As sourrain.com prepares to welcome the year of the Rat, here’s my home decoration (not decorating my own house this year) a rip off from 5xmom’s falling flowers. Many thanks to Guru Moo for uploading it

The flowers seem to dissapear when i scroll down to the next page - anyone having the same issues?

A little chinese urban legend goes that if you have conjuntivitis, that means you’re a peeping tom…either spying at your neighbour showering or your brother in the loo. Did you guys get that when you were young? I hated getting conjuntivitis - my whole family would tease me mercilessly and I can’t even cry with my poor eyelids stuck together. Hamsup (seedy/kinky/dirty old man) would be the least insult that’ll be used on me.At 4 years old.

Yesterday I nearly could not open my eyes. It hurts to even blink. My left eye is nearly swollen shut now. Probably due to the fact that I had peeped at bacon bathing OD-ed on chocs & mandarin oranges for my CNY self-celebration. It’s like as if I cannot stop peeling them oranges - best part is any other time of the year I DO NOT LIKE TO EAT CITRUS. Only in this 15 days of Chinese New Year that I go bonkers over it. Sigh.Anyway. I believe that due to the OD I am now ‘yit hei’ (too much yang, too much heaty food ect ect) and I wish i could just pop into any coffeeshop and ask for a pack of ice cold barley water with lime.All I have now is a measly bottle of Optrex, hopefully to keep my eyes free from infection before I get to the doctor’s tomorrow.Which, due to UK’s absolutely failure of a state-supported medical care, I cannot see until 2.40pm tomorrow.You think got 24hrs clinic ar?? Even hospital also they ask you NOT to go - unless you really are dying.

Best part? I have an extremely important interview tomorrow. Which I shall now be going in a Captain Hook eyepatch.

Hello God.It’s me. If you are listening, might as well you just shoot an arrow through my heart and kill me, kill me now!

Unlike my cheena-wannabe self, I adore desserts. I have an extremely sweet tooth, and will only stop when my teeth cries out in pain from the attack of sugars. However, chinese meals are seldom ended on a sweet note, unless you are off for a full sit-down 8 course meal - which happens on Chinese New Years and wedding dinners.

Chinese dessert usually have strange and wonderful names. It is usually some auspicious-sounding name - like four seasons ect. So I have decided to name my self-conccoted desset as well - presenting Growing Treasures.

Ingredients:

Dried white fungus. Be VERY prudent
6 red chinese dates
2-3 pandan leaves (pandanus leaves/ screwpine leaves) tied in a knot
100g of pak kor/ peh kueh (gingko nuts)
a couple of quail’s egg
wonton skin (optional)
rock sugar - according to taste

Soak the white fungus in warm water for a couple of hours. The reason this dish is called growing treasures is because the fungus grows and expands and nearly pop! It is HUGE. A fistfull will grow into a huge potful if you are not careful, and you won’t be able to fit anything else in it.

After the fungus is semi-soft, pop it into the pot and start boiling. You can now put those in:

rock sugar and tied pandan leaves.

Let it boil away merrily for an hour, and then add the dates. In the meantime, crack open the gingko nuts. Make sure YOU REMOVE THE HEART OF THE NUT with a toothpick…if you do not do that you will be very,very sorry when you bite into the extremely bitter centre. Me, in emulating the year of the golden pig, got some pre-cracked, de-hearted gingko nuts. Cheating, my mother laughed at me.

Depending on how long you’ve soaked your white fungus, you might only need to cook it for 2 hours, or like me, you might need more than that. Gingko nuts need at least an hour in the pot, so time it carefully.

When you are satisfied that the fungus is completely cooked, add the wonton skins and the quails’ egg for a quick boil to heat through,should not take more than 5 minutes.

mmmmmmmm…the sweet taste of home cooked thong sui.

I sometimes feel I’ve been bitten by the chinky bug..my past couple of posts have all been ‘in the spirit of chinese new year’. Maybe I’m trying to prove to myself I can do happy canto techno…

Chinese New Year in my family starts with a buffet at some 5 starred hotel. Chinese New Year in my small family now starts with a mad dash to my local chinese supermarket) for some steamboat foodstuff. So last Friday, I rushed down to Wing Lee Hong after work to stock up on fishballs, prawns, noodles, wonton skin, bok choy,fish tofu, tofu and some quails’ eggs. I also bought a pot of hotpot bean sauce, just to see how it tasted like. Being in the rush of the hoardes of chinese people preparing for their new year as well made me feel, if only for a moment, part of a community preparing for the same celebration - just like christmas.

Saturday afternoon started with making the stock for the steam boat to go happily boiling in. It was a simple stock made out of 3 good-sized pork ribs and a couple of cracked peppercorns. It is then left merrily boiling for a good 3-4 hours to get the full flavour out of the marrow and the flesh.

For wonton filling:

1 pound minced pork
2 finely minced water chestunts
A dash or two of Lea & Perrins sauce
A dash of good-quality soy sauce (I import mine from Penang,so sue me)
some dried shitaake mushrooms, finely minced
pepper
some cornflour

In the meantime, defrost all the frozen foodstuff. Make sure that wonton skins, if frozen, are left out for a good 12 hours before you need it - it is NOT usable unfrozen.

