July is birthday month for me. It is my birthday plus there are two other family birthdays. And there can be more than one celebration of a birthday. So this July is shaping up as busy too. So I thought I might fit in a dinner with Peter early on in the month. So I took us to the Dapur Dahlia Malaysian restaurant again tonight.
I get a feeling of real satisfaction from Dapur Dahlia dinners. Their dinners all seem to have a lot of rice so that may be at work. Rice is very filling. About 2 billion people find it so anyway.
Anne and Lana spent a lot of time talking, including discussion of the role of soy sauce in cooking. Both ladies have their own uses for it. Peter and I talked about many things, including about his eminent father whom I knew from his writings. We both studied psych at UQ in our student days at about the same time so some reminiscences about that also cropped up.
A pleasing discovery was that Lana is a keen Chaucerian. We joined in a recitation of some lines from the Canterbury Tales for a short while. We used the original Middle English pronunciation. It just does not work otherwise. We both share a keen appreciation of Chaucer. It is a pity that people are put off getting to known him by the very old form of English he used.
The food was as good as expected but a surprise was when Peter ordered a dessert. It was a sort of Malayan trifle -- only with about twice as many ingredients as a normal trifle. It is called Ice Kacang. There is a description of it on the menu. Peter gave me a taste of it and it was Yum!
So it was a good dinner all round. As a memento of it I reproduce the docket, showing what we had.
UPDATE:
I cannot resist mentioning something very few people realize about Chaucer. He lived during England's Plantagenet dynasty about 600 years ago. At that time most writing was done in Latin or Norman French. So when he chose to write in the English of his day, he largely had to invent his own spelling. So he simply wrote down the sounds he heard. So Middle English was phonetically spelled, unlike modern English. And, to a remarkable extent, we still use Chaucer's spelling, even though the pronunciation has changed. So in our English word "knight", both the K and the GH were originally sounded, not silent as they are today. We still write English largely as it sounded 600 years ago. Chaucer was very largely the founder of English spelling.
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