Dining With Jewelle

I developed a love for herbal soup when I worked in Keningau and there was one restaurant which always serves bowls of ready-to-eat "tun tang".

This was where I learn of ginseng soup, peanut soup and watercress soup.

Back in Sabah, as far as I know, watercress seems to be considered a low rank vegetable, not the kind you'd find at supermarkets. My mother used to get ours from those roadside stalls in Tambunan or sometimes Kundasang and I've grown up eating this vegetable cooked in soup and stir fried - the Kadazandusun way.

The funny thing is, my Kadazan family calls this "Sayur Hong Kong" or "Tan Choi", names which my Chinese family found strange. In fact, my mother in law refers to it, to me, as "watercress" and until today, I don't know its actual Chinese name!

But names aside, I get my stock from Supa Save which offers imported watercress, definitely not like those found on the Tambunan roadside.

And from my mother in law, I learn the proper way to cook this soup to get maximum taste and nutrients.

The taste actually comes from stalks so this is the part to slow cook with meat (either pork ribs or chicken) and dried red dates or Chinese wolfberries (salt to taste) for a few hours.

When its ready to be eaten, remove the stalks and put the watercress leaves for only few minutes (to retain its nutrients) and serve the soup!

This is a "cooling" soup so it's perfect after a hot day.

If you have never eaten this vegetable, read its nutritional values or try this detox recipe and keep a look out for restaurants or food stalls which offers this soup.

I'm sure you'll love it too.

One of my closest friend, who shared that phase of my life where delicious-but-additives-ridden food were our daily staples, must be settling down fine in England right now.

After 8 years in stress-inducing Kuala Lumpur, I bet she'd find that southern English town extremely peaceful. However, I'm also sure that she is starting to miss one of the "perks" of living in KL - all kinds of food, at all corners of the city, at whatever price and at any time of the day!

Because if this town where she is at, is anything like the one English city I used to be familiar with - food adventures would be minimal.

In fact, I'm not surprised if she has to travel far and wide to find the kind of food that she really enjoys.

And I hope she's will not be using the "We have no car yet!" as an excuse as she knows that finding a Car Hire company that can search for the best rates is not a problem with Car Rental UK. Not only is it an award winning site for the best car hire website, it also searches up to 50 sites for both suppliers and brokers! So it's pretty much guarantee that you will get the best deal.

So go hire a car and find some worth-writing-home-about kind of English fare, now!

One of the benefit of having native Iban family as one of our neighbour is that we get items that are not common for typical Chinese family.

Such as the homemade loofah - which was actually a new discovery for me too.

The most interesting "gift" was perhaps the wild boar meat which are commonly found in this part of Brunei and was given to us by our neighbour a few weeks ago.

Being exotic (read : not something my Chinese family would voluntarily buy from the market) my mother in law had quite a challenge figuring out how to cook it. She fried some with soy sauce, bean paste and garlic which turned out popular - until she announced its origin and even I felt a little squemish (for no reason!).

Then just the other day, she cooked a curry out of it.

If you're someone who have used the line "I don't have the recipe for that dish!" must know that it's outdated.

Having online access means you CAN get recipes of all kinds of dishes from all over the world, from conventional recipe websites to personal blog sites where the authors share their knowledge, tips and experiences in anything related to food and dinings i.e food blogs!

There are a lot of really helpful blogs that feature home-cook recipes complete with the list of ingredients and full preparation and cooking instructions.

The best thing about food blogs are of course - the pictures! Some outstanding foodblogs could be featuring a simple dish but their beautiful photographs would have you running to the kitchen to try out the recipe.

That is why, even stay-at-home mom must be tech-savvy and should know that such invaluable information are so easily available at any time of the day!

And don't even think about "Book is fine. Computers get spoil!".

Don't you know that nowadays there are plenty of home computer repair service such as the Fasttrek? Basically their highly trained staffs will come to your house to service your computer with affordable rates!

Spend no time unplugging all those cables and lugging heavy PC to the computer store but spend those time finding and trying out great recipes!