Expired…

It’s the last day of school today – the long end-of-year holidays will begin tomorrow and stretch right till January next year. That was why, when we drove to my girl’s school that day, we went through some of the stuff that she had there to take home.

That girl of mine is so serious in her work. She would be so engrossed in it and neglect her meals. Besides, for a rural school, there sure seemed to be a lot of things going on – meetings (which I disdained very much when I was still working as personally, I believe that action speaks a lot louder than words), extra classes and a whole lot of activities. Well, it is good in a way as being cooped up there in the middle of nowhere, it may get really boring and depressing sometimes for want of something to do. Most of the time she would be too tired to cook so she would probably just have a drink and some biscuits and that was it! We used to cook for her to take there and keep in the fridge so she could just heat it up and eat but I guess she wants to be independent and prefers to cook her own.

Anyway, I took home this made-in-Indonesia instant fried noodles…

…that my ex-Kanowit student, now based in Brunei, bought from there to give to me.

It had just expired a few days earlier…

…but I guess it wasn’t all that long ago so I just went ahead and cooked that for breakfast. There were two packets, just nice for my missus and I and I served it with the leftover char siew from our lunch that day, garnished with a bit of chopped spring onion…

Yes, it was still all right, no problem at all.

Other than that, we also took home a few packets of this…

…that my girl had bought for herself probably thinking that it would be something like the ones in Penang that she quite enjoys. My missus said that she had bought that flavour before, those days when she was still working to cook in their pantry and eat for brunch and she kept saying that it was not nice, nothing like the real thing and very very sour.

Never mind, even if she insisted it was not nice, at least, it should be edible and I could have that for breakfast and finish all the packets that were left eventually instead of just throwing them away as that would be such a waste. The expiry date for this one is in January next year so there is no hurry for me to do that and I can just cook one when there is nothing much in the house and have that for my breakfast.

Well, I did cook one packet that day to try…

…and indeed, it was nothing like the asam laksa that I had had before, never mind nice or not nice. It was sour, like what my wife said, and thankfully, I only used about half of the seasoning provided. Actually, it reminded me of the white tom yam bihun that I had sometime ago but of course, it was not as nice minus the fragrance of the lemon grass and all the other ingredients that went into the cooking but it was all right.

I added some fish balls to it and cooked an egg…

…hard boiled with the yolk still soft and moist. Yes, it was nicely done, just the way I love it. As always, I just used my direct boiling method – just put the egg straight from the fridge into some water in a pot (about three-quarters, no need to submerge it completely) and bring that to boil, small flame (I always use the smallest burner on our gas cooker), uncovered. I kept rolling the egg around so that the yolk would be in the middle and not to one side…and once the water started boiling, I covered the pot and waited for around 6-7 minutes before taking the egg out to peel and cut it into halves and serving it with the noodles.

It seems that this particular brand has also come out with the kolo mee and Sarawak laksa flavours…but if this is what their version of the (Penang) asam laksa is like, I don’t think I would be looking forward to those…especially when usually, theirs are more expensive than the other brands, any flavour.