Reminded…

I had the meat porridge with century egg here not too long ago and I thought it was very good. In the meantime, I heard that their nasi lemak is very popular so I just had to make my way back there to try.

When I got there that morning, the rice was just ready and the guy was scooping a bowl of it for somebody’s takeaway. I asked him if it had a lot of santan (coconut milk) in it and he said, no, there was no santan used in the cooking as a lot of people would like to tapao it and it might go bad. Of course, I made up my mind there and then that I did not want to order that, no, thank you!

I asked what else they had and he rattled through a whole list of things and finally, I settled for what he called “hung ngang long” (RM6.00)…

I am a Foochow but my maternal grandma was Melanau and for reasons unknown, I grew up speaking Hokkien at home – all my aunties and uncles and I spoke Hokkien among ourselves while my grandma when she was still around would speak Melanau to me and I would speak Sarawak Malay to her and we both understood each other perfectly!

I never did pick up the Foochow dialect, supposedly my mother tongue. In fact, these days, I can communicate a lot better in Mandarin, not in that dialect – the intonation, pronunciation and everything is quite difficult to master but I do know that hung ngang is the big bihun that looks like the noodles in Penang asam laksa but no, the texture and taste are different.

I thought that long is egg so I guessed that would be the noodles in egg drop soup. The egg is dropped into the boiling soup, cooked with lots of ginger and traditional Foochow red wine and the end result would be the yolk still soft and runny, something like poached egg but the  white would be all over the soup. My missus would cook that sometimes, served with mee sua, and my girl loves it and in my discussion recently on Facebook, a friend said that her mum used to cook that as a remedy for menstrual pains. If I am not wrong, it is the ginger!

What I was served…

…was nothing of the sort – it looked like the traditional Foochow red wine chicken soup with hung ngang instead of mee sua but it tasted very different and yes, it was very nice!

In my aforementioned discussion on Facebook, I was reminded of what my 2nd maternal aunt would send to our house everytime one of her daughters or daughters-in-law gave birth, one big pot of it and it turned out to be this – hung ngang long! I never knew what it was called – I just ate!

Yes, it is different from the usual bowl of mee sua in traditional Foochow red wine and ginger chicken soup as other than those, there would be some other ingredients added – I remember there was the kim chiam (golden needles), knotted and the mok mee (black fungus) and according to my friend, Annie, in KL, there would be the teck ann or canned oysters as well.

I must say that I enjoyed it a lot and I loved the egg used…

– this would be one of those Omega-3 or kampung eggs with its orange yolk. I’m not really a fan of hung ngang though so when I go back there for more of this, perhaps I could ask for mee sua instead. We’ll see…

CIVIC CAFE (2.310423, 111.8312260, formerly Wonderful Cafe, is located at No. 30, Jalan Dewan Suarah, right beside the Sibu Civic Centre.