as maghrib approached, my wife heard a rustling in the back yard. About five feet from our back stoop was an enormous biawak, apparently stalking a young cat sitting atop our recyclables.
Author Archives: bingregory
Petai
Some pictures of petai, a green bean used in Malay home cooking. It grows in long pods on a very large tree of the Legume family, Parkia speciosa. The beans are very pungent. I’ve most often seen it cooked in sambal tumis ikan bilis, a fried chili paste with dried anchovies. It is also eaten […]
Eid amidst the coconuts
The kids had a great time for Eid. We all flew back to West Malaysia to my wife’s village, just got back last night.. It was the first time my wife had been there for Eid in 8 years, and my first time ever. The kids got along great with all their cousins and second […]
Balik Kampung
An early Selamat Hari Raya and Eid Mubarak to all. I’ll be heading back to the kampung on Friday for an extended holiday. The chances of getting online will be slim. I should be back in early December, hopefully with a lot of pictures to share. Maaf Zahir dan Batin.
The Yard: Inherited Plants
As the yard was being cleared of brush, I came across a few plants of some value that I spared the parang for. The first is a very common seasoning in Malaysian cooking, Lemongrass or serai, Cymbopogon spp. Not surprisingly, it was planted just outside the kitchen door. From a distance it is hard to […]
The Yard: Adventures in Tropical Horticulture
Our new home is in fact several years old. The house itself is quite nice and liveable as is, but the yard… The yard needs a lot of work. I wanted a house with a lot of land, and I got that in the sense that the area is spacious. But it is missing about […]
White Minority
Sharon Gallagher is white but she knows what it is like to be part of an ethnic minority. For the past 18 months she has lived with her three children in the predominantly Asian district of Manningham in Bradford. This was once a white area, but over the past 30 years most of the whites […]
Biawak!
Yesterday, the fourth day in my new home, I opened my front door and found an enormous monitor lizard, or biawak. I had my camera in hand but by the time I exclaimed and pulled it out of the pouch, the creature had sped off around the house. Its long nails clacked and clattered on […]