Hainanese Chicken Rice video

Its amazing how he leaves the whole chicken in boiling water and it cooks completely through. 

I am learning here how to loosen up the chicken before cooking, it softens the meat. And interesting how he treats the rice before cooking it. It is the same way I have learnt rice has to be cooked. 

There is a thermomix recipe for chicken rice. It puts the a stock on the bottom, the rice over the stock to cook, the chicken over both so the juices drop into the rice, and a vegetable can be cooked on a top layer if we could fit it all in. What an idea! I don't have a thermomix and I don't intend to get one. But I wonder if this method would work in a pressure cooker. I am thinking this because we have a deep pressure cooker which could hold different layers. After all the preparation, it might take minutes to cook. Just let it come to pressure and switch off. The one thing missing from this thermomix method is the ginger / garlic / onion oil essential to this dish. Perhaps we could use it in the preparation of the rice and let it mix with the chicken and stock through the steam. 

Anyway, the kids love chicken rice. The most important part (not here) is the chilli sauce that goes with it. I'll have to add a how to do that video part later. 

Where to eat - Kelantan

http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/kelantan/

Soft boiled eggs

Malaysians Style soft boiled eggs.

This is a real Malaysian breakfast: soft boiled eggs broken into a small bowl with white pepper and soy sauce and a kopitiam, a drink. The toast is a thick home made style bread toast with no crusts and a heavy slathering of margarine. The kaya toast if you feel like celebrating with something sweet is the same thick toast with a generous slathering of butter and a layer of kaya. The toast is then dipped in the egg and the remainder egg eaten with a teaspoon.

It must take great care and precision to produce a precisely soft boil egg for every order. They would have to use timer and a staff member whose job is to only to hang around these eggs. One day, I spotted a yellow tower at a cafe with no burners. It looked like something one would put in a microwave but it looked too tall to fit. I saw eggs in them once. I also saw the customers having our typical breakfast. I put two together and realised the yellow tower made those eggs, but I didn't understand how and specifically how this cafe with no kitchen could produce this.

I finally asked, they confirmed my suspicion, but I still didn't understand how that yellow tower produced soft boiled eggs. I stumbled across the device on the net and found it was this:

It is a soft boiled egg cooker invented by a Malaysian. Typical for a Malaysian invention made in his kitchen in a terrace house in the middle of Cheras. (I am imagining this) It is made with the cheapest materials to make the device most affordable. It is utterly simple in its design and lacks the strong 'designed by a marketing advertising executive' who would have loaded it with accessories and weight to deserve its place in the middle class kitchens of the world. What happened to simplicity?

The most important part of this device is the valve, the only piece of non plastic. This is his story as said in the Star newspaper.

• How did it happen? Back in the days when Datuk Hew Ah Kow was just a lad working as a bulldozer operator in the jungles of Kelantan in 1973, there was little time to keep count of the minutes.
  
  “There were about 20 of us in a lumber camp who liked nothing better than to start the day with half-boiled eggs. The problem was, we always lost track of time, carried away with things like checking the engines and refuelling. So, by the time we got back to our eggs, they were always overcooked,” recalls Hew.
  
  “Young and full of bravado, I took it as a challenge and began to conduct my own experiments, puncturing the bottoms of Ovaltine cans with a nail and filling them with eggs and hot water,” says Hew.
  
  It took a year before Hew found the correct ratio of water to eggs. As he drew closer to a solution, Hew’s tests made him go off eggs. It also affected his colleagues who had to help eat his experiments.
   thestar.com.my
• • Image via Suanie.net
• The effort eventually paid off when one day, a direct-selling stockist rode his Honda Cub into Hew’s work camp and got marooned by the rain, forcing an overnight stay. At breakfast, he got to sample the most perfect half-boiled eggs he had ever tasted.
  
  “It was the camp cook who pointed me out. At first, he came to me and asked if I could give him one of my Ovaltine cans to take home. I said ‘No way.’ Then he asked if I could sell him the prototype so I said, ‘Fine, let me see the money first.’ He returned and gave me RM7,000,” recalls Hew.

Gula Melaka

http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2015/08/on-pursuing-an-obsession-and-getting-nowhere-until-you-do-me-and-palm-sugar-.html

Where to eat? Melaka

For a minute I tried to spell Melaka in english and couldn't - how many l's and how many c's which is it? So lets do Malay lots easier.

