Let’s go out…

The Deepavali holidays for all schools in the country started on Friday so my girl was home by evening the day before. The next morning, we went over to visit the grandparents and the grandpa suggested going out for brunch.

Of course, as I have mentioned before, my dad has a few of his own favourite places and he would prefer to go to one of them instead of trying some place new or different. That was why we ended up here again and he had the Foochow fried noodles with char siew added (RM5.00)…

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…again.

My girl ended up trying their fried rice (RM5.00)…

…and they sure had a lot of char siew in it. She was halfway through already when I finally found a place to park the car – parking in that area can be such a pain – so that is why you only get to see just one corner of her plate. Hehehehehe!!!! They were very generous with the serving so she could not finish, the small eater that she is, and no prize for guessing who ate it all up for her. After all, as they say, it’s a sin to waste…and yes, I thought it was really very very nice. For once, I can truthfully say that there is one place here in town where the fried rice is nicer than mine.

My missus also tried something different – their fried tang hoon/glass noodles (RM5.00)…

…and she said it was very nice. It certainly looks good, don’t you think?

I felt like having their very nice tomato kway teow (RM5.00)…

…so that was what I had that morning.

It got me wondering why I did not have any char siew in my plate of noodles and yet, the price was the same as the rest, the Foochow fried noodles especially so I asked the lady boss and she told me that a regular plate of fried kway teow with sauce/gravy…

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…minus the char siew, would cost RM4.50 and they would charge 50 sen extra for the tomato sauce added…

…and if I wanted char siew, that would be RM5.50 altogether. Hmmm…it was good enough without the char siew, I think.

That certainly was a delightful outing with my girl and her grandpa – we certainly look forward to doing that a lot more when the end-of-year school holidays come around at the end of November.

Is it really the same?…

Well, no, not really.

In an old recipe book that I bought for my missus a long long time ago, they call it “Chinese sponge cake“…

I think we call it kay nerng kor here or egg cake, the same name that we use to call these…

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…but even if basically the ingredients are the same, the one that we called lung ngor in Foochow, is baked in an oven and the other is steamed.

The Malays have their kuih bahulu…

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…but I do not know if they are baked in an electric oven now as well or they still use the traditional brass molds and bake the cake over burning hot charcoal. I remember in the old days they came in various designs and I particularly remember the one in the shape of a fish.

Then there is this variation of the steamed egg cake or kay nerng kor – what we call bak koi or meat cake…

My aunt in Kuching, or my maternal uncle’s wife, to be exact, makes the nicest bak koi…

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…but she is in Kuching and I am here in Sibu so I will only get to enjoy hers when I go over…or sometimes, she will send to me when there is somebody coming over here.

What makes this different from the usual plain steamed kay nerng kor would be the minced meat in the middle and the fried shallots on top…

…but of course, the ones that my aunt makes would be far nicer, very very far as she would be so much more generous with those two added ingredients.

Well, I guess beggars can’t be choosers so I will just have to be happy with the one I can get here (2.316156, 111.840448) at the fruit & vegetable shop along Jalan Ruby, sharing a shop lot with a hair salon at the other end of the block where Kim Won Chinese Medical Store is, where I buy those nice Sarikei Nestum-coated with peanut butter filling mochi. A quarter of the whole thing like this…

…is selling for RM5.50 each and though it may not be THE best, I would say it is pretty nice.

It’s been a long time…

It had been a long time since our last visit to this coffee shop (2.293211, 111.836387)…

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…along Lorong Chew Siik Hiong 1. If I am not wrong, that was four years ago in 2012.

Well, the other morning, I decided to stop by for their sio bee…

…Yes, they still did not look good, all that blistered skin and everything, exactly like the way they were before. They are now 90 sen each, up from 70 sen. I also had the giant steamed pao…

…that I liked a lot before except that it did not look that big anymore and the price had gone  up to RM3.00 from RM2.80. They still tasted good but I thought they could do with a little less msg.

