noodles Archives - As Suanie Sees It

the great penang getaway: august ’08: day two: more food!

September 25, 2008 By Suanie 16 Comments

Just realised that Pinky took a photo of the Air Itam assam laksa. You can view it here.

I’d made plans to meet up with Bryan, Peter, Wuan and ReallyBites for dinner. Unfortunately HPC was not able to join us as she had work to do. So she dropped us off at our hotel, not before getting Pinky a crispy Chinese pancake with peanuts and bananas inside, and fried bananas for snacks. By the way, I am still in amazement at how much food we ate when we were in Penang…

We chilled out and slept for a bit, and I took a couple of photos of the sunset.

7 p.m. : I was there!

At about 7.30 pm, Bryan picked us up at our hotel and drove us to Chulia Street. He said that the two things famous there are the curry mee and the wantan mee. So Pinky chose the former, I had the latter.

Pinky’s curry mee. She said it was a bit too oily for her taste

The wantan mee was the BEST I’ve ever had! The noodles tasted so fresh, light and springy! it was too delicious for words! Well, if I had to, here’s my Chulia Street wantan mee poem:

I went to Chulia Street
I had wantan mee
And now I’m fucked
Because
I’ll never be able to look
at wantan mee the same way again.

Wantan mee at Chulia Street

By the time we had our food, Peter was still nowhere in sight. So Bryan called him up and suggested that we go someplace else for food (our second round, heheh). We reached New Lane and Peter, Wuan and ReallyBites were already there. We passed by this:

It didn’t look all that great until they chop it up to little pieces and add it to porridge

Bryan helped us to order oh jien. He also got us a bowl of pork porridge to share. It had pieces of char siew, and boiled and deep-fried pig’s intestines in it. It was THE MOST AWESOME THING I’D EVER HAD! Have another poem:

I went to New Lane
I had porridge with pig’s intestines
It was too damn good
So I had another bowl
All by myself
And I want more
And more
And more and more and more!

This bowl of porridge is more precious than new-born babies

I really, really miss Penang 🙁

*Click here to view the entire Flickr set for ‘Penang, August 2008’, which includes photos not published here.

16 Comments Filed Under: Travel + Trips Tagged With: chulia street, curry mee, intestines, new lane, noodles, penang, pork, porridge, pulau pinang, sunset, wantan mee

hk june 08 – food food food

August 11, 2008 By Suanie 18 Comments

1) All photos taken using my super duper sibeh canggih Nokia N82.
2) You can click on the photos to view a larger version. It’s okay, we are all a bit blind sometimes.

When we touched down at the airport, the first thing that came to my mind was… KRISPY KREME! Well, what to do… we don’t have it here in Malaysia (yet) and all you people kept going on about how marvelous it is and how delicious and how everything, that I felt I ought to give it a try. Not VERY affordable, okay… half a dozen for HK$110 for freakin’ doughnuts!

The Krispy Kreme outlet at the Hong Kong international airport

Erna and I bought half a dozen to be shared. And this is my Krispy Kreme New York cheesecake doughnut that I could not finish consuming, because my family has a history of diabetes and I didn’t want to take my chances.

Got my saliva somewhere

My colleague tumpang a dozen from me. When he received and tasted it, he remarked that the Hong Kong version was too sweet — apparently he got some in Jakarta and the sugar level was very much acceptable. But not the Hong Kong one. I am sticking to Big Apple for my doughnut fix 😛

We stayed at the BP International for our first night in Hong Kong. Package included breakfast, so…

Breakfast of champions!

Erna was very amused by my sandwich. It tasted awesome! The bacon was crispy and crunchy, the omelette had cheese and mushroom and ham and capsicum, the thousand island sauce because I am Malaysian. As I bit into my very delicious sandwich, I could feel my arteries clogging up. But it was worth it. I suppose in 20 years’ time I’d look back and slap myself for wittingly screwing up my internal organs but that’s 20 years away!

Second evening in Tsim Tsa Tsui, we decided to eat cheap(er). Wandered into a random restaurant but the only available table was next to the toilet. So we decided to tar pau balik to our hotel room instead.

Beef ball noodles with oyster sauce

You know, when it was written ‘beef ball noodles with oyster sauce’, I didn’t expect beef ball noodles WITH oyster sauce… I thought they’d at least mix the sauce like how we get our wantan mee here. I suppose I should not take such things for granted. It doesn’t look very appetising, right? Well, it wasn’t.

One evening in Central district, we walked back to Lan Kwai Fong for beer, and decided to have our dinner at a German pub called Schnurrbart. Mostly because it was cosy, we were tired and lazy to go elsewhere, beer is always fantastic, and the bartender was very helpful with giving us directions to Stanley etc.

Typical German pub food – PORK sausages, fried potatoes and sauerkraut, yum!

We also ate at McDonalds once, at Burger King once and a quick sandwich at Pret a Manger. And a English breakfast set on the morning before we left for home. Familiar stuff can be comforting, heh.