Honestly
Melaka has some amazing food
Definitely worth a detour
Try Portuguese food and in Umbai, a kampung not far from Melaka is a Malay fishing village
There is a large hut
Outside will be parked mercs snd BMW etc
All races
The Malay villagers will have tanks if fresh seafood
Pick and pay by weight cooked ALa Melsyu
Try udang harimay simply goreng in kunyit
And each table has simple but delicious Nasi lemak bungkus
Just east that and too up with some anazing Malay seafood

Jonker 88
No. 88, Jalan Hang Jebat, 75200, Melaka, Melaka, 75200, Malaysia

Best laksa and chendol
To die for

Onde Onde 
Roti John berkas and Ayam golek near tanjung Kling

In limbongan in Melaka there is a small food court that serves breakfast
One side is a hokkien family that serves roti bakar,Telur kukus etc
But the other side is a melaka secret
Roti canai Faizal MohdcYusof
His secret?
He cooks over arang, not gas so heat control is an art form
And try with kari kambing

Where to eat? Penang

Penang

Peace & Joy coffee shop

Peace & Joy Coffee Shop located in the corner of China Street and Queen Street Penang has a stall selling delicious curry mee! Generally, the curry mee soup itself is very flavorful, while the ingredients top it off beautifully.

Curry Mee

Wan Tan Mee

http://www.misstamchiak.com/10-must-try-hawker-food-in-penang/

Alor Setar

ALOR STAR: IF you are a coffee enthusiast who appreciates freshly-brewed coffee, head to Caffè Diem at the heritage building of Pekan Cina, here.

://www.nst.com.my/node/65850

Malaysian Food - Hokkien Mee

Hokkien Mee

Hokkien Noodles 
If my Dad comes home late and is hungry, he comes home with Hokkien Mee from the stall behind Tawakal Hospital. It's the time to hang around him for a taste. With the chilli sambal on the side, this is quite a good tasting Hokkien Mee, better than the 'one in Petaling Street' I thought 10 years ago. And the taste is still the same. This visit home, I had it twice. Once when I returned home hungry and the other after going to the airport only to discover my flight was delayed. I looked hard at the cooks to see if I recognised him from 10 years ago, and just when I was convinced that they all looked too young or too old, the person who gave me my noodles, still packed 3D triangular shape in plastic and newspaper, smiled like he remembered me. He might have, he knows my Dad, his late night regular.

I got this photo on the web, it seemed to best describe the slipperiness and blackness of the noodles. Please click the photo to visit her website for the recipe.

Malaysian biscuits I loved

 Appam balik

caterpillar biscuits

Sooji biscuits


Love letter biscuits

Malaysian butterless biscuits

Scallion pancake

Restaurant: Alexis, BSC

Looking for a place for lunch one day I had decided on Dim Sum as I knew it would be easy to find something for Nathan to eat. But on our way there we walked past Alexis while looking for the race track he wanted to play on before lunch....

Oh, but it was too enticing, we decided the difficult option and walked into Alexis. We were in Malaysia when Alexis first opened in Bangsar in the 1990s. They used to order their cakes from Suchan who had a cafe in PJ opposite University hospital. Suchan's tiramisu cake was legendary in KL (it is different from the pudding, but tastes great) and we were thrilled we could have some easily in Bangsar.

Eventually Alexis made Suchan's tiramisu cake and all the other cakes themselves although it wasn't exactly the same.They also made a banoffee cake - a banana toffee and coffee pie made into a cake.  While I was in university it was my second favourite pie after a meringue pie . I was surprised Suchan knew about it and made the pie into a cake.

The Sarawak Laksa at Alexis was the best! Once I had a birthday party there and that's when we introduced Stephen to the Sarawak Laksa, his favourite too. So we try to go there as often as we can but sometimes getting there isn't easy. Now they have branches all over and unlike Madam Kwan's their standards remain good.

Coming back to our lunch, Nathan and I walked in and I immediately ordered my Sarawak Laksa and took ages to decide on a plain pasta tomato sauce for Nathan. Everything else looked too big and perhaps too spicy. The Sarawak Laksa is so popular that it arrived very soon after but the pasta didn't arrive for a while. Nathan was so hungry he said he wanted some. He tried it, said it wasn't too hot and ate more and more. He even drank the soup and eventually didn't touch the pasta!!! It was still yummy but without the chilli heat. The sambal on the side would have helped but I didnt add it to the soup.

That weekend I met up with Jenny, Mas, Norhayati and Nor Azrina at WIP. It was a little to loud to talk there so we adjourned to Alexis for cakes. At thie visit I got to try their cakes again. Here is a picture of the tiramisu cake. Yummy huh?



I am not a dilligent photographer. But I thought this blog needed some posts and one from my travels. So I googled alexis and tiramisu and sarawak laksa and got these fab photos from A Whiff of Lemongrass's very aptly titled post "The Things that make a girl go weak in her knees"