There is a kampua noodle stall in front but the one next to it was closed – probably that’s the decently-all-right beef noodles stall and Wednesday is their off day and next to it is a salad chicken and fish rice stall. Don’t expect to get any salad with your chicken or fish though – here, everything that has squiggles of mayonnaise all over, they call salad. I noticed this sign above the stall…

…and it seems like you will have to pay for your container to tapao (take away) what they are selling. Initially, when they first imposed the ban on polystyrene containers here, I did hear of places charging 50 sen for the somewhat flimsy cardboard box but I have not heard anything of the sort lately and have not been charged for it anywhere around town. I would think it is good to do so though so that everyone will bring their own containers and that would be a lot more environment-friendly.

When my girl was younger, we used to drop by here for the fried stuff, usually bihun, from the stall at the back…

…but the people moved away and after setting up their stall here, there and everywhere for reasons unknown, they ended up here. I don’t know if they are still there but I did go and eat at the time and no, it did not get me all excited and so far, I have not gone back for more.

I don’t know if the ones here now are the same ones who took over this stall initially – I did take my girl to this one here once for the fried bihun and she did not like it at all and that was why we never came back. They did not look familiar so I guess they are not the same people any longer. My missus had their see ham kway teow, flat rice noodles with cockles (RM6.50)…

…and she said it was very good but I would say that it did not come cheap, don’t you agree?

I went to the Muslim food stall…

…and had their nasi campur (RM4.00)…

– one meat and three vegetables. I thought the paku (wild jungle fern) and the ladies’ fingers were just so-so, not all that great but the cangkuk manis was very nice. However, the main attraction would be the chicken liver…

That was what prompted me to order from this stall in the first place and no regrets! I sure enjoyed it to the max!

Well, that was a pretty good brunch that we had that morning plus parking in this commercial area behind the Rejang Medial Centre is free, so I would say that we would not mind dropping by again if we happen to be around there.

It doesn’t matter…

…whether you’re big or small.

This coffee shop, Choon Seng, used to be in one of the old blocks of shops by the Sungai Merah Market before moving here and it was known far and wide for its very good coffee. My aunties, including the ones from out of town, all since deceased, would make it a point to drop by just to enjoy the coffee.

It started going downhill when the boss took over the fried kway teow stall and left the making of the drinks, coffee included, to the workers and everyone started complaining and grumbling that the coffee was really very bad, not like when the guy was doing it himself.

Not too long ago, I drove past the place and it was closed and I just assumed that it had called it a day for good but after a few days, when I went past again, I saw that it had reopened, occupying just one shoplot now, not two like before…and for reasons unknown, there was no shop sign so the other morning, I decided to drop by to check it out.

Yes, the boss was no longer frying kway teow – he was back making the drinks. In fact, he himself came personally to take our orders and yes, the coffee (RM1.70 a glass)…

…was very good, just like before, so much so that my missus exclaimed in delight that it was really very nice.

The chu char (cook & fry) place was still there, at the back…

…and they had a whole lot of choices for their chap fan. I know for a fact that it is very popular and come lunchtime, you may have to queue to get what you want.

The kampua stall is still around too, the same people…

…and I am particularly fond of their meat porridge. In my opinion, what it lacks in presentation – it may not look as nice as elsewhere, it makes up for it with the taste and I like it a lot more than all that I have tried elsewhere. To the right is a new stall selling laksa and lor mee but no, I did not try anything from there.

I decided to order from the Muslim food stall…

…right in the middle and yes, they are the same people who have been there for as long as I can remember.

I had their very nice roti telur (RM2.00)…

…with their curry gravy dip – theirs is a little different from the rest in town. They make theirs very thin and crispy and yes, that morning, it was just as great as ever before.

My missus ordered the kway teow goreng (RM3.50)…

…and was surprised that they even gave a fried egg with it, at that price! As for the taste, she said it was very nice, nicer than a lot of other places here.

