I’m exhausted from running around doing errands as well as tearing my hair out over academic stuff. Cooking, as usual, is one of my favourite forms of therapy and I have been cooking a great deal more lately, both for necessity and for pleasure. Living alone, it’s more convenient to just cook one dish for dinner. In an Asian household, we’d probably have 3-4 dishes accompanying rice at each meal but I often find it quite an effort. However, every now and then I do try to be more traditional, though shortcuts help a lot, as you may see with the following dishes.

Since I could not decide between the photo above and the one below, you guys get both!

Chilli Prawns

Instructions: Blend 1/2 a red onion (or 2-3 small eschallots), 2 cloves garlic, half a stalk of lemon grass, 1-2 centimetres worth of fresh turmeric, a handful of dried chillis softened with hot water, a teaspoon of roasted belachan, 2 teaspoons pan-roasted sesame seeds. This mixture can freeze pretty well and you can use it for a lot of stuff. I froze a full cup’s worth, but saved some for my chilli chayote dish. Heat oil flavoured with some sesame oil in a wok or good frying pan. Gently fry the prawns (still in their shells, but deveined) in the oil. Remove from the now-aromatic oil, and add the sambal paste. Wait till it sizzles, add a bit of sugar. Add salt. Let it simmer and bubble for a bit more before adding tomato sauce. Squeeze a small bit of lemon or use tamarind juice instead. You should probably taste it and adjust the seasoning to your liking. Some people prefer it sweeter, but I like a balance of flavour along with sourness and just a subtle amount of sweetness that doesn’t detract from the other ingredients. Add the cooked prawns gently, along with some wedges of fresh tomato. Cook till all the fresh, blended ingredients have amalgamated and the flavour is rich and fragrant. Serve with fresh coriander.

Mussels with Lemongrass and Coriander

I looked up some advice online before I started cooking these. Apparently, if they’re open prior to cooking, tap them. If they close, they’re still alive. If they’re still gaping open, they’re dead and should be thrown away. It was a bit intimidating and I felt a bit like a murderer but they were oh-so-tasty.

Directions: Chop onions (red onions or eschallots best), 2 cloves garlic, some lemon grass, fresh coriander and one bird’s eye chilli (finely, add more if you’re brave). Heat a small bit of oil flavoured w/ sesame oil. Add the ingredients. Stir. Add the healthy and cleaned mussels. Run away to the next room if you’re like me. Peep around the corner – if they’re all gaping wide open now and cooked with that aromatic steam, add stock. You could use fish stock or fish sauce, or, like me, use a broth made with anchovies and lemongrass (I had a fresh batch of this from my midweek Yong Tau Foo adventure). Just add enough for some gravy. Season it with a bit of soy sauce, freshly grated pepper and a squeeze of lemon. When they’re cooked, arrange the mussels in a nice bowl before pouring the gravy in. Garnish with some fresh coriander.

Chilli Chayote

A seafood feast still required a vegetable dish, and I decided to cook a chayote in chilli paste, with some more of the anchovy broth.

Directions: Peel the Chayote (Choko) and cut uniformly. Finely mince some coriander and mix it with the chopped chayote. Heat oil in a frying pan. Add a small bit of sambal paste to the heated oil. Add a tiny bit of sugar, as before, and some salt. Drop the chayote in this mixture and stir. Use some of the anchovy broth to moisten the mixture and to provide body. I added 2-3 ladles of this broth, slowly, as the chayote absorbed the moisture. Season with soy sauce and a bit of pepper. Once everything is soft, and glistening, turn the fire off.

And just for a sense of proportion, here’s the feast, as it were. I had it all with a small scoop of jasmine rice. More than enough leftovers for weekend snacking, apart from the mussels that vanished! Like magic!

Some dishes are so very comforting to make, precisely because they take up time, and require a certain amount of effort and judgement. These stuffed vegetables for either Yong Tau Foo or a Malaysian Chinese hotpot is a case in point. Repetition helps, as well as being able to wield a knife properly. I’ve been quite gratified to find that in the three years since I’ve been here, my knife-wielding skills have upgraded a bit, as I’m able to cut things more uniformly and thinner than I used to, in the past. Of course, I do make mistakes, but I’ve learned not to be afraid of them, and to be bold, but with discretion, in the kitchen.

The vegetables I used for these are red and green chillis, a bitter gourd, and a huge lebanese eggplant which I cut into pieces. I’ve posted fairly detailed instructions on how to make this here. Practice makes perfect, and with each version of a dish that I make, I modify and refine. For instance, I now use tapioca flour instead of cornflour, as I’ve discovered it gives better texture and flavour. Also, today, I discovered that pan-frying each piece for a shorter period of time, using kitchen paper to remove excess oil and then lightly steaming the vegetable over the broth makes for a lovely texture and flavour. This can be done by fixing a steamer over the soup pot. I cheated and used the rice cooker container, which comes with a portable steaming tray.

