Popping Pills and Sucking Eggs

Every time we land in Kuala Lumpur, my family and I tend to beeline towards our favourite food haunts and the one that often ends up first on our list is Uncle Lim’s at Subang Parade. Quick, easy and simple, it never fails to provide that instant fix for local flavours whilst still being light enough to stuff in our faces straight off an airplane.

As mentioned before, I am still suffering from a bout of gastritis. If I had been at full cast-iron stomach power, I would have ordered their Nasi Lemak at the drop of a hat. Nasi lemak is coconut rice that is served with a variety of meats or seafood in curries or chili sauces. But as my tummy was tender, I steered away from the rich rice n spicy sauces and ordered a Roti Bakar, two half-boiled eggs and a soya cincau. Roti bakar, also known as kaya toast, is an egg custard jam and butter or margarine sandwiched between thick-cut slices of toasted bread. I love toast. When done properly, this simple staple can be a magical thing. Crisp and warm, light and fluffy; the roti bakar at Uncle Lim’s always makes me happy.  The toast came with the typical breakfast accompaniment of two half-boiled eggs. Just with a sprinkling of pepper and a splash of soy sauce, the runny golden yolks and slippery whites go down a treat.

Then I was stupid; in place of a nasi lemak I decided to try their Kari Mee. The yellow noodles in a curry broth for some illogical reason seemed less offensive to my stomach. Of course I was wrong. The soup definitely had a hot spicy kick but seemed to wane a bit when it came to the rest of the flavour. In all honesty, it felt a bit weak and watery with little strength to stand up to the bold flavour and texture of the yellow noodles lurking beneath the surface. However, the fishballs, fried tofu and crispy wantons that decorated the top were quite tasty and helped to redeem the dish a little. Due to the Scoville rating of the soup, I nibbled on the noodles and half the topping before passing the torch on to my dear father, who inexplicably transforms into a bottomless pit every time we come to Malaysia, Singapore or Hong Kong or anywhere else where he can find food he likes that we can’t get back home.

My drink of choice was not surprisingly a soya cincau (‘chin-chow’). In recent years I have found it difficult to resist such promise of light refreshment with a soft gently milkiness, a delicate yet hearty drink and dessert all rolled in to one. I know it is only slivers of grass jelly in soy milk, but I adore the combination. Bubble tea can go suck an egg. Speaking of sucking eggs, I did take a straw and poked into the yolk of my second egg and proceeded to drink it from the inside out; a novel experience which was quite pleasant until I tapped into a small reservoir of pure soy sauce towards the end of my egg drinking escapade. Should anyone else try this, I recommend stirring your eggs and sauce first and make sure your eggs are soft enough for the size of your straw. Size can matter. 

The Gentle Joys of a Jentacular Porky Porridge

So much time has passed since my last entry and now I found myself lying belly down in bed in our house in Kuala Lumpur nursing a tummy-tormenting bout of gastritis. It all started last year when my bestie and I decided to get married. In January of this year, we registered our marriage in Thailand and began planning for the big receptions in Bangkok and Johor Bahru, my maternal hometown. As part of the preliminary preparations I went to JB to scout some potential places for the festivities. As JB is closer to Singapore than KL, we flew from Bangkok to Singapore and drove over to JB. For the return journey we planned to do the same in reverse but also stop over for a couple days in Singapore. This of course brought the promise of many a tasty delight for my insatiable taste buds. But alas, it was not meant to be. On the last day we were in JB, I awoke to the tumultuous twangs of stabby tummy pains. And so began a short but intense stint of stomach flu. However, I find myself here, a week and a half later, still suffering from the turmoil of a sensitive and bloated belly.

It was during those few days we spent in Bangkok before flying back to Malaysia (this time to KL) that I had the chance to be extra kind to my delicate digestive system which brings us to the star of today: homemade pork rice porridge.

