u m a m i

Fragrant noodles

Shrimp noodles tossed with fried shallots & garlic, wilted scallions & coriander. Delicious. Taking my time away to cook. Cheers!

Winter break

It's time for school holidays again. Yeah, term started on Jan 5 and finished by 14 Feb. Next term goes from 1 Mar till 14 Apr. French teachers have a nice life. They get a two week break at six week intervals, with two months off in summer, and during term time, there are no classes on Wednesdays. Husband reminded me to add that some days, classes are cancelled due to teacher's strike, transport strike, caterer's strike etc etc.

I'll take a break too. Nothing new to report on the home front. We are waiting for winter to be over. The days are still cold but it doesn't get dark too early. I have been staying at home and liking it a lot. The papers are full of depressing news,subconsciously and consciously we have retreated into ourselves, to take stock, to prioritise, to simplify. I don't shop for stuff anymore, except for discounted fabrics online. It's time to read all the unread books on the shelves, as well as the newspaper and magazines we subscribe to.

Tonight I am braising pork sausages with apples and pale beer. The dogs are getting hamburgers and vegetables. Hibernation food. See y'all in spring!

Saint Valentin

Heart shaped breads for tomorrow's breakfast. V loves anything pink (even the loo paper which in France comes in all colours but seldom in white) and heart-shaped.

Breakfasts in London

My system must have been more resilient than I gave it credit for. The appetite's back & we are hungry!

Breakfast this morning was a piece of dorayaki (pancakes with red bean filling), a cup of milky tea & a banana shared with husband. Not terribly exciting but wait, I have saved some pictures of yummy breakfasts from our trip to London.

Such as salt beef sandwiches on rye bread from The Brass Rail in Selfridges. A trip to Selfridges just seem incomplete without a fix, well alright, a game pie from the food hall would make a good substitute but husband has never stayed long enough in the UK to acquire a taste for such foods. Anyway, half a sandwich is more than an adequate serving for me, the full version is ginormous. The gherkin is a must, it's sharp bite and crunchy texture contrasts nicely with the soft, slightly salty meat. I've had other salt beef sandwiches in London, even going all the way to Golders Green, but I like this version most. Along with a mug of milky tea, we were set for a day of shopping.

Incidentally, with the weak pound, certain brands e.g. Chanel or Gap, worked out cheaper if bought in the UK than Europe. The pound must have fallen too quickly for retailers to adjust the prices and the savings were quite considerable. No Chanel for me, but I stocked up on Gap pyjamas and clothes for V.

The Sunday before CNY, it rained cats and dogs, so we stayed put in Islington. C recommended two possibilities for breakfast. The Angel Inn on St John St, or The Breakfast Club on Camden Passage. We chose Angel Inn because I haven't been to a good old-fashioned fry-up place in ages. Full English sets were going for 4.90 GBP, all served with a hot beverage and buttered toasts.

Husband's set included mushrooms and a burger. Plus chips, which V was not used to because they were fat and did not have a big surface area to pick up ketchup. Too bad. I helped myself to the fat chips, dousing them with loads of malt vinegar and salt, ahh, they were very good.

My set included sausages and bacon. I substituted fried mushroom for bubble- short for bubble & squeak which is a fried hash of potatoes and cabbage. It was all very tasty and wholesome, and we thoroughly enjoyed our breakfast. As is also usual after such a meal, we didn't think we need to eat like this for at least another year.

Later on, walking past The Breakfast Club and seeing the long queue of people waiting in the rain and the ambitious menu (mexican and aussie dishes, organic this and that, pork of this pedigree, oats of that lineage blah blah blah) posted outside, we patted ourselves on our backs for having made the right choice.

On the last morning, I decided I needed to eat something relatively healthy. After five days of relatively intense Cantonese, Malaysian, Taiwanese, Thai and Indian foods, a plate composed of nothing more than sweet onions and roast beets from Ottolenghi in Upper Street, Islington, really stated to seem appealing.

Unfortunately, we were too early for their salads, they were still serving breakfast. There were not too many choices in the menu- bread board, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, and porridge. Porridge? Alrighty-then, let's see how good their porridge is that they dare to put it in their menu.

