a Secret Recipe for failure

some weeks ago i found myself at Secret Recipe in Malacca. in Malacca. of all the places we could have gone to in a town famed for incredible Peranakan cuisine, we had to collectively gravitate towards the most convenient and familiar place: a shopping mall. now, Secret Recipe isn’t bad. their pastas are pretty decent, and their cakes – particularly the chocolate varieties – are quite popular at celebrations. but it makes the cardinal mistake that every, every restaurant i’ve been to falls prey to: serving a really crap onion soup.

if there’s anything that i shouldn’t ever do when eating out, it’s order onion soup. having made Thomas Keller’s inimitable soupe l’ oignon, anything else fails to live up to expectations. what can trump a soup with a base of slowly-caramelized*-for-five-hours julienned sweet onions, beef broth, rosemary and a dash of red wine? the answer: nothing. it’s depressing how restaurants mistreat and destroy a simple recipe. so i knew ordering onion soup at Secret Recipe would be a mistake (especially at only RM6.50 a bowl. what was i expecting?) but hope prevailed. and died upon its arrival.

if this is the way onion soup is normally treated and presented at restaurants, it’s no wonder so many people profess not to like it – they haven’t tasted a real onion soup. and Secret Recipe’s specimen was a prime example of how not to make onion soup: sloppy, badly presented and barely resembling onion soup.

for one, the onions hadn’t even been properly cooked. they’d been sliced (not even julienned properly) and tossed in a pan on high heat for probably a few minutes before having some stock poured over them. how do i know this? because it was pale, and kind of singed in areas. you don’t get that through slow-cooking. the soup tasted of mostly stock, with a faint aroma of onions. soup, yes, but not onion soup. don’t even get me started on the cheese, which was basically a depressing sheet of cheap rubber melted on top with some waterlogged chunks of bread.

my point being: it’s cold and windy right now, i’m sick and shivering and could really go for a good bowl of onion soup. definitely not going to find one at Secret Recipe.

*caramelized is technically incorrect, since no sugar is involved. unfortunately, goldenized hasn’t come into common parlance yet.

of cabbages and queens

i keep promising myself i’ll keep a diary. not a diary where i write down my thoughts, but a notation of what i did from day to day – can’t remember it otherwise. i’ve forgotten what i did every single day of the past month, and twitter isn’t much help since i don’t really tweet things that i did. i can’t even remember when i made molly’s chickpea-tomato soup (though it was when A came over) – which, by the way, is totally delicious. it’s a gut-warming concoction of tomatoes and nutty chickpeas, an undercurrent of rosemary tempering the acidity of the tomatoes, and i don’t even know how else to describe something so perfect for a winter night in a tropical country, except that even my little sister who hates all the “strange things” i cook up loves it. she actually does.

this term has been fairly insane. not that i’m working very hard or anything, but that i’m not. it’s almost as though i’m trying to cram about 18 years worth of not-slacking into as many hours of the day as i can – actually watching TV for a change, finishing Seasons 3, 4 and 5 of House M.D. (where will i get my binge fix now?!), scrolling through pages and pages of MLIA (and copiously reblogging them), and spending this afternoon reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden in one sitting. reading feels fabulous. and i’m having a life that isn’t work for a change.

most days i get to eat really good food – some meals are good while you’re eating them, and nothing to complain about, but some of them are the kind of meals you mention a few years later and set off half-hours of reminiscing. like Aunty K’s shepherd pie, the secret of which apparently lies in the Lea & Perrin’s sauce, and most definitely the 1:1 ratio of mashed potato to meat filling . or the char siu at Overseas, dark, intense, sticky chunks of meat, sweet-savoury and caramelly, yielding slowly to the bite and dissolving on your tongue.

