It’s great when friends appear in the newspapers (positive news of course!).
This one is an interview which The Star did with Eddie, who is a friend of mine and Nic’s. He is a cooking engineer which means he is an engineer but he also cooks. He’s also based in the USA.
He was featured in Monday’s Malaysians Abroad section of The Star and I almost guffawed when I saw the photo.
That is so Eddie! He tries to look ferocious but really, he’s a sweet guy. (And single, so ahem, if any ladies are interested in moving to the US and having a man cook for you, Eddie’s the guy!)
Actually Eddie’s on my blogroll and I met him yonks ago at this Mardi Gras party he and his siblings had at his home in Kuching.
But go read the spiffy interview and then go visit Eddie’s Cooking Engineer blog.
Food
Nasi Lemak Subaidah from Taman Pekaka
I feel a bit foolish because I just discovered this nasi lemak….like last night!
My cousin, Lai Yee, told me about the nasi lemak a few weeks ago when she was working the graveyard shift. It seems her boss had ‘tar-pau’ this piping hot nasi lemak for her and her colleagues late that night as they were clocking in at 2am. (Yes, people who work in factories start work at odd hours of the day. My friend, Karen, wakes up at 3.30am and gets to work by 4am. She services Australia/New Zealand so she’s there to answer calls when Aussies start calling in!)
I had listened in disbelief at her description of the nasi lemak. It was drop-dead delicious. With chunks of special Subaidah fried chicken.
The only Subaidah fried chicken I’ve ever eaten is pretty damn good. And that’s from the Subaidah Nasi Kandar outlet inside the USM campus.
Other than that, Subaidah Nasi Kandar never ranked high in my list of nasi kandar outlets. I prefer Kayu Nasi Kandar although prices are quite steep. But never mind lah, I eat nasi kandar once in a blue moon. Everyone I know shudders at the prices at Kayu Nasi Kandar but yeah, we all have our vices. Mine happens to be the beef curry from Kayu’s.
Now let me get back to this nasi lemak from Subaidah’s. This Subaidah is at Taman Pekaka which is just opposite Tesco Extra, Jalan Sungai Dua. The stall, located just outside the restaurant, opens at 10.30pm. Any earlier and you don’t get even a whiff of the rice. (Taman Pekaka and Taman Permai are 2 good areas around USM where you can get pretty decent food at almost all hours of the day!)
But they open on the dot. And a line of people already snake their way around the stall. The fried chicken is fried on the spot so you get almost a quarter chicken, piping hot from the kuali. We bought a packet of this nasi lemak last night, just to try it out.
The banana leaf intensifies the fragrance of the steamed rice. Sprinkle over some salty, fried peanuts with skin on. Throw in some sliced cucumber. Ladle over a good heaping of sambal ikan bilis (which is one of the best I’ve tasted). It’s not too spicy but has the right hint of chilis to complement the warm, moist fried chicken. Oh, plus there’s even a whole fried egg. All this for RM6.90.
Like the duck curry sold at Kassim Mustafa’s downtown, this nasi lemak will enter my holy list of food I must partake in, once in a blue moon.
It’s that kind of comfort food for a cold rainy night! Worth queuing up for!
Best Banana Cake Ever
Don’t you just love the smell of baking banana cake?
(OK. if you hate bananas, this post is not for you. Stop reading now. If you love bananas, then read on for you will find a recipe so simple you’ll run out right now to buy some to make this cake.)
I do. I love bananas fresh but also when bananas turn overly ripe, as they tend to do in our warm Malaysian weather, don’t throw them out. I know soggy, ripe bananas aren’t the best looking items to cook with but wait a minute and you will know why.
Bake a banana cake with soggy ripe bananas and you will have a luscious, moist, 100 per cent lovingly homemade banana cake par excellence (OK, and I am also running out of bloody superlatives here).
Bananas freeze well so even if you’re not in the mood to bake a cake anytime soon, they can sit in the freezer for sometime.
I have made this banana cake so many times I’ve lost count. And unlike my bread baking adventures which can be counted on the fingers of one hand, this one is a sure winner. Unless you don’t like bananas, in which case I cannot help you.
Marsha, my cyber buddy, asked for this recipe so I gave it to her. She promises to courier to me if it is hard as a rock. I assured her, no, I guaranteed her – this is a no-fail cake.