Wontons are very easy to make, and much fun as well. Mix the inggredients for the filling well,coating all of the meat with the seasonings. With your fingers, wet two corners of the wonton skin. Scoop a spoonful of stuffing and place it right in the middle, close the corners up so it forms a triangle. Apologies for lack of pictures - it was then that my camera decided to tell me that I am running out of pictures, so I had to be selective.

Its so easy even Bacon can make it :).

Oh, don’t forget to hard boil your quail’s eggs as well. I once saw some kwai lous drop the whole egg in shell and all in the steamboat’s stock - DO NOT DO THAT! Imagine all the chicken shit that you would be slurping in addition to your delicious stock.Gross.

Boil the eggs separately, and peel the shell off - that way all the bird crap on the shells are boiled and removed separate from your stock.Quail’s eggs are pretty small, I tend to just boil it for 3 mins and turn the gas off whilst it continues cooking.

ta-da!

Start dropping whatever you want to eat into the boiling stock. Trick is, anything that is floating is cooked and ready to eat, so tuck in! Most people like rice or noodles to go with it as well, but seeing that me and bacon weren’t that hungry we gave that a miss.

Hmm…what’s for dessert?

in the spirit of chinese new year…i present to you the ubiquitious straits chinese must-have on all happy occasions of wedding, new years and birthdays:

kiam chye ark(Hok.) /ham choy ngap(Can.) /salted vegetable with duck soup(Eng.)

Everytime I refused to follow my parents back to my maternal grandmother’s apartment, she(grandma) would try to seduce me by offering to make my favourite soup of kiam chye ark. It is basically a simple concotion of duck, pig’s trotters and salted mustard leaves but it produces the most wonderfully complex flavours known to men, infusing the kitchen with the signature aroma that had seduced me for so many years. Not many non-straits chinese would know about this dish, I have never seen it sold anywhere other than in Penang. It is one of the traditional dishes to originate from the gourmet central of Malaysia and the island of my birth - other specialties include hokkien(prawn) mee,lam mee (birthday mee), lorh mee (noodle with thick eggy sauce, diff from KL’s) and of course many,many more. To be born in Penang is akin to being born an automatic glutton and I tend to think I make quite a good glutton.

My mom has tried making it but sort of failed miserably because she is healthy - no fatty meats and minimal saltiness. I would wolf down 3 bowls easy of this soup everytime I am at my grandma’s - it would sorta be like MY soup because I love it so much.I had always thought of it as a really hard dish to adjust flavours to because it is a complex mix of sweetness,sourness and saltiness.

As I lurked over a newly discovered blog, I realized its not so hard after all. Initially, I was going to follow her recipie note-for-note; but in the end I rang home and got grandma’s recipie,which has slight variations.

Inggredients:
1 duck (mine was 1.95kg)
1 pig trotter (my butcher did not have any,so mine was without)
2 nutmeg seeds
dried chinese/shitaake mushrooms (soaked and sliced)
3 packs salted mustard leaves (kiam chye/ham choy) - make sure its washed and soaked;i found a dried worm in mine.
3 good sized tomatoes
2 big onions

chop your duck up into 8 pieces; trying to remove as much of the skin and fat as you can. If you can’t seem to de-skin your duck, it’s ok, let it be, but you would need to skim the fat off your soup later

Using a huge pot, boil around 3 liters of water and throw in your duck when it starts to boil. If you are very hard working, let the duck boil for around 5 mins to remove the scum from it, throw the scummy water away, and reboil it again in fresh water. Otherwise, spend time skimming the scum off later when your soup is cooked

soak your salted vegetable for around 5-10 minutes, taking care to clean it properly
chop the vegetable into pieces of around 5cm in length, and boil it together with the duck.

Include the rest of the inggredients and let it boil away merrily for at least 2 hours.

ta-da!Ok, not much to look at, but IT DOES LOOK LIKE THAT! Honest.I did not come up with some fugly looking dish and pass it off as nice.

I am like so proud of myself. if you are new to this masak masak series or you do not know me in real, you should know that I am a relatively inexperienced novice cook - when I choose to cook I do really simple pastas, curries and stirfrys.So to produce a soup on the same level as my grandma is - an achievement even my mommy is proud of.

*sniff*sniff*

Just because I’ve done this a number of times doesn’t mean that it gets better with time. It is always hard being away from family in times of celebration.And there are no bigger celebration than the annual Chinese New Year. As much as I hate the yearly trek of traffic jams in the name of celebration, I love all the fuss really. I love scoffing down all the food in name of celebration, the laziness of the whole celebration, the yeesang and the reunion dinner that is always held at a hotel - the last time my family cooked a reunion dinner was nearly 20 years ago.