Now this is rice porridge is pretty much your everyday Southeast Asian savoury jentacular grub, but that does not in any way detract from the delectable delight that it can bring, especially on recently bruised bowels. The raw rice is boiled with pork bones and plenty of water until the grains split and begin to dissolve into the brewing liquid. It is seasoned quite modestly with salt, pepper, minced garlic and soy sauce just to highlight the natural savoury sweetness of the stock. It is finished with a smidgen of minced pork and a scattering of sliced spring onions for a little splash of freshness. This should definitely be on the menu of gentle foods for the sick and will provide a welcome hearty meal amongst the deluge of dry toast and clear chicken broth (mind you, I still adore a good crisp slice of toast, sick or not). But even if you are fortunate enough to have a perfectly happy tummy, this makes for a tasty light meal that is extremely easy to prepare.

The Simple and Irreplaceable Taste of Sunshine

My mother recently came home from a trip around Italy, and like any other vacation-returnee, she brought back a typical assortment of giftable memorabilia. There were some tea towels, aprons and t-shirts but the real treasures were epicurean in nature. Among these priceless jewels were some sundried tomatoes. Dried with some salt to within an inch of their lives, these once voluptuous scarlet pomodoro were ripe and juicy have taken on a whole new persona as intensely dark and rich, twisted, tightly clenched nuggets of deep burgundy fruit that are smoky and earthy but still thrust through with a sharp tang.

As per directions, I soaked a handful in warm water for a few hours. The smell was intoxicating. Like a concentrated tomato consommé brewing, the tomatoes steeped in the water and created a thick burnt sienna tea from which wafted wondrous whiffs of wholesome tomato essence. I sliced some garlic, tossed it with some liberal lashings of olive oil, some fresh tomato and the now softened and sliced dried tomatoes and then let it simmer while I cooked my penne rigate to a couple minutes short of the package directions. Then leaving some of the pasta water in the pan, I ladled on some of the sauce and allowed the pasta to finish cooking and really soak up all of those delicious flavours. I turned off the heat and then stirred in a generous handful of freshly grated grana padano. I adore this cheese. The creaminess helps to balance out the sharp acidity of the dried tomato but it still has that depth of flavour akin to a good parmigiano reggiano. The mix of the fresh and the dried tomatoes provided a playful dynamic dining experience as your senses kept being pulled in different directions: sweet, sour, salty, fresh, smoky, soft, chewy. It was a delight to eat and the pure simplicity of the dish really kept things light. The taste of the sundried tomatoes resonated throughout every morsel but never seemed overwhelming to your taste buds as much of that flavour is aromatic. There really is something magnificently magical and curiously comforting about a big bowl of homecooked pasta :)

I Can Be Crabby But It Keeps Things Captivating

Much like Tom Yam Gung, Som Tam is likely one of the most lionized lip-smacking local delicacies of Thailand. It is a spicy, sweet and sour salad of shredded green papaya pounded in a mortar with fresh chilies, tomatoes, long beans, fish sauce and palm sugar. As with many other national iconic digestibles everyone seems to have their recipe, but there are some standard variations from the tourist-friendly Som Tum Thai.

If you have noticed the crawly critter in the corner, DON'T PANIC. Allow me to introduce the often overlooked Som Tum Poo (no, not that, poo as in “bpuu” meaning crab in Thai), procured posthaste from the purveyor of portable “papaya pok-pok” who parks at a spot preceding the precincts of my domicile. I also added a portion of Khanom Jeen, a soft white fermented rice noodle often eaten with spicy sauces and raw vegetables (which transforms the salad into Tum Sua). The simple addition of the small crustacean is akin to slipping a sliver of white truffle into an unembellished salad. The result? Sensational alchemy. The fresh piquant flavours of the tangy green papaya, lime juice, hot red chillies sweet tomatoes and palm sugar and the refreshing crunch of juicy long beans can start to fight against each other as the shout for space to scintillate the same senses, so the earthy savoriness of the seafood umami emitted by the tiny crab is a welcome deep undercurrent that dramatically expands the depth of flavour of the dish as a whole. Some may be squeamish at the sight of spindly legs and shiny black shells peeking through your fresh clean veggies but I assure you it is not as extremely exotic as you may think. As a scrumptious shropshire blue is to a plastic wrapped sliced of processed cheese, or a fragrant black truffle is to a can of brine soaked button mushrooms, Tum Poo has a prodigious flavour profile to the straightforward Tum Thai (sans crab) even though both can be as equally satisfying in the right place and at the right time. Besides, isn't it fun to just run around in the streets shouting to strangers that you have crabs?

