Monday, July 11, 2011

The Little Blessings In Life..

Buah Setoi
This is buah setoi. My colleagues tell me a smaller version of this fruit is called buah stair. LOL! Somebody dropped it off for Other Half together with some freshly plucked mangosteens from one of the dusuns near the border. Up north here, this fruit is rather well known among the kampung folks. These 2 are rather big setoi(s) my colleagues tell me. You are to peel the skin, slice it into thin and small pieces and cecah garam belacan with it.... that's something like the kuah rojak. My friend tells me her grandma used to pickle it. Some people chop it fine and fry it with dried prawns and coconut milk.

And it got me thinking about the little blessings that come our way. Macaroni with cheese, butter cakes, pies, Balik Pulau durians, kuih-muihs.... the food stuff that always end up in our stomachs and warm the heart. And this setoi is one of those things, even though we didn't really know how to eat them to begin with.

Been rather busy around the house of late... the current flavour is back to gardening. My last gardening craze was 10 years ago, before my gal was born. Back then, I was crazy about flowers, all kinds of flowers. These days, my preoccupation is the edibles. I'm trying my hand at vegetable gardening for a change. But so far, the only vegetable that has been growing well is our long beans. It's been giving us a rather good harvest for the past month or so. And many a long beans have found their way to my neighbours and friends too!

And I've been reading up about it quite a bit. Have been quite taken up by the urban gardening concept. So, it made me look around for the little things we can improve around the house. I realized that the air con water could be harvested for use. The water is after all clean.
Bird Nest
So, Other Half got down to redoing the piping for the air con and this is what we found on one of our units. A little bird had found a little hole in the plastic covering and built this inside. I saw some dried grass peeping out from the hole and we opened it up, this little home greeted us!

Anyway, work is still ongoing at water harvesting. I'm also trying my hand at some of the other leafy vegetables... and working on the 'watering' problem. Right now, I'm busy getting rid of the snails from my little vegetable patch.... it's a battle against the thousands.

4 comments:

Thomas C B Chua said...

AJ7, you must have been giving to receive. This is what we discover so durians, rambutans, "Cheese cakes from an AOG brother'" packets of breakfast and specialties from outstation like the 'Dragon balls from Penang," " Tau Sar Peah from Taiping," " Salt Chicken from Ipoh," "Seremban Siew Paus," and even "fried rice from Sadao, etc Thailand," land themselves in our stomachs from friends. Of course, it has to be a 2 way traffic to make relationship smooth flow. I count all these are all blessings that warm the heart.

PreciousPearl said...

setoi... never heard of it before. What does it taste like?

AJ7 said...

Masam!

Anonymous said...

Buah Setoi! We used to eat this when we were young. Didn't see it for ages. Last 2 weeks hubby bought one from market. Slightly larger than the usual one. I guess yours is much bigger. :)
Fr Wonderland

Broken?

Education in doldrums... An already broken education system given a really hard whack by Covid-19.  I used to read about pandemics, that a b...