I saw one of the ladies making this…

…so I asked if I could have a bit of that. This buah emplam comes from the mango family and is very very sour. The nice ladies happily obliged and no, they did not charge me extra for that. For one thing, the fruit sure does not come cheap these days. The last time I bought some, it was RM10.00 a kg and then it went up to RM12.00 a kg and now, the current price is RM14.00 a kg…and because of its weight, you do not get that many for 1 kg.

Of course I enjoyed it so very much with my nasi lemak special (RM5.00)…

…even though the rice was not really lemak. I did drop by for their nasi campur once and I liked it a lot – perhaps one of these days, I could make it a point to come a little later to go for that.

The coffee shop is much smaller now but business seemed to be picking up again – there were quite a lot of people that morning, past the 10 o’ clock tea break but not quite lunchtime yet. I guess now that the coffee is good again, pretty soon, the crowd would be spilling onto the road, the way it was before.

Slow and easy…

When my cousins were in town, they had a whole day to kill as their reunion bash would only be in the evening. I did stop by the shop round the corner from my house to get them the Nestum-coated mochi with peanut butter filling…

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…from Sarikei for them to try and we managed to stop by this coffee shop for the gula apong ais krim (RM3.00)…

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…and they loved it. My Kuching cousin agreed that this was so much nicer than the one I went to try in Kuching – she did not like that one either.

Come lunch time, we dropped by here for lunch but our main intention was to go and enjoy the coffee…

– the old-school local coffee that we have enjoyed since young and the lady boss did tell me that they got their coffee powder from the same place where we get ours.

Now that my girl has to observe a strict regime and keep to a gluten-free diet, there are many things that we could not order. Usually, at such Chinese eateries, they would coat the meat and seafood with flour and deep fry first before cooking the gravy for whatever dish they are for and pouring over them. I understand this seals in all the juices and makes the dish taste nicer…and unfortunately, (wheat) flour is in the list of stuff to be avoided.

The pandan chicken…

…was fine so we had that and also the claypot pork with dried chilies and salted fish…

*Oops!!! Sorry for the blurry pic – this place isn’t the brightest of places, I’m afraid.*

For our vegetable dishes, we had midin…

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…but I did not manage to take a photograph of that and we also had another one of their signature dishes – bitter gourd with salted egg…

They do cook the same elsewhere but somehow or other, they do not do it so well – in the opinion of many, this one here is the best.

The bill for the food came up to RM46.00 for 5 persons – I forgot to tell them to cook for say, 3 persons so I guess they charged accordingly for the total number of persons. I did not think the servings were all that big though and we did not have prawns or fish so I thought the total was a little on the high side. I must make it a point to remember the next time around.

For the very first time…

Yes, finally, I harvested my ladies’ fingers for the very first time…in my life, in fact as I have never planted any vegetables before. There were five…

…only but a couple of days later, I had two more and that was quite enough for a meal.

So the next question was how I was going to cook them. One way would be to fry them with sambal belacan/hay bee (dried prawns with dried prawn paste)…

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…or just boil and eat as an ulam with sambal belacan…

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…or cook curry like how they would have ladies’ fingers in fish curry…

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…or I could stuff them with meat or fish paste…

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…and enjoy them as a condiment in yong tofu.

In the end, I just decided to pound some sambal hay bee…

– with udang kering or dried prawns plus chili, calamansi lime juice, a bit of garlic and sugar and salt. This was different from sambal belacan (dried prawn paste dip), no belacan was used in the making but we ate it in that same way – just boil the ladies’ fingers…

…and eat with the sambal as an ulam.

How would you have cooked and eaten them if you were in my shoes?

What they want…

My cousins, one from Kuching and the other from Bintulu, were in town for their high school reunion and they flew here a day earlier. The night of their arrival, they wanted me to take them here for all the dishes that they had had and enjoyed so much before and that, of course, would mean that in the post, you’ll be seeing all the dishes that I have featured before.