Fresh Fruitiness Frolicking Over Lusciously Milky Lamellae

I’ve been craving thick heavy silky smooth dairy products for a while now. Craving like a starved dehydrated dog in the middle of a barren desert staring up a thorny cactus at a fat juicy house cat fanning itself beneath a golden parasol sipping a Moroccan mint tea frappe though an oversized bendy straw from a tall frosted glass. So my friend suggested a quick stop at the Amor kiosk as we foraged the walkways of Central Bangna.

Her suggestion was the neatly assembled Mille Crepe with Strawberry Sauce. The pale yellow of the wafer thin crepes set off the clean milky white of the cream delicately sandwiched between each layer. The slice was not particularly large. I would say it was a sensible size though. I ordered one slice to go and was thrilled to see the generous pot of deep red strawberry sauce taped to the top of the slice box.

The slice lifted out very easily. The delicacy of the crepes and cream beguiled the seemingly absent structural sturdiness. Even unwrapping the protective plastic film from around the perimeter left little lickable residue upon its see-through surface. After taking a moment to admire the soft cleanliness if the alternating white and yellow stripes, it was time to ramp up the volume with the viciously vivid rich red strawberry sauce. It was the foodgasm-inducing food porn money shot. The seed-speckled pulpy coulis of fresh ripe strawberries poured out beautifully from the petit plastic pot. It was not a cheap corn starch concoction of coloured gloop devoid of any sign of actual fruit. It had the naturally sweet fragrance of fresh strawberries and it tasted even better. It was smooth and sweet but not too sweet. The fresh flavour washed over and cleansed your pallet so it was the perfect accompaniment to the creamy crepes. There were about 20 neatly stacked crepes held together by a fluffy Chantilly cream. The crepes themselves may have been ever so slightly underdone, so they could have been too soft if they were meant to stand on their own. But with safety in numbers, the multi-layered culinary construction created a titillating texture for your tongue to play with and the thinly spread cream was sparse enough to let each crepe to be fully experienced in every bite. Some mille crepes are assembled with fewer crepes and thicker layers of cream slathered between them to create greater height with less effort. I must say that Amor has done a delightful deed by deciding to deal with the trouble it takes to stack each crepe upon one another with the optimum amount of subtly sweetened cream without sacrificing structural or textural integrity. Soft and light but still sinfully satisfying, the sharp sweet strawberry sauce and the delectable crepe cake slice are highly recommended for anyone seeking a scrumptious treat.

The Sultry Silk Road to Bracing Ant Bites

Most people out there have had nightmares or seen or heard horror stories about creepy crawly critters so it is fairly understandable that many would find the prospect of putting these petite partitioned pests into their protected pie holes. Of course, your environment plays a big part in your tolerance for unique ingredients. If you’re in Seattle, you’ve got Starbucks. If you live by the sea, you’ve got seafood. If you’re in the forests of South East Asia, you’ve seen silk worms and red ants.

Both dishes were brought down to Bangkok from North East Thailand. These miniature morsels have been lightly seasoned and fried. The silk worms are, as the name suggests, the cute chubby worms that spin cocoons of pure silk which are processed to make your silky soft shirts, skirts and ties. They also make a dainty delectable dinner. The fat and soft contents are encased in a thin crisp capsule that bursts with a lighter force than that of salmon caviar. The flavour is very comparable to prawn, or more specifically prawn heads. They have a savoury sweet shellfish umami swirled in with the musty hums of tiny dried shrimp. I would even describe their texture as akin to a dried shrimp that has been soaked or rehydrated in a cooking process.