In the meantime our coffees arrive, and we picked on a savoury muffin of pinenuts and tomatoes. Husband's scrambled eggs was served first, the eggs were of such a brilliant yellow-orange hue I wondered whether they painted the colour on. It was yummy, we were not expecting otherwise, but a little boring.

My porridge, when it arrived, was another thing altogether. It was actually beautiful to look at, I gasped when I saw it.

I drizzled some cream, it looked even more delicious, so I dug in. Wow! I have to concede they make better porridge than I can. Very smooth and soft like how I would cook mine (starting with water and finishing with semi-skimmed milk, stirring endlessly over a low flame), but probably whole milk or even cream to give that creamy and luscious texture. The nuts were still a little warm from their wee toasting, making them just that bit nuttier and sweeter, and the maple syrup of a good quality to both sweeten and add depth to the flavours. It was improbably delicious, such a simple dish, and I managed to finish nearly all of it.

Come to think of it, we haven't had porridge at home for a while. I might make some this weekend.

Not in the mood for food

Last weekend I went to Tang Frères and bought a lot of desserts and sweet snacks- glutinous rice cakes, coconut and red bean puddings, peanut and sesame brittles. They were delicious and on hindsight, a little too rich. Coupled with yesterday's lunch of not one, but two souffles, the collective toll on the system became too heavy. I am now paying for these excesses with a bad case of indigestion.

Food is the last thing I want to see, touch, smell or eat. I want only to lie down and sleep, maybe for the next few days or the week. There will be no food blogging for the moment. I am putting up instead a non-food picture- it is a log-cabin quilt, or maybe two, in the making. It will be sweet, the final result, yet will pose no strain on the digestive system.

It's really gold!

"Or" is French for gold.

Clementines are synonymous with Chinese New Year because the Cantonese word for them, "kam", sounds similar to "gold" which is very auspicious. We make sure there is a pile of them in the house, for eating (after all, they are full of Vitamin C), for good luck, and for exchanging with friends and family as we exchange festive greetings.

These clementines were expensive, it cost 6.80 euros/kg compared to the average of 2.50 euros. I bought a kilo to find out if they're really much better. It is bigger, very juicy and sweet with a heady and long-lasting perfume. It wasn't until I was onto a third piece that I noticed the "or" on the sticker. So it was not just symbolic, we were really eating gold!

Rasa sayang, eh rasa sayang sayang eh!

Ask anyone who's been through the Singapore education system about the songs they learnt in school or even just imbibed from sitting in front of their television and they'll sing you Majulah Singapura, the national anthem (usually without understanding what the Malay lyrics means because, duh, they've never learnt the language). Otherwise it'll be some patriotic national songs like Count on Me Singapore or even One People, One Nation, One Singapore which have always reminded me of the equivalent of brain detergent.

Ask any Malaysian over the age of 30 and they too will sing you the national anthem Negaraku. Usually not very well, because it goes on too long and is rather weepy. Then they'll move on to their all-time favourite which is Rasa Sayang. Rasa means taste or feel, sayang can be a verb or a noun, to convey love, dear, beloved.

Everybody can sing Rasa Sayang, at least the chorus part. The body of the song is a mix of poems and good advice. The chorus itself is infectious and catchy. Another reason for Rasa Sayang being embedded in our consciousness is the children's variety show by the same name, in those days before internet, Wii, PSP or multi-channel cable TV we really looked forward to this simple entertainment aired during public holidays. For one hour we would be treated to songs and dance performed by little schoolchildren like ourselves, sometimes in a basic stage or sometimes in a picturesque outdoor setting with waving coconut trees in the background. Yeah, we were easy to please in those days.

It's 2009 now. We have everything. Internet, robots, GPS systems and even smartphones. Some things remain unchanged, example, we continue to love the foods we ate growing up. Malaysian hawker favourites like satay, rendang, roti canai, kari ayam etc etc. We accept that outside Malaysia it'll be less authentic, less spicy, less sedap, yet we cannot walk past one without hoping to be proved wrong because honestly it doesn't even have to be very good, just not worse than what any anonymous food court stall in any shopping mall back home can muster.

So it was that just after we had dumped our luggage in C's flat, hopped on the first bus to Dean St in Chinatown and then striding eagerly to HK Diner for our Cantonese food fix when my internal food radar buzzed agitatedly. I looked around, ah, just to the right, along the little side street of Macclesfield St (No 5, T: 020 7734 1382, or next to Leong's Legend) was a boldly-lettered panel of the Rasa Sayang signboard proclaiming that they serve Malaysian/ Singaporean cuisine. Interesting, they even have yee-sang, the typical Chinese New Year fish salad that is wildly popular in both these countries but never really took off in other big Chinese communities elsewhere.