They have some new stuff in their decor – no, not these…

…but this collection of the old charcoal irons and other antiques…

…and this lighted display of the luminous green palm leaves…

…on the wall.

Of course we had their otak-otak fish (RM13.00 with rice)…

…and their mushroom roll (RM8.00)…

My girl would not want to miss the Bangladshi lamb curry (RM19.00 with rice)…

…one of her favourites here and she also asked for the Payung fish (RM15.00 with rice)…

…their very delightful ikan keli (cat fish) dish with lots of ginger and what not.

We also had their pomelo salad (RM8.00)…

…and I mentioned to the boss that there would only be three prawns in their belimbing prawn dish and there were five of us so we would end up fighting over who would get the coveted crustaceans and he told me not to worry as he would see to it that there would be enough to go round. In the end, we got this HUGE bowl…

…and it was exceptionally nice that night – the boss took over personally to cook it himself. The gravy went so well with the rice, good to the very last drop….and the best part was that he did not charge us extra, RM17 with rice as stated in the menu! I am sure there was enough there for two or three of their regular servings, at least!

We were all so full after that most delightful meal so we just did not have much room left for dessert but the two ladies insisted on ordering one jelly pisang to share, something that they enjoyed so much at a coffee shop here during their teenage years.

My girl insisted on picking up the tab that evening and giving her visiting aunties a treat – she’s such a sweet girl, don’t you think?

That’s good…

Yes, I have been dropping by here quite frequently but I did not blog about those visits as you’ve seen them all before. What they serve here is consistently good but there was one occasion when I was grumbling about the coffee. Well, the “new” guy is no longer around and now, they have a lady making the drinks…and yes, the kopi-o-peng (iced black coffee) is quite all right and it is only RM1.70 a glass. You may need to fork out 10 sen or even 20 sen more at some places in town.

I also thought at the time that the serving had shrunk but of late, we do get the usual amount…

…like before. My missus had their fried kway teow/flat rice noodles (RM4.00) just the other morning and got just as much as before.

On a more recent visit, I noticed that the crockery was badly chipped so I shared a photograph on Facebook and pointed that out. It is not healthy to use plates and bowls that are chipped – those should be replaced once that happens…and I am glad to say that this time around, I did not see any of those anymore and that’s good, very very good and I must say that this is anytime better than those colourful plastic ones too. I don’t know about everybody else but I always have this thing about hot food served on plastic – I do not feel quite comfortable with that.

I decided to try their kampua noodles with beef curry (RM5.00)…

I saw somebody eating that on an earlier visit and I was wondering what that would taste like.

It was nice but perhaps, it would take a little getting used to…

I would prefer to have kampua noodles the way they were, they are and always will be and as for the beef curry, it would go very well with their nasi lemak – you can have the regular or a choice of fried chicken wing, masak hitam beef or beef or chicken curry to go with it, all nice.

In the words of Shakespeare, all’s well that ends well…and now that, all is good here, I would say yes, we would most certainly be stopping by time and time again for a bite.

By your side…

This sparkling new coffee shop…

…is right beside the one I blogged about in yesterday’s post. They just opened earlier this month so you can see some of the flowers…

…from well-wishers here and there in the shop.

It turned out that the guy, an ex-student of mine, who used to dish out the fried stuff at this since-closed-down place (where I used to enjoy my favourite kampua noodles in town) is now here…

…but what he has in store is not in the “official” menu. However, you can order the usual like fried mee, kway teow, bihun and all the rest and if what I used to have at the previous place was anything to go by, they would all be pretty good.

The son runs the kampua noodle stall…

…in that same shop but I did not order any to give it a try. Perhaps I will do that the next time I drop by.

There was a vacant stall beside this one that day, available for rent at only RM350.00 a month and according to the proprietress, a Malay tenant was there but left after a week. Hmmmm…perhaps I could take over and sell something there, you reckon? LOL!!!

