Sigh!!! How many of you would agree that women are very good at hiding things? Wait a minute! Let me correct myself. They’re good at putting away things but they do it so very well. More often than not, they would be so well-hidden away that they themselves cannot find them and would have to turn the whole house upside down to find them. What do the rest of you think about this? Hehehehehe!!!!
Well, that always seems to be the case with the things in our fridge. Very often, I would discover things that I can hardly remember when we had them or where they came from and some would have grown moldy already but moldy or not, I would just throw them all away. Well, that day, there were already two tubs of leftover rice in the fridge and yes, this is going to be another fried rice post again. While looking through the fridge in search of something that I could fry it with, I found another tub, “hidden” in the compartment where we would usually keep out chocolates and stuff. That being much older than the other two tubs, I decided to fry it first and save the most recent one for another day.
That morning, I decided to use the fermented/salted dabai that I had kept in a bottle in the fridge. I have blogged about that here but this time around, I decided that I would remove the skin so the end product would not have that unpleasant-looking bits of black and besides, if the skin is thick, it does not taste very nice – siap-siap, they say in Hokkien, whatever that is in English. Other than that, I thought I would use the air budu I got from my friends from Trengganu and also some leftover calamansi lime juice plus sugar and chili dip that I had made the day before for my fried fish balls…
…and of course, I had my usual sliced shallots and garlic and I also got some of the skinny stalks of serai (lemon grass) from my garden.
After frying the shallots and garlic in a bit of oil till brown, I added the dabai…
…followed by the rice and after mixing everything together well, I fried that for a while before adding the air budu and the lime/sugar/chili dip…and half an ikan bilis (anchovies) stock cube…
…and finally, I added some eggs…
…and once I felt everything had been sufficiently fried, I dished it all out…
Yes, it was very nice with the flavours of all the ingredients used and it sure looked much better than I last time I cooked this, without the bits of dabai skin…
…all over but I would prefer it if I had added a handful of ikan bilis (dried anchovies) and maybe some thinly-sliced long beans or french beans to give more bite to it and perhaps, our own local stronger-smelling/more fragrant air budu aur would bring the taste to a whole new level. I think I will try that next time…
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 