been craving for this for quite some time, so i decided to try making it 2 weekends ago. i mean, how hard can it be, right?
yellow mee hoon kueh…
no, it’s not hard, but because i was only cooking for one, it’s quite difficult to control some things. for example, we’re supposed to knead the flour with water and egg. but because the flour needed is of such small portion, i didn’t even have to use water! i just broke the egg onto the flour and kneaded. that’s why the mee hoon kueh turned out to be yellowish. hehe…
anyway, i didn’t have anchovies, which is the main ingredient for the soup. the only anchovies i can find in the markets here are from india, and they looked quite weird. not at all like the anchovies we have back home. i also can’t find any ikan bilis stock cubes here. we have more varieties of knorr and maggi cubes here, compared to back home: chicken, beef, vege, tamarind and even pork. but don’t know why, no ikan bilis! *note to self: buy dried ikan bilis and ikan bilis stock cubes on my next trip home.
for the soup base, i put in prawns, dried shrimps (which is like redundant coz i already have prawns, but dun care lar), chinese mushrooms, chicken slices and some chinese cabbage that i bought from the chinese grocery store. the soup turned out quite nice, but the mee hoon kueh was too thick! so it’s not that nice. i should have thought of pressing it out with a rolling pin or a bottle to make it thinner. anyway, will give this another try when i get my ikan bilis.
made this last weekend, coz i bought some chicken breast fillets and had to finish them up.
chicken porridge with wolfberries and conpoy
just a typical weekend meal… but dunno why, even though i blanched the chicken, it’ll still produce the “white stuff” in my porridge/soup. maybe i didn’t blanch it properly?
i made this some weeks back, but didn’t post it up due to sheer laziness… 😛
in satisfying my crave for claypot chicken rice…
been craving for this for quite some time, so decided to google up the recipe and try to make it myself. i found a few versions on-line, but in the end, decided to use the one sent to me by my friend. it’s her mom’s recipe, and i chose it for its simplicity.
but my first attempt didn’t turn out quite so nice… coz i didn’t really measure out the amount of sauces used, but just went by my intuition. a dash of sesame oil, pinch of salt, a dollop of oyster sauce etc. the result was too salty!! so obviously i’m not that seasoned a cook yet to be relying on my “intuition”… hehe…
neeways, here’s the recipe my friend sent me, in case anyone wanna give it a try:
chicken – chopped in small sizes.
garlic, pepper, sesame oil, oyster sauce, black soya sauce, soya sauce, chicken stock (knorr cube or ajinomoto)
my mom would stir fried chicken first.
1. add oil. put some chopped garlic into wok. stir garlic until brown.
2. pour chicken in it.
3. add in oyster sauce, thick soya sauce, soya sauce, pepper, a little sugar, maybe a little chinese wine if you like.
4. add some strips of ginger if you like.
5. cook until gravy is thick.
6. add in chicken stock/cube.
cook rice as usual – when the rice is almost cooked, pour in the chicken. stir. leave for 20 minutes. then add some sesame oil (as you like). stir. garnish with shallots, spring onions and red chilli.
serve while it’s hot.
may give this another try, when i get another round of craving for claypot chicken rice 😉
2 weeks ago, it was my turn to have a blue moon… actually, it was my 2 chinese colleagues’ blue moon, but they thought it’ll be more comfortable to have it at my place. so the 3 of us shared this “blue moon session”.
it’s steamboat again, since it’s the easiest to prepare and requires almost 0 cooking skills! “almost” coz u still need to know HOW to prepare the raw stuff 😛
sempat cam-whoring even while eating. see that little blue japanese bowl on the table there? it contained a “special sauce” that i made using garlic, cili padi, coriander and soy sauce. not to brag, but it was a hit! 😛
my filipino and indonesian colleagues…
for desserts, i brought out the chocolate liqueurs that my ex-colleague bought for me from her trip to langkawi, that i shipped over with my stuff previously (resulting in a few getting dented). what better way to enjoy these than with a bunch of good company, right? besides, they’re nearing their expiry dates and i dun wanna be stuffing my face with all these chocs so as not to waste them!
actually the “real” dessert that night was supposed to be ice-cream (that pink stuff there) but a few of my guests have not seen these chocolate liqueurs before. in fact, i think only my filipino colleague has ever tasted them.
hehe… saw this shop at al karama after our indonesian dinner sometime last month, while on our way to catch the taxi home.
