They must be paying a bomb for rental. Plus, the first time I went there, our char koay teow came after 1 hour. The waiters are frantic and busy – they don’t have time to smile at you – they are polite but they don’t smile, and they don’t bother to explain why £6 is justified to the customer – who is left to decide whether to eat more or leave.

I’m taking my business to other restaurants. I’ve decided that not eating Malaysian food isn’t a big deal in this big city that serves up a lot of other stuff that’s more worthy of the customer’s interest.

To date, I have put my hands to claypot dishes, braises, sautés, grills… I’ve recently revisited char-siu again, and it seems to be okay. I’m still not sure which cut of pork is best. I tried tenderloin the last time, and that got burnt into a fish shape, and this time I tried regular ham steak, with a bit of fatty streaks at the top. The fatty streaks make it taste yummy, but they don’t make the corners crust like I want them to because the fat melts away from the meat too easily.

Anyway, I have more ham steak leftover and I’ve decided to put them to grill later. I was thinking of getting some crunchy greens like french beans or peas, but I realized I still have carrots, mushrooms, onions and leeks, which should go well with the steak. All that combination of veggies made me think of a stew or braised ham, but I ran out of aluminium foil and didn’t want to dirty the oven than it already is.

Claypot Chicken Rice

I bought a medium sized claypot because I wanted to cook more authentic asian dishes. It’s big enough to make claypot chicken rice for two people, and so that’s what I did. I can’t remember where I got the recipe from, and usually I just sample a few recipes at a time and adapt it to my needs. Some recommend stir-frying the chicken first. Some gave the recipes that didn’t need the claypot. Some cooked the rice first.

In the end, I just went with the cook-rice-in-claypot-dump-marinated-chicken-later approach. It took quite awhile – I was wary of letting the claypot crack on the electric stove. Thankfully, it didn’t, but man – 45 minutes for claypot chicken rice? I admit it was on 3 most of the time.

Google is still my best resource for recipes. I claim to keyword search everything, but I keep thinking that there should be some way of keeping track of all that besides my delicious bookmarks. My engineer mind is running wild again.

Masters Thesis and Microsoft Research

That being said, I now have some direction as to where my Masters thesis is going. I will be working with Microsoft Research at Cambridge to study how people search for images. While most work along those lines have gone into how to make machines more effective in finding images, my thesis will focus on more social and behavioral aspects about how people search for images on a day to day basis. So now, I am getting to grips with sociology and ethnography, and there’s tons of reading to do.

I’m really looking forward to it – it will be observing people rather than keyboard and computers. It’s a nice departure after a decade of tech-talk and ritualistic paradigms of engineering supremacy. I’m welcoming this paradigm shift, on my way towards thinking more about design than systems.

More food in London

The days of snow has departed. It’s been raining sporadically over the past few days. But we were blessed with a clear day on valentines, when LL and I went to eat Italian at Il Convivio near Sloan Square. They were having a lunch deal but I couldn’t resist ordering the prosecco which was absolutely brilliant, and some sides like the deep fried zucchini. The cappucino was a bit small, though the biscotti was the best I’ve ever tasted. Why does Starbucks and all the other high street coffee shops sell biscotti that hurt your teeth? This I don’t understand.

It’s the first day of my reading week, where I have no classes but am supposed to catch up on my reading. Tomorrow a bunch of us are taking a break and heading out to grab some swiss fondue at a restaurant that has cow bell shows and yodelling.

Mexican is our backup plan in case the cows go mad.

It’s indirectly related to the tau eu kay I made today, which is very Nonya, like my background (yeah, I have peranakan roots from my dad). I adapted from these two recipes, and I realized I put too much water, so the chicken didn’t come out all goo-ey like in the pictures. Instead I was left with a soupy sauce, which tasted super herby from the chinese 5-spice powder.

Note to self: Next time, put less water, or cook the chicken and simmer first before putting water.

I want to buy so many things but I am holding back because we’ve been blowing our eat-out budget again and again (even after LL increased it). So in an effort to cook more often, I went out and bought dried noodles that will keep for centuries, so that I don’t have to worry about food turning stale so fast. I only have two hands and I can’t buy a lot of food and carry them back, so I have to make several trips in a week.

Anyway, my wife says my cooking is improving. She asked for more rice today, which is a first. I have never seen her ask for rice before. Maybe she likes water-y tau eu kay. All the ones I’ve had are NOT water-y. She said the smell is accurate and the taste is accurate – just not thick like they usually do. I also think I put too much 5-spice powder.