We stepped inside. Ikea furnishings and bright lighting make it seem more like a cafe, reinforced further by black and white prints of typical kopitiam scenes hanging on the wall, and slowly the ears tune in that customers and staff were speaking English with that distinctive Malaysian accent.

We ordered extravagantly. Nasi lemak, char kway teow, sambal kangkong, nam yu chicken wings. Drinks like soybean milk, soybean with cincau, teh tarik. Desserts of pulot gula melaka, ondeh ondeh. When the nasi lemak was placed in front of me, I nearly cried, it looked so beautiful and right. The generous portions of rice and chicken curry, the rich spicing of the chicken and achar, really hit the spot, and it was only GBP 6.50 which cannot buy anything even half as satisfying in Paris. The curry was not as hot as I prefer, but the waitress readily gave out more sambal when requested.

Vera ignored her plain soymilk and slurped up all the grass jelly from my glass. She also ate the whites of my egg with rice and later we shared desserts.

There is also a small snacks menu from which we ordered chicken wings marinated with nam-yu (red fermented beancurd) and deepfried. GBP 3.00 buys you three drumlets and three wings. This was superb, crispy outside and well-flavoured chicken succulence inside.

Sago gula melaka came with proper palm sugar syrup and lots of coconut milk. Lovely. I asked about ice kacang and cendol, the nice young man from Pahang said it is 'akan datang' (in the works).

We ate here again on the first day of CNY because of its yee-sang. They had all the fixings, the lurid green and red strips were actually fried taro, quite tasty, and the waitress took the time to say out all the lucky phrases, as it should be. The salmon was too oily and fishy, and it wasn't the best version of yee-sang ever, but it's better than not having any.

Not every dish here is a winner. We like their beef rendang, the meat tender but not cooked to a mush, and the spicing just right, no shortcuts detectable. Curry laksa came with requisite tau-pok (fried tofu pockets) and the gravy was adequately aromatic and tasty. Nasi goreng was sedap (delicious) too. Misses included fried spring rolls which were just pathetic little cigarettes without much discernible fillings (incidentally, they looked and tasted like those we didn't like at Busaba Eathai's). Char Kway Teow was pale and looked like it wanted to shrivel with embarrassment, someone or something had forgotten about wok-hei here, without the typical fire-smoky aroma this dish should not even be listed on the menu. Ondeh ondeh was also a miss with its odd rubbery texture and even weirder taste.

There didn't seem to be many Singaporean dishes in the menu. Fish beehoon soup and chilli crabs are listed, next time perhaps. Speaking to the young man again, we learnt that they have been opened for only six weeks. I hope they do well, the food is mostly good, authentic and reasonably priced.

We went shopping at Liberty after lunch, at their fabric section I got talking to an old-timer staff whom I recognised from my student days when my mum and I used to buy fabrics to be made into dresses. They also had a wider range of silks, velvets, tweeds and all sorts of beautiful fabrics in those days, now mostly the cottons endure but relegated to a sad balcony space and no longer inside one of the main halls.

This time I got some shirts and let V choose a fabric for her dress, perpetuating our little family tradition. We chatted about fabrics and the better old days, from the way he spoke I asked if he was also a Malaysian and he confirmed that yes, he was. In comradely spirit he told us of two places to eat in London. One was at a very posh place, you don't need to go there he said, everyone is going to this new place in Chinatown instead, it's called Rasa Sayang, and is operated by the ex-owners of the old Bali at Edgware Rd (before it went downhill and had to close some years ago). Flashback! I remember Bali, it was the first Malaysian restaurant we went to when I first arrived as a student, I nearly fainted at paying the equivalent of RM3.50 for a stick of satay which in those days could have bought us more than a half-dozen back home.

Fast forward twenty years later, and well, nothing's changed. We're still paying whatever it takes for a taste of home, the taste we love, this rasa sayang sayang eh!

All together now,

Rasa sayang

eh rasa sayang sayang eh

eh lihat nonya jauh

Rasa sayang sayang eh