It’s Friday…

Ever since I bought the beautiful ikan terubok (chee khak/toli shad) that day, I had been looking forward to Friday, our no-meat day when we would cook that to enjoy.

It looked so fresh and fleshy too and I was quite sure it was going to be good but the boy told me there was no roe (egg) in it. It did not matter though as we are not really into those but somehow, I have the feeling that if there are eggs in the fish, it is more lemak (fat/rich).

My missus trimmed the tail and the fins…

…to get it ready to be panggang-ed (grilled/baked) in our Tatung pot. We decided not to line the foil with daun kunyit (turmeric leaves) this time around so we just rubbed it with a bit of salt and wrapped it up before putting it in the pot.

A Kelabit teacher-friend of mine saw my photograph on Facebook and commented that he never gutted the fish that he would cook over an open fire to eat. Yes, that is one thing my late mum taught us – to never clean the fish as it would not be so sweet and nice if we did that. She loved to eat the black stuff inside, something a bit bitter but I think that is an acquired taste. I tried it before and no, I did not think I would want to eat it again so everytime we cooked the fish, we would just throw it away.

It sure looked so good when it was done…

Just look at all the juices that had seeped out of the fish, an indication as to how lemak (fat/rich) it was. I love drowning my rice with the juices and eating them together! Omega 3 plus plus!!! Absolutely yummy!!!

To eat the fish, the scales had to be painstakingly removed…

…completely so we would not have deal with them all over the fish, here there and everywhere as that chore might affect our enjoyment to some extent.

A lot of people commented that they would not buy the fish because there are a lot of bones. Bones? What bones?

Of course, there are some BIG ones that are easily removed, not as many and not so hard to spot and get rid of as in the upriver empurau (wang poo liao) and its “cousins”. Those fish may be very sweet, so very smooth, so very fine…but the task of picking out the bones and getting rid of them is so time-consuming and it takes away much of the enjoyment of eating those super expensive fish! Another thing is if the fish have been caught and kept frozen for a long time, they will sell them to you at those ridiculous prices but sadly, they are no longer as sweet, not really nice anymore.

Anyway, back to the ikan terubok, I don’t know if those were from a different source – some say there are those from Bangladesh (cheap and used mainly to make those salted ikan terubok) but there used to be another variety where the top half of the fish was full of tiny bones like those in the ikan lumek. We would eat and leave that top part behind. Much to my delight, those that we get these days do not have those tiny bones so we can enjoy it from one end to the other.

Of course, at RM60.00 a kilo, RM48.00 for the one that I bought that day, I would not be buying it all that often. Once in a while will be fine especially with the rising prices of everything these days – one would need to be a bit prudent in one’s spending now, don’t you think?

That day, we had these long beans fried with sambal hay bee (dried prawns)…

…for our vegetable dish and this Chinese-style (oyster) mushroom and egg drop soup…

– my girl loved it! She said it was like sharks’ fins soup.