Two recommendable Korean movies

Nowadays (and since quite a long time), TV9 is showing a Korean movie every Sunday night at 10pm, in the original Korean language with Malay subtitles. Korean movies are generally a lot worse than Korean dramas; for some reason the plot is usually too silly for me to enjoy or appreciate.

I remember watching Jackal just because I heard that Song Ji Hyo (from Running Man) was in it, and I wanted to see how she acts. (I had never seen her in a movie or drama before) The movie was silly, and I was thinking rather disappointing, until the very end where there was a twist and made me appreciate the movie a bit after all. (It was about a bumbling assassin, by the way)

After that I didn't really try to watch any Korean movie... and then one day I saw the beginning of Montage on TV9 (my brother had the TV on, since he sleeps late and likes to flip channels to see what is on). It started off with the statute of limitations expiring on an old case, and the criminal managed to get away from the detective right before the expiry. I decided to continue watching it, and seriously, I have never been so pleased with a Korean movie. It is even in the top ranks of all-time, any-language movies, in my books.

After that, I took a look at the movies each Sunday to see whether there was anything interesting. Mostly there weren't, but another time I watched Confession of Murder, and found it pretty good as well. In this movie, a murderer publishes a book detailing his murders, after the expiry of the statute of limitations on his crimes. (hey, I love mystery and crime, so it's no surprise that the two movies I like are so similar in theme) I would still say that Montage is better, though.

So for now Montage is my first-ranked Korean movie, and Nine is my first-ranked Korean drama (more on Nine in another post... I hope!) It's like every new movie or drama that I watch will be compared against them... will try to update if there's a new number one!

Edit (28th June 2016) :
Added link to the post about Nine!

All about shrimp

Last weekend I was taking out some dried shrimp to cook with my vegetables. But amongst the shrimp siblings, there was an intruder... or maybe a cousin.

Well? Do you see it?

There is a mini-crab among the shrimp (top of the pic, in case you really can't see it). I soaked it in water together with its cousins, but it didn't get softer, so I threw it away. I'm not even sure whether it was an empty shell or not...

In an unrelated incident (that is to make it sound like breaking news, in case you didn't make the connection :P ), I was offered a cucur udang for free. And not for the first time.

There is this stall selling cucur udang (prawn fritters) near my place, at the area where I usually buy my dinner. I don't know what time they start selling, but they will close shop sometime around 7pm. Once I wanted to buy one piece, but they had only two pieces left so they gave me the second one for free. It was rather a dilemma to not say no, because I didn't want to eat that much (I was going to have my dinner too!), but they obviously wanted to get rid of the last piece, otherwise they would have to sit there and sell the single remaining piece.

Then today it happened again... I wanted one piece, but they told me I could have the second one for free. It's rather embarrassing... in the end I gave them RM2 instead of RM1.40 for the one piece I wanted.

I gobbled down one piece once I got home... and then thought to blog about this, so here's the second piece.

The batter that makes up the base has some mengkuang (and other stuff/spices) inside, which makes it better than most cucur udang (which only uses flour, I think). Previously they sold it on a table by the roadside, but today I saw that they had graduated to a dedicated van. The strange thing is their banner shows Cucur Udang Kuala Gula, but another signboard says Kuala Kurau instead.

And typing that led me to make a quick Internet search... turns out that Kuala Kurau and Kuala Gula are nearby places in Perak. There is even a blog post dedicated to Kuala Kurau's cucur udang. Now I know...

Book haul (again)

In early April, the Big Bad Wolf came to Penang (I mean the book sale, of course).

This time, despite trying not to look for new books (I was only looking for my favourite authors), I still ended up with ten books.

Four Jeffrey Archers, two Lisa Gardners and two Jodi Picoults. Added to that, Gone Girl which had an interesting synopsis and had been made into a movie, so I decided to give it a try, and the last book, My Secret Sister, which had actually caught my eye at the previous BBW sale too, and it attracted me again. This time I noticed that it was actually a true story (about twin sisters separated at birth), and that it was written by the sisters themselves. So I decided to pick it up this time.

It will take me some time to finish these, but maybe it will be considerably faster than books from other authors... I'm already itching to go and pick up the next Jeffrey Archer book. :P

Discovering satar in a different way

When I was back in Kuantan, we went to the market to buy some afternoon snacks.

Among the Malay snacks, we had our eyes on otak-otak and satar, but as we were walking back to the car, we stopped at another stall selling various kuih. There was something that looked like fish (sardine, maybe?) wrapped in crispy popiah skin. We would have walked right past, but then my mother saw someone preparing a whole lot more of it (wrapping it up to be fried). So we asked the seller, what is this? She said, satar goreng. She said to go ahead and try it, so we tried one. Turns out it is the satar filling wrapped in popiah skin to be fried.

So we bought some home.

One side of the wrapped filling is a little reddish; I think they put some chilli paste while wrapping the satar.

On another day, we went to Manhattan Fish Market to take advantage of their promotion (order two dishes at a lower price). The three of us (my parents and I) shared two meals:

Scallops Fish Chicken

Deep-fried scallops (scallops goreng tepung :P ), fried breaded fish, and grilled chicken breast (not sure if it's always the breast)

Small Flame

The "special" part is the flame-grilled prawns, which were flamed almost in front of us ("almost" because the waitress had to use the blowtorch away from our faces, hence away from our table) We thought this was supposed to come with calamari too, but it didn't have calamari. We were debating whether to ask, but then dug in first and suddenly, it seemed that if we asked, they might say that we had eaten the calamari before asking...

The dishes came with fries and garlic herb rice, so it was actually quite filling, even for the three of us! (small eaters...) We added a mushroom soup too, but it wasn't that special. It came in a huge coffee cup (at least that's how it seemed to me), but I didn't take a photo.