Dumbo in the Kitchen - #10: Evil Cup Noodle Made Evil-er

A question to the "Cup Noodle Tribe" (杯面族): What do you do when you are so hungry that one cup of noodle is not enough to satisfy you? Reach for another cup?

Well, you don't have to.

Whenever you feel that you are going to need more than the usual portion to satisfy, just grab a pack of Mamee Monster Ready-to-Eat Noodle Snack (which costs only thirty-something cents, if you buy the bulk-pack), and add it to that evil little cup.

The result: double the portion, without doubling the cost.

Dumbo in the Kitchen - #9: the Minimalist Spaghetti

Preparing spaghetti can be really simple, if you are not the picky type.

The picture below shows what I call a "minimalist spaghetti".

Some black pepper, olive oil, McCormick's Italian Herbs, McCormick's Basil (dried flakes), garlic, and whatever type of meat you prefer are all that you need for this dish. Oh, of course, don't forget to add salt to taste.

Now, all you have to do is to marinate some meat chunks with the above ingredients, then boil the spaghetti until half-cooked, then stir-fry those marinated meat chunks (use some cooking wine or just plain water to give it a suitable amount of gravy), and then stir in those half-cooked spaghetti and continue cooking until the spaghetti soaks up the gravy. When the spaghetti has been cooked to your preferred consistency, stir in some olive oil to emulsify (sort of "thicken") the gravy, and serve hot.

It tasted great (either I was very hungry then, or it was really good).

(It will be a HUGE plus if you know how to choose a tender cut of meat.)

Dumbo: Gourmet Extraordinaire - #13: Sweet Potato Fries with Sour Plum Flavor

This would be the second time this blog is featuring a Mommy Wang dish. The first time was when I wrote about their "Tiger Biting Pig" (虎咬猪) last year.

If you go eat at Mommy Wang's, there is one thing that you must try: Sweet Potato Fries with Sour Plum Flavor (香梅薯条).

Juicy sweet potato wedges are fried to a delicious crisp, then sprinkled with their secret concoction of sour plum powder. The yummy deliciousness scores a perfect 10 on my palate.

The orangish wedges in the middle are the subject of discussion here. The yellowish wedges on the left are Potato Fries with Seaweed Flavor (海苔薯条) (fried potato wedges sprinkled with seaweed and "secret flavorings"), which is also very nice (another must-try), especially if you are one of those people who prefer milder tastes in life. Its flavor is not as strong as the former dish, but it has this very nice seaweed aftertaste that will make you reach out for more.

That fried chicken thingy on the right is forgettable, to be honest, but that bowl of noodle was quite OK. However, if you want something filling, it is not their noodle dishes that you should order; instead, I would recommend that you go there on weekdays during lunch hours, when they serve (as their lunch sets) rice with not two, and not three, but FOUR side dishes (on top of a main dish of chicken or fish), plus a free drink.

Dumbo in the Kitchen - #8: As-Instant-As-Can-Be Pseudo-Pasta

If you are a bachelor - or a married man temporarily rendered a bachelor because the wife is away or refuses to cook for you - and you have no cooking skill whatsoever, and you loathe to have another meal consisting of instant noodles with the invariable flavors like "chicken soup", "curry", "laksa", "vegetarian shitake mushroom", etc. etc., what can you do?

Well, the answer is still instant noodle, but with a slight twist: make it a pseudo pasta.

The only ingredients you need are:

1) One or two packs of those evil instant noodle

2) A pack of Campbell's mushroom soup powder (I like the one with cheese flavor and croutons)

3) Water (ha-ha-ha...)

First, cook the instant noodle to the consistency you like (I used to like it mushy; now I like it el dente).

Then boil some water and prepare that mushroom soup. Make it thick (which means less water than it says in the instruction).

Stir the mushroom soup into the cooked noodle (or vice versa), and voilà, instant noodle that tastes somewhat like a good dish of spaghetti with thick mushroom gravy.

But if you find yourself doing this dish very often, then I feel sorry for you. =.= Go get a wife, or, fetch your wife back from her mother's (say sorry, say whatever sweet lover's lies, just bring her back). Or learn real cooking.