The next dish I want to make is bolognese sauce for pasta. Just because Iceland was selling 8 tomatoes for £1 and I need to eat tomatoes before they go bad. I also have ground beef which I need to consume. And I have tons of medium-sized onions left.

I have a problem in that I can only decide what my stomach wants to eat. So, I have no menu for the week, and I cook whatever’s in my pantry, or starve – because my stomach rules over my head. If it doesn’t want to eat something, it goes without it fine.

Of course, this is not fine. I need some way to set up some kind of structure so that I can go and buy food and cook it and have less wastage, because it stinks up the refridgerator (which is extremely small) and fungus feels absolutely yucky.

So what I’m doing is browsing recipes and keeping track of things I want to try. I take note of all the consumables and other stuff that I should store up in my pantry (flour, spices, herbs). So far, that’s been good. The 5-spice powder came about because I was reading another recipe from somewhere that needed it, so that’s why I bought it, although I never got around to cooking that dish. So I was happy that the tau eu kay recipe asked for it.

If any of you cook chinese/local meals – please teach me your stuff!

I haven’t yet made any

• curries
• fish dishes
• desserts (sago and gula melaka?)
• dim sum

So if you’ve got simple, great recipes for those – please drop a comment here.

I grabbed some recipes (here, here,and here) from Google and decided to give it a try. My wok wasn’t hot enough cos I was using an electric stove. I didn’t have belacan or sambal. Maybe I should have mixed the chili oil with some sugar, but I thought it tasted quite sweet already.

Some more I had lup cheong thrown in. The shrimps shrank from a 20 sen size to a 5 sen size… ????? I didn’t know they could shrink so small. The shrimps were from Netherlands or something. They eat a lot there, like in Ikea (cold water prawns).

Anyway, I think I should have put more soy sauce. I put like 4 tablespoons into my dish, which was sort of medium-sized – but it didn’t seem salty enough. I also used the oil from the chili oil (just the oil, not the chili) to cook everything. I did add about a healthy teaspoon of chili after frying the kuey teow a fair bit. I think 1 tablespoon of dark soy sauce is enough. More than that and it would taste really weird.

The taugeh tasted good though. I think I’ll make a batch of it in a few days’ time with sesame seed oil and soy sauce. Yummy.

I didn’t bother taking a photo because I was busy eating.

The trick is to keep the pan super hot and sear the steak, which should be marinated on pepper/salt and olive oil. 1 minutes 30 seconds on each side for medium. 8 minutes total for well done. Another recipe says not to overwhelm the flavor with too much pepper and salt. Rub in with fingers. OK.

Note to self: canned potatoes and peas don’t taste like the real thing.

10 bonus points for an edible budget steak meal for two.

I sat back after my last bite of steak and contemplated how I was slowly sinking into a state of stupor, having only consumed bits of food and research papers for the past 2 days. Maybe that was what made me download more emo and folk albums, and buy myself a ticket to see Feeder this Tuesday – alone.

Babi Guling Spesial, originally uploaded by jaremfan.

This is my photo tribute to Ibu Oka, the famous babi guling stall in Ubud, Bali. Good visuals help to prepare the meal, and I present to you nothing less than the delectable impression of this local delicacy.

Pictured above here is the Babi Guling Spesial – the dish that comes with the works. Spesial just means it’s served on a plate of rice. The other serving is “pisah”, which means the rice and meat are served seperately, albeit a larger serving. The nasi spesial costs Rp15,000 and the nasi pisah costs Rp25,000 due the larger serving.

The wait isn’t unbearably lengthy. The laid-back culture here affords a bit of relaxation in the relatively cool shades under the trees, umbrellas and main dining area.

The crowd builds up REALLY FAST. The staff comes in to start preparing around 11am, and the gates open around 12pm. You’ll see all sorts of people here – locals and tourists alike.

The waitresses are relatively helpful. They really work in an unceasingly hurried pace not very common to Bali. You’ll have to be nice. Lots are waiting in line. In fact the drinks can sometimes take longer than the dishes to arrive.

The onset is simple – it’s all about one dish, and one dish only. Everything else is secondary. There’s not much choice, otherwise. If you’re looking for mee goreng or satay, you need to go next door, to Bumbu Bali, which I hear is pretty good, too.

I think people keep coming back because it’s such a charming place. And undoubtedly, the meals never fail to disappoint. It’s as though the customers and the business work closely together to get the right blend of “Ibu Oka” experience.

