Category — Food

I’m not eating that!

We stopped at The Manhattan Fish Market on the weekend while shopping at Jusco Tebrau City. The Tebrau Jusco shopping complex is a bigger version of the one in Bukit Indah and it has a Harris/Popular book store, so it’s worth the additional mileage (kilometreage?) to get there.

When we first visited The Manhattan Fish Market 3 years ago, it was superb. The food was fantastic, the service top-notch, there were discount vouchers for future visits. Then, I don’t know what happened. The size of the side sauces that come with the meals diminished greatly, the staff became lacklustre in performance and the food, while still okay, didn’t quite zing any more.

Last weekend, giving it one last try before we scratched it from our list of favourite restaurants, The Wast ordered the grilled fish with rice and found two small stones in the rice before I told him to stop eating it. The price of the meal was deducted from our bill, but we couldn’t help but reflect on the falling standards in what used to be a very nice restaurant.

(As a note, The Manhattan Fish Market is a Malaysian-owned and -created restaurant chain. It’s also not cheap, by Malaysian standards. The grilled fish of the day with a drink cost RM23++.)

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. The Wast is very clear on what he eats when we go out, and our ten year-old doesn’t order from the kids’ menus. “The food on the kids’ menu isn’t very nice,” he told me on Saturday. “It all tastes the same and it’s boring.”

He has a point. The Fish Market’s three kid choices were, from memory, fish nuggets with chips, calamari rings with chips, or fish nuggets with calamari rings with chips. Kids at Kinsahi, a Johor-based chain of Japanese restaurants, have a similar choice of fried vaguely Japanese (or other) looking food with fried potato stars and/or chips. Why would you take your children to an otherwise excellent Japanese restaurant only to order them spaghetti with chips? When you start paying attention, you’ll notice that the children’s menu items are way below standard compared to the adult offerings, often greasy, unimaginative and carelessly compiled. Little Dinosaur ordered a kids meal @ Fish Market but the nuggets she received were strangely too soft under their batter, almost a puree. Being the less discriminatory type that she is, she told us it was “nice” but ended up not eating most of it.

It wasn’t until The Wast explained the facts of kiddy eating-out life to me, compounded by Little Dinosaur’s meal, that I saw the truth in what he was saying.

Do kids get such a bad deal when it comes to restaurant food because they aren’t the ones paying the bill? If we are enjoying our meals, do we blithely assume the quality of our children’s food must be equivalent and carry on regardless? Or is it a case of just being relieved that there’s something “kid-friendly” on the menu (buying into the pernicious myth that kids only enjoy food with deep-fried potato strips next to it) and so we’re content to close our eyes to sub-standard quality? (I have to admit, I’ve been guilty of that.)

Right now, though, I have no excuse. Over the past year, we’ve been moving to a policy of always checking that what we feel like eating (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, kopitiam, Taiwanese, Hong Kong cafe, ramen, steamboat, bbq grill, seafood, etc.) is close to what the kids also feel like eating. If we can’t come to a consensus, we leave and find another restaurant. The Wast has been eating from the adult menu for months now (mostly because the kid portions are too small for him. He’s as skinny as a rake, so where he puts all that food I’ll never know!) and I think, after this past weekend, I’ll be pushing finicky, fussy Little Dinosaur more aggressively to do the same. I know what this means — more restaurant-hopping, more cycles as we wait for our children to look over a variety of menus, more disgruntled opinions — but The Wast was right to point out the lower quality of kids’ meals, and we’re happy to listen. It means a bigger restaurant bill, but this is their nutrition and satisfaction we’re talking about. When it comes to food quality, children, and teaching them about quality, you have to go for the best you can afford. It’s as simple as that.

Don’t wrinkle your nose like that!

I know what you’re thinking. You’re imagining smooth frankfurter-looking things filled with fish paste. No no no. What I’m suggesting is something a lot more palatable and, according to Best Ever Recipes: Appetisers (published by Hermes House, 2008), is actually Hungarian in origin, so no strange mix of tastes (like sugar in the snag) here. Bear with me.

