A hankering for the real thing ....

Something less serious, on my favorite subject – FOOD, Glorious food.

Good ol' chicken rice, you can't get it easily anymore. By this I mean chicken rice cooked the traditional way. A nice chicken stock is made from the legs, necks, etc and then used to boil the rice with fat you liposuctioned from the chooks; enhanced with ginger, salt, and other ingredients.. Rice cooked this way is nice enough to eat on its own, to borrow a phrase.

The chicken will be steamed not boiled as nowadays; no roast chicky for the true gourmand. Wonder who steams chickens the old fashioned way anymore. Steamed chooks actually taste sweeter as they retain the juices which are otherwise lost when boiled.

I recall when I was a wee kid my mum used to cook chicken rice for the whole gang on alternate Sundays. She reared her own chooks in a hutch I built for her at the back of the house; damn proud of it I was. She'd boil water and select the fattest unfortunate chook, pulled the feathers from the gullet area, then enlist the services of her most blood thirsty son namely yours truly here - the rest of her brood were too squeamish; and I'd blithely slit the poor bugger's throat while she held on to the squirming bird's legs and neck. Norman Bates's rival was on the prowl again! Now I do the squirming as I shudder at the thought of how I could do it then. It was by the grace of Providence I didn't graduate to become a serial killer.

Nostalgic, those were the days. Chicken rice you get now just don't taste as good anymore. The rice is boiled with bottled stock or cubes with margarine, coming out a sickly pale yellow and tasting as bad. Chickens are boiled and then immersed in cool water; ostensibly to improve texture. Old mamas will tell you to avoid such boiled chooks if you are in the midst of a coughing spell; don't really know why.

You ever thought how many plates of chicken rice can be served from just 1 carcass? I did, but never figured it out. Suffice to say, it is many. Vendors employ many tactics to squeeze out as many servings as they can. The breast meat is often cut into 2 layers as it is thick. One layer will have the original skin, then the second layer will be adorned by skin transplanted from another unsaleable part of the chook such as the back. Another trick is to smash the flat of the cleaver on the portion, squashing and loosening out the meat to make it look more substantial. This trick is the favorite of vendors in Johor Bahru as I have observed. I know as I grew up in ol' JB.

A must have condiment with this meal is ground chilli mix - made from chillies, garlic, lime juice, sugar and salt. Dip the chicken slices in this mix, heavenly taste. The mix you get from vendors are made with artificial vinegar or acetic acid, the taste is way off the mark. Sometimes, you just can't cut any corners.

Sometimes, the simplest things are the best.

House brands

House brands of common food and household items are a boon for the budget conscious.
This is mainly in the realm of hypermarkets such as Tesco, Giant and Carrefour. With their huge bargaining power and marketing channels, they are able to extract good deals from producers. The lower price is then passed on to the consumer.

House brands with lower prices generally do not equate lower quality, though the imported items do tend to be superior. There are probably people who fight shy of house brands; do not want to be caught dead in possession of such items for fear of being labelled cheapskates. Such are pitiful souls who don't know how to stretch their ringgit.

My personal exposure to house brands is mostly limited to that of Tesco's. No, I am not paid by them to plug their house brand. A large proportion of the range is actually imported from the UK, and end up selling for substantially less than the equivalent locally made item. How is this possible? Buying power, economies of scale and efficient logistics; remember Tesco has a worldwide presence. Producers would much rather make less per unit and much more overall thru supplying a huge volume of goods; the bigger cake-small slice rationale.

Which brings to mind; how are our local producers able to survive? Given the choice between imported and local with the former having better quality and a lower price to boot, most people would plumb for the imported - halal status not withstanding. Are local producers just plain inefficient or they just greedy in trying to get a bigger margin? Trying to take local consumers for a ride? Or just not aggressive enough. The mediocre quality of their goods hardly puts them in a position to penetrate oversea markets? What about hushed up 'arrangements' between competitors to fix the market?

Think on.............

Light & Deadly

Quick! ditch those aluminium pots and pans you have lying around the house. Sell them for scrap, aluminium fetches a good price nowadays.

Has this guy gone bonkers or something? Sorry to disappoint you, still same old rambler. I didn't go into the scrap recycling business either.

Seriously, aluminium has long been suspected as a contributory factor to the onset of Alzheimer's disease; though not conclusively proven. Best to minimise the risks and keep one's fingers crossed, mine are crossed till they turn blue.

