Yesterday was Ain’s birthday. I thought I could have the money to buy a present for Ain this year. But we spent way over our regular budget this month getting Irfan prepared for kindergarten. So, maybe next year. Anyway, there was cake as can be seen in the photograph below. And apparently Irfan ain’t partial to yoghurt cheese cakes. Which is good news, cause there’s more for me! 😀 Happy birthday, my wife and my companion through adventure and hardship.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Food
Nasi goreng
All blog posts with food in them are listed here…
Soups
I don’t know what it is about Ramadan, but fasting makes me think about food. My last entry was about bread. What goes well with bread? Soups, of course! Toast up a little bread and dip it in hot soup, like little croutons. Mm mmm. Some soups even begin with stale leftover bread. Like this Gazpacho Andaluz. [[image:soup10.jpg:Gazpacho Andaluz:center:0]] I’ve had Gazpacho before, but usually it’s chopped tomatoes and other veggies in it (sort of like a mediterranean bubur ca ca without the bubur). But when we were in Jaen, at Alfonso’s El Bar Dalas, I had my first taste of the Andalucian Gazpacho. It’s a smoothly pureed raw vegetable soup, and if served as a tapa, it was served in a chilled wineglass. It was smooth going down and even though I hate tomatoes, I loved this gazpacho. I wasted no time in finding a recipe for it when […]
Continue readingBread 2006 (January through April)
It’s time for more bread! Continuing the adventures of bread that began with my birthday present from last year, and the breads of the second half of last year, here’s some more roti roti roti. [[image:bread63.jpg:Pain Ordinaire Careme:center:0]] The above was Pain Ordinaire Careme – my 2nd attempt at it. My first attempt it did not come out as well as I would have liked it, dry and not as plump and pretty. It’s one of the final pictures in the previous bread entry – but here it is again so you can compare the two attempts: [[image:bread59.jpg:Pain Ordinaire Careme – 1st attempt:center:0]] Below is a Scandinavian whole wheat bread called Volkornbrot – it was dense and heavy, very wheaty, as described in the book. To be honest, I didn’t really like it. [[image:bread107.jpg:Volkornbrot:center:0]] I got another craving for pau, so I made it again with the same “spanakopita” filling […]
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Exactly Four Years Ago Today…
… Irfan Shafiq was born just before 5 p.m. in the maternity ward at Kuala Lumpur Hospital. He caused his mother to be stuck at the hospital for almost 12 hours before finally decided it was time to pop out. I was right there with Ain when he popped out. When the nurse handed him to me he gave me his best “Hey… can you tell me what the heck’s going on around here” look. Atok and Opah arrived from Sitiawan today to celebrate the occasion with Irfan, after which Opah made nasi ayam for dinner. There was cake with candles (a hit with Irfan for some reason) and the photos were taken by Atok. We had dinner when Mak Long and Ayah Long came a-calling. I noticed that Irfan was sleepy by 8pm but he fought his drooping eyes until it was after 11pm, because of the occasion. I […]
Continue readingDesperate Prevention of Dilution
This was conceived untold years ago by me, but I forgot about it until recently, and most especially last night when we had teh ais to drink for dinner. Teh ais translates directly into iced tea, but it’s not exactly that. It’s more to the tune of tea with thick sweetened condensed milk in warm water, mixed with ice cubes or ice tubes. Some restaurants serve teh ais with a lot of ice rather than tea, which leads to very diluted tea if you leave it on the table for too long. This would also lead to a very annoyed Hisham. What I propose is this: Hours before taking orders for teh ais (or Nescafe ais or Milo ais for that matter) brew a ton of the drink, pour the liquid onto ice cube trays and freeze the lot of them. When someone orders a teh ais, put the ice […]
Continue readingCake on the First of May
May 1st is Irfan’s Cik Su F’s 19th birthday. Her sisters, including Ain, chipped in for a cake for a little get together. The cake had oranges and strawberries and mangos and kiwi fruits and grapes. Irfan also wanted in on the cutting of the cake, as usual. For the main course, Ain made bihun goreng, which was delicious. It’s all gone now. Snif snif. :’-( [[image:may1_01.jpg:Cake closeup:center:0]][[image:may1_02.jpg:Cake on tabletop:center:0]][[image:may1_03.jpg:Cake with assorted food:center:0]]
Continue readingPajeri Terong
When we were growing up, Hisham’s favorite food was Pajeri Nenas (holy cow! No Wikipedia listing for this!!). Pajeri is a kind of spicy thick gravy, sweeter than a curry but similar to a curry, containing different spices as well as kerisik). I had never made this dish myself, and finally I attempted it. But instead of Nenas (pineapple), i used Terong (eggplant/aubergine) to make Pajeri Terong. The eggplant (terong) being cooked: [[image:pajeri1.jpg:The gravy is still yellow and thin:center:0]] The pajeri terong, cooked and ready to serve: [[image:pajeri2.jpg:The gravy has darkened and thickened:center:0]] Amazingly, it turned out pretty good! I thought it tasted like my mother’s. It felt like I was home and eating her food, stealing as many pineapples from Hisham as I could. 😀 Thanks for the recipe, Mak!!
Continue reading2005: A Bread Retrospective
You got it! Another bread entry. In my one and only entry on this topic, I was waxing poetic about My New Hobby, and showed the breads I had been able to produce. That was about early August, last year. For the last one-third of the year, I have been hard at work baking bread and learning more and more about it. Vin no longer buys any bread, and I have experimented with a variety of breads in my bread book. This entry shows a selection of the different breads that I baked August through December of 2005. First off, my guide in the bread experiments, my bread book: [[image:bread19b.jpg:My Big-ass Bread Book:center:0]] Here are my Onion Twists. Onion Twist after being twisted but prior to rising: [[image:bread20.jpg:Before rising:center:0]] After the loaves rose: [[image:bread21.jpg:After rising:center:0]] Baked, with a dinner fork next to it for some perspective: [[image:bread22.jpg:Onion Twist, Baked:center:0]] Challah […]
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Squiddies!
The best fried calamari (sotong celup tepung) on this planet, as well as several other planets and moons (including the seafood industry on Europa), is located at the Medan Ikan Bakar FELCRA at Simpang Dua, Sitiawan. The taste and the texture is just right. And saying that the price is very affordable there is an understatement. In Sitiawan, this is where we’d like to engorge ourselves on seafood on special occasions. Last night we went there to celebrate Irfan’s grandparents 34th anniversary. Here are four of the photos from the dinner. …strangely enough, there were no pictures of Atok and Opah.
Continue readingMy New Hobby
I thought and thought and thought about my new hobby – bread baking, and I wanted to write a long paean to it. But now the days keep passing me by and my workload has not lessened. The summer is zooming by and I’m sure Hisham thinks I’ve totally forgotten that he’d done all this work to get my pictures formatted for the blog. Well, rather than research bread and write a history of bread, this will mostly be a photojournal of my new obsession. For my birthday this year, Vin bought me a KitchenAid artisan 6 quart stand mixer: [[image:bread01.jpg:Toy! My Toy!:center:0]] It was exactly what I wanted, given that I’d been dropping hints and marking my Kitchen.com catalogs for months before my birthday. Vin finally just sat down, pointed it out and discussed with me what size, what features, what color, etc. I wanted. So I got exactly […]
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Today’s Breakfast
Using whatever ingredients left in the fridge, I came up with this earlier today, took a picture of it, gobbled it all down, and now in my belly it will find a new definition of pain & suffering as it is slowly digested over a thousand years.
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