Fish sausages fall on the piscine food continuum somewhere between fish cakes and fish fingers. They are firmer than cakes but full of herby goodness, unlike fingers. First the recipe plus notes:

375g fish fillets, such as perch, pike, carp or cod, skinned (I used dory)
1 white bread rolling75ml milk
25ml chopped fresh flat leaf parsley (actually, I used a mix — parsley, rosemary, oregano and a bit of dill)
2 eggs, well beaten
50g plain flour
Fresh breadcrumbs (or panko, the delightfully spiky large crumbs from Japan)
Oil
Salt and pepper

1. Mince or process the fish coarsely in a food process or blender. (Just check first to make sure all the bones have been removed.) Soak the roll in the milk for about 10 minutes, then squeeze it out. Mix the fish and bread together before adding the chopped parsley (or herbs), one of the eggs and plenty of seasoning.

2. Using your fingers, shape the fish mixture into 10cm long sausages, making them about 2.5cm thick. (Be careful because they’re very fragile at this stage.) Carefully roll the fish “sausages” in the flour, then in the remaining (beaten) egg and finally in the breadcrumbs.

(Step 2A. Put on a tray and put in the fridge for 30 minutes to firm up the sausages.)

3. Heat the oil in a pan then slowly cook the sausages until golden brown all over. Drain well on crumpled kitchen paper. Garnish with the deep-fried parsley sprigs and lemon wedges dusted with paprika.

Here’s a pic:

You know, people are often a bit apprehensive about cooking fish. And it really isn’t helped by this cookbook. The editor of the book is Christine Ingram and she makes wonderfully affirming statements like:

* “Use this batter … whenever you feel brave enough to fry fish.” (Parmesan fish goujons) WHAT???!!! Brave enough to fry fish? Srsly?

* “If you can’t find Serrano ham, use Italian prosciutto or Portuguese presunto.” (Grilled asparagus with salt-cured ham) Sweetheart, if I can’t find Serrano ham (says Kaz from Johor), chances are I won’t be able to find prosciutto or presunto either, m’kay?

* “... this succulent tapas dish … tastes even better served with some home-made aioli.” (Chicken with lemon and garlic) Pity there’s no recipe for aioli in the entire cookbook then.

* “This is a well-known and much-enjoyed salad, even though its origins are a mystery.” (Caesar salad) A mystery … only if you don’t like food. (Hint: check out Julia Child.)

So, I like the cookbook, but am not too keen on Ms Ingram’s pearls of wisdom. Must be getting cranky in my old age but I hate it when people in authority either don’t do the proper research that is part and parcel of their bloody job or put off enthusiasts/students by making stupid statements. But the fish sausage? She is delicious!

Fish sauce smells pretty, uh, fishy

Another new salad to add to the family repertoire. I made this salad with a slight amount of trepidation back in November, but the kids just wolfed it down and asked for more. I mean, really, trying to cook interesting food for children is a real crapshoot. So, now that I’ve found this recipe, I’m holding onto it with both claw-like hands. As usual, the original, from the Periplus Authentic Recipes series (Authentic Recipes from Vietnam by Trieu Thi Choi and Marcel Isaak, 2005) is given below, as well as my notes in italics.

1 skinless chicken breast (about 100g), stamed or poached until cooked and shredded to yield about 1 cup
½ head cabbage, leaves washed, rolled up and thinly sliced (I usually use red cabbage because it looks so stunning)
2 tablespoons minced mint leaves
2 tablespoons minced polygonum leaves (also known as daun kesum in Malaysia, and maybe Vietnamese mint elsewhere. The cookbook tells me that if you can’t get this particular herb, substitute with equal quantities of mint and coriander leaves)
3 tablespoons fish sauce (be brave; it’ll all come right in the end)
1½ tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
½ teaspoon crushed black peppercorns
2 tablespoons crispy fried shallots (I tend to leave this out because, as much as I love the taste of them, the shallots always get stuck on my back teeth; J doesn’t even like the taste of them)
2 tablespoons crushed roasted unsalted peanuts (I use a mortar and pestle to give an interesting, uneven texture to the crushed peanuts)
1 finger-length red chilli, deseeded and thinly sliced lengthwise (I leave this out for the moment because of the kids)

1. Combine the chicken, cabbage, herbs in a large bowl.
2. (Now this is my own step. The cookbook has you tossing everything, except the shallots and chilli, into the bowl with gay abandon, and adding more sugar to taste, but I tend to take a more nuanced approach to salad dressing.) Combine the fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and pepper in a small cup or bowl. Mix until the sugar is as dissolved as it’s going to get. Don’t worry if it’s still a bit gritty by the time you’ve finished mixing, you won’t be able to taste it in the final dish. Adjust ingredients to taste.
3. Garnish with red chilli and serve immediately. (As mentioned before, I leave out the chilli, then dust J’s and my portion of salad with chilli flakes. Can’t live without them chilli flakes!)