If I can make it, anyone can. After all, look at me. I am not the best baker around – I tend to go for shortcuts if I can (like cake premixes but after sometime I gave up on those as the cake tastes fake!)
OK, for this banana cake you will need:
150 gm sugar
150 gm butter
150 gm self raising flour (with a pinch of sodium bicarbonate)
3 eggs, beaten
1 cup of ripe bananas, mashed
First you cream the butter and sugar. I used to beat them by hand with a wooden spoon for about 15 minutes. Then I got a hand mixer so that made it even quicker.
With a hand mixer, you take about 5-8 minutes on a medium speed. Then slowly pour in the egg, bit by bit. You don’t want the whole thing to curdle like taufufah. I usually pour in the egg about 3 times, each time mixing it well into the creamed butter and sugar.
Once the eggs are all in, use a metal spoon and fold in half the amount of flour first. Fold lightly. Add in the whole cup of bananas. Then add in the second half of your flour. Don’t overfold.
Pour batter into a greased tray that’s lightly coated with flour. I don’t line my tray with greaseproof paper – too lazy for such dainty stuff.
Bake in a preheated oven at 160 C for 20 minutes (using bottom heat) and after that 10 minutes (using top heat). I know ovens can be strange so your oven may take a little longer or a little less. So the final test lies with your equipment. The test of a done cake is a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake and comes out real smooth and clean, no batter bits stuck.
Cool, cut and serve.
That’s it! A superbly yummy cake (which can be cut into 24 pieces) and eaten in a jiffy.
Try and do tell me how yours turned out, OK?
Gotta Love a Man Who Bakes
I realized that a lot of things can be therapeutic and relaxing. For me, it’s beading (that’s making earrings with bling, lots of them), crochet (all I wanna do is amigurumi, that’s cute animal creatures instead of some huge shawl or pullover), gardening (I find peace in weeding and killing mealy bugs) and of course cooking and baking.
Baking is of course a result of getting this cheap oven from Tesco. I mean, I’m still in the testing it out stage so no point in getting the top of the range oven. Anyway, my apartment kitchen is too small!
My latest craze is baking bread but since that last episode (of a successful bread recipe from watching Chef Michael Smith on AFC), I have not had time to bake much bread.
I have relied on Gardenia for bread.
And Gardenia is not exactly the best type of bread there is but one has to eat, so the nearest thing for breakfast is commercial bread.
But BG, a friend (yes, now I know who you are!) is a man who bakes for his wife. He bakes because it is also therapeutic.
Kneading bread is fun and I think that’s why he loves it so. Just like I like to see my dough rising. So excited over such banal everyday cooking but then again, nothing beats cooking. You get to eat the outcome!
So if you are looking for tried and tested bread recipes (BG has international tastes OK, from ciabatta to beer bread) and a no-fail approach to baking bread that is free of preservatives, you have to stop by his bread blog. As he is based in KL, he also informs where to buy bread flour! He does an excellent job of breaking down the art of making bread into something simple and homey and of course, full of love!
Gotta love a man who bakes bread right?
My Favourite Chinese Foods Which I Won't Ever Eat
If you are 30 years and above and Malaysian Chinese, you probably will know what I am talking about.
I started off responding to Marsha’s comment on this blog post about made in China ice cream. Then I realized that hey, it could be a blog post on its own.
You know why?
If you are Malaysian Chinese and have lived long enough in this world, you will know that even before the awful melamine milk scandal, we’ve been eating Chinese products for a long time already. From the time of my grandfather in fact. Maybe even longer!
I suspect we’ve been ingesting enough chemicals to blow ourselves up.
And it’s not just the White Rabbit sweets either.
Here’s a list of my favourite Chinese foods which I am not eating anymore. I’m not scared of dying. I’m just scared of being poisoned and die an unnatural death.
1. Ma Ling Luncheon Meat
I can tell you that THIS is my favourite of all. I can tell you that throughout my growing up years, this has been a family favourite too. Whenever Mom had no time to cook, we’d open up a can of Ma Ling Luncheon Meat, slice the round slab of meat, fry them and god, did they taste heavenly on rice and with bread. The luncheon meat was oily and porky and salty. If you slice it real thin before you fried it, the meat would be crispy and salty! Heaven was in that slice of meat!
But I stopped buying this about 8 or 9 years ago due to one bad incident. I opened up a can of luncheon meat and saw the meat had some greenish mould! Yucks. I don’t know what it was but I was sure I wasn’t going to eat that gross stuff.
