Thursday, August 13, 2009

Great Summer Weather

I have been really enjoying the great weather so far this Summer. Many Torontonians will want to vehemently disagree with me. This summer has been wetter and cooler than normal.The natives have been whining about it being not hot enough.They are partly right.One of the major differences in weather in the eastern seaboard of North America and say the U.K is that we have very cold winters and very hot summers.In the UK , the temperatures are relatively cool in the summers and typically do not get a really a hot whack of in your face heat for any length of time in the summer.If you watch golf on TV, you will notice that during the British Open in the middle of July, both players and spectators are wrapped up in sweaters. Not so here.We typically get very hot temperature for days on end, 32 -35 C during July and August.This is the payback for the very bone chilling days in the winter.So when this hot weather is not delivered by mother nature, the people really freak out.Not me though.Being brought up in the tropics, I have enough of hot weahter to last me a few life times. I enjoy the 20-25c highs so far this summer.I played golf yesterday in 22c weather, absolutely fantastic for this time of the year. This Saturday the forecast is for a high of 30c and this means lots of Gatorade to bring along for golf.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Penang Hokkien Mee

Made Penang Hokkien Mee over the Civic Holiday long weekend. I typically make this dish several times a year mainly in the summer when kangkong is at its best. The key to this dish is to use lots of shrimp shells for the stock base. Malaysian street food is not as well known as say Thai and Vietnamese in this part of the world but I promise you that we have a bunch of very delicious dishes. Penang Hokkiem Mee is one of these dishes. In the Kuala Lumpur area where I was from, the best Hokkien Mee is from the O&S Coffee shop in PJ. On every visit back, I will make a point to have a bowl of this dish and really soak in the taste and when I cook this dish back in Toronto, I would have made a good duplicate. On numerous occasions in Toronto when I sample various dishes from my Malaysian friends, many of this dishes are nowhere close to the original in both the taste and the type of garnishings. One of the reasons is that they have have been away too long and have lost sight of the original taste.




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