“malaysian fast food destination. kdai makanan malaysia mamak” they have abc and rojak!!!
dunno how authentic it is, coz they even spelled “kedai” wrongly. too bad we were full from our dinner. if not, i’d like to give this shop a try. maybe i can go again. but then again, it’s quite far and out of the way, so maybe not.
i’ve formed a gang here recently. or rather, a few of my colleagues and i have formed a gang recently. actually, most of us don’t have much in common. yeah sure, some of us love books… some of us are chinese… some of us speak malay… some of us are from the same departments… some of us even have a few overlapping similarities to the common grounds as mentioned earlier, but that’s not the reason our gang was formed. the one and only reason for the existence of our gang is that whenever we get together, we’re always talking about food! so we’ve called ourselves the makan-makan gang! 😀
every beginning of the month or so, when we get our salaries, we’ll always think of places to go have a good meal. so far, we’ve been to:
chinese steamboat buffet…
korean food…
indonesian food… this is mee soto, by the way.
other than going out for meals, we’ve also started inviting each other over to our place for some home-cooked makan, especially now that the weather is getting too hot for us to venture outside.
these 2 girls are from the hr department, an indonesian chinese and a filipino. they were very kind to invite me over to nina’s place for some home-cooked dinner when they heard that i’m just gonna go home and cook myself some mee cup.
home-made steamboat, also at the filipino colleague’s place.
actually, all of us claim that we seldom cook, only cooking “once in a blue moon”. so every time we get an invitation to someone’s place for home-cooked meal, we’ll joke that there’s a blue moon that day. hence the “blue moon” has turned into something like a code for us, which means that someone has decided to cook on a certain day. so it’s not uncommon to hear us saying, “the moon at so and so’s place is going to be blue this thursday!”, or “so, where and when is the next blue moon going to appear?”, or “your turn to have a blue moon, huh?” etc.
anyway, our gang consists of:
yours truly, of course! 😛
the 2 gals from hr as mentioned…
my artist from china and another indonesian chinese from finance.
another chinese national colleague from sales.
and finally, the latest member to join us, a fijian colleague (she’s the one sitting opposite me). sorry for the blur photo, but i can’t find a good one with a clear shot of her in it.
looking forward to the next makan, either eating out or a “blue moon”! 😀
i’ve wanted to have some plants in my new apartment for quite some time, but kept putting it off… then when i was out shopping for groceries at carefour today, i saw that they have some really nice peace lilies on sale there. so i bought a small pot.
i’ve always liked this plant…
last week, i was at daiso and i bought a pastel coloured tin bucket, a cute lil tin watering can and some plants deco.
always have a thing for cute lil watering can…
don’t they look so sweet together? 🙂
i’ve read that the peace lily is a somewhat easy to care for indoor plant, so hopefully mine will grow healthily!
been craving for lotus root soup for quite some time now and when i saw some frozen ones being sold at the chinese groceries store, i decided to cook some this weekend.
my lunch for today…
it’s kinda oily because i boiled it with some chicken wings (with skin). chicken wings are really cheap here, coz most of the people here like to buy skinned chicken meat. so since they can’t remove the skin of the wings, most people won’t wanna buy the wings. normally i get about 4 wings for only dhs 2 (rm 1.70).
other than chicken wings, i also threw in some wolfberries (kei zhi) and red dates. i also bought a small pack of mini chinese dried scallops or conpoy from the chinese groceries store. so i threw some of that in too…
mini conpoy for dhs 25 (rm 20.80)
actually i threw all the ingredients into my phillips rice cooker yesterday night, set the timer for it to cook for 3 hours, finishing at 1pm and then keep warm thereafter. ah, i simply love my rice cooker, which i bought when i moved into my one bedroom apartment back in kl last year. it has artificial intelligence! just pray that it don’t decide to take over my apartment one day! lol!