For the past couple of rainy days, I’ve been soothing my sore throat and palate with hot, and fragrant broth into which I added scalded noodles, beansprouts, these stuffed vegetables and the wonderful Enokitake mushrooms. Together with the dipping sauce that I like to make, the taste recreates my favourite Malaysian hotpot, which should have the delicate flavour of lemongrass, fish, seafood and mushrooms. The recipe for the broth as well as the dipping sauce can be found here. I modified the dipping sauce a bit, omitting the guilin paste, adding some of the broth as well as juice from one thin lemon wedge.

Instructions for a Simple but Delicious Home Hotpot

Follow the link for my broth. If you’re not happy with anchovies (you don’t know what you’re missing out on!) use chicken stock or fish sauce. Make the broth, the stuffed vegetables if you feel like it, and the dipping sauce.

Here are my favourite hotpot ingredients. Prepare a small quantity of each in a small dish. (1) Vegetables: Either Chinese Watercress or Lettuce. (2) Beansprouts (3) 1-2 raw eggs (4) Enokitake Mushrooms (5) Shitake Mushrooms (6) Shredded Seaweed (7) Raw Chicken Strips (8) Squid/Cuttlefish (9)Varieties of Fishballs/Stuffed Vegetables (10) Rice vermicelli/hokkien noodles or glass noodles.

Other people prefer (1) Prawns (2) Beef (3) Raw Fish Strips (4) Crab sticks (5) Different Vegetables (6) Cooked Quail’s Eggs.

Really, the sky’s the limit, sometimes.

For dipping/garnish you need: Dipping sauce. You can use my recipe, or just make up your own variation of sweet/sour chilli sauce. Or get it straight from the bottle! Also, have a container of deep-fried garlic or deep-fried onion handy. Salt, pepper, soy sauce, finely chopped spring onions.

You’ll need a steamboat cooker (electric), but I’m usually happy with a rice cooker. It’s cheap, it’s portable and is safer for those of you prone to woolgathering. Set it in the middle of your table or eating space, with all the different hotpot ingredients around it. Have your scoops, and bowls for everyone. Hotpots are nice, friendly and communal things for rainy days, but it works just as well if you’re alone (and have heaps of free time, which I don’t), or there’s just two to three people.

While people take turns ladling things into the broth to cook, the best conversations take place. The gravy gets richer, more fragrant and more heady. The layering of flavours, the distilled essence of each ingredient mingling with each other, to me, evokes the complexities and inherent hybridity of storytelling.

At the final stage, you may wish break the egg(s) in, preferably after you’ve added the noodles, so you may fully enjoy the last stage of this beautiful and soul-satisfying broth. This has always been one of my favourite ways of bonding with my closest friends, but I’ve also enjoyed a long, leisurely hotpot alone, contemplatively, while listening to the rain outside or while watching anime or dorama. Some people may find that sad or horribly solitary, but I find it very satisfying and healing. I had some lovely afternoons like this after I submitted my M.A. thesis and was a bit burned out.

It doesn’t necessarily mean you eat more, if you do a solo hotpot. You’re likely to be mindful of every chicken strip or vegetable you’re dropping into that bubbling gravy, and of the moment when you retrieve it from the hotpot, and spoon more of that broth into your bowl. I’ve used quiet moments like this to furiously plot and plan away details of a story or a research project. At the end of it, I savour the moment when I finally break an egg into the gravy. It heralds the end of the feast, and the steam that fills the air somehow feels imbued with goodwill.

Of course, I did none of this today, since I’m on a conference paper and thesis-writing deadline rush, but I managed to evoke all of this within the confines of a single bowl. That worked just as well. One of these days though, I am going to have an epic hotpot evening, whether solitary or with guests. And you’d better believe there’ll be pictures.

I slept a little earlier than usual and was awakened by nightmares. The kind of nightmare I used to have as a kid, to be precise, so I should be forgiven if, at 2:00 am, I am indulging in hot milk, cookies, Arcade Fire and photomanipwankery. I love saying that word. Photomanipwankery! I suspect the wind howling outside has something to do with the nightmares, as it rattles latches and doors; but it does invoke a rather delicious feeling, of wildness and possibility, that kind of manic exultation that I associate with reading lush historical fantasies or gothic and byzantine texts after midnight. I read Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts’s Empire books on a series of nights like these, puttering about a sprawling single story house in a white nightgown, listening to the wind rattle the branches of looming equatorial houses, feeling the thrill of fear but refusing to budge from the chair into which I wrapped myself, with a thick book I refused to let go of, not till the neighbour’s cock crowed at dawn.