Dumbo: Gourmet Extraordinaire - #12: The Master Chef of Kampung Pantai Acheh

Our village is so small, it doesn't have a restaurant you can go eat out at when you don't feel like cooking at home. There are two coffee shops, no doubt, but you can't rely on them for your daily victuals; the one nearer our house (well, the house we are renting) caters to a special horde of people: mahjong players; the other one which is a bit further off on the other direction (not visible from the main road) sells grilled fish and "ais kacang" (shaved ice with sweet stewed red beans and other confections) at night, starting at around 8:30pm (too late for proper dinner, IMHO).

But we, the village folks, are not completely "disenfranchised" in our rights to eating out, as we still have one person - the only person around here (OK, she has a "sidekick", sort of, in the form of her Indonesian maid) - to turn to: a middle-aged auntie who wields her magic at a small roadside stall from 1pm to 6pm everyday.

I describe her as "magical", because she can do so many different dishes so well! In Penang, if a hawker sells curry mee, he or she will specialize in curry me, and no other; if koay-teow-th'ng (粿条汤; rice fettuccine in clear broth), then just koay-teow-th'ng. But what does this auntie offer? Fried rice, fried noodle, char-hor-fun (沙河粉; fried rice-fettuccelle in starchy gravy), hokkien-char (福建炒; noodle in starchy gravy), ee-fu-mee (伊府面; pre-fried noodle in starchy gravy) koay-teow-th'ng, laksa, curry mee, and several other dishes I'm sure I haven't even thought of trying. You could even bring along the ingredients of whatever dish you want to eat, and ask her to cook it for you (rather than soiling your own hands and kitchen).

Of course she is not the only person in this world to know how to prepare so many different dishes; but what amazes me is that most of the dishes she prepares are as good as - if not better than - those prepared by hawkers specializing in only one dish. I particularly like her fried rice, curry mee (shown in the picture below), ee-fu-mee, hokkien-char, and char-hor-fun.

And she prepares them in HUGE portions, which is so totally agreeable to my biggish tummy. :-p

Squirrel, squirrel hunter, and shotgun

Today is 2nd July. My last post wast dated 3rd May. It's been practically two months since I last posted in this blog. In retrospect, I would blame it on my ISP (no specific name here; but if I tell you that I'm a Malaysian living in a very remote area where all the other newer internet service providers have not managed to extend their services to yet, you know which company I'm talking about).

***

Of course, there was also the factor that I had been quite busy with my translation works in the past two months, on top of having started teaching again (once or twice a week) at a college where I used to work full-time for five years and a half. But it was because of the frequent internet service interruptions in May that made me drop my blogging habit.

It happened some time in the first week of May, if I'm not mistaken. My internet connection started having very frequent hiccups: I would get disconnected and reconnected again as frequent as every 5 minutes. It was annoying, to say the least, but we were not overly concerned about the problem, because our ISP is notorious for inefficiency and below-par services, and we thought it was some of their people tinkering with the lines somewhere, again.

But after a couple of days of "hiccups", my internet connection just "stopped breathing", and died. No amount of retries would get us connected, so we finally realized it was a major problem, and we called their service hotline.

Now, don't get me started on their service hotline. Sometimes it would take umpteen attempts before someone would answer your call, and even that would not have been possible without spending about 15 minutes on the line listening to a recorded trying-to-sound-sweet-but-not-succeeding voice telling me over and over again that "your call is important to us; all our service personnel are currently unavailable; you will be attended to shortly".

Right. I'm some pesky problems to be "attended to".

The guy who finally answered noted my problem, gave me a report number, and said that their local service team will look into my problem in a couple of days.

And then a couple of days went by with no sign of the local service team having any intention of gracing our small little remote fishing village with their revered presence.

So I called the service hotline again. "Your call is important to us..." I don't usually cuss, but I recall that I cussed a lot that day.

What transpired was another report, another report number, and another two days going by without a hint of the local service team being something real rather than imagined.

The third time I called the service hotline, I managed to get a hold of someone from the technical service team rather than the usual clueless operators. That fellow, who was quite nice, polite and patient - finally, a little credit to the ISP - gave me instructions on how to test whether there was something wrong with my modem (because, to be honest, my modem's age was pushing two years, and I was not totally sure it was not the modem giving me problem; but I needed to be sure, as it would be ridiculous to go buy a new modem every time you have a connection problem). After testing the modem according to his instructions, I found nothing amiss with the modem, so the fellow made another report (again!) and gave me the report number.