This is my third time here, since 2002. Little has changed about this place.

But then, few things need changing in Bali – a place where time catches up to you, not the other way around.

This is why I keep coming back.

The good people here and spent long lifetimes building intricate detail into every single thing – their culture, art, heritage, service and land.

It’s curious how the world tends to navigate around it. Bali is a pit stop for life’s reflection.

When will you get here?

If you do, give this guy a call: Made (pronounced “mah day”) at +62-8123985395. He is my regular tour guide around the island, and has been for the last 2 years. A very dependable and decent guy, his service is reasonably priced and he’ll try to accommodate customized requests like day trips to Ubud, art shopping, or more off-beat tours (he took us Jatiluwih).

Meanwhile, time will move along. Pigs will be slaughtered. People will come and go.

Just to show you some internal workings of what makes this babi guling so special:

It’s cooked inside as well as outside.

If you do get here, time it well. 5 pigs come and go in one day. Servings start at 12pm, and often end at 2pm.

Potatoes, Carrots, Oxtail!, originally uploaded by jaremfan.

Big car fans, a big portion of the Malaysian population, indulge in a relatively passive sport I call “car-gazing”. It’s kind of like shoe-gazing, but bigger and faster.

The sport involves attempting to find pleasing visual distraction to match our daydreams when we’re out on the street, whether it be about life, the weather or the curry spot on your shirt.

Most of these pleasing visual distraction are either people or cars. Now, the reason why cars tend to be a better bet is because 90% of most Malaysians already travel on the road, anyway… and the rest are in Singapore.

And the other reason why cars are so easy to notice is because there are so many gray Wiras and Wajas on the road. The moment a red BMW appears, it stands out like Hillary Clinton in Uganda… and that’s WITH the auntie driving inside.

Now on the matter of car-gazing, everyone’s an expert. You’ll find that everyone has something to say about any kind of car, be it a Proton or not. And the reason is this – there’s a type of car for every single human being on the planet. So talking about cars is EVERYBODY’s business.

The only time they stop talking is when, lo and behold, a giant Harley appears, cruises past all the indiscriminate four-wheeled objects, and rides off into the sunset of dreams – as though Time itself had stopped to take a pee and come back to find the world in a state of disarray.

And this is particularly the case because the Harley makes a poignant statement that all those car people have completely lost the plot about the cup-holders and seven-seater layouts and digital odometers and on and on and on.

This brings me to the subject of soups – on which everyone is an expert on… because they know how to tell their mushroom soup from their minestrone and their mother-in-law’s ginseng explosion.

They’ll be able to tell you that the best mushroom soup is in Pizza Uno’s, or Mama Chop and Papa Grill, or at the Equatorial Hotel, or… wait, aren’t they all sort of the same? People will continue to talk… right up to the point of an oxtail soup. In which, they stop and go… “that’s just something The Ship serves because it used to serve that since the 1950s”.

Up until some “uncle” brings them to this nondescript pub called Rennie’s on Jalan Gasing to try the oxtail soup (it’s SO nondescript that you can’t tell if it’s closed or open). The moment you step in, Time itself stops, just like in Hotel California. And you sit on the table, and order the Oxtail soup, because that’s pretty much the only thing you want to order because the menu is so short, it would fit in your shirt pocket.

And from the moment you walk in to the moment you feast your eyes on the sizzlingly boiling claypot broth – your mind gets further and further away from the mushroom soup. Plainly, mushroom soups don’t matter anymore. And neither do any other kinds of soup. Because everything you knew about soups doesn’t apply here.

Sure, I could talk about how REAL carrots and potatoes are used (not the peanut sized ones), or how succulent the oxtail meat is, or how flavourfully complex the concoction is.

But that’s beside the point.

What’s intriguing is that Rennie’s has been around since 1976, appealing to a crowd of veteran journalists, run by Trudy Klassen, wife of the founder, the late Rennie Klassen, who was also once a president of the Selangor and Federal Territory Pub Owner’s Association.

The oxtail soup is a whole new story by itself. I can’t tell you about it, because I forgot what I learnt about it the first time I’d been here – more than 10 years ago – but it’s got some secret stuff that was a home-made recipe, and that’s how it stuck.

Secret or not, that stuff works. I was there a few weeks ago, and my wife and I avoided conversation because we were so immersed in it. And you would think that for RM18, we’d order one bowl and share between the two of us. But that’s clearly not the way to enjoy this speciality. It was designed as a full meal… with a bit of garlic bread on the side. And if you get tired from eating too fast, you can take a break and gaze at old men discussing politics or run your palms through the plaid-patterned tablecloth, and then get back in again.

