicelli) plus the sambal (chili paste) and the last one, the lime juice…

I boiled the prawns, shell removed…and used the stock for cooking the gravy. That was easy enough – all I had to do was to empty the contents of the sachet and bring it to boil…

The peeling of the prawns and the de-veining was the tedious part and took quite a while. Besides, I also had to lightly fry the tau kua (bean curd/tofu cake) and the omelette and then slice them into small thin pieces/strips plus some spring onions for the garnishing. They usually have chives in mee siam but I am not a fan so I decided to omit that. I also decided not to have any hardboiled eggs either as there was the omelette already and I reckoned that would suffice.

When I had got everything ready, I started to fry the mihun. All I had to do was to heat up the wok and empty into it the second sachet – the one with the paste for frying…and then, I added the mihun, pre-soaked to soften, and mixed everything together thoroughly. Once done, I scooped it all out into a casserole dish and garnished it with everything that I had got ready earlier…

Lastly, I emptied the sambal into a bowl and added the lime juice to it…

This would be the chili dip to accompany the main dish and I must say that it  was quite spicy and very very nice.

Finally, the moment of truth! I helped myself to some of the mihun and the condiments and poured a bit of the gravy over everything…

Ooooo…it was good!!! Exactly like how I remembered the Singapore mee siam to be – the one that I had way back in 1973.

In case anyone is thinking that there wasn’t much gravy in the serving that I had, the truth is that I was scrimping on it – trying to stretch it a bit so that I could have extra servings and instead of 450 ml of water for the gravy according to the instructions on the box, I added a bit more – 500 ml…and in the end, there was enough for 5 servings instead of just 2-3.

For one thing, I thought that was a lot of work…and I just cannot imagine me preparing the ingredients and everything right from the start and cooking it all by myself, no way! Now that there is this available at the supermarket here and the end result is as good as it gets, should I be craving for mee siam again, I will just hop over to the place a stone’s throw away from my house and grab another box… Easy! Hehehehehehe!!!

Things don’t always turn out that way…

Well, I guess we all know that things don’t always turn out the way we expect like the fish that I cooked the other day…

I marinated it with garlic butter…

…and then I popped it into the oven to bake. After some time, I turned the pieces over and waited for it to cook completely and all the juices had come out of the fish…

Then, I took some of the olives (stuffed with anchovies) that Quay Po Cooks gave me sometime ago…

…and added a few of them, along with some of the cherry tomatoes from our garden…

…and then I sprinkled some chopped spring onions and Chinese celery and bits of chili over the fish…

…and popped it back into the oven. I turned off the oven and let the fish continue to cook in the existing heat in it.

The end result looked pretty good and it tasted good too…but it did not turn out quite like what I had expected. I would have thought that it would taste kind of western but it turned out to be something quite Asian or Chinese in the end. Perhaps if I had grilled or pan-fried it and added some creamy milk and cheese sauce, then it would be a different story altogether.

The consoling part is, of course, the fact that it was hassle-free and easy to cook and both my missus and I enjoyed it very much…

Remember this…

I remember this! They used to sell them in the school canteen in little packets at 10 sen each, if I’m not mistaken, and inside, one could find something like uncooked instant noodles coated with some kind of seasoning but there wasn’t any necessity to cook them – they could be eaten just like that as a snack. I also remember that they used to advertise it on television during the children’s shows. I think there was a blue Sesame Street-like monster that would open a packet and eat the contents and then it would say in its growling husky voice, “Maaaa…meeeee!!!!”

However, I do not remember ever buying their instant noodles, for some reason or other but the other day, I found some in the pantry…

– my missus must have bought them – so I decided to take a packet and cook it to give it a try.

It was all right – like any other instant noodles, chicken flavour…

…but what I do not understand is why they label it as “ayam kampung” which in English, means “village chicken”. These would be the ones allowed to roam around the houses in the kampung, pecking at any food they can find and fed on corn unlike those commercially-farmed ones that have been fattened on chemical chicken feed and I hear that they also give them hormone or whatever injections to stimulate growth and things like that.  Thus, if you choose to buy one of the supposedly more nutritious and organic kampung chicken at the market for your herbal soup, it will cost you a lot more than the normal ones…which makes me wonder, though I doubt it very much, whether there is any of such chicken used in the manufacture of these instant noodles.

As for the taste, I am pretty sure it would be nice with extra ingredients added or with a bit of ginseng and wolfberries like what I cooked sometime ago with the made-in-Sibu Mee Daddy, chicken flavour…

I had a post on this a long time ago and I said it then and I will say it again now – that if you are feeling lethargic or tired, you can try this – it will certainly help boost your energy and make you more energetic…and will certainly save you the trouble of having to steam your own ginseng chicken soup for this same purpose.

