As Suanie Sees It

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.

If you hail from Batu Pahat, there is no way you could escape Ah See’s 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 while growing up so we’d know the difference between Ah See and everyone else’s wantan mee. When I was a kid, a regular order sold for RM1.20 — I have no idea how much it is now but I heard that while the price increased, the quality deteriorated. No matter. We are not here to dispute quality control or what not, we are here to learn about the history of Ah See and his Wantan Mee, for I know the story. Thank your very lucky stars that you, O honoured ones will soon know too.

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 and it became the hit of town. Hence 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… kenot perform in… ahem… ok anyway he decided to make his own sauce, and ater 7 weeks, he came out with an orange-y kind of sauce. Excited with his discovery, he began putting the sauce on his dry mee. His wife however was not contented.. she thought, this Ah See, kenot make me satisfied oredi, want me to eat dry mee by itself… how stingy… So she bought some pork from the butcher and roasted them, then sliced them into pieces and ate it together with the mee. Mr. See was angry that his wife found something better than him, so he raided the pantry and found flour and shrimps and a bit of meat. So he pounded the shrimps and meat and put them into little balls into a small piece of flour, shaping it like a shape he saw in his dream the day before. then he boiled them and it turned out surprisingly good.

Soon his invention was the talk of town and Mr. See being the Chinese sensed a good opportunity to start business, rented a small stall to sell his mee. 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 already had a son before all the soy sauce business.

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 mee using his great great great great great grandfather’s secret recipe. The Japanese soldiers liked his mee so much that everytime 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 replicaof 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)