Luckily…

Last Sunday afternoon, Father’s Day, I had to go out for a while and despite my attempt to rush back quickly, I did not manage to escape getting caught in the sudden downpour. That was why I had to wash the car once I reached home.

It was around 4.oo p.m. and still raining with a bit of thunder and lightning, just a bit, when my girl came out to tell me that there was a sudden blackout. I saw my neighbour coming out to look at his meter so I guess they were in that same predicament.

Oh dear!!! Like what I had mentioned in yesterday’s post, we were planning to have a steamboat dinner and for that, we would always use the electric multi cooker…

…that I bought in Kuching many many years ago when my girl was still little for over RM200.00.- and it has served us well all this time. Things made in the past are certainly of a better quality than the ones today – those that we buy nowadays do not seem to last very long.

I was not unduly worried as we have one of those mini gas cookers using those aerosol gas canisters. My girl was using that when she was at her school in the jungle and when she moved back to town. we took it back with us and all the unused canisters of gas. We could take that out and use it instead and I guess we could light some candles and eat in the dark…and as it was raining, it was not hot that evening and anyway, we have three of those fans that run on both electricity and rechargeable batteries so we could take them out and use. I bought two for my girl to use in the jungle school where blackouts were frequent and may last for days and weeks and I kept one at home in case of an emergency.

In the meantime, I quickly called my ex-student who holds a managerial post – customer service at our local electricity board, Sibu office and she was so surprised as everything was all right at her house. She said she would check and call me back which she did to inform me that the people were on the way to check the sub-station for my area and work on the problem right away. It did not take very long, around half an hour, maybe, when power was restored, praise the Lord! We were thus able to have our steamboat dinner as planned!

As you can see in the above photograph, we had sweet corn, fish maw, bean curd sticks and quail eggs already in the multi-cooker and my missus also bought these thinly sliced pork and beef for shabu-shabu or hotpots…

…at one of the meat shops. There are so many of them these days, all over town. They use machines to slice the meat while frozen so they are able to get them in such paper-thin slices.

She also bought these mussels and cuttlefish…

…and threw in some of the prawns that we have in the freezer to use as ingredient like when we fry vegetables for one. I have not gone to my favourite fish & seafood stall for sometime now as I bought a whole lot of fish at one go. We just ate the last ikan terubok on Friday and and there are still a few or chio/ikan bawal hitam/black pomfret in the freezer. That was why we did not have any fish paste so we did not make any fish balls for our steamboat.

We also had these mushrooms, baby corn and lettuce…

…to throw into our steamboat and instead of tang hoon (glass noodles) that we would usually add, my girl wanted this udon…

…that my sister gave to her the other day instead. Well, she did like it a lot, that much I would say.

We sure enjoyed our steamboat dinner to the max that evening, dipping everything in the super tasty chili dip…

…that my missus made. That was so good!

I must say that I had a great Father’s Day that day despite that little hitch with the brief blackout in the afternoon. Luckily, it did not last very long.