And although I only had the usual white cabbage at hand yesterday, this is what it should look like:

NOTE: Because getting particular herbs can be a bit of a hit and miss affair, when I see the herbs on offer, I grab a whole lot of them, mince them, mix them and freeze them in plastic bags. This way, I always have the herb mix on hand to whip up this salad with leftover chicken. They’ve kept well for 2 months, so far. The herbs, that is.

ASIDE: And in Neo Dark Ages™ news from Malaysia, I bring you the burning of churches and the banning of the use of the word “Allah” by non-Muslims, even though the Arabic word predates Islam and is currently used to also describe non-Muslim deities. I was going to write an entire rant about this, but A Rahman does a much better job in a letter to malaysiakini (Malaysia Now) here. The way it’s going, Malaysia is going to lose its “moderate Muslim country” tag … not that I think certain loud-mouthed and closed-minded factions care. (And, again, you’ll note that the action is being taken to “protect” Muslims from confusion with other gods. Insert appropriate WTF comment here.)

Let’s talk food!

So, we only ended up with the immediate family for Christmas Eve dinner. This ended up being a good thing, considering the cutting of the fingernail thing. In fact, it was such a convivial and relaxed meal, with just the kids and pets, that I might not invite anyone to a Christmas meal ever again!

I know it doesn’t quite look like much, but here was our dinner table:

So now that we have the picture, let’s delve into the recipes.

TOMATO PASTA SALAD (which, incidentally, isn’t even in the photo! Doh!)

This was the first time I tried this recipe and was such a huge hit that it’s now become part of our standard salad repertoire. The recipe originally came from the Better Homes & Gardens “A Treasury of Christmas Food & Craft” softcover book, 1998 edition. Here’s the more-or-less original recipe with my notes in brackets.

½ cup oil-packed sundried tomatoes, drained (you can get gold easier than you can get sun-dried tomatoes here! Not managing to source any for Christmas, I settled for the equivalent amount of feta in oil with herbs)
1-2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons oil, from sundried tomatoes (see above note)
½ cup olive oil
500g pasta bows
1 bunch fresh asparagus
250g punnet cherry tomatoes
250g yellow pear tomatoes
1/3 (that’s one-third) cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
Salt, pepper
Fresh basil leaves to garnish

1. Combine sun-dried tomatoes (feta), garlic, vinegar and oils in food processor bowl. Process 20 seconds or until ingredients are combined. (I add the salt and pepper at this point, not at the end, separately, as the recipe advises.)
2. Cook pasta bows in large pan of boiling, salted water for the time stated on the packet (usually 12 minutes) or until al dente. Drain.
3. Prepare asparagus. (Now, the true way of preparing asparagus is to bend the stalk, which will snap at the point where the woody part of the stem meets the tender part. Unfortunately, this is only a game for restaurant chefs because you wouldn’t believe how much of the stalk gets wasted! My tip is, for big stalks, to cut off the bottom 2cm. If the stalks are skinny and all green, I just trim the ends. Then I get a vegetable peeler and I peel away the skin on the bottom half of all the stalks. It sounds like a lot of work but you get into the hang of it quite quickly, especially if you rest the stalk on a chopping board and roll it with your left hand while peeling with your right.)
4. Plunge asparagus spears into a bowl of boiling water. Leave 2 minutes, until vibrant green in colour and slightly tender. Drain, then plunge into a bowl of ice water. When cold, drain and pat dry with paper towels. Cut into 3cm lengths. (I do my cutting beforehand. Have you ever tried to boil the entire length of long-ass asparagus spears? It’s frustrating if you don’t have a fancy asparagus cooker. So, cut first, cook for 2 mins, then cool very quickly in iced water. Drain and dry.)
5. Cut cherry tomatoes and pear tomatoes into half, lengthways.
6. Assemble salad while pasta is still warm: Combine pasta, tomatoes, asparagus and parsley in a large serving bowl; mix in dressing. Add salt and pepper (if you’ve decided to wait till this point). Garnish with basil leaves. (I use the small leaves to garnish with and make pesto with the large ones.)

