Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

  • 09 Dec

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    Getting ready for Christmas

    4

    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?

  • 23 Nov

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    Malaysian food: not for me!

    4

    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.

  • 02 Jun

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    We have bread! Kinda sorta….

    2

    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.

  • 13 Apr

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    The Wast’s Sardine Curry

    2

    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:

    The Wast's sardine curry

    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.

  • 02 Jan

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    Durian and petai, oh my!

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    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!

  • 26 Dec

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    Christmas food

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    So, how did you celebrate Christmas? For Eurasians, our big meal is Christmas Eve dinner, which is then followed by attendance at Midnight Mass (as most Portuguese Eurasians are Roman Catholic). This also seems to be the case in Poland, so all we — as a family — really needed to do was to mash together the menus and drop the Mass to achieve fusion.

    Traditional foods for me are: roast chicken, Vindaloo Curry, Captain Curry and a salad.

    Traditional foods for J are: carp, vodka [EDITED to add:], pierogi and poppy seed cake.

    We nixed the carp and the Captain Curry, mostly because I didn’t like the idea of eating wet tissue paper (the carp) and we didn’t need two curries for a mostly-family dinner (Captain Curry).

    You’re probably wondering about the names, aren’t you? Well, the original name for Captain Curry was Kapitan Curry. The Kapitan was the Chinese head man in Malacca who was the spokesman for the Chinese community when liaising with the Sultan and his staff. His name was given to the curry because the dish, made with chicken, is a combination of the best of Malay and Chinese influences. The Eurasians did their own take on the mix and some called it Captain Curry, which is probably as confusing a name as you can get.

    Vindaloo Curry is pronounced vin-DAH-loo, not VIN-daloo like you hear it in the UK. I’ve gone back to making it with the original meat, which is pork. Modern Eurasians usually make it with chicken. It is based on a Portuguese dish Vinha d’ Alhos, which means “with vinegar and garlic” … I think. Wikipedia has it all wrong with this dish, concentrating only on the Indian version (which results in a thick, dark brown curry) and missing the Eurasian story (which is slightly thinner and a bright reddish-yellow if you’re doing it right) altogether. The spices we use are very simple — only dried chillies (lots and lots of dried chillies!) and mustard seeds. The other flavouring comes from garlic, onions, ginger, salt, sugar and, most importantly, vinegar. And we add potatoes. That’s about it. This is a simple curry that’s very easy to get very wrong and, if it goes wrong, it does so right at the end, so there’s the potential to screw up the entire dish … and it’s not easy to redeem.

    Although I didn’t plan it that way, it now appears that a yellow vegetable curry is also a dinner table staple. I usually make it without the chillis but with the curry leaves and mustard seeds. It’s quick, versatile and gets the kids used to curry without the heat. As their heat tolerance rises, so will the level of chilli inclusion.

    I’ve now left the chicken in J’s capable hands and he does some rotisserie magic with it. People have asked for the recipe, but I’ve directed them to J. I just eat the thing! An Eurasian-style roast chicken is one that’s been slathered in mustard, pepper and dark soya sauce. It is dotted with butter and sprinkled with paprika (like you can notice that against the dark soya sauce but, hey, that’s how it’s done) before being roasted in the oven. The soya sauce seems to act as a shield, keeping the chicken flesh moist and tender underneath the deliciously crisp skin. If you’re in the mood for an experiment, try it.

    The Eurasian salad I used to get served as a child was AWFUL and it put me off salads for years! Limp lettuce leaves are propped around the edge of a salad bowl, holding sliced hard-boiled eggs, sliced red onions and a thin, yellow “dressing” made with powdered mustard and sugar that soaked everything like a tasteless, cold, semi-sweet soup. Ugh! The minute I moved out of home, that sucker was gone, and replaced with a green salad lightly dressed with home-made vinaigrette. Sometimes, tradition is a bad thing!

    Desserts can range from souffles to trifles to tortes, all home-made, depending on how we feel that year. So, would anyone else like to share? What dishes define the holiday season for you?

  • 31 Oct

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    Ranty McRant: Cooking programmes

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    Do you know one of things J and I do to relax? We put on episodes of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin to watch on TV. If we think we’ve seen them a bit too often, we put on some Rick Stein just to mix things up a bit. And we’re even warming to Jamie Oliver. You can safely say we like food. But if there’s one thing I’m getting a bit too much of, it’s the stupid pronouncements of every celebrity “chef” out there.

    Bear in mind, that I love/adore cooking, and have done for more than 2 decades. We have hundreds of cookbooks on our bookshelves. I can watch an episode of “Iron Chef” and criticise them because they didn’t remove the pistils from courgette flowers before frying them, or because they believe pizza pie originated in Italy.

    So, as an exercise, let’s see if you can spot this incidence of repetitive inanity.

    Did you know that the traditional cuisine of northern Italy depends on fresh ingredients, sourced locally? And that the traditional cuisine of China depends on fresh ingredients, sourced locally? How about the traditional cuisine of Mexico? Fresh ingredients, sourced locally. Having absorbed all that, can you tell me … what the traditional cuisines of south-east Asia depended on? Go on, give it a shot. Got it? Yep, they depended on freakin’ fresh ingredients, sourced freakin’ locally! Would never have guessed that one, Anthony Bourdain!

