Bad reputation…

If you may recall, I got this fish, a patin, from Annie-Q‘s mum that day…

I never liked patin before as it had this bad reputation of having an unpleasant smell…and I had had my share of those before. In fact, when I shared the photograph on Facebook, a cousin of mine in Kuching instantly asked, “No smell kah???”

Well, I guess those would be the farmed ones. Someone told me that if they have flowing water in and out of the ponds in the fish farms, the fish would not have any smell…but when you’re buying one at the market, there would not be any way you can tell and you would just have to take the fishmonger’s word for it. In fact, some would even lie through their teeth and tell you that they’re freshly-caught ones. Tsk! Tsk!

Thankfully though, these days, we are able to buy fish reared in the vast man-made lakes at the Batang Ai hydro-electricity dam where with the ever-flowing water, the fish would not have the mud smell at all and nothing can be more fresh than the tilapia that we get from there – you can buy them at the market, alive! We had one at a restaurant here once, salt-baked and it was simply awesome, so very very nice.

Actually, Annie’s mum gave me one not too long ago and honestly, I was quite  sceptical about the fish at the time since I had had some unpleasant encounters before and I did not have a good impression of it but my missus cooked part of it in our kampung masak kunyit style and to my surprise, it was really good. She cooked the rest of it with bandong (tapioca) leaves – it was nice but I think it would be nicer with ikan buris, a river fish that is getting to be rather rare and difficult to get these days.

This time around, I decided to do something different with it, so I pounded some shallots, garlic, chilies and a bit of ginger and tumeric (kunyit)…

…and bruised the ends of a couple of stalks of lemon grass (serai) and other than those, I got some curry and Thai basil leaves from my garden. Well, I guess it is quite obvious that with all those fragrant ingredients used, you just can’t possibly go wrong – it has got to be nice, that’s pretty certain.

Anyway, firstly, I fried the pounded ingredients and the lemon grass in a bit of oil and when they were good and ready, I added the leaves and some water. Finally, I put in a teaspoon of tom yam paste and some sugar to counter to very sour taste of the paste. Once the gravy had started boiling, it was ready for use.

Since it was very big, I decided to cook only the bottom half of the fish. I placed it in a plate and threw in some ladies’ fingers, cut into halves…

Then I  poured the gravy onto the fish and everything else in the plate…

Oh dear!!! It looked like the plate was too small so I transferred everything into something bigger and steamed it till the fish was cooked…

So was it good? Absolutely!!! Very nice and smooth texture and completely no smell at all!!! Even Melissa, who is somewhat picky about the fish she eats, loved it a lot and of course, we let her enjoy as much as she wanted…

Well, in case you are wondering what happened to the top half, I cooked that in our kampung masak kunyit style…

…to give to my mum as we did not let her try that the first time around. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very well done – not sour enough and not salty enough…but nonetheless, my mum said she enjoyed it very much as the fish tasted really good.

Thanks so much to Annie’s mum for the fish…but please don’t give me anymore as I have nothing to give in return. Should I be feeling like having that again, maybe I can just ask around at the market to see if there is anyone selling ikan patin from Batang Ai – I’m pretty sure there would be some around.