Wow, that’s a lot of blood

If you’re into cooking with any kind of zeal, you’ll come across the advice that you should always use the very sharpest knife during any cutting task. “It’s the blunt knife,” you constantly read, “that does the most damage.”

When cooking, I tend to set up my prep area a particular way. Directly in front of me I have my chopping board, the type varying according to what I’m slicing and dicing. To my right, I have a selection of the knives I’ll use during the prep session, all laid out one beside the other — a boning knife for, er, boning, a black ceramic knife for vegetables, a chef’s knife for herb chopping, and so on. The sharpening steel is always the rightmost utensil. Beyond my chopping board is my “refuse dish”, where I deposit all peelings, skins, and ends. I may have two of these if I’m putting aside some peelings, say, for a stock. To my left, I have empty containers ready to receive whatever I’ve prepared.

I’ll be honest and say I like my system. It’s what works for me. And so I chopped, sliced and filleted my way through the Christmas menu, sharpening my knives in between (all except the black ceramic which has to be specially sharpened by some Japanese samurai master in Kyoto during the full moon only when the cranes fly, or something).

That done, I noticed that the cat’s meat also needed cutting. Unfortunately, this only occurred to me after I’d cleaned my prep area. You can guess what’s coming next, can’t you? I grabbed the first clean knife I had (not so sharp, no weight to it). And started laying into the sinewy buffalo forequarter.

It took less than a second. One moment I was realising what a bad idea it was using an unsuitable — and blunt — knife, and the next, the blade slipped and cut my finger through the nail down to the flesh.

As I type this, my left index finger is still throbbing. And it’s difficult to type without that finger in fine fettle — the letters r, t, f, g, v and b depend on it. So take it from me, folks, those righteous cookbooks are right. It really is the blunt knife that does the most damage. And that one’s from personal experience. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake.

In other news, I’ll be touching on the festive season in Johor in my last Novel Spaces post for 2009. Look out for it after 6:00am EST today. Ow!

I have PLENTY of time. Not.

It never fails. One minute, I’m regarding the calendar and snorting because I have so much free time it’s laughable. The next, it’s the day before Christmas Eve and I haven’t done A Thing.

Gads, I’m a bad parent sometimes. You know those parents who have a ritual around putting up a tree and decorations? Who have stories about special ornaments handmade by their great-great-aunt with arthritis from ration coupons they saved during the war? Who have lovingly preserved each and every recipe so as to reproduce faithfully a banquet from the nineteenth century? Yeah, nope, not me. After giving our last two artificial trees the thumbs down, we haven’t even bought a new one yet, and Christmas is just a couple of weeks away. Yikes!

(Then again, we don’t even have curtains for more than half the house, so what’s a tree between friends, right?)

One thing we have decided to follow is the Christmas Eve dinner thing. Because it’s so hot here in the tropics, you’d have to be a lunatic (are you listening, Australia?) to have a major food-fest at lunchtime. Interestingly enough, it’s also the same on the Continent. So, Malaysia and Poland are in agreement and a Christmas Eve dinner it is.

J abhors carp, the traditional Polish main dish. He tells me he’d rather eat wet tissue which, interestingly, resembles the texture of carp … or so he says. I wouldn’t know, having never eaten giant koi-type fish (hey, we keep them as pets!), but I’ll take his word for it.

On my side of the fence, it’s Portuguese Eurasian roast chicken. This is a family favourite, and is something I can make in my sleep, so it’s definitely on the menu. Vindaloo and devil curries are also traditional, but the kids still aren’t that much into the chilli-hot food (yet!), so I have to make a choice.

I like vindaloo because of the adventure. I say that because it’s not like the Indian curry of the same name at all. It’s fresher, a lighter red and quite vinegary (no surprise, as it’s based on a Portuguese dish cooked in vinegar sauce). The thing is, it’s also a finicky dish. Just add one spoon of vinegar too much and you’ll ruin the entire curry you’ve been slaving over for more than an hour. This is a curry that demands you taste CONSTANTLY! Eurasians have normally cooked this with chicken, but I like the texture of pork more, so that’s what I use. (And then I discovered that — hey! — pork was the traditional meat for the founding Portuguese dish too. Fantastic!)

