I'm sure you're noticing a pattern in recent posts...

First we have something not entirely positive. And then we have food. Kuching comfort food... Where would we be without it?

This week's version of "not entirely positive" was a lot of time spent at the hospital, following up on the findings of the MRI Nigel underwent during those last days in Istanbul.

There have been consultations, blood tests, a CT scan, and more consultations.

He's outwardly fine, let me reassure everyone. No recurrence of the symptoms that led to the MRI in the first place. But there is something amiss, and correcting it will need to be factored into the next few weeks/months.

Seriously, if it's not one thing, it's another...

So, swiftly on to less weighty matters. We've been members of a couple of organizations here pretty much since we arrived. But we were fairly busy at the end of 2019, and after that, physical meetings were off the table for a long, long time (usual reason). We're not big fans of Zoom and the like, so we kept to the margins. However, it's now possible to have real meetings (with attendees sensibly masked, of course), so this week we've been to a Sarawak Heritage Society members' night, and a Malaysian Nature Society talk about combating the illegal wildlife trade.

The latter was held at the Sarawak Islamic Information Centre, which is a really lovely building:



And now we get to FOOD...! A couple of home-made things to start with:


This was a nice invention. The broth is a blend of chickpeas, water, tahini, olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice (a kind of liquid hummus). Into the warm soup you dump some tomatoes and cumin-roasted vegetables (red onion, okra, and eggplant work well), and then just drizzle some kefir over the top. Would repeat.

I forgot to tell you about my not-so-successful experiment with fermented tofu the other week. For the record, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the fermented tofu itself. It's creamy and cheese-reminiscent, and the brine makes it nicely piquant. Where I went wrong was in using too much, so that it absolutely sat all over the other flavours in the dish like an elephant on a tennis ball. Would buy more, but use more sparingly...


Most of our fun food this week has been eat-out:








La Boca Ria's serrano ham and Manchego toasted sandwich is also worthy of mention. Took me right back to Spain... But I have no picture, because it's hard to photograph the inside of a sandwich.

And finally, the rest of the week's gallery: