Let me try…

I saw it on a banner in the vicinity of some food stalls at Bandong here and I had seen it on the menu at this place in Kuching as well but I had never tried it before, much less cooked it myself.

Initially, I tried it with some fresh dabai (local wild black olives) and even though it was nice and I could feel the richness of the fruit, it did not really stand out as something so nice that everyone would not be able to wait to have a go at it too. Then, I guessed that they probably used the salted or preserved fruit and not the fresh ones so I decided to make some myself…

It seems that some people do it in some other way and they end up with some seedless preserved dabai paste but what we usually do in my family would be to soak the fruit in salt water and after a few days, it would turn soft and red like this…

Having got what I wanted, I got the usual ingredients ready…

– some sliced shallots and garlic and finely chopped spring onion…as well as the preserved/salted dabai, seeds removed, some pounded chili that I had in the fridge and some leftover salted fish…

To start off, I fried the shallots and garlic in some oil till golden brown and then, I added the salted fish…

…after which, I threw in the bits of salted/preserved dabai…

…followed by the rice, and after mixing everything together well…

…I added an egg and the spring onion and once I felt that it had been fried enough, I dished it all out…

…and served. There wasn’t any need to add more salt as I had the salted fish already and of late, I had steadfastly refrained from adding any msg in my cooking.

It tasted great…

…though I did not feel it was a lot different from my initial attempt when I used the fruit, fresh…and other than that, I thought the salted fish kind of overpowered the taste of the fruit. Maybe the next time I cook this again, I would just use the much milder ikan bilis (dried anchovies) instead.

Fingers crossed, I would get it just right next time…