The traditional salad I remember from my childhood days was An Abomination Of Nature. No other words for it. It put me off salads for decades. The basic ingredients were okay — lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, onions — but the dressing was, not to put too fine a point on it, the spawn of Satan. My mother used to make up some concoction that combined condensed milk with powdered mustard and enough water and milk (almost a cup) to form something with the consistency of swampy water. This would then get poured over the basic ingredients and let to soak for hours before serving. Believe me, it’s worse than it sounds.

Nowadays, we do a green salad with a freshly-made vinaigrette although, as we’re having a party this year, I might also add a pasta and asparagus salad.

In deference to the cold of the Polish winter, we’ll have some mulled red wine in addition to other, non-alcoholic refreshments. It goes down to about 25-27 degrees Celsius in these here parts around this time of year (in the evenings), so I think our fake fireplace (we lugged it all the way from Australia) will look very nice in the corner. We’ve had it on before (just the flames, not the heat) and visitors have loved it! And I’m trying to talk J into cooking his most excellent chicken briyani.

Dessert is where we all fall down. From watching Jacques Pepin, I know how to do a bulk order of Crepes Suzette in one go. And thanks to the Juniors’ cookbook (that’s Juniors of New York), I can whip up a mean NY-style baked cheesecake. Both are good do-ahead dishes. Some bought, good-quality ice-cream for those who want it and I think we’re done!

So, our menu is shaping up as follows:

• Chicken liver pate and one other dip to start (pesto? pimento? pumpkin? p-sour cream?) plus other cheap nibblies, like crisps and mixed nuts, and so on
• Roast chicken
• Pork vindaloo curry
• Something from J: chicken briyani or roast leg of lamb
• Potato dish, maybe a gratinée
• Two salads
• Rice
• NY baked cheesecake
• Sorta kinda Crepes Suzette

What about your Christmas do, for those having one? Care to share what you’re having? Are you going traditional, iconoclast, hybrid?

In which Kaz goes cruising for a bruising

I was talking to my friend Parvathy recently. I was in a particularly good mood as I had tried on a pair of trousers I’d bought a couple of years ago and the darned thing — that had fitted quite well — slipped straight off my hips. I’ve had an aim of losing a few kilograms over the past few years but absolutely refuse to adhere to any particular diet. Instead, I’ve been trying to eat breakfast, cut my meal consumption to two a day and get some exercise. For one reason or another, without my really noticing it, I’ve shed the fat.

So anyway, there I was with Parvathy, in a good mood.

“Living in Malaysia has been great,” I enthused. “I’ve lost a few pounds.”
“How did you do it?” she asked, greatly interested.
“I don’t eat the food.”

It was a statement as a joke, meant to elicit a laugh, but is truer than you can imagine.

Food in Malaysia. Everyone raves about it. As did I. Not any more. If the United States has an obesity epidemic (as Alexander Cockburn so drily observes), then its Asian equivalent is Malaysia. By the universe, I’ve seen some porkers around. And, like Cockburn, from all age groups. Young men and women sporting enough spare tyres to service a car is not a healthy look. I try to imagine them having sex (hey, I’m an erotic romance writer, okay?) and it just doesn’t quite work. Let’s break it down.

Satay. Mmmm, those delicious charcoal-grilled skewers of meat. Not too many lean pieces are used. And they’ve been marinated in a sugar mix. And basted constantly with oil. Before being served with a sauce thick with peanuts. And palm oil. And sugar.

Nasi lemak. Well, for a start, “lemak” means “fat” in Malay. The rice has been cooked in coconut milk. The ikan bilis (dried anchovies) have been fried in palm oil. The sambal contains sugar. The really nice, smooth-tasting sambals contain condensed milk, I kid you not.

Roti canai. Oh, that flaky, crunchy, soft-as-butter layered flat bread! Made with evaporated or condensed milk. Also, heaps of ghee.

Laksa lemak. Coconut milk. Palm oil.

Run of the mill curry. Palm oil. Coconut milk.

Chicken rice (and I’m sobbing as I type this because this is my favourite dish). Chicken fat in the rice, the more the better.

So, what’s wrong with palm oil? Palm oil, my stalwart Asian readers, contains between 49% (palm oil) and 81% (palm kernel oil) saturated fat. Did you get that? Up to EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT saturated fat!!! Do you know what saturated fat does to you? It clogs your arteries. It increases your (bad) cholesterol level. One of the reasons humans eat fat is to help produce energy to maintain our body temperature but in an equatorial country, for crying out loud, that need is at a minimum, so it gets socked away in our bodies instead. Malaysians gleefully go through palm oil like it’s water and say things like, the curry is no good if it doesn’t have a layer of oil floating on top. Doh!