Talking about the proprietress, it looked like she sells the drinks and also some delightful selections that you can pick from the menu. She has this Vietnamese coffee…

…which I tried…

…and yes, I thought it was quite good but at RM3.50 a cup and RM4.00 with ice, I think I would much sooner go for our own local coffee – RM1.80 next door…and only RM1.50 here or here. I don’t know if the one here is any good though as I did not have that that morning.

She did mention that they make their own kaya (coconut jam) for their kaya toast unlike many places in town where they just use the canned Yeo’s one which does not tickle my fancy, not even a little bit, thank you very much.

I tried their sio bee/siew mai (meat dumpling)…

…going for RM1.00 each but I must say that I would prefer their seafood ones (3 for RM3.50)…

…with real whole shrimps inside…

I asked the lady if she made them herself but she said no, a friend makes them at home and she helps sell them at her coffee shop.

So what did we have for our brunch? We did not want the chicken curry with rice…

…so I chose their stewed pork leg (RM6.50)…

…which, like the one next door (RM7.00), was very nice too but I would not say that this was cheaper as it did not come with one whole stewed egg nor did I get any complimentary  char bee lau/fragrant root (chicken) soup.

My missus had the pork belly slices with preserved vegetables (RM6.50)…

…and I would say that this one had an edge over the pork leg – I thought it tasted a little nicer.

Yes, I would say that we enjoyed what we had that morning and yes, we certainly would be back. I did give the location in my previous post, but anyway, here it is once again – it is here (2.296578, 111.826150) along Jalan Tun Abg Hj Openg among the shops to the right of Kin Orient Plaza where the old/original Sing Kwong Supermarket is – there are not that many shops there so it should not be difficult to find…plus parking is easily available and free!

We’re taking over…

If I am not mistaken, this Malay coffee shop was here before they moved to their new location in the vicinity of Sg Merah and now, not one but two Chinese coffee shops have taken over, side by side in that block of shops and this is one of them…

It did not look like there was anybody renting that stall in front at the moment – most probably, it is currently available for anyone who is interested and chances are there will be somebody selling kampua noodles there eventually.

This seemed quite popular…

– I did see some people having that but it was already past 10 in the morning and I did not feel like it.

The kopi-o-peng or iced black coffee (RM1.80)…

…was very good, extra kao (strong) and the sweet young girl even asked whether it was kao enough and to my liking.

There is a Muslim stall further in but we did not order anything from there. Instead, we tried some of the somewhat limited choices from the second stall…

My missus had the hung ngang (big bihun) in the traditional Foochow red wine chicken soup (RM6.00)…

…and it was very good. You can either have that or mee sua with the soup and they even have goji berries and red dates in it.

I had the stewed pork leg rice (RM7.00)…

…and I don’t know if it is their SOP but the friendly lady gave me a bowl of their char bee lau (fragrant root) soup)…

…to go with it.

The soup was very nice – maybe not as nice as when we cook our own at home but I would say that it would rank among the better ones when compared with those available outside. The stewed pork trotters…

…were very good too, almost but not quite like what my missus cooks at home as I did detect a light hint of black vinegar. We do not add that to our stewed pork leg. However, I thought it was rather pricey compared to the stewed pork rice that I had here – perhaps if they could give just one more chunk of the meat, I would consider it a bit more reasonable.

There are a lot more to choose from the menu at the Muslim stall but nobody seemed to be ordering anything from there so I am not too sure how long it would last.

I wouldn’t mind dropping by here again for what we had or the other two options available, four altogether, but I think I would want to go and check out that coffee shop next door first to see what they have in store. Well, if anyone is interested, it is here (2.296578, 111.826150) along Jalan Tun Abg Hj Openg among the shops to the right of Kin Orient Plaza where the old/original Sing Kwong Supermarket is. Yes, it is in the same area as this western fusion restaurant and this Korean one – there are not that many shops there so it should not be difficult to find…plus parking is easily available and free!