Roadside…

This stall by the side of the road at Bandong here in Sibu…

…has been around for many years now since I first blogged about it in January, 2009 and to this very day, ever so often, when we did not feel like cooking, we would just go and tapao the food from there. In fact, when my blogger-friends came over from the peninsula over two years ago, I invited them to my house for dinner and I did buy some of the stuff from here – yes, they’re that good. That night, they had their masak hitam beef, the umai (the Melanau raw fish delicacy), their ayam belada and the sambal terung.

The food here is home-cooked – they cook it at their house right behind those shops at the back and at around 10.30 to 11.00 every morning (except weekends), they would bring everything out and start selling. I particularly love how they cover everything nicely unlike some places that I’ve seen in many parts of the country with a multitude of flies hovering all over the place and the food like Japanese war planes.

They’ve extended the stall a bit now so there are a few more choices than before and they even have a stall by the side selling barbecued chicken wings, fish and others and at times, you may even get some pa’is – fish or shrimps wrapped in banana leaf and cooked over some hot burning charcoal…

Actually, the son is the one running this panggang stall – you can see him in the first photograph helping his father (a fat guy, though he seems to have slimmed down a lot now, wearing a cowboy hat) in his section of the business. The meat and seafood dishes here are consistently good – you have a choice of their very nice masak hitam beef, their chicken dishes be it curry, masak merah, belada, korma or kicap berempah…or you may prefer the fish – nicely marinated and deep fried or asam curry and I think they do have prawns too (though I am not sure if this is available every day)and even salted eggs!

I am not too fond of their vegetables though but sometimes, I may buy some that they cook masak lemak (with santan/coconut milk) like this nangka muda (young jackfruit)…

…that I got from there the other day for only RM2.00. It was all right that day – not quite lemak enough for me but the pineapple sambal (RM3.00)…

…was really very good and so was their bubur pedas…

…that they were selling that day at RM3.00 a tub.

That was all we had for lunch and dinner that day, total damage RM8.00 only and we still had quite a lot of the pineapple sambal left so we kept that for the subsequent days – it really went so very well with rice! No, we did not go 100% vegetarian that day – there was a lot of leftover rice in the fridge so I fried some cincaluk (fermented shrimps) fried rice with ikan bilis (dried anchovies) and egg in it as well and I also pounded some sambal belacan (dried prawn paste) to complement everything that we had…

Yes, we do have simple meals sometimes…and the best part, of course, was the fact that it was cheap as well!