And as for coconut milk. Now, maybe coconut milk isn’t as bad as I was thinking. However, it still has a fat content of around 17%. I mean, we go nutso over milk, having “skim”, “low-fat”, and “zero-fat” versions, all because the full-cream product contains — are you ready? — 4% of fat. But we’ll wave coconut milk through as being “healthy” with a fat content of SEVENTEEN PERCENT?

The upshot of all this is that a normal Malaysian meal is a heart attack just waiting to happen. Now, I’m trying not to get all paranoid over this. I had a big bowl of laksa last night for dinner, for example. But I probably won’t have another one for another 3-4 weeks. The same goes for nasi lemak. And I don’t think we’ve had any roti canai for more than a month. And I’m not secretly looking at all those dishes, thinking to myself how I’d like to devour some curry and roti for breakfast every day. There are heaps of other dishes we cook at home that are healthy, and that the kids love, but that don’t pack the same kind of lethal punch as you get in an average Malaysian food court.

Part of the problem is that cooked food is so cheap here. And professional women tend not to cook. (One of my cousins, at the age of 35+, cooked her very first curry and called us, Malaysia to Australia, to tell us the good news. She didn’t really learn how to cook anything else, but would commandeer the kitchen when guests were due, so she could “show off” her “cooking prowess” with her infamous one curry.) It’s just a lot easier to grab some grub from the local stalls and head home rather than swelter away in a hot kitchen with no air-conditioning.

And, if you have children, the chaotic two-sessions-a-day school schedule kicks in. You might have one child going to morning school ( start at 7:00am-ish, finish around 2pm) and another going to afternoon school (start at 1:00pm-ish, finish around 7pm). They may then shoot off to tuition a few times a week before heading home. Trying to organise a mealtime together gets difficult, especially when you add in two working adults. Servants also cook, and that’s an option, but the kind of food they cook is, again, not the healthiest, relying mostly on frying. We cook at home about five nights a week and go through three litres of oil in 4-5 months of cooking. That’s seen as being very unusual in a country where families buy large 5-litre bottles of palm oil, often filling the shopping trolley with them, close to festival time.

One of the final factors is that Malaysia is the world’s top producer of palm oil. So what’s the most common form of fat you get here? Yep, palm oil. The one that also happens to be the unhealthiest in the world. We buy pure canola oil, but that’s easily three times the price of palm oil and, at the rate that Malaysians go through it, the average family simply can’t afford it. And don’t even get us started on olive oil, which goes for an average of RM30 per 700ml bottle for the good stuff.

And, lastly, you have the average Malaysian’s utter love affair with fat. If the Scots hadn’t come up with deep-fried, battered Mars bars, the Malaysians would’ve. Malaysians can take anything and turn it into a feast of fat. Order prawns and it will come fried in pure butter with curry leaves and butter-fried breadcrumbs. The problem is, it’s absolutely delicious (Butter Prawns, KL style). I ordered Cantonese-style flat rice noodles at a Malay restaurant a couple of weekends ago, and it came as a full-on fried kway teow (noodles fried with soya sauce in oil) and surrounded by an Chinese-style sauce thickened with cornflour and egg, to which meat and vegetables had been added. Hey guys, one or the other, but not both on the same plate! Deep-fried sushi; puff pastry enclosing everything, from custard to tuna curry; tea and coffee, loaded with condensed milk AND sugar; fruit danish pastries topped with slices of pound cake; doughnuts glazed with chocolate icing, then decorated with chocolate sprinkles, and filled with chocolate custard; pizzas with tearaway crusts that contain three cheeses and are topped by cornflakes sprinkled with more cheese; fried noodles, fried rice, fried anything-that-stands-still-long-enough; and deliciously golden fried chicken, as far as the eye can see.

It’s okay from time to time. But it’s a complete overload on a daily basis. And, fellow Malaysians, it’s killing you. Somehow, that plate of mutton rendang (coconut milk, sugar) doesn’t look quite so attractive any more.

ADDITIONAL: In concentrating on the fat, I completely forgot the diabetes risk from the sugar. The average Malaysian consumes one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of sugar a week! Add that to the fat intake, and I’m surprised there are even people still alive in the country. All it shows me is that the human body is a wonderful mechanism that can truly take a bucketful of punishment under the cover of pleasure.

