A Small Sum of Asam

This food stop was at Cafe Mark in One Utama. If I hadn't been taken there by regular diners I might not have noticed the inconspicuous establishment. The modest entrance and decor reflect the simple local style of food served. But don't let the quaint quietude put you off, this cafe is famous for a fragrant fiery feast of Asam Laksa.

Asam is a soup based on the tangy tamarind. It is sour and spicy and packed with fresh fragrant herbs and vegetables for an extra zesty boost. What's great about this style of laksa is that it satisfies your cravings for chili and curry-esque spices without the added richness of coconut milk. The tang of tamarind, menthol of mint and heat of chili all work together in one refreshing noodle bowl. Mark's is also surprisingly generous with the fish meat which soaks up the bold broth.

Keeping with the asam theme, we ordered a plate of Asam Sting Ray. Yes, sting ray. I love sting ray. The flesh is the most moist, delicate, white fish meat you will ever eat. Having a single smooth plane of conjoined cartilage instead of finicky invisible needles is also a plus when diving into a bite of ray. Here they are prepared in an asam sauce and served with okra or ladies fingers to the locals. They also give you a plate of rice and mixed vegetables for an afoordable set lunch price.

Shovelling all the spicy acidic sauces down my throat, I definitely needed a hydrating cooler to quench the would-be stomach ulcer burning its way through my digestive track. Cincau to the rescue! If I am ever hot, thirsty or need a gastronomic fire extinguisher, this cooling grass jelly drink always rises to the challenge. Soothing, smooth and filled with silky strands of jelly. I want one. Now.

Sweet and Savoury Singaporean Sensations

On one our trips around the many malls of KL, we stopped for a quick bite at Oriental Cravings. IT's a small cafe in a department store, wedged between clothing and handbag stores. Simple local style food here is served up with a little extra cost for the cool clean air-conditioned atmosphere. Wasn't too hungry at the time but I could not resist having a savoury bite. Glancing through the menu, my usual choices of hot curries and assam based dishes seemed a tad too daunting. So Singapore fried noodles were a welcome option for a light flavourful tea time meal.

Singapore fried noodles is a dish of mee hoon (fine rice noodles or rice vermicelli) and assorted vegetables and proteins. Bean sprouts, onions, bell peppers, spring onions and shallots are common choices for plant portion while prawns, pork, chicken and egg are frequently present as the protein. The noodles are fried dry (meaning without a soup or liquidy gravy) and seasoned to be sweet and salty with a hint of heat. Don't be deterred by the term, dry, as the noodles are anything but. Bold flavours are carried by the soft fluffy strands of noodles making every bite a scrumptious explosion. It's fun and filling enough as a main dish without being heavy. Very satisfying working your way through the plethora of ingredients and textures. It's a really popular item in oriental menus abroad, like Chinatown in London. Cheap too.

Sassy Shelf Selections of Sarsaparilla

A&W Root Beer has been my favourite commercial root beer brand as long as I can remember, probably due to the association with vanilla ice cream floats in big frosty glasses. Damn you Pavlov. There's something special about drinking a beverage from a tinted glass bottle. Nostalgic, if you will. A bridge back to the days before mass-produced aluminium cans and plastic bottles. There's a sense of history every time you wrap your fingers around the cool weight of a glistening glass vessel. This was the first factor that attracted me to this sturdy bottle of root beer. I had never tasted Angus O'Neil's brew before. It was nice. It has a pleasant mellow flavour, less sweet than most commercial brews. You can really taste the subtleties of the various ingredients like ginger and liquorice. Those who are very sensitive to herbal flavours like these should probably avoid this one. For everyone else, it is a very nice alternative to regular root beer. Like any good brew, it goes great with a salty snack. Root beer from Down Under :)

They're bulky, but I consider them carry on

I've never been crazy for chocolate or nuts. As a child, I was more of a Mars bar fan than I was a Snickers one. I love soft and chewy textures which is why nougat and taffy have long been my candies of choice. The supermarkets here in Bangkok have wide range of sugary snacks but they tend not to draw from American influences, unless you are wandering the aisles of Villa (specialty import supermarket), but even they you will often see more Australian or British products. So when trolling through the tantalising trenches of treats back in Malaysia, these little tangerine packets caught my eye. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

I love trying things I don't normally eat. I vaguely recall having these cups of chocolate coated peanut butter before but I wanted a fresh experience. I'm a sucker for retro aesthetics so the packaging was almost enough for me to reach out and grab them.

Tiny food has always been one of my vices. Aren't they adorable? I've always thought they looked like miniature chocolate tarts. The tiny paper cups create that cute connection to the charming cupcake. Even the crappy cardboard tray could pass as a cookie sheet. I would have loved to play with these during one of my childhood cooking game sessions. Pint sized pies anyone?