These red ants have been cooked, dressed and tossed into a simple Thai style salad. Their tough exteriors have been softened but still provide texture when you bite through their soft bellies, much like a soft boiled pea. The delicate body structures have taken on a lot of the flavours of the salad dressing which is rich with the fragrant flavours of South East Asia. The ants themselves were sweet, salty and savoury with the freshness of lemongrass and the herbal hum of aniseed and nutmeg. You may have to overcome the visual challenge of placing a bug you would usually beat with a baseball bat between your teeth and swallowing but I assure you, the flavour experience is not something to be feared. The textures on your tongue and between your teeth are very much like eating peas, beans or pulses and the flavours provide a welcome wake-up call, interesting but not offensive, to your palette.

Chicken goes Cluck-Cluck, Camel goes Moo

Recently came back from a trip to Abu Dhabi. It was my first time in the Middle East and I was looking forward to stuffing my face with ample array of Arabic eats. For me, the reason why travelling is worth the effort of packing up a boiled-down reduction of the essentials in your life and subjecting yourself to the torturous turmoil of commercial air travel and the moody bipolar whims of airport staff and those who supposedly enforce security by not looking at their screen when a passenger puts their bag through a scanner and forgot to discard her bottle of water and subsequently has a neat souvenir from the UAE that also provided some needed hydration in the car on the way home in Thailand, is the fact that we can experience first-hand a fundamental fragment of a foreign culture by simply sampling the local food.

Extending this idea further, you can find the basic building blocks of a cuisine and culture by looking at the base products and ingredients on hand which is why I love exploring supermarkets to see what the locals favour. I must say, walking the isles of a big supermarket somewhere in Abu Dhabi, the one section that made my jaw drop was the cheese counter. Or counters I should say. Never in my life have I seen such a large and varied selection of cheese on a commercial level. I am certain their repertoire could rival many specialty cheese stores out there. Of course I am still speaking on a commercial scale, so if you want that one type of homemade cheese they make in that one place in the world, by definition, you will not be able to find it anywhere including this vast library of cultured cow juice creations. Cows –now we come to the main subject of this particular post. We are no longer talking about cheese. We are going back one more step and talking about that primal provider of life for all of us mammals: milk.

Step back for a moment and recall where we are in the world. We have landed in the United Arab Emirates. Aside from the ridiculously indulgent 7 star hotels and the most expensive, tall, large, ornate (etc. etc…) structures in the world, what do we think of? Sand dunes, endless desert, sand storms, sand surfing, sand skiing, sandy beaches, sand, sand and sand. And what do we envision ourselves riding across these surreal sand swept landscapes? Jerboas! … Ok, I didn’t have the opportunity to go camping and encounter these adorable desert mice as they bombard you during the night, but I am determined to meet them next time. But seriously, we are talking about the iconic camel. If you have cows, you have cow milk. If you have goats, you have goat milk. So if you have camels, yep, you have camel milk. I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to sample some fresh camel milk plucked off a fluorescent-lit supermarket shelf next to the comparatively boring basic bovine variety.

The inconspicuous plastic packaging in a sense diffused some of the exotic mystery but it also emphasised that wonderful feeling of being somewhere new. I could not walk into a Big C in Bangkok or a Sainsbury’s in London or a QFC in Seattle and grab a petite plastic bottle of camel milk from the refrigerated shelves. Before cracking it open, you can already see that the colour looks like most varieties of milk. A clean opaque pearly white peeks up at you when you pop off the top. It has the faintest blush of a rich cream. Putting it up to my nose, I could smell a rich dairy scent with only a very light hint of a fresh game protein. This experience was reflected in the flavour. I was anxious and excited as I brought it to my lips and took a sip. I let the liquid spread across my tongue and slowly inhaled through my nose to try and experience as much of the taste as possible. It was a rich and heavy milk, akin to the thicker cow milks you find in England, but still not crossing over in to the consistency of cream. The initial hit is a luscious creamy dairy that morphs from a familiar milky taste as it enters your mouth to a grassy game meat scent as it slides down. As you swallow, you notice a salty savouriness which is the stronger flavour in the yoghurt culture finish. The salted yoghurt taste lingers and melds with that fresh grass fragrance to create a unique aftertaste. It was quite an intense experience so I was more than satisfied with the small portion. It is highly recommended for those who are fond of goat, ewe or alternative milk sources but also for anyone curious or wanting to step out of their box, or in this case, milk carton.