Craving…

A long long time ago, my maternal uncle in Kuching, since deceased, was craving for our family’s traditional masak kunyit (cook with tumeric) recipe so they asked my foster-cousin to cook and I took it all out for him in a Nescafe bottle to enjoy – the tua thow hay (big headed freshwater prawns) or udang galah masak kunyit.

It did not occur to me then as to why they could not cook it themselves in Kuching – maybe it was difficult to get hold of those prawns or the freshwater river fish that we always used to cook the soup, the ikan buris. It was not until much later that I asked my foster-cousin to cook so I could learn how to do it myself and much to my surprise, it was so very easy to do so and there had been no looking back since.

For reasons unknown, my missus prefers to cook it asam-style the way the Malays cook it…

I think their recipe is a lot more complicated, very nice too but there would be a lot more things (ingredients) to prepare. Our way is so very simple and to me, it is just as nice. My girl is not so crazy about how we like it so I never insisted on cooking our fish or prawns this masak kunyit way.

Well, the other day, we still had our ikan buris/lajong in the freezer and on our no-meat Friday, I took them out as suddenly I had this craving for those in our good ol’ masak kunyit style that we had always enjoyed in the family all these years. My missus told me to leave it there – she would get it done for me and by lunchtime that day, this…

…was served. She had cooked just the heads and the tails for the soup like what I told her to. I love the soup so much – it goes so well with rice and it would take quite an effort to stop at two plates of rice and not go for another serving.

Unfortunately, she did not get it quite right that day – something was missing and it turned out that she forgot to add that little bit of belacan (dried prawn paste) plus these days, she does not add any msg at all in her cooking. Thankfully, it turned out quite nice and I sure enjoyed it a lot even though it was not exactly like when I used to cook that myself.

She deep-fried the rest of the fish…

…for my girl to enjoy but no, this sai seng is another fish like the ikan keli (nor duck meat) which she would not touch with a 10-foot pole. That was why she took out the udang galah that she bought quite sometime ago…

…to cook so she would have something to eat.

At the same time, she also cooked this dish of pea sprouts…

…with thinly sliced fish cake for our vegetable dish.

That sure looked like a pretty simple meal, don’t you think? But believe it or not, I enjoyed it so much, both for lunch and for dinner. After going out to eat so often or tapaoing food from outside, it sure was a welcome change from the usual – I sure wouldn’t mind having homecooked dishes like these again and again.