The milk chocolate is quite mild, which works for my tastes. The only problem with the cocoa casing is that it seems to instantaneously liquify upon human contact. The equatorial climate may have contributed to this, but even in air-conditioned rooms, the chocolate seemed to melt if you breathed on it. Strategic consumption may have to come into play when tacking these candies. Gently pull the paper cup away with your finger tips and scoff the lot. Biting a bit at a time may lead to melty chocolate mess. The thin soluble paper does not provide any structural support whatsoever. Regardless of these issues, the whole point of the peanut butter cup is, of course, the peanut butter. The enclosed nutty goodness is not exactly like it's creamy namesake. The peanut filling is drier in substance but surprisingly more silky on the palette. It's salty as peanuts should be and is just sweet enough to remind you that you are indeed eating junk food. They also seem to be addictive. A few days later I ended up buying a family bag of mini ones and kept munching them on the plane. Miniature tiny food: miniature with the more miniature size. Anybody want a peanut?

My Milkshake Bringeth All Ye Gentle Folk to the Breakfast Table

I like milkshakes to the point that I drowned out my childhood cow milk allergy in cold creamy goodness. If anyone lives near a GBK (Gourmet Burger Kitchen) you have to try the lime milkshake, it is pure puckering perfection. But let's get back to the breakfast table. The diabetic American one to be more precise. As a child I had heard of these candy coloured pastry treats that you could just pop into a toaster and enjoy. But they were from far away and you could only see them in Archie comics and on TV. A little way down the road and the emergence of import supermarkets gave the bright boxes a place on the shelf. But they were really expensive and look mildly radioactive to adults. Finally in my college years, I shared a dormitory with a notorious candy dealer. She had ample supplies of the elusive rectangular pastry pockets. I got pop tarts.

Now, my first flavour was the classic strawberry. Since I was giving in to the infantile impulses of my food psyche I might as well stick with one of the most child-friendly fruit flavours. I liked my first few bites enough. It may have been my high expectations and excitement that led me to believe that. You soon realise the taste of rainbows tastes like chemicals. I needed a tall glass of milk to help wash it down and desensitise my tongue. Fast-forward to my most recent trip to Malaysia, I was shopping around a Cold Storage (local supermarket chain) looking for local snacks or anything I was not used to seeing in Bangkok. Lo and behold the psychedelic packages were sitting neatly on the shelf. I know I can get pop tarts in Bangkok, but I tend not to go looking for them. Again, my mind likes the idea of such over the top treats more than my taste buds. What caught my attention in this case was the flavour: Strawberry Milkshake. A certain someone had recently sent me a photo of the flavour range for sale in a vending machine. I was baffled as how a product that was already the furthest possible thing from a healthy breakfast could be pushed even further. Ice cream parlour flavours do not equate healthy or breakfast. I needed to know.

It's a sweet cookie pastry stuffed with a sweet filling, iced with a sweet pink icing and decorated with sweet rainbow sprinkles. I can feel my foot falling off as I stare at the pale plank of potential diabetes. But wait! There's 25 percent less sugar! Only 3 cups instead of 4! Yay! Kittens for everyone! Still, this merely meant that you could take a few more bites than usual before needing something to soothe the sweet sugary burn. The pastry and icing were the same as I recalled from previous encounters, clinging to the bleak flavours of white flour and white sugar but strangely satisfying if you're in the right mood.

I am a sucker for sprinkles so seeing the little flecks of colour was a welcome break in the otherwise albino tart. The monotonous colour palette was reiterated once I penetrated the crumbly casing. I preferred the glaring red of strawberry filling peeking out from under a blanket of snow white icing. The tart faintly emanated the fragrance of a strawberry milkshake which was not too unpleasant. The cut in sugar was a welcome adjustment, but overall, if I am in the mood for doping up on kiddie crank, I'd rather have the sweeter sharpness of fructose fruit from a straight strawberry one. Nyan cat, all the way.

The Grass is Greener at Green View

Malaysia has no shortage of casual family style Chinese restaurants. Round tables are supersized with the addition of giant plywood discs with a lazy susan groaning under the weight of over-ordered meals. Green View’s bright neon sign proudly displays a massive crab in some sort of two-step animation. Honestly, I could not work out what it was supposed to be doing. All I saw was one whole crab with both claws up in the air, followed by a crab slightly to the right with his left claw missing. There was also a king prawn in the corner wearing a little crown. Appropriate. Besides the quaint signage, the restaurant staff are inviting and the air-conditioned room is clean and comfortable. Aside from the sporadic pops of flies exploding on one of the many UV bug zappers mounted from the ceiling, that is. Fly 1: “Don’t go towards the light!!” Fly 2: “I can’t help it, it’s so beautifu-ARGH!”.

