Sunday, April 14, 2013

Breakfast at tea time



This post is for MGW in KCMO. This is a picture of the chwee kuay that I wrote about a while back. It really isn't much to look at, it's quite simple fare really. The brown bits are the salted preserved radish. It adds flavour to what would otherwise be tasteless rice flour cakes.

This unassuming chwee kuay is comfort food to me. It brings me back to my childhood. When I was very young, my mother would buy some back from the market on Saturday mornings after she had done her weekly food shopping. Years later, when I was a teenager, we moved, and the market where she then did her shopping had a McDonald's next to it. Saturday breakfasts then became burgers and milkshakes. Funny thing is, a Big Mac will never bring me back to childhood breakfasts the way chwee kuay does.

Now, it is the husband who buys home the chwee kuay after he's gone for a morning power walk. I'm still being spoilt.  :)

And then I had a slice of toast after the chwee kuay. That's definitely breakfasty.

2 comments:

MGW said...

The chwee kuay looks just like poached eggs with bacon bits on top. I'd have never guessed this is a rice cake -- here they are dry hard blocks of cement that no one who really likes the taste of food could ever eat (they taste like really dusty cardboard). Is the radish salty? Thanks for the picture -- I'm not sure I'd enjoy the food but it's cool to know what it looks like. Makes me think I should travel more . . . if only age didn't make travel so complicated.

Unknown said...

It's not the crispy rice cake made of puffed rice, but a steamed version made from ground rice flour. You must have had rice flour rolls at dimsum restaurants. This is a bit like that, instead of steaming them in sheets and then rolling them up into rolls, the mixture is steamed in a little muffin cup and comes out like a little cake. The radish is very salty, and technically L isn't allowed it for his low-salt diet.