It’s not often that we (as a family - I do it all the time hee hee) go for buffets, so that once a year occasion is usually met with whooping joy even though the food is usually bad and they sometimes have lameass competitions.I miss the day-before rush to get the freshest fruits and the best meats from the wet market and the tradition of visiting ancestral gods at the ancestral village at the stroke of midnight. That is the one day in the year I feel close to my roots and what it is to be a fourth-generation malaysian chinese of the fisherman stock.The smell of burning incense, the loud incessant karaoke blasting through the village complete with mahjong tiles clucking always makes me feel like I belong, if only for a moment. Beer cans are pushed around in truckloads like a carlsberg sponsored event. The females are forced upon bottles of mineral water.And all the while, the karaoke continues blasting like crazy frog on heat.

And the next moment it is gone. I will never be able to connect with the karaoke-blasting sunflower seed-cracking people sitting around every year at the ‘community centre’ awaiting the dawn of the new year. They call each other pighead and smelly teat (not kidding) and treat me like the urbanite I am; gawking at my mannerism and my false airs. The flailing ties that connect us as the same family ( we’re all connected by surname) will end with my father being recognized as the cheeky 3-year old who ran up and down the village in his diapers ready for a game of cards. Me and my brother do not belong here, with the scary-looking ancestral gods and ruddy faced fisherman pushing beers into our hands. We belong in the Starbucks generation, but has Starbucks ever believed that we were one of them,urbanites so completely influenced by commercialization that we do not belong to the people that is part and parcel of a huge family?Of our huge family?

The first day of chinese new year will always start with a vegetarian meal and then off to my maternal grandmother’s. Now here is when it gets even more confusing. Both maternal grandparents are adopted, which makes roots tracing a bit of a problem. Am I 100% chinese? I have no idea. Am I part of another culture three generations removed? Both my grandmothers follow the tradition of the Straits Chinese of beautiful frilly kebayas and living in sarongs all day long. My childhood food is a classic representation of the Straits Chinese food of Penang. We do not only have classic chinese foods like steamed fish and double-boiled soups, we have creamy curry chicken, tamarind-flavoured curried stingray and all sorts of kuihs ( sweetcakes)

But who am I, really?

This year’s ‘reunion dinner’ included a wide spread of hotpot/steamboat assortments and a chinese white fungus desset in my attempt to grasp at the straws of my heritage.It is as chinese as I can get without blasting karaoke, but somehow, a family of two is never the same with the frustration with dealing with a family of 100.

If you are celebrating this year of the Golden Pig with family, rememeber, no matter how painful it is (when you getting married ah?When you having children ah?) or how boring (eat eat eat gamble sleep), you choose your friends, but not your family, because they are and always will be what you are made out of.

Language ……..Native speakers…….Countries using it as official language

Chinese………..937,132,000 ………………………… 5
Spanish………..332,000,000…………………………20
English…………322,000,000…………………………115
Bengali…………189,000,000………………………… 1
Hindi /Urdu ……182,000,000………………………….2
Arabic………….174,950,000…………………………24
Portugese……..170,000,000 ………………………..5
Russian………..170,000,000………………………. 16
Japanese ……..125,000,000………………………..1
German…………98,000,000…………………………9
French………….79,572,000………………………..35

*taken from a shite history of everything that you ever need to know.

There are so many zeros behind total of native chinese speakers I can’t even count.It is more than Spanish, English, French, German AND Japanese put together.

chinky-ness rules! *blasting happy canto techno*

Kung Hei Fatt Choy/Kong Xi Fa Cai/Keong Hee Huat Chye!

mom: hmm..you owe me money

me: what owe you money - when?

mom: there…ang pow money

me : *scratches head mumbling wtf* I owe you what angpow money?

mom: I gotta give angpow on your behalf to sooo many people.You have soooo many cousins and all your cousins’ kids? And some of them their kids’ kids’ leh? Then your grandmother leh?

me: you simply give ang pow to everyone for what??! For fun isit?! I no money to give angpow to your 1000s of relatives that’s why I’m not going back for cny then you simply go and give on my behalf!?! WAH I not pokai enough??

mom: yah. it’s like that wan. HAVE to give. first year mar.it is rules. Dont care whether you are here or not MUST DIE DIE also give. why you dont know wan?If you dont want to give angpow then what for u get married?

me: BECAUSE YOU NEVER TELL ME! (and btw…i so gian want to give angpow thats why I get married isit?!)

mom: Why you don know yourself wan meh? yah.Anyway. I give ok. rm10 per pack. Maybe will be RM1000 in total. Or more.I take from your bank account ok. You where got poor - in oz most of the food also your father paid what

me: BECAUSE U BOTH DONT ALLOW ME TO PAY!!!!

me: but but…i didnt get to go back this year because I knew I got no money to give angpow..if i anyhow also must give then might as well i go back rite? Like that next year I dont get to go back already:( .

mom: not too late wat. Come back lah

me: You really think I print money? WTF………

so dear friends, pls go visit my mother. she will give u an angpow on my behalf and an orange on her behalf.heck, I am apparently distributing angpow to the whole wide world anyway…*”T^£%!”$!.