Announcing...........

The arrival of my new babies from Amazon.com!!!

1) Dim Sum by Ellen Leong Blonder - had a peek through and I love it already. Watercolour paintings on how to pleat a dumpling, who couldn't love that???



2) Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan - the must-have on the foodie blogosphere. Never mind that I don't have a real oven....but one can always dream for USD12.99, no?

Wistful sigh.............can't wait to take them home :)

Next on the never ending wishlist - Falling Cloudberries.

On Cooking for Others, and Beggar's Chicken for Lazy Ppl

Lately I've been slack with food writing lately. I'm as obsessed with it as ever, feverishly draining my hard earned cash impulse-clicking on Amazon and MPH.com.

My cookbook repertoire now includes Nigella Lawson, Jean Georges Vongerichten, and soon, Dorie Greenspan. I have books on how to make Yorkshire pudding ("all puffed up and glorious, sinful with whipped cream and golden syrup"), Vietnamese Pho, Paneer, Thai Green Curry, Beggar's chicken, Penang Nasi Kandar.

Cooking interests me, but the serving, the offering of a piece of my work to others is what gives me the real rush, I realize.

Food photography, to be honest, bores me. I just don't have the patience to adjust camera angles and lighting. Maybe it's because my photos never come out the way I want it....but the real rush comes from when people taste it. My heart breaks and I brood for days when my food isn't finished. Why why why Too much salt. Too little salt. Pan was too hot. Shouldn't have added water why why why why

I have a friend, who - bless her - seems to really enjoy to cook for - us. But when we sit down to her cooking, and start reminiscing about how we miss our long lost Char Koay Teow and Chee Cheong Fun and Briyani Rice from home, I start to feel sorry for her. Because you see, we're doing what I normally do when I sit down to bowl of Maggie Mee, or worse, when I'm on a diet, All-Bran or microwaved egg whites, my cookbook/magazine in front of me and the TV on the food channel - we're imagining we're eating those foods we miss/dream about while chewing on substandard stuff. This, to me, is rather saddening. One cannot, of course, put the blame on anyone. But let's face it, it is NOT the kind of feedback I want for all my banging and clanging in a blistering kitchen.

So that's why, despite my interest in Indian cookery and the promise of 5 ingredients, 50 dishes, I yet to cook an Indian dish. But I have made Lor Mai Kai (3 times), risked a shortcut Beggar's Chicken and tried about 10 different mushroom dishes, because I know AK will like them.

So says Nigella, it is about giving pleasure to others, and it does not necessarily need to make us suffer in the process.

Shortcut Beggar's Chicken (serves 2) , a One-Baking-Tray-Meal

Enough chicken pieces for 2 persons
2-3 small carrots or 1 1/2 large ones, peeled and sliced into 1.5 cm-ish thick coins
About 8 shitake mushrooms, soaked in hot water for 10 minutes and quartered, keep the soaking water
Goji berries, half a handful
1/2 a honey date, broken up into small pieces or 5 red dates
A few keichi (chinese herb)
About 1 cup chicken stock, or water will do in a pinch

1 tbsp light soy sauce
t tbsp ShaoXing wine
1 tsp sesame oil
White pepper

Extra soy sauce, wine, oil and pepper to taste'

1 baking tray, aluminium foil

Preheat the oven to 190 degC.
Marinate the chicken pieces in the seasonings overnight in a plastic bag.
In a baking tray, strew the chicken pieces, carrot coins, soaked mushrooms, keichi and dates/berries. It's good if your pan can fit all of them, but if not, layer them - herbs and dates/berries at the bottom, chicken pieces and fit the mushrooms and carrots in between the chicken pieces.
Pour over the chicken stock and mushroom water.
Cover the tray with foil, poke some holes in the foil with a fork to let out the steam and roast for about 1 hour.

(enough time to spend 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer and do some cooldown stretches)

In the last 15 minutes, remove the foil and let the chicken brown. Taste the gravy and season as necessary.

Serve with white rice and sliced red chillies in soy sauce.

The chicken will be tender and juicy, with nicely browned skin. Carrots will be baked up sweet, and the gravy will be all herbal frangrance and concentrated with a bitterish (from the herbs), sweet (from the dates and berries), good-for-you kind of flavour. And the mushrooms - one bite and all that flavoursome juiciness rushes out and fills your mouth. We ate this, devoured this, on a Monday evening. Many repeats to come.

Forgive the kitsch and the over-description. But this is what Nigella-ism is about - maximum pleasure for minimum effort. .

Choices Today....what happens tommorrow?

I've been working in kind of a pretend-to-be-busy stupor for a couple of months now. Funny thing is, when expectations are low it is so much easier to assert oneself.

When expectations are plonked so directly in front of you, then one starts to think waaaay too much.

Couple this with jadedness, fear of what other people think, reluctance to "ask" out of (again) fear of looking incompetent.

It's time to start from Zero again, time to humble oneself.

This Has To Stop (???)

I haven't exercised for an entire month now and am feeling the effects.

My shoulder aches more and my tummy is now straining against my pants and I really hate that feeling. Yeesh.

Too much dining on the company credit card and taxi rides. Not enough movement all in all :(

Stupid hypothyroid.

Time for a detox this weekend.

Yahah...and next week the sinning starts all over again.

