Category: Food Porn

I’m sure the locals are familiar with this. I called it “o-ka-na” in Hokkien, direct translation in English is “black olive”. The correct name is “dabai” for the natives but how does the Chinese called it? I’m not sure. I know many Foochows(a Chinese dialect group in Malaysia) like this a lot. They usually served them with dark soy sauce.

I called it “o-ka-na” because I saw it for the first time when I’m still a little girl. It’s given to us by my aunt’s boss from Sibu. It’s black in colour and my mom told me it’s a type of olive, so that’s how I invented the name 😛

Some people don’t like dabai because it has a peculiar taste. Hmm… But I don’t think it tastes strange. Dabai tastes like an olive to me hahahah… Just like those olive on the pizza except it’s a bit more stronger. You do not need to cook it, you just need to soak them in a pot of hot water until soft and they are ready for consumption.

My way of preparing is by boiling a pot of water with salt. After that, soak them and cover the pot with the lid until they are soft. That’s all. I don’t add anything to it. The saltiness of the salt and the flesh of the dabai is heavenly. Yummy… The saltiness is up to you, there is no fixed amount of salt used. I don’t like it with soy sauce(dark soy sauce right?) as it’s very messy and the taste of the soy sauce is too empowering.

By the way, the inside of the seed can be eaten too. Just “hammer” the seed and eat the inside. Sometimes it tasted a bit raw sometimes it’s tasteless. The texture is a bit like boiled peanuts.

By the way, you can’t get dabai all year round, it only comes out at certain time of the year, I’m not sure when but the last time I had it was December 2006. One more thing, I heard that dabai is very high in cholesterol. Is it true?

Nothing much happenning around. Sorry for the ad overloaded because I have nothing to blog. Will minimise my ad posts and dig something out to blog.

Popiah, one of my favourite food. It’s not easy to find good popiah nowadays. Last time my parents used to buy them from Petanak market but don’t know where’s that lady gone to now? I heard that there a nice popiah stall at Expert Food Court, Jalan Song.

What is popiah? It’s a type of spring roll usually sold and widely eaten by the Chinese community in Kuching. Is there popiah in other part of Sarawak? Does other races eat it too? Hmmm… I’m not sure about this.

The outer layer is made from pastry sheet. The inside consists of various type of veggies such as long beans, carrots, water chesnuts, salad leaves, chillies… I’m not very sure what else they have in there as different people have different fillings, different preferences. The inside is laced with sweet peanut sauce and if you prefer spicier version, you can have sweet chilli sauce added too. Popiah is consider a type of vegetarian food(I guess…) since there is no meat in there and many vegetarian shops selling it too.

The savoury taste of the filling, the crunchiness of the veggies and the softness of the tastelss pastry sheet blends really well together. So many type of flavours and so many type of textures… Oh la la… Though it’s a bit messy when eating them, you need skill for it 😛 However there are ways to make it less messy. Here’s one way…
Just use a plate and a spoon *LOL*

Haven’t dine out for quite sometimes already. So, decided to dine out for lunch today at Best Berry. They have new menu available now. The have wide selections of toasts, some of them are so cute that I don’t think you have the heart to take a bite at all.

I like their drinks. They come in drinking jars. The drink on the left is Lemon & Tea HK Style(RM3) and the one on the right is Pudding & Tea(RM3.50).

Here comes the food, very big portion.
Left: Udon Asam Laksa(RM4.90), I thought they have at least put in a bit of seafood such as prawns in there but they didn’t. Only some pineapple chuncks, lots of red onions, shreaded cucumbers and some spices unknown to me. It’s not very spicy but for those that can’t eat spicy food, I won’t recommend it. Else, you can order it 🙂
Right: Here’s something from the new menu. It’s called Fried Fotlao Rice(RM5.90). In Chinese it’s “fo tiao yi chao”, direct translation to English is “Buddha Jump One Fried” *LOL* The taste was pretty bland with lots of veggies and some seafood. The name really suits the taste 😛 If you get me. If you don’t, nevermind about it.

Best Berry is located at the same row as Kaya & Toast, Madam Tang’s, E-West, and Chicking at Petanak. Quite a nice place to hang out with friends. It’s not air-conditioned so it’s a smoker paradise.

In conjunction with VMY 2007 (Visit Malaysia Year 2007), let me introduce some local fruits today. Currently we can get a lot of these in the market.

First of all, DURIAN! King of the fruits. If you want to know more about it, click here to learn more about durian.

We have king, we should have a queen. Here’s the queen of the fruits, MANGOSTEEN. Click here to learn more about mangosteen.

When it’s the season of durians and mangosteen, you will also see RAMBUTAN around. Click here to learn more about rambutan.

Now… Let’s welcome “BUAH TERAP”. I’m not sure what it’s called in English. It belongs to the Moraceae family. I couldn’t seem to find much details about it in English. WAIT!! Finally found it!!It’s also known as “marang”, click here to learn more about “buah terap” or “marang”.

Lastly, there’s another fruit called LANGSAT but I have no photo with me. Forgotten to take them. However, you can see a portion of them in the picture above, see those small round fruits under the “buah terap”? So if you would like to know more about it, click here to learn more about langsat.

Hehehe… See how lazy I am? 😛

I’m feeling sick today, whole body is aching. Yesterday got the scare of my life, my left eye was swollened and red until I couldn’t really open my eye. Luckily after about 1 hour+, it got better, might be something that irritated it. The eyelid seems a bit swollen today and seems like there’s a small bump inside my eyelid.”Bak Jiam”? -_-“(Sorry, I don’t know what it’s called in English.) Looks like it’s the season to get sick now.

We always see pizzas in Pizza Hut, now they are having Rice Fiesta. They have two types, (1)Rice Platter with 2 Deli/Sweet & Spicy Wings and (2)Baked Cheese Rice(I couldn’t remember the actual name. It sounded something like this :P). Each comes with a glass of Ice Lemon Tea and Soup-of-the-day.

We ordered Baked Cheese Rice.
The conclusion, I don’t like the rice.