Then I started thinking – what do the Chinese put in this can? Is it really pork? Could it be that they ground up other types of meat e.g. roadkill? I still don’t know. I have sworn myself, ok, ok more like weaned myself OFF this Chinese product. I know I could buy the European luncheon meat (which costs a bomb) but nothing tastes like the Chinese version.
Did you know that there’s another version with ham bits? Nic says I’ve been living under a rock as I have never eaten this ham version (I think it’s a premium version). The ham version has a green and white label with a white pig on the label.
2. Pearl Bridge Fried Dace with Black Beans
Who hasn’t eaten this with porridge? The fish is hard, oily and salty. (Hey, it seems all Chinese canned products are salty! In fact, sometimes overly so!). The black beans have an acquired taste but goes so well with the fried fish. Nowadays there are some rip-offs of the original brand. One is in a deep blue tin sold under the Gulong brand. I don’t want to eat this fish anymore because again, like the luncheon meat above, I cannot trust the Chinese manufacturers. I don’t know what chemicals they use to preserve the fish! It is likely to be illegal! On days when I crave something like this, I run out and buy Yeo’s brand Fried Mackeral with Black Beans. Of course it tastes completely different but what to do?
3. White Rabbit milk sweets
Oh, I loved this when I was a kid. I still have a packet in my fridge as I type this. I gave it away to friends as gifts last year during Chinese New Year. It brought back lots of good memories of Chinese New Years past when I would peel off the rice paper wrapping and let it melt slowly, deliciously on my tongue! That would be the best sort of feeling in the world. I loved the creaminess of this milk sweet! I could eat a bunch in one sitting. And now we realize that it contains 50 times the permitted level of melamine!
4. Chinese wax sausages and all types of waxed products
Convenience is the word when I talk about chinese wax sausages or ‘larp cheong’. I’m Cantonese and I grew up eating tons of this precisely because it’s so convenient to prepare. Just throw a pair or two of this into your rice cooker when you are cooking rice. Once the rice is done, so’s the sausage. Take it out and slice it and you have instant food! The oil would have absorbed into the rice, turning the rice into the Chinese version of nasi minyak with a fragrance of pork sausages! Yummy. But what scares me is this: what is the sausage wrapping made of? What is the wax made of?
Then there’s waxed duck thighs which is another gorgeous meat, to be found usually during Chinese New Year. Waxed duck thighs can be cooked like waxed sausages. But you can glamorise it a bit and cook it the way my Grandma did – braised with button mushrooms and chicken meat. This rendered the waxed duck thighs – also extremely salty – to a five-star dish status! Salty and oily – a bad combination for your heart and cholesterol but oh-so-damn-good with rice on the first day of Chinese New Year.
5. Braised pork in a tin
This is one pork dish which can kill your heart. Nic calls it ‘wobbly pork’ because really it wobbles so much due to the fat ratio of the meat. Braised pork in a tin (don’t ask me what the brand is – you don’t need to know the brand but you can see it on supermarket shelves, the non-halal section, of course) is actually chunks of fatty pork immersed in oil! It’s every cardiologist’s nightmare! My Aunt uses this braised pork to stirfry with beehoon, even the oil. Nothing is wasted. Not one drop of oil even. I don’t buy this anymore as I think I’m now 34 years old and I should be kinder to my waist line and heart.
All the above are my fave stuff but I don’t eat them anymore. I am not sure what goes into these food products from China but I really don’t want to know. I might keel over if I find out. But this is not all there is. There’s dried red dates, there’s snow fungus, there’s all sorts of dried herbs from China which I can tell horror stories about. I now go for Eu Yan Sang herbs as I feel safer if there’s a brand behind it.
Speaking of which, I still haven’t dared to eat the Walls’ Moo ice cream even though it’s been cleared of melamine.
How about you?
Tell me if you’re as guilty as I am of ingesting poisons and chemicals, no thanks to unscrupulous Chinese folks in mainland China.
And what’s your favourite canned food of all? 😉
Pure Organic Munching
I realize it’s been suddenly a deluge of food posts.
I don’t know why. Maybe too many projects are happening. I just got a blog consulting project running for the next few months so that’s one more to-do in my long list of to-do’s (I kind of thrive on work and like I said to Vern, the more one has to juggle, the better one juggles!).
Anyway, back to food.