anyway, i’d love to throw in some peanuts in the soup, but i discovered the pack of peanuts i bought from lulu’s hypermarket some weeks ago was infested with worms! yucks! lucky thing i stopped to scrutinize it, rather than throwing them in blindy!
still, the soup was delish! and i threw in some “transparent noodles” when i’m ready to eat, for a more filling lunch. i don’t know what’s the actual name of that noodles – you can see it in the 1st picture above. it’s broad like kue-teow, but will become transparent when cooked. i think it’s made from yam or something. the menu at xiaowei yang steamboat labeled it as “mongolian noodles”, but my chinese artist said that’s not their real name. she mentioned something else, but i totally forgot.
i had 2 big bowls of this soup (1 with the yam noodles and one without), and there’s still one more bowl in the pot for later. now i’m thinking of cooking some porridge with dried scallops for dinner. ah… satisfying weekend meal! 😀
it’s been nearly 8 months since i first step foot in sandland… after the first month or so, time seems to be whooshing by! it’s summer now… today is particularly humid, with an average high of 44 deg c and average low of 33 deg c. and i just read in a magazine that when the air is humid, the weather will feel hotter than when compared to dry air on a higher temperature. the weather has been getting gradually hotter since a month back, so most of us are staying indoors more and more. ah, the blessings of centralised air-conditioning! 😀
anyway, after so many months here, i’ve gotten used to:
1. people calling me m’am or madam
i used to feel so weird when my own colleagues (even those of higher levels than me!) call me that. but now, i don’t even think about it, coz i realized that it’s their culture and something that comes naturally to them. much like us calling people “miss” or “mister”.
2. inserting a tiny bit of arabic into my daily conversations
at the post office
clerk: madam, you have no small change?
me: mafi (arabic: don’t have)
clerk: i also mafi…
me: sho hada (arabic: what is this?)
.
.
.
clerk: *hands me my receipt*
me: khalas? (arabic: done/finish)
clerk: khalas, madam
me: shukran (arabic: thank you)
clerk: afwan (arabic: welcome)
p/s: i also know some arabic words to scold people! but let’s not go into that, ok? 😛
3. not driving
without a valid driving license nor a car here, i dare say i’ve gotten pretty good at taking the bus and metro here. actually not having to drive is a good thing also. not only do i save a lot on petrol money, i also don’t have to worry about parking when i go to some place unfamiliar. i don’t even have to worry about my car getting dirty and needing a wash! 😀
4. not worrying about food
with my meals taken care of, i no longer have to fan (canto: crack my head) about what to have for breakfast/lunch/dinner. just traipse down to the staff cafe and take what is served. of course, the food are all repetitive and tends to get “not very appetizing” after a while (mostly indian and arabic food, and not very tasty one at that!), but at least they’re free and we don’t have to think of what to eat everyday. however, i do try to cook something on my own during weekends, coz really getting fed up with the food.
5. filipino sales girls mistaking me as their kabayan (filipino: fellow countryman)
can’t blame them actually, since i don’t really look like a chinese myself, thanks to my maternal grandfather. so now i’ll just do one of these:
a. pretend i don’t hear them when they’re calling out to me
b. say, “sorry?” when they’re speaking directly to me
c. say, “hindi ako pinay” (filipino: i’m not a filipino) when the fancy struck me, just for the fun of it
6. not speaking much malay
back at home, we’re so used to inserting malay words into our daily conversations, that sometimes we don’t think twice about it. but here, i have to be careful not to do that, even though i still speak malay with a few of my malaysian and indonesian colleagues. but i’ve also taught my colleagues some malay words, such as makan (malay: eat). also, they’ve started using the lah, even when not talking to me! 😀
ok lar, that all i can think of for now. good weekend to everyone! 🙂
in sue's world... 