Go ahead! Give it a try and see if it works on you…

You’re not the best…

…but on the whole, I thought you were quite good…

Well, my missus and I stopped by this place for lunch after the church service on Sunday and I decided to give their kueh chap (RM4.00) a try.

My missus had their claypot noodles (RM4.50)…

*recycled pic*

…which I had on my previous visit there and even though I enjoyed it a great deal, I did not want to have that again and would like to try something else for a change.

The kueh chap was good…and I must say that they were very generous with the ingredients – all the innards and stuff. The lagsana-like pieces of flat, broad rice sheets of noodles were nice , soft and chewy, not thick and rubbery…

…and the chili dip was very good too – sourish and spicy. What I found lacking was the soup or broth – even though it wasn’t too bad, I felt that there are a few other places in town with something more fragrant and tastier.

But still, it was good enough and I did think it was worth having…just that personally, I think it fell a bit short of qualifying to be among the best in town.

Happy to meet you…

In my previous post, I mentioned that I got to meet two new friends, both of them doctors from the peninsula and one of them has been posted to a town here while the other came for a short visit. Well, we agreed to go out for dinner that very evening and so there we were – the two ladies, Ryan, my missus and I.

Of course I had to order the usual – their fried midin (jungle fern) with belacan (dried prawn paste), the cangkuk manis fried with egg, the pandan (screwpine leaf) chicken and the sea cucumber soup. I did not quite like the belacan used in the first dish – I guess they did not manage to get a good batch this time so the smell was a bit too strong or heavy and was not as nice as usual.

I did not want to order the butterscotch prawns anymore as I thought we could have pork instead for a change…

It was good – very nice but I think I still prefer prawns. Maybe the next time I drop by the place, I’ll try it with fish instead and see if that is any good.

They were out of local tofu so they used those Japanese egg ones instead…

…for this sizzling dish with the minced pork and chopped shitake sauce poured over the bean curd. Everyone thought that was good but I wish we could say the same about the Foochow-style fried noodles. It was all right, not bad really except that it was not exactly the same and they added too much pepper to it.

All in all, the bill came up to over RM82.00 for 5 persons, inclusive of rice and drinks and they rounded it up to just RM80.00 unlike at one place that I frequent in town where they would do nothing of the sort even if it is just a matter of a miserable 10 sen! Tsk! Tsk! If it isn’t for the nice food and everything else, I would have stopped going there altogether.

Well, that night, one of the ladies…

…insisted on picking up the tab so I just let her even though I did feel that I should be the one paying as I got my missus to come along and I also asked Ryan to join  us as well. Well, never mind! The next time you come to town, my new-found friend, just give me a tinkle and we’ll go out jalan-jalan cari makan again and this time, it will be on me. Deal?

Seeing you again…

It certainly was nice to see Ryan again – he’s currently home for the summer holidays before he goes back again to Russia for his final year and we met for breakfast here. He had the sizzling beef kampua and he loved it a lot and he enjoyed the vanilla mille crepe a great deal too. Of course, we had the kompia as well…and I also tried this meatball noodle soup (RM5.50)…

It was nice and I was glad that those fishball-like meatballs did not have that peculiar kind of smell that would put me off everytime I had those. I wonder which brand they used. Of course I would very much prefer the freshly-rolled minced meatballs but being a lover of clear soup noodles, I must say that I enjoyed it – not the best I have had around but it was good enough.

Thanks very much, Ryan, for this –

– their limited edition no less. At the time of writing, I had not tried it yet so I’m afraid I cannot give any comment in it. As a matter of fact, I have seen different varieties of this at a local supermart but I have never bought any to try mostly because for one thing, they do not come cheap, these imported stuff. So deprived, don’t you think? Hehehehehehehe!!!

We certainly had a great time catching up with things in our lives – it has been a year since we last met and there were lots to talk about. Then these two ladies joined us…

– both doctors, friends of a blogger-friend of mine from the time when he was still struggling with his studies and living in Russia…like what Ryan is doing at this point in time. One of the ladies has been posted to a hospital in Sarawak and the other is based in the peninsula. They managed to get in touch with me through my blog and  Facebook and it certainly was my pleasure to meet them in person.

They had had their breakfast before they came so they just had drinks and tried the kompia…but we did manage to go out for dinner that same night and for that, you will have to wait till the next post. Stay tuned!!!

Good with the bad…

When Annie-Q was back here in Sibu with her twins, they went with her mum to this coffee shop, Twin Corner, to the left of the Paramount Hotel in the vicinity of the Kampung Datu shops and she loved the roti canai as well as the other things there.

