Taco Tuesdays ~ Seafood Lunch

about 1 month ago

Now We are back with TACO TUESDAYS time!!!

tuesday taco (1).png

Last month I made a Taco Tuesdays post about Live Seafood when I got to get a live fish for my father. A few weeks later my father kept nagging me about getting another round of live seafood... Well I had been avoiding him for days but I thought there should be an ended for this.

He is already 76 this year, and I think it's unfair to him that after he retired, he can not have what he wants. So I talk to my mother whether we should accommodate his wish, but not 100% of what he wants.

Finally after a long talk full of old tales, he accept our term. Currently live seafood is too expensive for me, so we are going to get DEAD SEAFOOD as the replacement...

Well, there is no DEAD SEAFOOD... what I mean it is a seafood but definitely not the live seafood. The regular one without live fishes, and we are going to some seafood restaurant nearby our home.

WELCOME TO FISH CEMETARY

Since I was a toodler, I have called these boxes as fish cemetery.

Some restaurant can not afford big fridges, because it's too expensive and the electricity cost killing them. So they go with conventional ways, using cool box, fill them with fish, crabs, prawn and other seafood, cooled by ice cube.

So in those restaurant we are seeing some boxes full of dead fishes. they give me some impressions of fish coffins LoL.

this lady was digging the ice so fast in Turbo Mode. I asked her to slow down or pause a bit, but she refused. I could not get any clear shots there.

Finally We got the fish we wanted. It is the same fish, Brown Marbled Grouper. But this time it was bigger, at 1 kilograms size. That time fishes weren't the expensive ones.

The most expensive one was these Lobsters. They only had a pair, I told my father that it was not the right time to get them. The number on their back was their weight, which each number could cost you around $ 2,5 USD. So the smaller one on the left was 7,5 ons (100 grams) x $ 2,5 = 18,25 USD.

Anyway most people in Indonesia refer 1 ons (read: ounce) to 100 gram, which the right one is 1 ounce = 28,35 gram. So you need to be careful when people here saying ounce or ons, it has different number than what it suppose to be

MY ORDER

Everything starts with the appetizer. Everywhere we go, my father always ask this as the appetizer. The Virgin Clams. I do not know why he loves Virgin Clams so much, it is one of the cheap clams here. A portion of Virgin Clams below, tagged at 2 USD.

I have picked a lot higher price appetizer. My pick is this, the Asparagus Soup. One portion of Asparagus soup is at 3,5 USD and we divide that into three small bowls below.

Ok now we get into the side dishes. The first one is prawns. It's called Udang Saus Padang, or Prawn in Padang Sauce. Padang Sauce has similar form with Sour and Sweet souce, but it has more spicy flavor because the ingredients are dominated by hot pepper, garlic and shallot.

The second side dish is Salted Egg Yolk Calamari. I was a bit disappointed with the coloring, because I expected something that more yellowish than that. The taste was not that bad, but below my standard for a salted egg dish.

Both of the side dish are 4 USD.

And this is what my father keep asking. A Hongkong Steam Grouper. It's on 10 USD only, a lot cheaper than the live one we had last month. However it is what people say, quality comes with price.

It's not that the fish taste bad, it's just that for people who are sensitive with seafood, we know exactly which one is fresh and which one is not. It's not like the fish is not fresh, it is fresh, but the taste is a lot different than the live one.

BON APPÉTIT

OK that's all what we have ordered that day, and all have been served on our table. There is a plate I could not take the picture, the stir-fried yellow burr head with fermented soybean paste. That's on the red plate, it's on the next of my father...