Mornings - buffet breakfast (nasi lemak, prawn sambal, and to offset dinner, all-bran cereal with soy milk

Lunch - shiok malay rice with lots of curry and sambal or at the Chinese Restaurant nearby - giant river prawns, scallops stir fried with vegetables, szechuan soup, fried rice.

Dinner Day 1 - Pork Chops and Bratwurst plus stolen crispy pork skin from AK's pork knuckle at Mr. Ho's fine foods
Dinner Day 2 - Japanese food - unagi, unagi omelette, butter braised mushrooms, chicken tonkatsu and grilled mushrooms
Dinner Day 3 - Room service - fried rice with giganto prawns, chicken and beef satay, tumeric chicken wings
Dinner Day 4 - Arabian buffet - rice and lamb pilaf, grilled beef, lamb meatballs, plus chilled seafood (mussels and scallops) plus chocolate fondue for dessert!

And it's been like this for the past 2 weeks. My body is seriously feeling the effects of too much good food and too little exercise.

Think I'll survive on Assam laksa and fruit on my next visits.

Yeah right.

Kingdom of Cambodia - Siam Reap & Angkor

Well, a lot of walking, a lot of climbing up stairs designed to make us crawl/grovel on all fours in heat that seared the skin and numbed the mind.

But it was fun, really. And those temples of the God-Kings of Angkor are really a sight to behold, monuments to their vision, ambition and ego. After the fall of Angkor, add nature and another 500 years and the result is a wild mixture of stone and roots, melded into one entity.

Kingdom of Cambodia - Phnom Penh

AK and Deb in front of the Independence Monument in Phnom Penh.

Nearby the airport, you can pay some USD to shoot real AK-47s/shotguns, thanks to the Cambodian soldiers trying to make an extra living. We paid USD25 to shoot 5 rounds of the shotgun. Not my cup of tea, I was terrified of the whole gun+shoot thingy.

City Sights:

Phnom Penh is NOT a pedestrian friendly city, let me tell you. Dozens of motorcycles with entire families on them (mothers clutching their babies, children in the front and in between)/tuk-tuks/cars heading towards all directions at a time. It took us a good few minutes to muster our courage to jaywalk across and pray for the best.

You can carry almost anything on a motorcycle in Phnom Penh - we saw a couple dozen chickens, an entire pig all trussed up (still alive) and immobile in a long basket and one that really made me cringe - a large sheet of glass being held upright by the pillion rider.

Sign at the Killing Fields. I don't really wanna post too much about it or S-21 here, suffice to say that it is a sordid reminder of the deepest darkest deeds the human soul is capable of.

Kingdom of Cambodia

We're baa............accck from the Kingdom of Cambodia.

Some lessons learnt from this trip:

1) When it comes to packing medication, prepare for the worst (and I mean worst). And don't think just because we didn't experience it in Paris/Rome/Amsterdam/Bario, doesn't mean our stomachs are made of lead. Enter Phnom Penh and Siam Reap, banana-coconut milk shakes, fish amok and one million flies in the vicinity and yes oh yes, we're not as invulnerable as we thought we were. Thank goodness we passed on the spiced river snails and deep fried creepy-crawlies (beetles, tiny whole frogs, crickets, hairy looking-spiders the size of 50-cent coins).

2) When it comes to money, don't even think of scraping by. Always size up the wad of cash by at least 50%. Sure, it just might get stolen, but at least you escape that super lousy feeling of having to count pennies, not because you can't afford it but simply because of under-estimation of world inflation rates. And prices quoted in the Lonely Planet written in 2005 ARE NOT going to hold up in 2008. *Smacks forehead*

3) We got it good here in Malaysia. Clean water, constant electricity supply. In Cambodia diesel generators abound because of the inconsisteny of the electricity supply, and our tuk-tuk driver used water from a rain puddle from the shower the night before to wash down his motorcycle. Talk about making the best of what one has.

4) Do we really know how good we got it? Nevermind the corruption in out government, at least we didn't have our government+intellectuals+educated class almost totally wiped out by a paranoid Paris-educated radicalist who wanted a nation of farmers and declared Year Zero when he took power. At least we know where most of our aunties/uncles/ grandfathers/mothers/fathers are. Most Cambodians have to pay their respects at the Choeng Ek Killing fields to the Stupa with 5000 skulls, because they don't know where they're buried, because they were murdered in such a way that belied all respect for the human soul.

I truly wonder how is a nation to heal, emotionally, spiritually after such an atrocity by its very own. But you gotta give them credit for their pluck and their spirit.

We have found Cambodians to be honest, gentle and so hospitable it made staying in the guesthouses so special. We'd like to thank the Manor Guesthouse, for their wonderful map and directions, for arranging our transport for us, for shielding us with umbrellas when we arrived there in pouring rain. We thank the Rosy Guesthouse in Siam Reap for their undemanded concern when AK was sick, for their personalized room service, for getting us on the Tuk-Tuk to the clinic. To our wonderful Tuk Tuk driver Vithu who guided us throughout Siam Reap over bumpy roads and sandstorms and rain, who made sure we were bundled up in the little cart and who embodies, with his determination to learn and speak English to guide us, and his caring for us, all that is so magnificient about this country.

So thank you, Kingdom of Cambodia, and my very best to you.