My dear mom is now 84 years young; losing her memory – suspected Alzheimer's.
Praise the Lord that her health is very good indeed. Short term or recent memory is very bad but has photographic recall for yesteryears' happenings. To test her during the last CNY balik kampung, I asked her about her life before I was born. She could recall every detail well; I even managed to extract from her some recipes for comfort food that I sorely missed. During the CNY binge of eating and sitting around, my mind got around thinking what brought about her condition. It is not a simple case of her hard disk getting full. I then recalled that she used a lot of aluminium cookware; stainless steel or tempered glass ones were not generally available then. Lord have mercy, I ate a lot of food (albeit delicious) from those pots and pans too. Am I destined to get Alzheimer's too? This is rather worrisome to say the least. I hope I don't get to the stage where I have to jot down my life's details in a little pocket book or make that a PDA in this digital age. Good thing I haven't been quaffing down fizzy drinks in aluminium cans for a long time. Hmmm, must inspect restaurants' kitchens before I eat there, gotta beat a hasty retreat if I see any aluminium cookware lying around.

Not only kiasu but getting kiasi too.

(kiasu= afraid to lose ; kiasi = afraid to die)

Honesty & Tall Tales

Honesty is such a lonely word.
Everyone is so untrue.
Honesty is hardly ever heard.
And mostly what I need from you.

So goes Billy Joel's Honesty

Is honesty the best policy? Or rather is honesty the better policy?

Lying can take more than one form; be it simple white lies or blatant outright deception.
One can also be addicted to lying – one is then termed a compulsive liar. Jim Carey's Liar Liar movie is a good showcase of this affliction; his character can't go thru a day without uttering some untruth, his attorney job not withstanding.

I cannot help but feel lying is stressful – both to the liar as well as his audience. Let's start with his audience; those people to whom a person tell lies to- may be apt to call them the victims. Very frequently the victims know full well that the liar is spouting lies but are too kind or courteous to tell him off. I know because I have oft been a victim of lies big and small. Stressful as I have to hold myself in check to keep from confronting a friend who is such a compulsive liar. Four out of every ten statements issuing forth from his mouth are untruths. Mind you, he is not trying to swindle me into a get rich quick scheme or somesuch; not that I have anything to be conned out of. Just lies about everyday things. Except he keeps repeating the same lies on different occasions but with dissimilar basis. We'd known each other for over 10 years and while I am not exactly Einstein, I am not a doofus either so he should know I can't be easily deceived. I just didn't have the heart to confront him with his lies. Ever the thinker; I wondered why he keeps doing it. Is there a psychological need for him to keep lying? Does he actually derive a perverse pleasure in diddling his victims?

When one exhibits a penchant for lying; one should be well equipped with a really good memory besides the first prerequisite of verbal creativity. This is because of the problem of lying to many victims; never sticking to the same tall story line. You can forget what lie you told to which person as well as the exact context of the fib. On the other hand, your victims can recall clearly what you lied about earlier and contrast it with what you have just repeated. Worse, they may get together in your absence and compare notes and conclude that you are just a big fraud. Liar Liar becomes your moniker. Yes, it is all too easy to become a liar of Clintonian dimensions.

Some may say such lying is harmless but the problem is such consummate liars may graduate to worse levels such as swindling or cheating as well as marital infidelity. Whatever it is, the harm has been done. I am especially wary of people whom I know are prone to habitual lying that I take everything they say with a double pinch of salt.

Perhaps it is still better to keep one's mouth shut than open it unnecessarily. If you cannot tell the truth, then shut yer trap. Don't lie.Why bother.

Nothing is opened more by mistake than the mouth. A closed mouth gathers no foot too.

Imported Wives, anyone?

Malaysian men prefer foreign women as wives. I wonder if this is a sign of the times. How many local men have actually married foreign women? Are these men representative of the larger majority of available males?

I certainly would not want a foreign woman for a wife. The cultural clash of two persons from different worlds is not something I want to confront nor grasp with each waking moment.

For the men who took in foreign wives, I wonder what made them plunge into such matrimonial abyss. Is it because they really cannot sucessfully woo a local woman? Is it because the local women available to them are dowdy in appearance and thus deemed undesirable? Is it because the local women are too demanding in their criteria for rating a man as a suitable catch? Or rather, is getting a sweet young lolita as a trophy wife the main attraction here? The local men who took in foreign wives are mostly advanced in age. For the foreign women the decision to 'export' themselves is mainly a marriage of convenience – an escape to a better life. I am sure a matured genteel man is not uppermost in their minds as to how much the dowry her family will get and the monthly remittance thereafter.