I love my ladies group. Well for one, we always aim to meet each other for lunch and talk about business.
Last Friday, Jo and I ended up at SEED Cafe (again) on Nagore Road which is just around the corner from Jo’s shop on Lorong Selamat. Jo and I often meet to talk about our activities and events for WomenBizSense, and we do our best planning over lunch!
SEED Cafe is one place which makes me feel good about myself. It’s a pure organic vegetarian cafe that’s quite a hit with health-conscious Penang people. I’ve been there 3 times already and each time it is packed with customers (even though parking is horrendous. Parking in Penang is mostly horrendous but don’t even think about finding a parking spot on Nagore Road unless you double park.) They also sell organic stuff – organic miso, organic sauces etc.
SEED can seat customers upstairs too so we opted to go the first floor (where it’s quieter). I usually order this drink, Vitamin King, a blend of vegetables and fruits. It’s a green concoction with a hint of tartness. I believe my body is absorbing chlorophyll when I slurp this down.
My favourite dish seems to be the spaghetti with pine nuts with a creamy pesto made from vegetables. The pesto is rich with the fragrance of Thai basil (you will either love this herb or hate it to bits…it’s pungent and it’s definitely a taste to be reckoned with). Jo enjoys this dish too. But I always get hungry almost immediately – perhaps due to its meatlessness! I wanted to try the vege ham burger but the cafe had run out of this the day we were there.
Their salad is not bad – a simple mix of vegetables (turnip, carrot, purple cabbage) with raisins and a creamy dressing. Again it comes with Thai basil so be forewarned.
I’ve also tried their pumpkin soup (available on certain days) which is really robust and filling.
This is a place I can be quite happy eating in. I always get a burst of satisfaction if I eat right. I know I’m nutty like that.
Expect to pay an average of RM 20 per person if you dine here. Not exactly cheap but hey, at least you’re not stuffing your face with greasy, fried stuff. This is organic and this is healthy. And you feel absolutely light unlike those heavy, sleep-inducing lunches (read: heavy on rice and meat).
And We Shall Have Bread
I’m quite pleased with myself today. I managed to bake edible bread!
You see, I had always wanted to bake some bread – after all how hard can it be right?
Apparently, baking bread is hard.
Oh I don’t mean putting everything into a bread machine or bread maker and turning it on and going to bed and waking up to freshly baked bread. (Cheater’s way)
I mean, the real bread making. The kneading, the baking, the smell of fresh bread wafting all about the apartment.
That sort of thing. Going back to basics.
I know. I’m no Martha Stewart. I can make a mean crispy curry puff, I can bake the moistest banana cake, I can make fine Cantonese soups BUT I cannot make bread!
Like Su Ping says, How can? Or rather, where can?
My first 2 failed attempts at making bread was a few months ago. I was in Tesco Extra and saw this box of flour specifically for making bread. And it was only RM2.80. OK, even if I fail, it’s just RM2.80 down the drain.
I failed.
Despite my gungho attempts at kneading the bread dough.
You know why? Because the damn recipe was wrong! Usually breads need some fat, shortening or butter. Usually butter is about 20 to 30 gm. The recipe printed on the side of the box said: 200 gm of shortening. And me being the first time blur bread maker, I followed it to a tee. I kept kneading and kneading but it was too oily. The dough didn’t rise. Maybe the yeast was suffocated by too much fat.
When I finally threw it into the oven for a 30-minute bake, it came out looking brown and hard. It was just a lump! (Felt so horrible throwing food away. Guilt!)
So I pulled out all my recipe books, went through all the bread recipes.
Finally after much comparison (and also noted in Betty Yew’s book) I learnt lesson number 1, that fat or butter in bread usually was in small quantities. I wanted to write a complaint email to the flour manufacturer – how could there be a misprint of quantities – 20 gm and 200 gm makes a whole lot of difference!
But I don’t give up – persistence is my middle name.
Armed with new information, I went to Tesco Extra and bought the same box of bread flour. I put in only 20 gm of butter this time, kneaded the dough for almost 45 minutes and left it to rise. Problem was, it didn’t rise! And the bread turned out hard and unedible.
So now I’m thinking: is breadmaking that difficult? Or am I just doomed to eat Gardenia’s for the rest of my life? Or did something else go wrong?
After researching a bit, I thought, it could be that the yeast was dead. So I tested the yeast. You can learn from me and save yourself the heartache of not having your bread rise.
