Was looking at some blogs to pass the time, and in the end, the blogs made me hungry. So here I was trying to sleep while my stomach is rumbling and somehow the thought about the food I ate in school came up.
The one dish in Primary school I clearly remembered was sold by the chubby old lady in the 2nd stall from the right. She would have all the different fried items like hotdogs, fishcakes, chicken nuggets or fried eggs that you could have in your
Nasi Lemak. The other choice she had was the fried rice,
which wasn't fried at all but was rather just the coconut rice mixed with slivers of fishcake and omelette. That somehow became my favourite
tuckshop order, with either a whole piece of fishcake (
50 cents!!) or a fried egg to top it off. The eggs were always fried with the outer rim all crispy while the yolk was left runny. Best thing to do? Break the yolk over you rice and mix it in...
ooohhh HEAVEN! Not forgetting her sambal which made that piece of fishcake into a delightful snack before or after ECAs.
Then came the thought about
the first dish I ever had in Primary school which was from the noodle stall right next to the old lady's. This was run by a younger lady with, who most probably was, her daughter. She sold simple bowls of noodles with slices of pork, fishcakes and fishballs. Somehow I can't remember if there was any prawn in it but it tasted like prawn noodle stock. The whole memory was of me enjoying my bowl of noodles, while my parents stood infront of me talking to my form teacher, confirming that I was taking Mandarin as a 2nd language rather than Malay. Well, over the next 5 years, I learnt that there were a lot of things you could say to make a simple bowl of noodles change into a great big feast-in-a-bowl, and that
the chilli always makes a difference.
The thoughts went back to the fishcake snack and then I recalled the fried carrot cake, the type that came in squares, you'd eat with sweet black soy sauce & chilli. This snack was sold by the drinks stall, the very 1st one on the left, or as most of us know,
Uncle Ho's stall! Uncle Ho & his wife were a cute elderly couple who were sweet and patient, and also adapted to new things quite fast. During the 6 years there, the drinks change from cardboard packets to canned, and some used to be scooped out like they do with soya milk &
chin chow drinks until F&N introduced them to dispensers. At one point, they allowed us to step in and do our own mixing of drinks, or the "
Chumchum", which they learnt, was a mix of all the different things they can dispense. Back to the carrot cake. That square little piece became another favourite snack of mine as it had a nice amount of pepper in it. If you were to ask me now I would probably say it needs more pepper, but back then when I wasn't that much of a pepper maniac, it just made my senses tingle.
Finally the long thought went to this one other stall my sis talked about before, the Malay stall. I honestly have no memory of that stall as I probably ate there only once or twice in all of the 6 years. Not that I don't like their choice of food, but more like the fact that they always sold out or weren't open. The only thing I know is that they were the 2nd stall from the left.
I'm hungry!
