… it begins with the heart …

This time we were off to Damansara Indah where I would cook for another of Steven Poh’s family friends, the Wongs. I still had no idea who they were but it was certainly a great way to meet people!

The menu was simple except for the Oi Oi Baked Chicken, which required quite a few ingredients for the marinating. How did this recipe come about? Well, it was a hungry afternoon and my two sisters, Oi Lai and Oi Leng unanimously decided that they wanted roast chicken for lunch. So off I trotted into the kitchen to satiate their craving. I had never made roast chicken before but since I’m pretty good at winging recipes, I confidently chopped up some chicken, threw in some crushed garlic, bay leaves, pepper, salt, ginger juice and popped it into the oven. The dish turned out delish!

The next dish I cooked for the Wongs was Mun Yee Mee. I wanted to make the Malacca version, which tastes somewhat different from the KL one. The dried yee mee you get in Malacca is nice, chewy and smells awesome when cooked, but this time we had to make do with the KL version.

Pasta is everyone’s favourite, so for this cookout I decided to cook my own version of the Aglio Olio. The difference here is that I added some ikan kurau salted fish (horrors! hum yue with spaghetti!) and dried chili to the pasta to give it a slightly robust flavour. Maybe I should simply name it hum sauce spaghetti or spaghetti with The-Italians-Will-Kill-Me-For-This sauce.

The original plan also included a prawn dish, but I had difficulty finding fresh medium-sized prawns. We therefore had to make do with fish. I got some frozen dory from the supermarket, pan-fried it and made some peppercorn sauce to pour over it.

For the finale, I blanched some asparagus and laid them bare on the platter. Then I blanketed it with minced meat in garlic chili sauce.

So there you have it! Another memorable cookout and a great time meeting new acquaintances.

… and ends with a burp…