    Is that all these people can say nowadays? Who are the vacuous clones writing this rubbish? I lift my eyebrow disdainfully as I stare at the TV screen. “So you’re saying there were no Concorde flights transporting white truffles in oil halfway across the world back in the fourteenth century, then?” With an entire region’s cooking repetoire to choose from, are the phrases “fresh ingredients” and “sourced locally” really the only things one can think of?

    Because God hates me(*), I was also subjected to a dreadful series called “Sugar”, where some bimbo concocts nouveau yuppie food in an ersatz house setting that makes Ikea catalogue photos look cosy and traditional. And do you know what she said when preparing a sweet pastry base for a pie? “Prick the bottom of the pastry with a fork or it will spread when it bakes in the oven.”

    I almost fell off the sofa. It will spread? We’re talking pastry here, woman, not chocolate. And, in fact, pastry has a tendency to shrink when it’s baked. Good gods! It was oh-so-obvious that this woman — who stands in front of a camera, being paid an obscene amount of money to teach people how to make the equivalent of twee canapes — had never cooked a goddamned pie in her life. Because, gentle reader, if she had, she would know that one pricks the bottom (and sides) of fresh pastry to stop layers of pastry ballooning up/out and filling the pie cavity. I know this because I’ve cooked dozens of pies and it’s happened to me. But this woman can — either through stupidity or ignorance — stand there under a cloak of authority, collect a fat fee and lie through her back teeth over, not just one but two, facts. I wouldn’t mind so much, except some newbie is going to take this piece of drivel as gospel and live a life filled with culinary falsehood. (I take food very seriously.)

    I can understand that cooking programmes are chic, and that various producers are falling over themselves to come up with the next biggest name. But could somebody please think of the words they’re putting in these people’s mouths? Just to help me regain my composure, I’ll finish with one of Julia’s priceless comments:

    How much garlic you add depends on how you feel about garlic

    Amen, Julia. We still need people like you around.

    (*) Actually, S/He doesn’t. We have a cordial agreement, God and I … I don’t bother The Supreme Being; The Supreme Being doesn’t bother me.

  • 12 Sep

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    Funny on food

    1

    In the beginning, God covered the earth with broccoli, cauliflower and spinach, with green, yellow and red vegetables of all kinds so Man and Woman would live long and healthy lives.

    Then using God’s bountiful gifts, Satan created Dairy Ice Cream and Magnums. And Satan said, ‘You want hot fudge with that? And Man said, ‘Yes!’ And Woman said, ‘I’ll have one too with chocolate chips’. And lo they gained 10 pounds.

    And God created the healthy yoghurt that woman might keep the figure that man found so fair.

    And Satan brought forth white flour from the wheat and sugar from the cane and combined them. And Woman went from size 12 to size 14.

    So God said, ‘Try my fresh green salad’. And Satan presented Blue Cheese dressing and garlic croutons on the side. And Man and Woman unfastened their belts following the repast.

    God then said ‘I have sent you healthy vegetables and olive oil in which to cook them’.

    And Satan brought forth deep fried coconut king prawns, butter-dipped lobster chunks and chicken fried steak, so big it needed its own platter, and Man’s cholesterol went through the roof.

    Then God brought forth the potato, naturally low in fat and brimming with potassium and good nutrition.

    Then Satan peeled off the healthy skin and sliced the starchy centre into chips and deep-fried them in animal fats adding copious quantities of salt. And Man put on more pounds. God then brought forth running shoes so that his Children might lose those extra pounds.

    And Satan came forth with a cable TV with remote control so Man would not have to toil changing the channels. And Man and Woman laughed and cried before the flickering light and started wearing stretch jogging suits.

    Then God gave lean beef so that Man might consume fewer calories and still satisfy his appetite.

    And Satan created McDonalds and the 99p double cheeseburger. Then Satan said ‘You want fries with that?’ and Man replied, ‘Yes, and super size ‘em’. And Satan said, ‘It is good.’ And Man and Woman went into cardiac arrest.

    God sighed ……… and created quadruple bypass surgery.

    And then ……….. Satan chuckled and created the National Health Service.

    Have a good weekend all!

  • 05 Sep

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    Half-arsed review: San Francisco Steakhouse

    0

    Do you know what I really miss, living in south-east Asia? A selfishly large hunk of charred beef, still bloody in the middle, served with oversized cutlery. So, when we visited KL a couple of months ago, I was adamant about my food choices. “I want steak!”

    Along one of the many many sides of the frighteningly humongous MidValley Mall in the heart of KL, is the San Francisco Steakhouse, which is quite a swanky place done in dark muted tones, with linen tablecloths and a little buzzer at each table, so you can just press a button for “Waiter” or “Bill” without needing to wave wildly amid other diners. Cool idea, although we had to stop little fingers wanting to press a button every few seconds.

