Archive for the 'Food and Drink' Category

I never liked Continental breakfasts. To me, a Continental breakfast is a dry bread roll, a dollop of butter and some tasteless jam. Given the choice in most hotels between an English breakfast and a Continental one, I’d go for the bacon, sausage, fried egg, mushrooms, fried bread, grilled tomato and baked beans every time. It’s a no-brainer.

But then, when we were on holiday in Delft a couple of weeks ago, we stayed at the Hotel Emauspoort and they served a Continental breakfast that has changed my life. Well, my eating habits anyway.

Buffet-style, they laid out home-made warm and fluffy croissants and an array of rye bread, fruit bread and other baked goodies. We could help ourselves to cheese, ham, salami, gherkin and boiled eggs. There was a bottomless bowl of fresh fruit salad with strawberries and jugs of fresh orange juice. There was yoghurt and milk and cereal, too.

After the first morning, I found myself day-dreaming about the next day’s breakfast, already feeling the croissant break crisply and yet softly in my hands, tasting it’s fresh, yeasty, buttery flavour in my mouth. I just loved that European mix of cheese and cold meats and gherkin in the morning - excellent for protein and yet light and refreshing. And afterwards, a bowl of fresh fruit salad to cleanse the palate.

The next weekend, I was back in London and we went out for breakfast with a friend. I had an English breakfast and found myself not really enjoying the over-salty, chewy bacon and the over-salty sausage and that oily full feeling you get with fried foods. I longed for the fresh tastes of Delft.

I’d always enjoyed the British morning fry-up - it’s what this country specialises in. Now, it looked like its place in my Breakfast Hall of Fame was about to be eclipsed by the rising star of a Dutch breakfast. Was the breakfast at the Hotel Emauspoort really the best breakfast I’d had to date? It got me thinking about the other great breakfasts I’d ever had.

Alongside the English breakfast, I’ve also loved the so-called American or cowboy breakfast - steak, egg and hash browns. When I was on a road trip across California and Arizona years ago, we’d often walk over to a diner like Denny’s from our motel room and I’d indulge in a fortifying steak and black coffee before setting off in the car.

In Malaysia, breakfast could be anything from deep fried or steamed dumplings to prawn noodle soup, nasi lemak, laksa, curry and fried noodles. The Chinese Dim Sum is a selection of tidbits that in some places is eaten as breakfast. There’s something special about sitting at a table in a Malaysian market next to a steaming vat of curry parked on a three-wheeled motorbike, with the chaos and noise of the stalls and traders around you, eating laksa in the early morning.

If I had to choose my favourite breakfast in the world, which would it be?

Oh dear, I can’t make a choice. I love them all.

English fry-up? Laksa? Steak?

If you forced me to choose, I’ll have to go for the steak, egg and fries - the American breakfast. Perhaps it’s because it reminds me of the open vistas of Arizona. Perhaps its that satisfying feeling of being set for the day, packed with protein and good coffee - and without being as oily or salty as an English breakfast.

At any rate, it looks like the delicate taste of fluffy croissants in a charming European setting is great but just not great enough to be my No. 1 Favourite Breakfast of All Time!

What’s your Favourite Breakfast?

I’m going to tag some bloggers to see what their Favourite Breakfasts are:

1. My cousin Pey Colborne, who is a poet and also a foodie. Her blog has photos of meals she’s about to have and that her husband (what a star!) has made for her. She’s bound to have something (poetic?) to say about great breakfasts.

2. Massage therapist and friend Melanie Crowe, who is South African but based in the UK. She blogs about massage, de-stressing and health. I’m curious to know if she’s fond of fry-up breakfasts or if she eats tasty yet healthy breakfasts.

3. Silvia Cambie, who is my associate and co-author of New Trends in International Public Relations, is Italian and now also lives in the UK. She has lived all over Europe so I’m hoping she can share some breakfast delights from the Continent.

When you’ve been tagged, the rules of this tagging game are:

A. Blog on the theme of My Favourite Breakfast on your blog.

B. Link back to (i) the person who tagged you AND (ii) to this originating post My Favourite Breakfast on Fusion View.

C. Tag three more bloggers to share the fun.

D. Refer back to these rules on your blog.

Even if you haven’t been tagged, you can still share your thoughts (or tastes!) - add a comment or email me. Or write about it on your blog, link back to this post and follow the rules A-D.

Photo: thanks to fremontdock.com

This is the last in my series on the influence of food in my life. Having cried over English school food and introduced my Uni friends to nasi lemak and laksa, it’s time to bring the English over to tropical Malaysia for some real treats…

When I’ve brought my English friends back to Malaysia for a holiday, they are always taken by the hospitality and friendliness of my extended family and my Malaysian friends. Uncles and aunts and cousins always make a point of inviting us all out for a huge slap-up meal, making sure that the UK visitors try the tastiest and most exotic dishes. My local friends take us out to the pasar malam for hawker food that my guests have never experienced before. The challenge seems to be to offer the wildest and most unusual foods to the mat salleh. My great-aunt had the dubious honour of being the Malaysian that gave my first boyfriend fried pig’s fallopian tubes. Some cousins brought a huge pile of the stinkiest durians for a group of my friends from law college. Other family members came up with a plate of chicken’s feet fried in soy sauce. My UK friends have all gamely tried everything, winning the hearts of the Malaysians - and their respect. One French girl I brought to KL was sniffy and picky about what she ate and point blank refused to even taste some dishes. No-one liked her. And eventually, I found, neither did I and she was dropped from my address book.