Another noodly meal at one of the roadside restaurants:

Bread, egg, and noodles with pork chop

We had our last evening meal in Hong Kong at a restaurant located a short distance from our hotel. Looked promising because there were a lot of people eating there. Heh, that’s almost always my gauge for edible (hopefully food) food. A typical conversation would go something like this:

“Let’s check out this restaurant/ food place!”
“Oh? What do they sell?”
“No idea. But there are lots of people in there! Shouldn’t be too bad.”

We got an order of deep-fried chicken wings because we saw it being delivered to one of the customers. Apparently the restaurant was well-known for it. Not bad.

Deep-fried chicken wings with spice

And more noodles! Thankfully this one was a bit different, with the soup being of the hot and sour kind. Plus you could add whatever ingredients you wanted — assorted parts of the pig, sotong balls, etc.

A big bowl of noodles in hot and sour soup

I bought back some ‘lou poh bing‘ because Pinky insisted that I get some to try. Hmmm… tasted like any Chinese pastries that I can get here in Malaysia 😛 I shared it with some noobs and they seemed to like it 😛

Noobs eating wife’s cake

For the record, Kim had only one. I took two photos of her eating that single one, that’s all 😛

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All blog posts on this trip:

– hk june 08 – the obligatory ‘i waz there’ photos
– hk june 08 – food food food
– hk june 08 – things you can buy with money
– hk june 08 – what little alcohol tales
– hk june 08 – when relieving yourself is not a relief

– Flickr set for Hong Kong 2008 trip

18 Comments Filed Under: Travel + Trips Tagged With: bacon, Blogs I Read, hong kong, krispy kreme, noodles, pork

Ah See Wantan Mee’s history revealed

March 31, 2006 By Suanie 16 Comments

If you hail from Batu Pahat, there is no way you could escape Ah See Wantan Mee at Jalan Jenang. The fame! The legend! The shop is smack in the middle of town, some people (like me) ate it ALL the time growing up. We’d know the difference between Ah See and everyone else’s noodles.

When I was a kid, a regular order sold for RM1.20. I don’t know what’s the current price, but rumours were rife that while the price increased, the quality deteriorated. No matter. We are not here to dispute quality control or lack thereof; we are here to learn about the history of Ah See and his wantan mee! I know the story, and soon you shall too.

This would be a good time to get on your knees and thank your lucky stars while praising my goodness….

No? Okay then.

Ah See Wantan Mee has a long standing history and tradition. Legend goes that once in China, there was no soy sauce at all. Then someone brilliantly invented this remarkable, highly versatile sauce. It became the HIT of town. People began taking soy sauce with their meals, regardless of whether they were eating roasted pig or salted fish or salted vege or rice or mooncakes or ang ku kueh.

One day Mr. See got tired of too much salt in his meals. He rightly figured that was the reason he had been having problems with his kidneys, which led to… uhm, reproduction problems.

He decided to make his own sauce for food. After 7 weeks of experimenting in the kitchen, ta-dahhh! He came out with a nice, orange-y kind of sauce. Excited with his discovery, he began putting the sauce on his noodles.

However his wife was not pleased with just eating dry noodles. So she bought some pork from the butcher, roasted them, then slice into pieces to eat together with the noodles.

Now, Mr. See was angry that his wife found a better way of eating noodles. He raided the pantry and came out with flour, shrimp and meat. Thus, he pounded the shrimp and meat together, made them into little balls, tucked the balls of meat into thin flour pieces. He boiled them in broth and it came out REALLY GOOD!

Soon his invention was the talk of town. Being Chinese, Mr. See grabbed the opportunity to start his own noodle stall. His wife put aside personal grudges and helped him with his thriving business. They became very very rich but Mr. See never recovered the use of his… organ. So it was lucky for them that they had a son prior to the soy sauce wreckage of life.

Years later, Mr See’s great great great great great grandson arrived in Batu Pahat in a tiny boat to escape from the nasty Japs, to find that Malaysia was sadly faring no better. So he started a stall selling noodles, using his great great great great great grandfather’s secret recipe. The Japanese soldiers liked his noodles so much that every time they finished a bowl, they would shout in glee, WANTAN MEE, WANTAN MEE! And that was how wantan mee got its name.

Business was so good that he could hardly cope. A few years later he was blessed with a son, which he named Ah See in memory of his ancestor. Ah See Junior in turn named all his children Ah See, like Ah See Girl, Ah See Boy, Ah See Girl Girl, Ah See Boy Boy and so on. They were all Ah See and if my information is correct, they are still all Ah See. The Ah Sees continued the highly lucrative wantan mee business and their fame spread far and wide.

As we all know, success breeds jealousy. Some people got extremely jealous and decided to make their own wantan mee, mainly to cash in Ah See’s success. A mistake in the research lab produced black coloured wantan mee. Ah See Junior then warned the copycats that if they continued with their experiments to produce a replica of his wantan mee, he would sue them till they have no money to take the bus home. The competitors thought, what the heck and began selling the black kaler wantan mee. Hence today we see so many stalls selling such a wantan mee and you know they are downright not nice to eat at all…

Get real wantan mee only at Ah See Wantan Mee. Tidak ditanggung halal.

(Very obviously, this is a work of ridiculous fiction written many years ago. It was lunch time and I was missing home.)

16 Comments Filed Under: Stories + Conversations Tagged With: batu pahat food, noodles, wantan mee