The main reason we come back to this restaurant, is the Prawn Noodles. Served up in a massive white dish, these once crispy deep fried egg noodles have been drenched in a gooey prawn-infused gravy and are crowned with some seriously sized shrimpage.

As impressive as the size of these crustaceans are, I find the flesh, despite being well cooked, ever so slightly tough and far too hefty in size for an already rich shellfish. You really have to wrestle with the meat to cut it down to bite sized portions.

The noodles and gravy are another story. Deep frying the egg noodles prior to saucing them makes them much more absorbent and they just suck up and saturate themselves in the flavourful brown gravy. The shellfish have passed on their legacy and that scrumptious seafood flavour is abundant in the saucy noodles even without eating the prawn meat.

We don’t usually order fish done sweet and sour style in Asia, unless it’s a whole one and we aren’t sure how long it has been dead. So having this dish of sweet and sour garoupa was a bit different, though not unwelcome. It’s on my favourites list when dining in Chinese restaurants in Western countries.

The fish pieces are big enough to give you a full bite of white succulent fish meat and not just greasy batter. The sauce was quite typical of any sweet and sour you could find anywhere in the world; jazzed up ketchup. And the typical vegetables (onions, mixed peppers, pineapple, tomato and …cucumber?) were fine in their own right, not over cooked, but they seemed a bit disparate. Overall the dish was quite pleasant. Who can resist the ease of popping solid bite sized pieces of boneless white fish into their greedy mouths?

If you want a full sensory experience, you should order any dish that comes in a clay pot. From the streets of Hong Kong to the alleyways of Bangkok’s Yaowarad (Chinatown) clay pot dishes know how to make an entrance. They have great heat retention which allows any treasures retained within to remain bubbling and sizzling once they are placed on the table. Miniature eruptions of billowing steam and scalding sputters of sauce are all part of the clay pot experience.

This clay pot was filled with braised goat meat, tofu skin and wood ear mushroom. The earthy colours were reflected in the flavours of the dish. The bold aroma of the goat was perfectly complimented by the strong salty hum of the dark sauce. The tofu skin and wood ear mushroom had the textural strength to stand up against the hearty flavours but also provided refuge with milder and lighter flavours. The meat is so juicy and tender it falls off the bone. There is so much warmth in flavour and texture in this dish, you can’t help but love it even if you are not used to eating meats more on the game side.

This one is for all the vegetarians out there. Two types of tofu and loofa brought together by a simple but tasty gravy. It adds a lighter and healthier feeling dynamic to a widely techniflavoured table of Chinese dishes. Textures are abundant in this one. The larger brown structures are wiggly oblongs of egg tofu. Imagine a delicate savoury egg custard encased in golden fried skin. I adore the gentle eggy taste and the soft melt-away texture of egg tofu. Breaking through that once crisp membrane and releasing the soft contents over your palette is as satisfying as it is delicious. The other tofu variety present is one consisting of layered tofu skins. The multiple layers stimulate your tongue and tickle your gums as your teeth ease through them. Tofu skins have a more elastic quality than solid tofu and one might think that compacting so many sheets in these blocks would result in an impenetrable Kevlar mass. It does not. The layers have sucked up the flavours and moisture of the dish into every pore and the body is soft without losing the integrity of each soy leaf.

The third component is the vegetable that most think of as a bathroom utensil rather than a kitchen ingredient. The loofa is a common green vegetable used in Chinese cuisine that often falls under the radar in other parts of the culinary world. It’s like a cross between a cucumber and a zucchini in fibre and flavour. Even when cooked, the loofa has the refreshing characteristics of the cool cucumber with the soft bite of a zucchini or cooked apple. This triad is brought together by a translucent brown gravy which is smooth, silky and savoury scented so as to compliment the calm fragrances emanating from the major ingredients.  Loofa! Fun to say, great to eat and if they get too old, dry them out and use them in the shower.

The Taste of an Asian Ocean Dream

If I were on my death bed and I had to choose one meal to have before pushing up daisies, I would choose prawn mee. Yes, we are back on the humble hawker street. But hawker or not, you cannot deny the perplexing gamut of flavours that are presented to you in a plastic bowl. The sultry smokey depths of toasted crustacean essence and crispy shallots mingle with the sweet playful juices of prawn and chili. The broth is what elevates this dish to heavenly heights. Despite having so many facets of flavour, the soup remains light and refreshing. This is why I prefer having it with mee hoon (thin rice noodles) rather than mee (thick yellow noodles) or even a mixture of the two. I find the flavour to the mee to be overpowering when put up against the delicacy of the delicious broth. I savour my food and pairing it with the mild and absorbent mee hoon creates a wonderous eating experience. I've ordered prawn mee in restaurant environments before and it never matches the levels of palette stimulation as the kopitiam across the street.