Fresh seafood

The best thing about living so close to the ocean...seafood!!! That's another thing I miss most coming from an island to a flat land where you're surrounded by corns and soybean.

On weekends, mum would stir-fry 'pek chiau' with soy sauce...definitely the best! I could eat 2 just for lunch and skip the rice. When dad's around, we would have the baby 'pek chiau' deep fried. It would be soooo crispy you can eat the whole thing, even the bones! On days when ahmah is too lazy to cook, she would make steamed 'bola hu' in soy sauce with chilli and that's enough to go with rice. Mum actually managed to smuggle some 'bola hu' for me a couple years ago...gotta do that the next time I go home. Kekeke...

Whenever there's a function, we would go to Teluk Bahang or Batu Maung for finger-lickin good seafood. Crabs and honey prawns!! But now when I go back only for a month, I tend to get sick of them by the end of my break because seafood are not really healthy food and it kinda gets to my stomach after a while. The last two trip wasn't that bad because we have home cook seafood! Instead of going out, we buy them back for gee kim to cook. She's the best cook for homecook food I've known! She can make any hawker food too! That's one thing I'm glad that I get to go back to Penang for hols instead of to PJ. Kekeke..

There was one weekend when se han ee and Uncle Francis brought us to Gertak Sanggul to buy grass for our garden. Uncle Francis saw some fisherman coming up shore and approach them..the next thing you know, we got fresh fish! How often can you actually buy your seafood from the fisherman themselves just when they bring the fish back from the ocean? Definitely not in Michigan!
As for this year, since I couldn't go back home, I got my share of seafood from the coast of Massachusetts. There are fresh lobsters, they were caught and kept in a seawater tank until they are ready to be barbequed or steamed. That's me pulling up the lobster trap. Unfortunately, the trapped that I pulled out had a hard-shelled sea mollusc instead. But the trip out was fun. I just love being out in the sea. Once they are out of the water, the lobsters are basically harmless. They can't move very much except for their claw. So we have to hold them upside down and tie up their claw with a rubber band. If the claw is not tied up, when it is added to other lobsters in the sea water tank, they would clip off each other's claw. Agressive!
Besides lobsters, the Swope serves fish or scallops almost every other day. I definitely did managed to go poultry-less this summer. They have really good shrimp sandwich, crabmeat salad and seaweed mix. Then there's salmon, codfish, sea bass and more. The one thing that we still don't get in US is fishes are not served as whole fish. They usually use only the fillet. But it was still good.

The restaurants closeby all serves seafood too. I've had a mahi-mahi sandwich at Captain Kidd, fried calamari at Landfall, fish and chips at Lee Side and salmon at Phusion Grille.