There are no chooks in this neighbourhood; the cold wind which is not sure which season it belongs to is rattling through subtropical trees and the nearby bush. If I stay awake long enough, I will hear kookaburras at dawn. But the feeling corresponds to those emotions felt, over ten years ago when I inhabited a sprawling house with raised wooden floors in the bedroom. It was one of those large, clunky terrace house developments built in the `70s in Malaysia; they have such a retro feel about them. I prefer those house designs to the newer, more upscale developments. There was more solidity in their design, also more square feet. These houses were built for space and maximum coolness in a hot climate. Also, there was something about these spaces that breathed and exemplified gothicity, something that inspired, even as they terrified and kept me awake long after I should have been dreaming of cybernetic sheep!

I was very sad when I left that house. The haunting sense I experienced in it, the blossoming of my gothic artistic sensibilities made its way to more than one of my texts and paintings; although Domus Exsulis only came into being a couple of years later, in a house bordering a Malay village, where the claustrophobic communal lanes were populated with stories of phantom tigers that roamed the development at night, love spells and possessions, care of witch doctors. Where these fears took the shape of other revenants that lurked beneath the sickly orange glow of street lamps.

And so I listen to the wind blow here, and I think of all things that haunt these spaces and our dreams, which will not allow us to choose where our minds reside, even if our bodies inhabit different spaces; sometimes by choice, sometimes by chance. Perhaps there is a reason why, in these pictures, I looked for that quality of translucence and luminescence. They speak of a place where the borders thin out, become see-through, where possibility may yet sneak past the barricades we put up against both the cold wind and the revenant predators of our own making.

As it must for watermaidens everywhere.

Whenever I conceive of any new blog, I visualize it like a living, ever-refreshing book with its own peculiar narrative and focus. Growing Fins, for me, needed to be about fluidity and the ebb and flow of everyday life, with snap-shots and reviews, scrapbook style. I consider this incarnation of my personal blog as an ongoing “interactive” memoir. I’m a lover of the memoir, and food writing in particular. My heroes amongst female diarists and journallers include Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, Sara Suleri and Isabel Allende. I take seriously the advice of l’ecriture feminine proponent, Hélène Cixous, to “write yourself”, and this is my credo, amongst other things. The personal to me is very political, and I consider these blogs by hybrid people such as myself “live” and on-going testimonies of lives on the edges and in-between cultures.

However, I’ve noticed lately something missing in my blog posts. Perhaps some innocence or open-ness has left me, and perhaps that is natural when one becomes more guarded with age and circumstance. Some of that came back, earlier this year. Lately, I’m not so sure about the direction I want this blog to take. It will still exist, but the idea of composing this ongoing memoir of my existence has been problematised by several factors. The grand narrative of my life has become timorous when it used to luxuriate. But, luxuriating in my life is still important for me, as is my credo of “living a good life”. To me, that includes being truthful, having an honor code, keeping one’s physical spaces simple, keeping one’s interactions with others simple but earnest, and utilising things to the best of one’s ability, ie; truly finding “heaven within a wildflower” and “infinity within a grain of sand”. A word-child, I take to heart words of wisdom from many cultures. A textual watermaiden, how could I not want to create a textual embodiment of my own ontology? To me this is economical too, after all, we would not want to throw our memories to the wind, when memory and consciousness can be erased all-too-easily.

Perhaps these grand ideals for being simple is sometimes the hardest, especially when one is complex and raised in a consumerist culture. I like things, I like shopping and I’m a pack-rat. I guess in many ways this blog has become like the online habitat of a pack-rat, with textual mathoms and contradictions everywhere.

These musings are occuring because mythopoetica.com has been rejuvenated. Every single blog/site has been given a new background. CSS has been lovingly fondled. Posts are happening elsewhere, particularly at the main blog for The Mythogenetic Grove, where I write about my progress in both fiction and the visual arts while musing about myth and fairytales within a hybrid context. While the personal is political, I feel a need to be less personal in divulging details about my life, but focusing on ideas and thoughts instead. This does not necessarily mean that the focus of this blog is going to shift, dramatically, any time soon. But it does mean that I’m thinking about the direction and focus of it all. For some reason, I am thinking wistfully about the posts I used to write on A Living Space, when the internet and me were still relatively young, and no one actually read me. However, neither of us are young now. We’ve grown cynical and guarded, but perhaps within that maturity, there is room and hope for innocence, and for this grand narrative to still luxuriate, cautiously, with dignity.

About the photo: I decided to give another of the pictures I took in Penang (2007) the Photoshop treatment with some extreme curves action going on here. Lately, I’ve been more interested in the photographs I took in Malaysia. Perhaps it was because my camera did not have a broken lens then, or perhaps there’s just something about Asia that inspires and invigorates my muse. I delighted in these old spaces, growing up. To a certain extent, if I wanted to re-image my words on this blog as a building, it would be one of these old houses in Penang. Or perhaps one of those colonial mansions that still exist there, ringed with, and haunted by, rain-trees.