This time around, somebody finally showed up at my door step. And I was glad it was the actual service team from the company itself, and not the sub-contractors they engaged for cable installation. The lone technician who came to answer the distress call of this, uh, extremely frustrated guy (not a damsel) was also very polite - another credit to the ISP; at least most of their technical folks are nice and polite, as far as I know, unlike those folks manning the counters of their local service centre) - and he tested my phone line with a handheld tester he brought along (the precise reason I was glad it was the REAL service people from the company, because I'm sure their subcon people do not have such a handy tool).

After less than a minute of assessing the evidence and engaging in deliberation, the judge (the technician) and his jury (the handheld tester) came up with a verdict: the phone line was faulty. And the good technician told me he had a pretty good idea where that fault may be.

He told me that they had been aware for quite some time (close to a year, actually) that a certain section of the phone cable had been partially damaged, and they had been requesting (what? for close to a year?) that the state headquarters send a team to reinstall the cable (the huge ones, not the small ones handled by the subcon people), but so far no action had been taken (I almost fainted when I heard this).

And how exactly had the phone cable been damaged? According to the good technician (and I hope he was not messing with me with his quirky sense of humor), some local squirrel hunter had accidentally shot the phone cable with his shotgut (shotgun!!!) while hunting the pesky little rodents.

And that, my friend, was why my internet service was interrupted for nearly two weeks. (To the credit of the ISP, they fixed the phone cable within two days - not another year, thank God - of the good technician's visit.)

***

EPILOGUE
========
A week after the above incident, our internet service was down again. Another major one. This time, we called the abovementioned good technician directly (he was gracious enough to leave his number the last time), and he came around to find - again! - the integrity of the phone line being compromised. "Don't tell me it's another squirrel hunter taking another round of potshots at the phone cable," I said weakly. But he told me the problem was different this time. Apparently, he had spent half an hour surfing the internet by tapping directly into the local switchboard or something two or three kilometers from my house, to make sure their newly-installed main cable was working fine; so the fault must be at a certain point along this two or three kilometer stretch of cable. Despite his assuring me that this incident was different from the first, I could not help but recalled having seen the local squirrel community gleefully playing on the poles and cables along the road leading into our small little village, and I tried to recall if I have ever seen anyone in our village carrying a shotgun or hunting rifle.

The problem was fixed a few days later, after the subcon people came by to replace the phone cable leading into our house. It could have been fixed a little earlier, but that was not their fault, because we were not in the first time they came a calling.

Dumbo in the Kitchen - #7: Tortilla Roll

I wish I could have tortilla (tor-TEE-ya; why? Ask the Spaniards/Mexicans, don't ask me) more often.

I mean, if I have rice with side dishes, my rice (carbohydrate) to vegetables to meat ratio would be roughly 7:2:1. But if I have tortilla (prepared as shown below), my carb to vege to meat ratio would be a much healthier 1:2:1.

***

You can prepare the minced meat in any flavor you like. What I did was somewhat tomato-ish with soy sauce flavor, I think. Yeah, I cook all my so-called Western dishes with soy sauce. Very typical Chinese cook. Can't live without his soy sauce. But to my defense, the soy sauce I use is very delicious (everyone who has tasted it agreed): it is added with red dates, so there's this additional layer of aroma and sweetness to it that I find hard to describe.

And don't forget to prepare lots of vegetables (whatever vegetables that you would normally put in your salad). I used lettuce, carrots and tomatoes.


Lay those veges thickly onto the tortilla...


Then a layer of minced meat (cooked, of course)...


Then my favorite herb: coriander (cilantro). I used to hate this herb (and along with it, celery, parsley, and the likes) when I was younger. But now, I love it like crazy (I believe God has changed my taste bud so I eat more of these herbs that are helpful in lowering blood pressure; in my line of work, that is a boon indeed).


My tortilla roll turned out to be too "fat" to be rolled up "spring-roll" style. And I did not have any toothpick to hold its shape, so I tore a strip of aluminum foil and tied it up like a ribbon. That's a bit of MacGyverism in the kitchen for you. :-)


Pop it in the oven...


My toaster oven was too small, so the tortilla roll got too close to the heater element and was a bit over-charred. But, it still tasted nice. :-)


Another wonderful bread to use for such dishes is the Lebanese bread. Nowadays, you can find tortilla in most hypermarkets, but not many hypermarkets sell Lebanese bread.