My days of growing up in Kuching, Sarawak I only ever known cangkuk manis or mani chai cooked 3 ways. In Pan Mee soup, fry with eggs and masak lemak like this. I have seen people adding to BiHoon goreng (fry vermicelli) etc but that’s individual prerogative I believe, not traditional but I can stand to be corrected of course.

I was lucky that a friend shared half her pumpkin with me but boy was it tough to slice. I was so worried that I would cut my fingers. Very stressful. Next time I will ask her to please slice for me too. – kekekekeke I sliced and freeze them waiting and waiting for fresh mani chai. Luckily I found them yesterday at my local Asian shop! I was so happy. Finally I can cook Mani Chai masak lemak.

My mother often refers to this vegetable as Lakian Chai. We eat it quite often including Midin. When we eat outside, if mother believes we are heaty then she would order mani chai and if not we would have Midin goreng belacan. Ah…..those were the days. This is a super easy dish to cook.

Firstly, fry the shallots, remove and keep aside. Do the same with the dried anchovies (ikan bilis). Then using the flavoured oil add in mince onions, lemon grass, garlic and fry.

Secondly, add in the turmeric, pumpkin, chicken stock cube, coconut milk, sliced red chillies or bird eyes chilies and simmer.

Lastly, bring to boil and simmer till your pumpkin has soften. Taste, season, heat off and add in your mani chai. After a good stir topped with the crispy shallots and anchovies. Serve hot.

“I wanted to make this album for a long time and finally have a double boiler. I hope you will try and make this. This was taught to me by my ex MIL who hailed from China. She passed away nearly 3 decades ago but she taught me a lot of 康熙帝 Kāngxī Di’s cooking and Chinese herbs.” – 25th January 2015 (Facebook)

My original blog was lost but due to Facebook’s albums I was able to retrieve some photos and this album. Today while talking to a lady I was suddenly reminded of this as I do need to partake in some goodness aka pure chicken essence with herbs, as I am still not as strong after suffering and recovering from Covid19. I need to renew my energy and boast some strength.

I decided to take out my double boiler and start working on ‘healing’ myself a bit. So I resurfaced these photos and redo this album in my new blog. This time my blog would never be lost as hubby has saved all in 3 different places, 3 copies – kekekekeke He had also written a program to update automatically each time I update it.

As I boil more and more ‘healing soups’ I will be posting new photos but for the moment these are old photos just to explain the procedures. I never post soups much even though we have herbal soups at least twice a week. I always thought people know how to boil soups. Recently I realised this is not actually true.

I do know that nowadays many people won’t be boiling tonic soups or make chicken essence like this but I have always drank chicken essence this way. I would never drink the jars stuff as when comparing the taste, the jar stuff tasted like chicken stock with ajinomoto. To me they are only suitable for seasoning a dish.

A lot of tonic stuff nowadays come in packets and you only need to steep them with hot water. Again that’s fine but they are not the Real McCoy.

This IS The Real McCoy.

Once in a while I have a hankering to boil this soup. It brings me down memory lane when my father would take us to this restaurant in the middle of Pandungan Roak, Kuching, Sarawak.

No matter what dishes the parents ordered, there will always be this soup. I guess it is because we, the children love it so much and easier to add to rice and eat as children like soupy rice.

I have been meaning to cook this and i have bought some sweetcorn before I sliced a chunk off my right thumb so I have to wait until now to satisfied my craving and to blog this.

Drinking this, memories of my early teens comes back in flood. My years growing up in Kuching were some of the best times of my life.

A good soup with a balance of sweetness from the fresh sweetcorn kennels and the tasty pork balls with cuttlefish, the fresh ground Sarawak pepper …… happy belly.

I hope those who have not tired before might try this for it’s good and quite tasty.

A friend recently is very interested in learning this dish. Maybe because she sees I eat a lot of this. It’s my go to lazy dish. When I am wrapping, I tend to wrap a big batch and bagged them into my freezer.

Then when I am hungry and want some food I would just make an easy chicken or mushroom stock, add a few of these babies from my freezer, some fried shallots with oil and any vegetables I can find in my fridge. Sometimes I add in an egg or two. Lunch or dinner is served within 20 minutes.

This brand of wrappers is the bigger ones so perfect for wrapping Sui Kow as I like to put in a lot of big bits of prawns. No I am not making my own wrappings though at one time when these wrappers were no on sale for 6 months I thought I might have to. Phew…..not that hardworking but was considering buying a pasta machine.

If you can only find the smaller wrappers then chop your prawns smaller.

As for my broth I use anchovies powder or mushroom powder or chicken powder if there’s no home made stock in my freezer. The mushroom stock I buy from the Japan is very good. It is entirely up to you of course.