    I didn’t spot it till afterwards (‘cos it was hidden by a promotional flyer), but the set menu for around RM$38++ was the best deal, which includes entree, main, dessert and tea/coffee. In the end, I opted for the run-of-the-mill fillet steak (for around RM$38++), cooked blue. It was a measure of the fact that the wait staff are experienced that they didn’t even bat an eyelid at my preference. (I’ve been in restaurants where the staff have actually gathered around to watch me eat my steak, unconvinced that I really enjoy a slab of meat that’s crispy brown on the outside and dripping red in.)

    The service was efficient but cool. Things were done quickly enough, but I always got the impression that these people had better things to do than serve us. Which was a shame, because the kids were on their best behaviour, and I was in the mood to relax. I ordered my steak with garlic sauce.

    The good: When the steaks arrived, they were perfectly cooked. The servings are large. The menu caters for varied tastes. The ambience is very up-market for what turned out to be a reasonably-sized bill (about RM$160 in total) for a slightly-hungry family of four.

    The bad: The fragments of garlic drizzled on my fried tomato accompaniment were burnt. Do you know how bitter garlic gets when it’s burnt? Do you know how long it takes to wheedle little pieces of sticky, burnt garlic from in between molars? Meanwhile, the sauce overpowered the taste of the steak … but there’s a reason for that.

    The ugly: Okay, here’s the sitch. The cheaper steaks at the SF Steakhouse are pre-tenderised. I’m 99% sure of it. How? Because I could mash a piece of steak against the back of my teeth with my tongue and the fibres would dissolve. Real untenderised meat doesn’t do that; doesn’t turn to porridge the moment you exert some kind of pressure on it. And the sauce is overpowering because the steak has no taste. After the “porridge” experiment, I scraped all the sauce off the meat and noticed a telltale streak of sinew cutting through it, a sure sign of topside. And topside doesn’t have that much taste. So, the restaurant “adds” taste through the use of strongly-flavoured sauces, like garlic and peppercorn.

    J complained that I was spoiling an otherwise delightful dinner by being so analytical, but steak is something I take very seriously. I don’t have it very often (maybe only 3-4 times a year), but I love me some hunks of charred and bleeding cow muscle and — because it’s such a treat — I’m very particular about how it’s handled. Maybe the Wagyu steaks (at RM$65++ a pop) were done properly, but be warned if you ever order the more ordinary fillet steaks at the San Francisco Steakhouse. If you’re a true steak afficiando, you could be in trouble.

  • 22 Aug

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    Category

    Fud!*

    0

    The 14th of September is the date of the Mid-Autumn Festival for 2008. What does this mean? Mooncake!! Mooncake mooncake everywhere, so many variations to choose from.

    About.com gives a great description of the Festival. Here’s a brief — ha ha — taste:

    Every year on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, when the moon is at its maximum brightness for the entire year, the Chinese celebrate “zhong qiu jie.” Children are told the story of the moon fairy living in a crystal palace, who comes out to dance on the moon’s shadowed surface. The legend surrounding the “lady living in the moon” dates back to ancient times, to a day when ten suns appeared at once in the sky. The Emperor ordered a famous archer to shoot down the nine extra suns. Once the task was accomplished, Goddess of Western Heaven rewarded the archer with a pill that would make him immortal. However, his wife found the pill, took it, and was banished to the moon as a result. Legend says that her beauty is greatest on the day of the Moon festival.

    As mooncakes only come around once a year, J and I make it a point to try different types and, in our quest for delectable edibles, have stumbled across the excellent range from Yong Sheng. Their Yoghurt Paste Mochi Moon Cake is divine (moon cake filled with cranberry yoghurt paste and a Taiwan-style mochi), as is their Auspicious Moon Cake (yam filling enclosing a mochi with a strawberry fruit gel in the middle). I’m also hankering for their Lemon Green Tea Moon Cake which, as you’ve probably guessed, contains green tea. Their strangest one, though, is the one I wanted to point out:

    It’s called a Nyonya Pudding Curry Moon Cake and, in case the text from the brochure is too indistinct, this is how it’s described:

    The aromatic curry paste in this mooncake is made from curry power [sic], galanga [sic], lemongrass, chilly, lotus seed paste and other 20 over Nyonya style cooking ingredients. The taste is definitely aromatic, spicy with a touch of Peranakan cuisine. The smooth mochi and pudding filling are indeed the ideal blend for superb taste. Surely pleasing your sensitive taste buds.

    Yes, you have just seen the words “curry” and “pudding” together (hopefully, for the first time ever at this blog). And, believe it or not, it actually tastes pretty darn nice. It’s also rather hot, so is not recommended for those who normally avoid fiery food. (Or, er, curry pudding.) Hop along to Yong Sheng and you’ll see some mooncakes that look almost too gorgeous to eat. Almost. Heh heh. Of course they’re all high in calories but, what the heck, the Mid-Autumn Festival only comes around once a year. In fact, there’s a Yong Sheng shop on the way to the bank and I need to duck out to do some banking later this afternoon…

    *: That’s the Gary Larson spelling for “food”, not the acronym for “fear, uncertainty, doubt”.

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