Lesson number 2: Test the damn yeast before you bake bread.
Put 1 tsp of yeast into a half a cup of warm water. Stir in 1 tsp of sugar. Wait a few minutes. If your yeast is alive/active, you should see the mixture frothing, bubbles and all. And yes, you will smell a yeasty smell. It looks like the ‘head’ of a good beer. If nothing happens, you’ve got dead yeast. Throw it away and run out for another packet of yeast. Don’t worry – yeast is cheap. You can repeat this experiment until you are satisfied the yeast is partying hard.
And then I got smart. I watched AFC’s Chef At Home (Michael Smith) one night and he made bread and he made it by hand. Without using special bread flour. He just used all purpose flour which is really regular wheat flour.
So I jotted that recipe and after I tested my yeast, set about making that bread this afternoon. (I love Michael Smith for such a simple and easy way to make bread.)
Chef At Home’s Bread/Bun Recipe
All I needed was 3 cups plain flour, 1 cup oats and 2 teaspoons salt. Make a well in the centre. Add 1 tablespoon of instant yeast. Pour in warm water (1 cup warm water) and 1/4 cup honey. Mix into a pliable dough. Add 2-3 teaspoons of olive oil. Knead the dough well for 20 minutes. This gave me a good arm workout. Kneading dough is hard work! You can add some powdered milk and some orange zest but I had run out of milk powder and didn’t fancy zesting any orange!
Next, oil a bowl and put the dough into it. Cover with a wet cloth. I put this whole bowl, cloth and all into my oven. I figured the humid and enclosed condition of the oven would help the yeast do its work. It did! My dough rose after 30 minutes. I was doing a mental jig when I saw that. I took it out and ‘punched’ it down again. Rolled it out and made 7 lumps of round dough balls. Back they went into the bowl/oven for another ‘rising’ session.
Next I made some butterscotch by heating up 5 tablespoons of sugar with half a cup of water. Stir in some butter when the sugar’s melted. Keep stirring until the sugar turns brown. Turn off the fire and keep stirring this golden rich butterscotch (tastes heavenly!).
What you do is pour this cooled liquidy goodness into your baking pan (get a round pan). Arrange the rolled dough lumps and leave again to rise for another 20 minutes. I realised much of bread baking is about ‘resting and rising’ time. While you’re doing that, preheat your oven. Bread needs hot ovens so I set my oven to 220 Centigrade.
Finally, the bread/buns go into the oven for 30 minutes. The smell of baking bread is unbelievable.
I scorched my butterscotch but the bread/buns were edible! They turned out soft and chewy and I am imagining it with dollops of butter. Yummy!
I got it right on the 3rd try. And that pleased me to no end I tell ya. Already I am imagining all sorts of possibilities with this bread recipe. I could add raisins, nuts, chocolate…..
Follow the Durian Trail
Only mad people or fanatical durian lovers would hop out of bed on a windless Sunday afternoon (yesterday, to be precise) to eat durians. We were either mad or mad over durians. It didn’t matter coz we had such goodies that I will brave the sun again, if only to taste these exquisite fruits!
This was the real Balik Pulau experience as we did drive all the way to the other side of Penang island. We almost missed the place as there was no signboard. Yes, that’s the signature style of Penang eateries sometimes. The good stuff don’t have signboards. You just follow your nose or secret trail.
Secret Society Food
The title intrigued, didn’t it?
We took our staff out for lunch 2 days ago to this place we were raving about since we got to know about it. A client took us there and it was so secretive, so weird that we had to bring our staff there, if only to marvel at what good marketing is about!
Favourite Makan Places Around Sg Dua
Update: I decided to update this post a bit as I have some new makan places to add.
I have been living in this Sungai Dua area since 1994.
That was the year I entered university.
And that means I have been living in this area for about 14 years.
And that means I have been eating around this area for 14 years.
Which is a long time. Grrrr! I don’t know if that’s good or bad…
So suddenly I think: ya, actually I eat a lot around this area and I know some lovely and affordable places to eat. Not only Chinese food. I think this post was partly induced by Derek who asked me where else to eat porridge besides the one he goes to in Bukit Jambul. (Yes, Derek, I’ve tried that porridge place – Nic’s fave place to go for stewed pig ears and fatty pork! I just can’t stand the humidity and dirt of that shop.)
OK, so here goes.