The seventh lunar month is on its way out and with its exit all the ghosts that have been let out of Hell for the duration of the month will have to return to where they came from.

The believers have offered prayers and delicious food to the wandering spirits so that they will not go hungry.
In many towns temporary stages were erected and performances were staged at night to entertain both the denizens of this world and the other world. In the more traditional communities, operas are staged but the newspapers have reported that times are changing and instead of traditional Chinese operas, there are nubile singers who not only sing but dance on stage to entertain the audience.

One can also see on the roadsides, burnt paper offerings and the stumps of joss sticks. There are also giant joss sticks placed along the kerbs in housing estates.
During this month, children are not allowed out when it is dark and no names should be uttered loudly for fear that the ghosts may harm the young ones. Marriages do not take place during this period as it is considered to be inauspicious.

The following month, the eighth lunar month is an auspicious month and the mid-autumn festival will be celebrated with moon cakes and lanterns. This is a month that everyone looks forward to and in fact the supermarkets are already selling all kinds of moon cakes. People are spoilt for choice this time with new concoctions created that we would never have dreamed of a decade ago. But more of that in the next post.

Jalan Pasar Stalls

This evening was highly anticipated as it was to be a trip down memory lane.

I had seen a segment on Astro ( cable tv )which featured some stalls in Jalan Pasar in Pudu in Kuala Lumpur. This was exciting as I had frequented this area in my childhood. There used to be a wet market and food stalls which were very popular with KL folks.

We used to take shortcuts cutting through the little kampung and along the back streets to get to Jalan Pasar. Today the little kampung has given way to multi-storey buildings and flats and I don't recognise the area anymore.

It was not easy to locate the lane that houses these food stalls and we had to ask our way there. It certainly was smaller than I had expected. The variety of food was also less than I remembered.

However we settled for different dishes.

My spouse ordered a bowl of pig innards soup with rice. Inside the bowl I could see pork slices, liver, intestines and cubes of pig's blood.


I opted for grilled stuffed tauhoo. The tauhoo had been deep fried and cut into two. Then it was stuffed with sliced cucumber and bean sprouts. This dish also came with grilled cuttle fish and deep fried prawn fritter, i.e. small prawn dipped into batter which came out as crispy rounds of batter and a bit of prawn. ( hei piah chni ) The dish was topped with coarsely pounded peanuts and sweet chilli sauce.

The lady boss obligingly placed a piece of the round prawn fritter upright so that it could be photographed.



My daughter opted for the fried radish cake. The steamed radish cake is fried with dark soya sauce, egg and bean sprouts and a dash of chilli. It smelled good.


There was also a stall with fresh slices of fish, fish ball, squid, etc etc which you would dip into a pot of boiling water to cook before you dip into a sauce and then eat.


Other stalls sold local cakes and iced drinks.

We finished our food and made a beeline for the carpark as it was getting dark and we had to go through narrow lanes and quiet streets. I would say it was an okay evening but I wish the food could have been better.

In Praise of Food

I just gotta share this!!

My sister forwarded this to me earlier this afternoon and I enjoyed the lyrics so much that I have to share it with all who understand the Hokkien dialect ( a Chinese dialect ). The food is really delicious and the sight of the variety available really titilates one's tastebuds.

Except for some food typically found in Sarawak , most of what you will see are available in Peninsular Malaysia.

Kudos to Kenny Sia who produced this video. Enjoy!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r5AEyGsy74

Obese Pets

In their natural habitat, we will not see animals that are overweight. They don’t get obese like us human beings. This is not because they don’t have enough to eat.

The reason is that they eat the food that is appropriate for their systems.

However, once the animals have been acquired by us as pets, we tend to feed them with the wrong food types thus leading to obese pets.

We give them processed pet food that contain additives and other things that they were not meant by nature to have with the result that we have obese pets with some of them even becoming diabetic! Yes animals do suffer from the same diseases as humans. Just as we develop life-threatening diseases with poor food choices, likewise we are also depriving our pets the opportunity of living a long and healthy life.

The food we buy for our pets is often influenced by marketing campaigns that promote them or we out of economic sense of waste not, want not, give our pets the leftovers or our meals. We also tend to overfeed them, out of love for them. We don’t want them to go hungry. However, do you know that dogs are usually fed once once a day? Some folks are known to feed their pets 3 times a day! How not to get obese? It is made worse when their owners have no time to exercise them! Our pets have no say in what they eat as it is we who determine what they eat and they have to bear the consequences of the decisions that we make. So let’s hope we make better decisions where our pets are concerned.