For the local women who are left on the shelf (pardon the expression) , perhaps some soul searching may be in order. The saying 'do not judge lest you be judged yourself' certainly rings true here. No doubt, a woman with both a good education and career and/or family fortune will not want to marry below her station But as time passes, one's criteria (whether man or woman) has to be flexible. A woman in her twenties can afford to be choosy, justifiably so I may add. However if she is still single in her late thirties or early forties and still as demanding in her choice of life partner, something is out of whack here. I am not saying she should get hitched to the first man who even glanced her way. Forget the young notions of a rich handsome man to sweep her off her feet. A good man may not be rich nor handsome. At this point in life what both sexes need is a good companion to keep loneliness at bay in later years.

Ditto for the men. Maybe they were too career or business minded in their youth so that marriage was not an option then. Or they were too busy playing the field in younger years to realise that time and tide waited for no man? Or are they just the rejects that no woman in her right mind would want?

Talking to older friends who are single, I noticed a reticence towards matrimony at their age. A common dismissal is – why get married in the face of high and rising divorce rates? To me it is like hoisting a white flag before riding into battle. The game is over before it has had a chance to begin. Do you really wish to be one of the statistics?

I am no sociologist and can offer no researched data to support my views. I have probably opened myself to a lot of brickbats in expounding my views thus. But whatever it is, do not shy away from exploring what opportunity fate or divine providence has planned for you. Tis better to have loved and lost than have never loved at all. Something like that............

Member punya pasal

or – I have friends in high places. In Malaysia it is not what you know but rather who you know. The MO is to tap into whatever resources you can bring to bear if you have a friend in the right place. Even in mundane things such maintenance and water bills.

Yup, you read right. I live in an apartment whose management (developer) threatens to cut off the water supply to residents who are behind by only 2 months' maintenance charges or Rm70 in water bills. Residents who are behind in payments are listed in a notice board located at the lift lobby for all to see; it also announces a monthly 'operasi kunci air' on recaltritrant residents who fail to pay up. I make it a point to to check out the board and once saw that there was a resident who owed 8 months' maintenance and over RM1000 in water charges – this resident was still enjoying uninterrupted water supply. I made an enquiry when paying my bill and was told ' this person has a special arrangement with someone in the management'. He also runs a dilapidated food court or shack near the apartments and the water is piped to it. The cheek of it all! Using water at residential rates piped to a food selling establishment and not paying the bills at the same time.

The resident committee is well nigh useless in fighting for the apartment dwellers' rights; being more interested in organising table tennis or other games. This is why not many people bother to join the committee or attend meetings.

On the same note, this is why strata titles takes umpteen years to be issued. The developer wants to keep on creaming the maintenance income which would be lost once the titles are issued because the residents can then set up their own independent management firm to handle everything. So they drag their feet as the delay serves their purpose. This situation will never improve, so perish those hopes for a speedy change to this.

Just grin and bear it. Meanwhile, try to cultivate some friends in high places. May do you some good.

My swan bigger than your swan.....

Malaysians seem to be pre-occupied with setting some record or other. Biggest this, longest that, highest something or other. Why do we indulge in this? Do we really need such shallow achievements to crow about to all? Are such records of international recognition? Are they a waste of resources that could be more meaningfully expended in other avenues? Are we so insecure that we need such feats to gather attention to ourselves?

A record breaking burger was recently made in Pennsylvania that weighs in at 55.79kg. Now that's a real whopper! A humongous beef patty sandwiched between the halves of an equally giant bun and garnished with pounds of tomatoes and lettuce. Let's see Popeye's friend Wimpy wolf that down. A claim is being filed with the Guinness Book of Records.

That was a creditable burger and record. Not like our local attempts. Longest hot dog 'record' which consisted of hot dogs stacked end to end does not a world record make. Anyone can do this. What will impress is a fantastically long bun holding an equally long sausage. Same with the 'longest' satay grill, just lots of satay grills juxtaposed on adjoining tables. The latest was the kebab attempt; another case of just sambung-sambung. This is pathetic! Maybe this is why we have a local book of records; we can't get into the Guinness. Or is it because Guinness is not halal due to its stout. Whatever.

Our local attempts at setting dubious records are a waste of time, resources and effort. It is better that the money spent be chanelled to charitable purposes and the free time of the participants expended on social work.