It’s a fact of life that it’s the simple things we miss the most. There was a time in my life, for example, for quite a few months, when my definition of heaven was a quiet bedroom to sleep in at night and a hot shower in the morning. I wasn’t worried about a car, or a wine collection, or owning several laptops. Silence and hot water were it for me.

For the past two years, J and I have had a similar need for something basic yet essential. Bread. That’s not to say there isn’t bread in south-east Asia but — damn it all to hell! — 99% of the loaves and rolls you buy here are sweet! There doesn’t seem to be a wheat flour product around that doesn’t have copious amounts of sugar added. (I keep wondering about the level of diabetes in this part of the world. Maybe I’ll follow it up for a later blog.) And so that makes a supper of bread with cheese and fresh tomatoes with herbs a bit difficult. Not to mention to accompany soup. Or with chicken salad. Or even a nice fish curry.

We ordered a 25kg bag of Finnish organic flour from a bakery in Kuala Lumpur last year, but that was expensive, inconvenient to collect and we couldn’t really get the hang of the flour. It had a personality that we somehow couldn’t work with. (Bread-making, as any bread-maker will tell you, is as much art as science.) I mentioned our need to my friend, Parvathy, and she asked whether I’d made enquiries at the spice shop I had visited recently with her mother. Well, to be honest, the woman at the front counter of that shop scared me. To say she was unhelpful to the point of sullen muteness would be an accurate summation of the situation. When I relayed this to Parvathy, she laughed.

“Oh, that’s just the wife,” she told me. “She hates working in the shop.”
“I can tell!”
“The problem is, her husband and both sons work the shop, so she doesn’t really have a choice. The result is, she takes it out on the customers. But you just ignore her, lah, and ask one of the sons. They’re very helpful.”

O-kay. But before I could work up the courage to go back, Parvathy beat me to it and, the next thing I knew, there was a 25kg bag of high-protein flour shedding white powder on the back seat of her car. It seems the shop didn’t do any lesser quantities. After collecting it, J and I stared at the sack with lingering doubt.

“It comes from the Johor Flour Mill in Pasir Gudang,” I told him, having read it off the label.
“Uh huh.”
“At least it’s not Finnish.”
“Uh huh.”
“And it’s not as expensive as the Finnish stuff.”
“Uh huh.”
“Care to make a loaf?”
“I’m … not sure. I think this is something I have to work up to.”

But time was getting away from us and I knew I’d have to make a loaf before Parvathy’s visit, when she was bound to ask how the flour was. So I did. And, gentle reader, the bread came out brilliantly. It rose to the occasion, baked with a lovely medium-brown crust, and smelt divine. There is nothing like the smell of a loaf of bread baking in the oven wafting through your home to make you feel, well, at home.

There’s only one problem. It’s sweet. The damn flour is sweet! Though thankfully not as sweet as the stuff you buy in the shops, which has sweet added to it and is then baked and glazed with sweet before having a decoration of sweet on top. * sigh * So, we have 25kg of (sweet-ish) flour to get through. Oh well, could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Finnish.

I know, I didn’t blog on Friday. Put it down to a moment of madness. Being Malaysia, the kids didn’t have the day off but we did! Can you imagine? A morning and part-afternoon alone with my husband? We haven’t had time together like that for a couple of years now. So we made the most of it by having breakfast outside together, then doing some leisurely shopping before heading home in time for the school bus to drop off our kids. It was sheer bliss. But that meant I missed Friday’s blog. So, without further ado, here it is ….

We’ve been letting the kids help us cook off and on for the past few years now. But only recently, J and I took the decision to get a bit more systematic about this, recognising that we’ve perhaps been a little too protective of our darlings in the kitchen. To this end, The Wast cooked his first curry on the weekend. It’s very simple and tastes lovely … and will hopefully encourage him to become a bit more adventurous in his own culinary adventures, although I really can’t complain — he already reaches for the chilli sauce in restaurants now instead of the tomato sauce (ketchup). So, if you’d like a dead-easy curry recipe, here’s one for you too.