Well, my friend, Philip, is back in town from the US and the other morning, we went there for breakfast. He ordered the roti telur…

…which was indeed very good and I particularly loved the dhall dip…

…which was fragrantly tasty – it was thick and you can see all the dhall beans in it unlike at many places where the dip is watery with bits of long beans and what have you…and has hardly any taste of dhall. I would say that it is even nicer than the one at the Bandong stall that I like a lot but if I’m not mistaken, it is slightly more expensive here which is to be expected as the stall is located in  a coffee shop and they would have to pay the rent and what not. I tried a bit of the sambal by the side and found that it was great as well.

The tomato crispy noodles (RM4.00) that I ordered from the Malay noodle stall there…

…was closer to what one would find in Kuching – the gravy is not so heavily adulterated with tomato ketchup compared to what I have had at the other places in town but unfortunately, there were only those few miserable shrimps and some sotong (squid) in it. I tasted a shrimp and found that it had a strong smell so I quickly spat it out and put all of them by the side of my plate – it was quite obvious that they were not very fresh. Otherwise, I would say that the noodles were not too bad.

Philip ordered their fried kway teow (flat rice noodles) with egg gravy (RM3.50)…

…otherwise known as wan tan hor, and we could tell from the moment it was served, judging from the appearance, that it would come nowhere near what we had here…and we were absolutely right.

All things considered, the roti canai or roti telur is certainly worth going back there for but I don’t think I would want to order anything from the noodles stall anymore the next time around.

Knowing how thoughtful and generous Philip is, I was pretty sure that he would not come back empty-handed and I was right! He brought me these all the way from the US – the made-in-Canada Ma Ling luncheon meat and the US-made condensed milk…

Thanks so much, Philip. That is so very nice of you and it certainly was great seeing you again and of course, we’ll go out again sometime to see if there are any more yet-to-be-discovered great eats in town…

Oooooo…luncheon meat!!! And Ma Ling no less…

Yum! Yum! My favourite since I was small, fried with sliced Bombay onion and egg. Care for some, anyone? Hehehehehehe!!!!!

Breathless…

In my previous post, I mentioned that a cousin of mine was in town and I took her here for dinner as she insisted on having the jelly pisang – a drink that she used to enjoy at that Ban Chuan coffee shop here in Sibu when she was still very young and had not had since.

Well, she had her wish granted even though it was not exactly like what we had way back then – here, they would substitute the shaved ice with vanilla ice cream (RM7.00). Of course, it is also very nice this way but some of us would tend to cling to the memories of what we had in the good ol’ days gone by.

I tried the longhouse chicken (RM16.00) that night…

…which was supposed to be something like ayam pansuh except that it was not cooked in bamboo. We felt that it had the taste but in our opinion, it was way too mild. We would prefer it to be stronger and other than all that they already had in it, they could have added some more things that we would find in the ethnic delicacy – things like daun bungkang, tapioca leaves, daun kunyit (tumeric leaf – the Bidayuhs would have that in their pansuh) and so on. Other than that, we were quite put off by the fact that they added a bit of cornflour to thicken the sweet, natural juices from the chicken plus all the ingredients used. We did tell the boss all this so hopefully, the next time around, it would be more to our satisfaction.

They did tell me that it was just meat cooked in tomato sauce so all this while, I did not bother to order their Indian red curry chicken (RM16.00)…

…to try but that night, I did. True enough, it was meat in tomato sauce and not what I had expected – something like ayam masak merah (red-cooked chicken). The saving grace was that it was very spicy and that made it taste pretty good as a whole. The gravy went very well with the rice. For this dish, you can have the option of either chicken or beef.

The boss gave me this dish of guang ming duck to try…

…on the house. It had a lot of the chopped daun kesum (Vietnamese coriander/mint) on top and that, I would say, is an acquired taste. Those who are not accustomed to eating such herbs and leaves may be put off by that and I must say that I thought it had a very peculiar taste at the start but as I went on eating, it sort of grew on me and I began to like it more and more. But I would think that they should not add cornflour to thicken the gravy in this dish as well – something that is very common in Chinese cooking.

We also had the guava salad (RM7.00)..and my cousin loved the mushroom roll (RM8.00) a lot but what took her breath away and rendered her absolutely breathless was the otak-otak (RM13.00). She instantly placed orders for a few to be wrapped up nicely so she could take them home with her when she went back the following day.

All in all, she enjoyed the dinner and would definitely love to drop by this cafe again if ever she had the opportunity to come to Sibu again.