This thing at Rennie’s is beyond the talk of soups. It’s about that meal that’s meant to be enjoyed just-so – in all completeness, drenched in all that old-school pubbery and timelessness. Quite like a Harley, actually.

Rennie’s House of Oxtail
No. 119, Jalan Gasing, Petaling Jaya Selangor 46000 (near the Satellite restauraunt Ipoh chicken rice)
Tel : 03-7955-2541

I found a really good Thai restaurant in PJ in Section 5, near PJ Old Town and Jalan Gasing. It’s right behind the park (that hosts a bird event every weekend) that’s adjacent to the Templer roundabout . There weren’t many reviews on it, so I decided to post one.

The tomyam is extremely flavorful – lots of prawns and sotong inside. The kangkung had a nice crunch to it, and I liked how it tasted. I just wish they didn’t put so much chili. I don’t know if it was anything special, but anyway, I enjoyed that. We also ordered the “no name” fried chicken, which was really juicy.

The food was quite spicy – so much that I was sweating and tearing.

It was just the two of us, and the servings were quite large despite being the smallest serving. It would be better to go in a larger group. I would be keen to try the fish, somtum and other stuff.

Quite recommended.

Apart from the food review, I also observed that Malaysian dish servings are generally larger – in Bangkok, a typical meal with tomyam, chicken, and greens were half the size of what we ordered, and they were more than sufficient to fill our tummies.

I’m quite a fan of Bangkok, Thailand. I must make mention one of its derivatives - Black Canyon Coffee, which has recently appeared in some Klang Valley spots. I just got back from the one at Summit, USJ, with LL.

She reported the pad thai isn’t as good as the ones in Thailand, and I suppose not everything is authentically Thai about Black Canyon. The iced mocha was okay, though. What I previously enjoyed was some gourmet hot coffee, like the one displayed in the picture – but I decided tonight was not a good night for hot coffee.

I might make a trip back another day.

The menu is a carbon copy of the one in Bangkok, though, with RM conversions (almost dollar to dollar). So, the prices are relatively decent.

What makes it different is how BCC communicates its own brand of coffee culture – just like how the Japanese have their own perspectives of McDonald’s, all packaged for local consumption (Tsukimi burger, anyone?)

For example, it has all sorts of sugary phrases pasted gratuitously across the walls and menu pages, on their coffee mugs and saucers – “a drink from Paradise… available on Earth”, reads this one in the picture here.

You can’t blame the Thais for their entrepreneurial spirit – God bless their souls. I hope we Malaysians warm up to this. Coffee Bean and Starbucks are getting a bit old.

For some odd reason, emotion got the better half of me, and I decided to go buy the Bialetti Mukka Express Cappucino maker. I blogged about my initial discovery a few months ago, when I had dinner at Neroteca with LL.

It operates in the same fashion as Bialetti’s original Moka Express espresso maker invention by Alfonso Bialetti, back in 1933. The only difference is that this one makes cappuccino and latte, assuming the inclusion of milk (yum!) and frothing.

I’ve always wanted a stovetop espresso maker, but I’ve always refrained from it due to the fact that I already have a french press (two, in fact), and I’m not too expert about mixing espresso and milk and doing the frothing bit to get my lattes and cappuccinos.

The Mukka Express makes it dead simple. It has markings to tell you when to stop pouring water and milk, and you only need to fill enough coffee grounds to fit the filter reservoir. The rest of it boils down to choice of grounds, water quality, milk type, and heat.

My first cuppa tasted creamy and rich, which is the way I always like my coffee, but I failed to produce the froth. I think I didn’t press the pressure valve or something. A clean pressure valve also tends to guarantee proper production of milk froth.

The video on the website gives me some indication of what I should be aiming for. The best part is, the coffee improves with regular use.

I was expecting the price to be RM100ish, but the lady said they were selling it for RM260. I decided to buy it anyway, since I thought I’d be making coffee more regularly now. Oddly enough, it’s selling at USD89 on Bialetti’s website, so RM260 is quite a steal.

It’s going to be tough if you’re looking to get one from Neroteca, ‘cos I got the last one in stock. But the lady said they’ll bring more in the near future. She also said there were 3 sizes although there’s really only one. What the hey?

Update:

The trick to getting froth is to turn off the heat when you hear the “pop” sound from the frothing. Pour immediately.