i may profess to try and eat anything and everything, but i really am boring in food choices – i return to the same few delicious things over and over again, just because they’re really good. i mean, i’ve made these chocolate chip cookies twice thrice within the last month. scads and scads of them. the last few times i ate Japanese, i ordered some variant of raw fish. then there’s the turkey-spinach wrap i have every time i go to Marmalade, because their lamb kofta is overwhelmingly large and flavourless, the lasagna is a wobbling tower of too much cheese, and their Oreo cheesecake is definitely made with gelatin. why would anyone make a cheesecake with gelatin? the mind boggles. and hey, that turkey wrap is good stuff.

and for a week in october, i was eating braised cabbage every day. every day. i pretty much vegetated that whole week. that was the week R, the girl who’s modeled for my art pieces for the past two years, came over and cooked lunch with me. we made cumin-lentil soup, which she and my sister hated (“that’s dhal! you can’t drink it!!!”) but i rather liked.

we made brownies, cookies, grilled chicken and the eponymous braised cabbage, another molly-orangette recipe. there is a certain brilliance about molly, especially when she can persuade R to eat the first carrots that she’s ever liked, which is no mean feat. the girl hates her veggies.

truth be told, i wouldn’t be able to resist the cabbage on sheer aesthetic value. it’s right there, that humble stack of leaves perched on the plate next to the grilled chicken. sure, it’s no Keller creation, but it has a rustic, homely loveliness to it – the multi-layered mellow-looking curves softened in the heat of the oven to yield perfectly to the teeth, nestled closely in crinkly, golden-brown wedges. and the taste – subdued, comforting, like curling up under a blanket, the intense chicken-salty juices and the sweetness of the cabbage mingling, its bitterness dissipated through long braising.

seriously, you have no excuse: it is dead easy to make, as long as you have two hours to spare. so do yourselves a favour, and make it. the poached egg sounds as though it would be fabulous. it’s gorgeous with a grilled chicken thigh, rubbed with sea salt and black pepper, grilled for 20 minutes at 170C and another 10 at 200C for the skin to crisp up.

for dessert, hot and cold brownies – the brownie component from Fran Bigelow’s Chocolate, the recipe for Truffle Brownies (or something along the lines thereof), and R’s contribution, Tin-Roof Ice Cream. chunks of brownie in the ice cream make it feel as though you’re eating the same thing at different temperatures, which is oddly addictive and lovely. and that brownie is no joke – that is rich stuff.

it’s days like these i love most – slow, fabulous lunches with friends, long leisurely chats about everything and nothing. trying to get R to eat vegetables, discussing the ins and outs of life in england with A&Z. that’s one type of day. the other type of day is today, where everything proceeds normally, but is then punctuated by euphoric surprises. like finding out i received two CIE awards for Lit and Art (World). followed by MY SISTER JUST GOT ENGAGED CHYEAHHHHH!!

over and out until the endorphins wear off

a real quick update (for zw who apparently checks this everyday)

this place has been dead, i know, and it stopped being alive just when someone died. i really do have several posts in limbo – on Kow Leong Kiang (since july), on some of the best Italian food i can find around here (at Buonasera), a sublime braised cabbage i can’t stop talking about, on life, how organising SEASAC MUN is driving me insane, and Quidditch. all those things.

but all those things are kind of unfinished. kind of the way i feel – undone, unfinished, in limbo. i don’t know what it is, but it’s gotten to the point where i’m coasting through just trying to make it to the end of each day. each day’s taken on a certain grayness, and even with all the crazy-fun-mad things i try to inject into each day (like making dinosaurs with my fingers, saying “Pika!” before sneezing, getting all hyped up about Quidditch), something’s wrong, and i’m on edge.

maybe it’s because i just watched Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. watching something (which isn’t House) really puts me on edge, because i should be doing something else. i enjoyed it, and i’m really nervous at the moment. the anxiety doesn’t make sense. i’m looking for a purpose where there isn’t one, and it is probably scaring the hell out of me. is this university-application anxiety? pre-university teenage crisis? maybe i just can’t stand not knowing what i’m going to do. the grayness is the hopelessness.

