Pao Addict

Dear lonely isle,

Lately I'm getting addicted to pao.
It's all the rage in this house at least.
I think I can consume pao for breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper and midnight snack.
Yeah, I like it that much. Hence the word "addicted".

The pao can be bought in packets from the frozen foods section in Giant.

Vegetarian Meat Buns.
Talk about being inconsistent.

Freshly steamed pao.
Hehe, pao boobies!

White, soft, fluffy dough with juicy vegetarian meat filling.
YUM.

Let's take a closer look.
I'll help you.

Overexposed Pao.

I'm feeling hungry just blogging about this.

Hot pao = happy innards :)

Now you see it.

5 minutes later...

Now you don't!

Pao was goooooood.

This reminds me of a show though.
Last semester, if memory serves me correctly, me and my mom were flicking through the local tv channels. (No, we don't have Astro.)
Finding nothing to watch, we settled on a local horror production.
No really, I watched it too.
Well that would probably be due to the fact that we didn't know it was a horror show.

I mean, how many horror shows go along the title 'Pau Suri'?
Anyway the show was pretty weird, because it started with a girl, whom we're introduced to as Suri; hardworking, poor maiden bereaved of parents at an early age.
Somehow,she acquired pao-making skills along the way and so thus made and sold pao for a living. And what awesome pao-making skills they were too, because apparently those that ate it fell in love at first bite.

From the appearance of the pao, they look to me like flattened lumps of what probably used to be pao. Okay, maybe the secret to making fantastic pao is to flatten it. I wouldn't know.

Back to the story, we are now brought to the present day (yes, apparently Suri lived in the past). So here's a story of a girl who stops to buy goreng pisang on the way home from work. Now the narrator's voice gets ominous, telling the unexcited audience that all is not it seems. And truly, for the moment the girl leaves her goreng pisang unattended in the living room, they all miraculously turned into pao.

(Yes, let that be a lesson to all of you. Never leave your goreng pisang unattended. Even if they all do not miraculously turn into pao, they might all mysteriously disappear. You might want to check if your brother eats lesser for dinner that day, a very suspicious circumstance. Possibly he had been gorging himself on goreng pisang. )

So the girl's room mate, returning home at some later time, suddenly feels hungry and checks out the plastic bag in the living room. She then asks her room mate if she had bought pao.
The reaction was, (translated)

Girl 1 : Pao? What pao?
Girl 2 : The pao someone obviously bought. Since there's only 2 of us living here, and it wasn't me, I'd thought it would be you.
Girl 1 : But I didn't buy pao...Hey, where's my goreng pisang? I bought goreng pisang!

(Moral lesson 1: Don't leave your goreng pisang unattended.)

Girl 2 : Are you sure?
Girl 1 : I did! Maybe the stupid vendor gave me pao instead of goreng pisang..but does he sell pao?
(Moral lesson 2: Do not be so hasty to call vendors stupid. I'm very sure he is highly capable of differentiating between a longish, yellowish, fried object and a roundish, flattened, steamed object.)

So the matter was resolved. The vendor was stupid and she developed a sudden case of amnesia. At any rate, that didn't slow them from wolfing down a few pao.

Girl 1 : Eh, this pao is pretty good!
Girl 2 : Delicious wei.

We, the viewers were shown that there were only 3 pao left.

So later on, at night, Girl 2 came down for a late night snack. She remembers the god-amazing pao she tasted earlier and decided to have some more. And because this is supposed to be a horror movie and because awesome mysterious (or would sinister be more appropriate?) forces are at work, lo and behold, there was once again a full plate of pao on the table awaiting her. So Girl 2, possibly in her half awake state, thought that heaven had truely descended, and finished all the pao.

After Girl 2 went back to bed, Girl 1 got up and got hungry, and went to explore the kitchen too. She poured herself a glass of water from the kettle on the stove and noticed a plate of pao sitting innocently on the stove. Well, obviously she ate it. All.

With this, the narrator continued to intone, in a voice he thinks is ominous, that Suri's pao is not to be taken lightly, as they will bewitch all that eat them. And then we are treated to a ghostly figure, apparently Suri, watching from the window.

And so went on the rest of the show, pretty much the two silly and moreover extremely greedy girls, continuing to gorge themselves on pao whenever they see it, both eating and eating until they don't even realise they're eating anymore. At first they both assumed that the other one bought the pao and then proceeded to eat it. Discreetly at first, the pao refilled its numbers on the plate, and they would find a plate of pao separately, and eat everything. This then evolved to even as they shared a plate of pao while watching tv, both pigs didn't seem to realise that the plate of pao never seemed to finish. There was always a few left no matter how much they ate.

Anyway, I didn't really finish the show, went out before it ended.

Somehow this pao addiction suddenly reminded me of so absurd a show.

love, joyce.