Oil
1 large onion, halved and sliced into half-rings
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
Small handful of curry leaves
8 small to medium okra, washed and trimmed but left whole
3 whole chillies (serrano or jalapeno work well) Optional
1 pouch fish curry paste
1 oval tin of sardines in tomato sauce (around 400g)

1. Heat oil in pan. Add onions, mustard seeds and curry leaves. Stir. Be careful as the mustard seeds will pop.
2. When onions are soft, add okra and, if using, chillies. Stir-fry for a few minutes.
3. Add curry paste and mix vegetables in this. If you find the mix too thick, add up to a cup of water to make the gravy thinner.
4. Simmer, with lid on, for 6-8 minutes.
5. Open tin of sardines and add juice to the simmering curry. Stir.
6. Switch off the heat. Carefully add sardines to the curry, being careful not to break the fish. Replace saucepan lid to let fish warm through in the curry sauce.
7. Keep in the fridge overnight after cooling. Heat the next day and have with the flat bread of your preference, preferably for breakfast.

Here’s a picture of it:

If you can’t source pouches of curry paste, use curry powder. Mix two to three tablespoons of powder with enough water to form a paste. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned salt at all. The amount you use depends on the paste/powder. If I find a curry needs salt, I add it either while cooling down after cooking or while warming up before serving for the first time. (I’m careful with salt because J has high blood pressure.) Also, ALL my curries are made the day before they’re eaten.

It was a stinky New Year’s, although Malaysians will recognise the items from the heading and smile a little. Being Malaysian-born, it’s no surprise that I’m talking about FOOD!

Let’s hit petai (per-TIE) first. These flattish green beans come in long, strap-like pods that resemble organic ammunition belts. The Parkia speciosa tree may reach 30 metres in height. I remember my father always coming back from army manoeuvres in the jungle, loaded up with bundles of petai that my mother and I would then peel. You can eat the beans raw or cook them, usually in a very thick and strongly-flavoured sauce. The crunchy texture of petai doesn’t change much after cooking.

All kinds of “native” fruit, vegetables and herbs are getting raves from natural health practitioners nowadays, so what does petai help with? The list includes depression (although I think that’s due to the hot, sticky curry or sambal mix that usually enfolds it), PMS, anaemia, high blood pressure, constipation (again, I think it’s the sambal mix it’s in), hangovers, obesity, smoking, stress, nerves, mosquito bites, morning sickness and warts. I remain a bit sceptical about all this, but J tells me he was listening to a one-hour radio programme that extolled the virtues of petai, so the news is certainly getting out there. Here’s a nice picture of a petai dish from Wikipedia. It’s making me a bit hungry even looking at it.

There are a few downsides to munching on petai, however, and they include bad breath, smelly farts and smelly urine (they contain the same set of amino acids as asparagus, but stronger, imo). So you’ll definitely want to warn whomever enters the bathroom after you … or not, as the case may be.

Reaction from n00bs: We had it in a Thai dish, fried with prawns and chilli. J says its definitely an acquired taste, commented on the hard texture, but said he’d try it again … in a few months. It certainly cleaned out my colon, so I’m not complaining.

And we finally cracked the durian that kindly Mr. Loh gave me. The smell of durian is like sugar-coated onions that have been sweating in the oven. (J gave this to me when I had a particularly bad throat infection once, and it helped, so don’t laugh.) And it doesn’t get any better because, to be perfectly honest, once you crack the thick thorny skin, you are confronted with something that looks like a smooth, yellowish obese sausage of cat-sick. Have a look at this (like the previous pic, credit to Wikipedia) and tell me I’m wrong:

There are more than a dozen different durian cultivars, each with its own characteristics. I’m a fan of the yellow, sweet, mushy varieties, although I hear there’s a red variety in Sabah.

Reaction from n00bs: (The type Mr. Loh gave me was white and sweet but with largish seeds.) After saying he’d join me for a taste, The Wast chickened out when confronted by the smelly reality. Only J and my darling, sweet Little Dinosaur ponied up to have a tiny bite. Her reaction can best be described as every vaccination she’s had as a child, rolled into one. I’m not talking about crying, but a stunned look of utter bewilderment, accompanied by a quick, erratic stiff-legged gait around the dining room, followed by a quick dash to the refrigerator to pour herself a drink. J tried something similar by downing a can of Guinness, until I pointed out that if you make a “tcha” sound with your tongue, the taste of the durian comes back into your mouth. He tried it and reported, quite sorrowfully, that I was right.

But, for me, it was heaven. Petai for dinner and durian for midnight supper on New Year’s Eve. What a lovely way to end one year and begin another. Happy 2009 to all!