you know, we spend a lot of time preparing for something. living for the future, thinking about the things we’re going to do with the things we’re going to get in the future. maybe expectations are the problem. people expect me to do “great” things. i expect myself to do great things. and i’m not so sure i can, or want to.

no worries, folks. i’ll be back soon. i’ve watched too much TV this week, so it’s off to essay-writing: i’ll figure something out. and the next post’ll have pictures.

colours seem to fade

a friend’s father died yesterday; i found out this morning, and cried for most of the day. it’s not as though we are best friends, or even close friends who hang out often, who confide in each other. thinking back to my reaction – the overwhelming rush of sadness was for him and for the person i know him to be – cheerful, capable, super-talented, quirky, funny, absolute sunshine – and reconciling it with events, life, things. but despite not being close to him, i do have a soft spot for this kid, who was an editor under me last year and who i selected as successor to the school paper. there are people i care about without really knowing them or expecting similar – and i would not want to see them sad, ever, especially not like this. and so i grieve for the survivors like him. and i don’t know how much love you can send out like a star in the night to someone, but i’m sending everything i have, and i hope he gets it.

my sister said something to the effect of “it’s funny how we choose to let some deaths affect us more than others, otherwise we’d never be able to cope.”

the colours seem to fade

visitations, guitars and chocolate

time goes by far too quickly; sometimes – anytime at all – i take a mental step back from the present and think to myself, this is a moment; it’s gone. it happens especially during conversations. i listen and watch intently, trying to preserve words and motions in my head. how can i preserve this? this is now, now is then. to capture this moment this instant the gesture the stories the blink of an eye —

apple has always wanted to be taller

—and so we have cameras now to store memories, at least when i remember to bring and use it. but you cannot live experiences behind a lens, so stories must acquire a fog that comes with the hazy filters of memory. with each telling they become crisper, clearer as details get smoothed over and sharpened. besides, is a photo accurate? are photos real memories, or pictures of a memory? i cannot tell clearly. clearly. but this is overthinking. i’m still harrowed by stories, sickening stories which weigh heavy on my mind, despite having just watched Definitely, Maybe (which i actually enjoyed a great deal – good storytelling and enough plot twists to keep me interested; absolutely loved april though you kind of know she will be The One in the end; abigail breslin is quite the little charmer).

late birthday cake

that said, i think (if indeed i do at all) it’s important to meet people who are buckets of fun, talent, intelligence and general goodness. so a month and a day ago i emailed zhi wei after discovering his music for mp3s. worlds are small – we’d met two years ago at the preliminary rounds of wsdc. i have absolutely no recollection of this, of course, thanks to my abysmal memory, but he did and reminded me thusly. and i never fail to be amazed by the way friendships can begin and be sustained in this digital age, having cultivated some of my closest friends, like Z, Ad and JY, mostly online, before so in person, and keeping them so by the same means.

and so it is with this friendship – it is only a month old, and it still astonishes me that i can map out its course over archived conversations on gmail. but i digress too much. zhi wei came up to KL and stayed the night, bringing with him his voice, movies, irrepressible good humour, stories and hilarious Yoda/Scooby-Doo impressions, and then some.

there was Hedwig and the Angry Inch, much file-sharing, hefty doses of irreverence, torrents of awful puns , molten chocolate babycakes (for which the first two failed) and a kind of lame birthday song,

guitaring, rock band-ing, a soap opera till about 2.30 in the morning, curry and stories for breakfast, songs and singing and Business Time obsessions and slug sex as narrated by David Attenborough – surprisingly beautiful.

there was no vanilla ice cream, alas, but this time food takes a backseat in the face of simply having a good time. meeting people like zhi wei is definitely one of the several highlights of life so far, and in the process of that reaffirming how very cool my sisters are. to the point: it was great having you here, zhi wei! you’re welcome here anytime. in about three years time when you get back from the UK.