Ancient Carrot Soup

It never occurred to me to revisit my recipe for carrot and potato soup until I spotted something at the Cold Storage in the "new" Jaya Shopping Centre.

Purple carrots.

Lead "actors": potatoes and purple carrots

Oh, how novel, you might say. But I remember reading from somewhere that carrots come in several colours, like corn and rice, and was apparently what the ancients used to eat. And it seems that the lobak ori were mostly purple ones, and the modern orange carrots are mutants, widely cultivated for economic reasons.

The colour of purple carrots indicates its anthocyanin content. Reputed to be a powerful antioxidant, anthocyanins are also found in a variety of food, such as purple corn, blackberries, eggplant peel, Concord grapes, black rice and black glutinous rice. However, the actual contributions of food-based anthocyanins to one's health haven't been concretely substantiated.

Veggies getting tossed with the aromatics before the main event

But, mmm, purple carrots. And a purple carrot soup makes an interesting talking point, even if the nutritional value is hyped up.

Three small potatoes, three small purple carrots (not expensive), shallots, garlic, mixed herbs and the usual seasoning, plus a little pre-packed vegetable stock (250ml; they ran out of bigger packages).

First, the sautéing of the aromatics. After which, the vegetables - peeled and diced - were added.

When the veggies were ready, I poured in the vegetable stock plus some water and brought the whole thing to a boil. After which, it simmered for about 10 or 15 minutes, during which I added black pepper, a bit of salt and the mixed herbs.

ROILING HELLBROTH (and yes, the stovetops need cleaning - done that)

Getting it to cool before the blending took longer. What you get is something that resembles black glutinous rice dessert, albeit a few shades lighter, due to the potatoes. The spuds also provide the starch to thicken it, so no need for cream, yogurt and the like.

The blended stuff goes back into the pot and heated up till it bubbles. Don't let it bubble for long; as soon as you see a few of those pop, stir and stir for a bit and take it off the heat. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

The soup, like Zhang Ziyi says in her Visa commercial, was a bit "too sahltee." I think the heat must've dulled the tastebuds; the saltiness was more evident when the soup cooled. Should I have tasted the stock first to check? Maybe.

I think the soup also needed more carrot, less potato, and a shorter cooking time. A few bits of raw purple carrot on top - plus some croutons or toasted baguette slices - wouldn't have been out of place, either.

Blended and brought to a boil: Carrot Soup of the Ancients

So yes, ancient purple carrots. I think they should be on supermarket shelves - and salad bowls - everywhere.

Currying Flavours With Egg And Bacon

I am fond of curries, even those that don't necessarily qualify as such by Malaysian standards.

Some of my favourite dishes are the curry rices some tai chow restaurants prepare, which are more like the Japanese curry rice that I'm also fond of. But sadly, very few places that sell this dish are nearby; the nearest one closed shop weeks ago.

Curry pasta sounds like a poor choice in comparison.

It's a bit more involved than my sunshine pasta, in that I use more herbs and spices and add some bacon and a poached egg for good measure. Non-spaghetti-type pastas like fusilli, shells and penne work better with this, but I'm not laying down laws here. Use whatever you like.

Curry sauce fusilli with bacon and poached egg; the bit of yolk is what
remained of a botched poach - let's not speak of it again

For better results, I'd mix a little grated ginger, grated garlic and grated shallots with the curry powder, a bit of salt and water while the pasta cooks (in salted water) - but you can do without the wet spices in a hurry, like when you're so hungry it feels like you're about to give birth to a chestburster.

Then again, there's the bacon and poached egg. You fry the former in oil (or without, and let the fat render for use later, though this is pointless if you're not using a whole lot of bacon) and put it on a dish with a paper towel to catch the excess grease. I could write a whole post on the latter, which I won't because HUNGRY, yo.

Just poach the egg, fish it out of the water and put it on another dish lined with a paper towel to soak up the excess water. If the poached egg still has some water in the pockets of cooked white, it'll seep into the pasta and dilute the curry.

Once the bacon's done, you use the fat left behind to fry up the curry paste. I didn't bother with the oil-separating thingy, so I waited until the paste is fragrant before I tipped the pasta in.

Few things approach the sanctity of liquid ambrosia than the
fluid yolk of a poached egg

Stir to coat, adding a little water if necessary. Add a tablespoon or two of yogurt to cream up the sauce, mix well and plate. Push the pasta up into a pile or make a nest of sorts where the poached egg goes, then sprinkle with bacon bits and serve.

...This happened late last year. But what the heck.

Book Marks: Copyright Fight And Stuff

The author of Malay-language novel Aku Bohsia is reportedly suing a film production firm for allegedly plagiarising the novel for the film Bohsia: Jangan Pilih Jalan Hitam. I was surprised this suit was filed. Because:

[...63-year-old Elias Idris] said he wrote the novel in 1995 using the pseudonym, Anne Natasha Nita, and obtained a copyright on it.

