Cooking The Books

Chee Cheong Fun

Well my time in Malaysia has come to an end and I'm going to miss the food.  The place really is special when it comes to eating.  Not that most of South East Asia isn't but where Malaysia excels is the meeting of 3 cultures: the Malay, the Chinese and the Indian.  The relatively big percentages of each - maybe 60/30/10 respectively - leave each having a huge impact on the culinary scene.

Probably due to this supply of fantastic food they love to eat too, the attitude is so different to the UK.  No putting together crappy sandwiches at home for the lunch box, here folk set up road side stalls - a table and a few tupperware containers - which every morning serve queues of people picking up noodles or nasi lemak for the day ahead.  Breakfast seems a fairly common eat out affair too, I'm sure some folk grab something quickly at home but there's enough people who don't to mean all 3 restaurants and another 3 food stalls on our small estate were full every morning. 

One of these restaurants and one of these stalls sold a dish known as chee cheong fun.  A delightful smorgasbord of fish balls, fish sticks, different tofu and stuffed vegetables which after choosing are given a few minutes simmering to warm through before being placed on top of chee cheong fun - chee cheong fun being wide rice flour pancakes which they slice into centimetre wide noodles for you.  A spoonful or two of 5 spice tinted gravy and another of chili sauce finish it off.  With so much variety you could have a different, albeit similar, meal every morning for eternity. 

If that wasn't great enough the aforementioned stall was less stall and more kitchen motorbike sidecar, driven to the street corner each morning by a little Chinese lady.  When this trip is over I'm not quite sure how I'm going to survive in England without such things commonplace in everyday life.

Pepper Stomach Soup

I'd seen this dish on menus a couple of times and been told that the fiery heat of white pepper was the perfect accompanied to the the sweet, porky goodness of a pig's stomach.  A cut that ranks as one of my favourites.  I was told this was a fine meal to consume when you'd had too many but still needed to drive home (not that I condone such activity), the pepper induced sweats helping to rid your body of the alcohol before you set off. 

When I first had it I thought it worked well but the family with me said it was nowhere near peppery enough, which was strange as it was propebly the strongest pepper flavouring I'd ever had in a dish.  It wasn't until I had it a second time that I realised just how much white pepper one can put in a soup, and how the story of drinking it before drink driving may actually work.  At first it was as if you were at school again and one of your friends had stung you with the unscrewed pepper lid trick - surely this much pepper couldn't have been put in on purpose?  The nose ran, the eyes watered, the throat stung...  The heat is so different to chili heat too, an almost throbbing heat.  Once the taste buds got used to it though - or they died, not sure which - it became quite pleasant: clearing the passages, bringing on a cooling sweat and actually tasting pretty good.

I doubt I'd try it at home, mainly becasue I find stomach something I like to eat but don't particularly like to handle, but it's worth checking out on a menu, whether or not you're over the limit.

Banana Leaf Curry

A popular way of serving Indian food in Malaysia is on a banana leaf.  This few ringit (about a quid) meal (a thali basically) starts with a banana leaf in front of you, on goes some white rice then dishes of various vegetable curries - beetroot, breen bean and cabbage amonst others in that photo - are scooped on to it, then usually a pot or three of daals is dumped on your table and you can pour as much as you like on the rice.  You can add meat curries too, but you need to pay another 3 or 4 ringits for these maybe.  Tasty food aside you're expected to eat with your fingers, stirring some rice and dal together and using them (don't let it touch your palm) to get it into your mouth.  Messy, spicy, tasty fun.

They're served everywhere but some of the nicest I've had were in Brickfields, an area 10 minutes walk from KL Sentral, the main commuter hub in the city so very easy to get to.  If you do make it up that way you have the honour of eating in the same restaurant that Malaysia's PM recently did - Restoran Sri Kortumalai.  A marketing opportunity the owners weren't going to let pass them by.

Roti canai making in action

I've wrote about the roti canai a while back and said I'd report back once I'd got some action photos of them being made.  Well I finally plucked up the courage to photograph the chef in action so here they are.

Durian

To dismiss eating a durian due to it smelling of rotting flesh (not that I agree it does smell quite that bad) is like not eating a ripe French cheese because it smells like worn socks. Whilst I agree it does have a certain odorous quality (I've just entered my guesthouse room and it has a distinct durian smell, even though the durian is in a plastic container, in a plastic bag in the fridge) if you look beyond that you're left with one of life's great gastronomic delights. Forget adjectives usually reserved for fruit - crisp, tart, juicy, refreshing - and start thinking of those you'd use for more decadent pleasures - unctuous, rich, creamy... When properly ripe it melts in the mouth, coating the palate much like the aforementioned ripe cheese, with its bitter sweet, very fragrant flesh. Even this fails to capture the essence of it all though, there's an alcholic headiness to it unlike any fruit I've eaten. It truly is a delight. To add to the pleasure it does the same to your hands as it does to your mouth, a mountain of tissue is requisite to rid any stickiness that sucking on the fingers fails to remove.

It can be an acquired taste, sure, but once acquired it gets better every time you have it.  Lucky for me it's durian season now and I'm in SE Asia.