We had Bunapi Shimeji Mushroom with our lunch today.  SiewPeng fried them with broccoli.  When I put this mushroom in my mouth, it felt like a spring jumping inside my mouth.  It was smooth, elastic and crispy.

This is the first time we bought it from a hypermarket.  The first thing that came to my mind when I saw it was - I wanted to take its photo, it looks cute.  We decided to buy it although it is expensive compared to the other type of mushroom that we usually buy.  Later SiewPeng worried on how to cook it and have done some research on the Internet.

As I have just learned about this mushroom, there are many types of Shimeji Mushroom.  Bunapi Shimeji mushroom is also know as Japanese white beech mushroom.  The other type is called Buna Shimeji which is the brown beech.

View from the top, - the Shimeji mushrooms’ caps look like the enlarged molecules that we have learned in chemistry.

View from low angle, - I like to see the lines underneath the mushroom cap.

The bottom part of the Shimeji, - I wonder if each of the mushroom stem is grown from a big main trunk.

-  Taken with flash.

-  Taken with my light-box’s lamp.

This is the making of the series of photos above.  I used an energy saving bulb as the light source.

I like its taste and the smooth feeling in my mouth.  We are going to buy it again.  :D

This is the first time we saw a green radish.

In Chinese, no matter it is a white radish, purple radish, green radish or even carrot, we called them “LuoBo”.

“HuLuoBo” - Carrot.
“HongLuoBo” - Red radish.
“BaiLuoBo” - White radish.
“ZiLuoBo” - Purple radish.
“QingLuoBo” - Green Radish.

We bought it from a hypermarket.  My mum said that it is uncommon to see green radish here and it must be imported from other country.  My sister-in-law quickly took out a piece of newspaper and show us that there are different types (about 20 types) of radishes and carrots.  The articles with pictures was published in the health section of a Chinese newspaper a few days before we found and bought this green radish.

We were not sure how to cook it, and finally we used it to make soup.  It tastes similar to white radish.  I wonder if the green radish can be used to make Chinese radish cake (”ChaiTaoKueh” in Hokkien - a Chinese Dialect) which is usually made using white radish.  Chinese radish cake is our favorite delicacies.  Yes, it is delicious.

Related Post: Romanesco Broccoli.

Apples and oranges are the most common imported fruits in Malaysia. But, today we show you how SiewPeng arranged them and make them special.

They are both healthy food.  Apples contain a lot of minerals, and oranges give Vitamin C.

There is an idiom which says that, “An apple a day, keeps the doctors away.”
I say,”An orange a week, prevents your body from being weak.“. - (c) 2009 ColinJong.com

Today is Monday again - the first day of a typical working week, we wish you a healthy week ahead.

I hope more people are aware about this.  It is about our health.

I read this news from thestar online:-

[The Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) has called on the authorities to ban bottled water in the country, while also warning consumers NOT to refill plastic bottles or reuse them as chemical leaching can pollute the water within and such bottles were made for one-time use only and would not stand up to repeated wear, dishwater treatment, direct sunlight, high temperatures or rough handling.] - from theStar online.

It is also not good for our environment because up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.

You can read more about information and safety of plastic bottle at Wikipedia, Resin identification code, Safety of Plastic Beverage Bottles, and also Safety of Polyethylene Terephthalate.

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What else can we use to store water and allow us to bring it everywhere we go?  Glass, ceramic as water container material is not a good idea because they are heavy and fragile.  What about metal?  It is heavy too and you never know the water you drink can be polluted with ferrum (Fe) or cuprum (Cu).

I have a suggestion, why not use this:-

This is a bottle gourd. It is also called Calabash.  In Chinese it is called HuLu.

It is commonly seen in Chinese or Cantonese Kungfu movie, but not commonly used in real life.  According to wikipedia, [In the old days the Chinese doctors would carry medicine inside so it has fabled properties for healing.]

I have one planted by myself years ago.  The gourd that it produced was too small, the plant (an aggresive climber) only produced 2 gourds, and I removed it from my garden because it climbed over my other plants.  I have not tried to use them as water bottle because I only left one, I have forgotten where is the other one.

May be one day in the future, the farmers will do mass plantation of bottle gourd to make bottle or container for food storage.  Who knows?

***  If you want to try to use it as water bottle, you try at your own risk. ***

I guess there must be some process to make it become a good and safe water bottle.

This is the overgrown mung bean sprouts which we planted quite sometimes ago.  It looked too green compared to usual bean sprout.  It is not edible, but it looks artistic when the light goes through the leaves and draws the line in my photos.  Again, I used backlighting to shoot this photo.

They were planted in a small bottle of water.  What happened to their future?  They might have been planted onto the soil, and produces more mung bean.  But they dried after a few days later because we did not refill its water.

We did not use the correct traditional way to plant it, that’s why they do not look like normal bean sprouts.  From Wikipedia, I have learned that in order to plant bean sprouts, the mung beans should be watered for 4 hours under the day light and then they must be kept in the dark until they turn into bean sprout.  But we let it accepting light all the time, that’s why…

Bean Sprout is a popular and can be considered as one of the cheapest vegetable as a Chinese dishes.  It is very nutritious.  Some bean sprout are made of soya bean as well, and this version gives a bigger bean sprout.

In Hokkien (a Chinese dialect), it is called “Tauge” where Malays are also using the same word without translating it.  In Mandarin, we called it “Dou4ya2” locally (in Kuching or East Malaysia), but I have heard that it is called “Ya2Chai4” (Mandirin) in Ipoh or other part of West Malaysia.

One of the famous food in Ipoh is called “NgaChoiGai“, where “NgaChoi” means bean sprout in Cantonese, and “Gai” means chicken. :roll: Don’t get confused.

If anybody knows what it is called in Tamil and Hindi please let me know.