As I understand it, the term bohsia (literally, Hokkien for "no sound" or "voiceless") is usually synonymous with "slut", one that tends to hang out with gangs or prostitutes herself.

So ... yeah ...

Also:

• Spirits Abroad (Fixi Novo, 2014) by Zen Cho won the Crawford Award (for first fantasy book) in the United States. Cho's book shared the award (full name: the William L. Crawford Fantasy Award) with The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman (Ecco, 2014). Congrats!
• From the Penang Monthly magazine, "The new wave of Malaysian Fixi-on" by Marco Ferrarese. I had no idea this publication existed. Also in the current issue (January 2015), a profile of Ismail Gareth Richards, who runs the GerakBudaya Penang bookshop.
• "Being critical of made-in-Malaysia books is all about being supportive." Daphne Lee returns to The Star in a new column on local books.
• So you think you know Chaucer, do you? Paul Strohm's The Poet's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury tries to uncover more about the author of The Canterbury Tales.
• Is this the world's first gardening manual? I'm not really sure. Some of the gardening advice is just plain weird, hucksterish, even.
• A load of malarkey (come on, who could resist?): How "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" came to be.
• Fifteen words that actually came from literature. Turns out the term "unfriend" is a lot older than thought.
• Scopes trained at apparent half-truths in the novel American Sniper.
• Why Indian author Perumal Murugan quit writing: the furore over the translated edition of controversial novel Madhorubhagan.
• When Oxford University Press issued a an advisory on the inclusion of pigs and pig-related things in children's books, people naturally had stuff to say, including Ron Charles. OUP has since clarified its stand, saying that it does not ban porcine material from its books but does provide "guidance to authors on a range of areas that might cause offence in specific markets. This does, amongst other things, include advice around the use of images of pigs."
• Why John Murphy's grandfather translated Hitler's Mein Kampf. The story of "the first unabridged version in English, which was eventually published in London in 1939 - is an intriguing one. It involves worries about copyright, sneaking back into Nazi Germany to rescue manuscripts and a Soviet spy."
• When it's time to let go of a book, how to decide what stays and what goes?

Book Marks: The Late, Late Year-End Wrap-Up

The local social media scene was briefly set alight (as usual) when news of a wild boar in halls of the MMU Cyberjaya library emerged. The creature was said to have wandered out of the wilderness bordering the township and ended up in the library, where it was eventually subdued and carried off. A news portal had a great headline for the story, which was proven real. The fate of the boar isn't known, but things don't look good for it.


Plus:

• The religious raid and book seizure at Borders, over the Malay translation of Allah, Liberty and Love, was ruled illegal by Court of Appeal at the end of last year. Even more recently, the government failed to keep the ban on the Malay translation of Irshad Manji's Allah, Liberty and Love, published by ZI Publications.
• Malaysian National Laureate Datuk Abdullah Hussain (1920-2014), passed on at the end of last year. Sad news.
• Zen Cho, author of the anthology Spirits Abroad (Fixi, 2014), is interviewed by Daphne Lee on writing, SFF, Western vs Malaysian publishing and more.
• "Making Malaysia’s literary capital work": A Q&A with the curator of the 2014 George Town Literary Festival.
• A well-travelled food historian studying urban food culture in the Asia-Pacific is starting a new blog (h/t Robyn Eckhardt). Should be worth following as it fills up.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s first novel, Mycroft Holmes, written with screenwriter and producer Anna Waterhouse, will be published in fall by Titan Books. It stars Sherlock Holmes' brainy older brother.
• UK bookselling chain Waterstones noted that sales of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader had "disappeared" after seeing higher demand for physical books. The resurgence in demand for print was also credited to Waterstones's refurbishment of some of its shops and giving managers more control over their stores to cater to local tastes.
• Annie Proulx regrets writing Brokeback Mountain because it seems many readers wanted Jack and Ennis together - which wasn't what she had in mind. Well, if this back ain't broke, don't fix it.
• The sad fate of a best-selling young novelist, who died alone in a house along a windswept Irish coast.
• Mark Zuckerberg starts a book club and its first book, The End of Power by Moisés Naím, sold out on Amazon.

Book Marks: #GTLF2014, Battle Diary, And E-Book Fatigue

Writing chose us, say author Susan Barker and poet Sudeep Sen. A lyrical piece on the recently concluded 2014 George Town Literary Festival. The writer who gave us the above also wrote about how writers Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, Marco Ferrarese and Shivani Sivagurunathan create a sense of place in their works during the Festival.

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Publishers told Chantelle Taylor no one wanted a war story by a woman and asked her to sex it up with romance. Good thing she didn't listen. Despite other publishers' - ahem - misgivings, Taylor's battle diary was well received.

Also in the annals of "publishers who don't know what works and what doesn't", Amazon rejected a book for containing too many hyphenated words, only to put it back on sale later.

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Data from Kobo reveals readers couldn't finish some e-books. According to The Guardian, "The Goldfinch may have won Donna Tartt the Pulitzer, praised by judges as a novel which 'stimulates the mind and touches the heart', but the acclaimed title's 800-odd pages appear to have intimidated British readers, with less than half of those who downloaded it from e-bookseller Kobo making it to the end."

Proofreading a 250-plus page e-book on-screen hard work. I can't imagine going through something almost as thick as The Kindly Ones or James Clavell's brick-thick novels.


Also:

• RIP Shirley Hew, veteran Singaporean publisher. The executive director of Straits Times Press was credited with discovering award-winning writers Suchen Christine Lim and Colin Cheong.
• The Japanese version of Lat's Kampung Boy won second place in Japan's Gaiman Award for the overseas comic category. Yay, Datuk Lat! Omedeto gozaimasu!
• They're expensive to produce and harder to sell. So, is there still a point in publishing academic books?
• Publishers talk about the hits and misses of 2014. Andrew Franklin of Profile Books deviated a little to tell us he was "most proud NOT to have published" Girl Online - and "most ashamed for my fellow publishers for signing up."
• A new book reveals that Beijing's claims to the South China Sea are a recent invention. Ooh, won't this raise a few hackles in the mainland.
• Why we should write in books: the case for marginalia. The points in that article are interesting and kind of valid, but I don't have any compelling reason to start scribbling in books - especially those priced over RM15 and above.
• Someone wrote some thoughts to The Malay Mail Online about "why many Malaysians still cannot converse in English". One Tweeter (can't remember who) noted the irony.
• The future of books and bookstores looks bright to James Daunt, chief executive of Waterstones. I think Daunt sounds a bit optimistic in this article, but if he feels this way....
• When I first got into blogging, I came across quite a few good blogs, and Michael Ooi's was one of them. Glad to see it again (H/T Suanie), and glad to see him keeping it real after all these years. And I can relate to this.

It's What We Say And Do

This afternoon, I went to donate stuff for the flood relief efforts - and became a beneficiary of the kindness of others when my car battery died at the underground parking lot at IGB Tower, TTDI.

Two foreign security guards tried to push my car in an attempt to jump-start it. It failed; I was told later this evening that such emergency jump-starts only worked with manual vehicles. Eventually, one of them looked under the hood and concluded that the battery was gone. He pushed my car into another parking space while I looked for help.

Luckily there was a car workshop nearby. The chief foreman and possibly the boss drove me back to my car with a new battery. I also learnt a bit about my car: seems you can change the battery while the engine's running (it's not battery-operated), and one should, to keep certain settings in the car's electronics from being re-set, like my clock and saved radio channels.

"No good deed goes unpunished", some might say. But I should note that the battery's about two years old, at a time when many other batteries warrant replacement.

In the face of misfortune or a force of nature, what or who we are is nothing. What stands out most is we say and do. And what the volunteers were doing at the donation drop-off point at TTDI is great.

Some of those who formed human chains to convey donated goods into vehicles for transport included migrant workers at the restaurants/drop-off points, like the guards who helped me out.

Let's be like this all the time, rather than during emergencies only.

Faking It

Outraged over Girl Online? Scott Pack doesn't think it's worth exploding over, because it's nothing new. Many famous people don't write their own books, but theirs are keeping bookstores afloat.

"Because the truth is the other books, the 'worthwhile' ones, aren’t popular enough to sustain our industry," he blogged. "And they never will be. The festive boost that the likes of Zoella, Jamie Oliver, underwater dogs and that bloke from Westlife provides is often the difference between a bookshop existing and not existing."

Was it so long ago since everybody was rattled by another ghostwriter's confessions?

Over at Salon, Laura Miller delves into the reason why Zoella's teen fan base feels "betrayed" that she did not write her own book.

From what I understand of Ms Miller's piece, Zoella's fault, if one can call it that, is that she made authenticity part of her brand. People like it if you're "real", especially those who are young, impressionable and bone-tired of faking it - and dealing with fakers - to get through the day.

So I guess her biggest fans should feel cheated - because if plain old Zoe Sugg didn't write her own book, what else did she not do?

A writer (let's call her "Gem") with whom I discussed this feels ghostwriting non-fiction (memoirs, textbooks and the like) is fine; "authors" of such books are often non-writers and have little time to write or research beyond their day jobs. Given the nature of our work, I could commiserate.

Writers of fiction who employ ghostwriters, meanwhile are the real pretenders, said Gem - like artists who don't paint or sculpt their own works. While non-fiction involves stringing together facts into an attractive and engaging narrative, fiction, she feels, is more of creating original material, even if the underlying concepts or ideas originated elsewhere.

Still, James Patterson's books are pretty hot, even though word is that he doesn't really write his own books anymore. But you know, it's like Danish butter cookies. Once someone hits on a winning formula, you can't stop the copycats and you're all, "Screw it, bad mood. WANT."

And for similar reasons, I think we can also give "Katie Price" a pass.