The food highlight experience for my visiting Western friends used to be a trip to the wet market in Pudu. My mum used to do all her grocery shopping there until traffic and parking made it impossible. When she first got married to my father, my father’s mother took her to the market and introduced her to all the stallholders there, saying, “This is my daughter-in-law, treat her well. If you cheat her, you have me to answer to.” Once every few weeks, my mum would put on her oldest clothes, take off all her jewellry and put on her marketing shoes and head to Pudu market early in the morning. So we would wake our visitors before dawn and all pile in to the back of her car, groggy and half asleep still. At the market, we would follow her to the chicken man and watch as she chose the chickens for him to garotte and throw into a drum of boiling water to loosen the feathers. My friends began to pale. Next, we passed the cute puppy dogs in cages - and no, they are not pets, I would say to our visitors - making our way to the beef butcher, careful not to slip on the blood from the decapitated cow on the slab. Now, my friends were turning green. My mother would then buy vegetables and fruit and spices and head back to pick up the chickens and some chunky roasted pigs trotters for breakfast, the smell of spices and fruit and raw meat mingling in aircon. An hour later, back at home, we would be showered and sitting down to a breakfast of pigs trotter congee while my English friends looked ill, asking weakly for some dry toast. “If you eat meat, you should know where it comes from,” my mother would say. “At the market, you know it’s fresh and just killed for you.” And even as they nodded, I would see my friends pining for the shrink-wrapped sanctuary of a Tescos.

Of course, Malaysia is more than its food and Malaysians abroad and at home have achieved impressive and astonishing things in the 50 years since independence. But for me, food and meals have brought people together for millenia. To sit together around a spread of food, whether at a table or on the floor or on a mat on the bare ground, people and cultures have met each other at the deepest level since civilisation began. At a meal, in past centuries, they left their weapons and differences outside. These days, we don’t carry weapons but most of us try to leave our differences outside at meals with friends and family. We share and eat each other’s foods and also our personal stories and cultures. Even a lunch of baked beans on toast told me in more than words about the UK I had come to back in 1975 in the same way that an abundance of durians told my UK friends something about Malaysians and their sense of humour and pride. In the simple, natural act of sharing our food with others in the countries we travel to, I feel that Malaysians abroad have shared - and continue to share - what is truly valuable about who we are: warmth, generosity of spirit, joy in the good life, graciousness and common humanity.

Photos: scenes from Pudu Market - my photo album c. 1995

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Continuing a three part series on my experiences of food in England. In Part 1, my horror and tears at English school food. This week, curry and spice and everything nice at Uni…

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison. I lived in a shared house down Cowley Road in Oxford during my second and third years, thriving in the joy of being free from the institutionalised halls of residence. My housemates and I threw parties and gave dinners, dressing up to fit the themes we devised. It was the early 80s and we were playing at being the cool, sleek grown-ups of the ’40s and ’50s - Bogie and Bacall were our models, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “High Society”. At candle-lit dinners in our shared living room, our men wore black tie and cummerbunds and we girls shimmered in cocktail dresses and high heels. We ate parma ham with melon, smoked salmon mousse, roast duck in blackcurrant sauce, drank champagne. With coffee, we puffed on cigarillos and nibbled at blue-streaked gorgonzolla, sipping port.

But nothing compared with my Malaysian dinner parties. I had brought a wok back in my suitcase after one holiday back home. In the cupboards were an endless stock of sambal belacan, stinky dried fish, dry-fried shrimp, thick gooey soy sauce, crispy ikan bilis, fragrant pandan leaves, curry powder, chilli powder, turmeric, five spice cloves, blocks of coconut concentrate - you name it, I had it. They came with me back to Oxford either stowed away in my suitcase triple-wrapped in plastic bags and towels or hunted down from London’s Chinatown. Back then, before mass cheap travel and globalisation, my English friends had never seen - or smelt - anything like it. Most of them had never travelled beyond the boundaries of Europe and some had never left their little island at all. I fried up prawn chilli and flavoured rice with coconut and pandan for nasi lemak; sizzled up bright yellow turmeric pork with caramelised onions; cooked sesame chicken with nasi goreng. My friends watched me as if hypnotised, amazed that I did everything in the wok - even bacon and eggs on some Sunday mornings. “Why not?” I would say, “It’s just a cooking implement.”

To come to my Malaysian dinner parties, my friends had to dress up. In the winter, I would turn up the heating in the living room, pull back the dining table and chairs against the wall and lay out a large woven mat I had brought back from KL. Sometimes, I even managed crepe paper palm trees sellotaped to the walls with green fronds hanging from the ceiling. In the summer we would sit out in the overgrown garden, the tall weeds and unkempt grass adding to the fiction of the tropics in suburbia. The theme was tropical Malaysia so everyone had to come in tropical clothing - Hawaiian shirts and shorts, flip-flops, sarongs. We would all sit cross-legged on the mat and eat nasi lemak or curry with our hands. Once, Siva, a Malaysian PhD student brought a coconut and a parang and chopped it open Malaysian style, spinning the fruit in one had as the other expertly hacked the husk away while my English friends watched in awe.

It was in the summer vacations of those years at university that my English friends would take long trips to India and South East Asia. They would be the generation that would seek out exotic restaurants with tasty, spicy food once they were back in the UK and settled down to their jobs. They would be the ones finding new and cheaper ways to travel around the globe and to look outside of their home island for work and business opportunities. It seems to me that from the ’80s onwards, the British began to evolve from seeing the world as an empire they owned and imposed their will on to a place of interest and wonder to explore and exchange with. Looking back, I wonder how many other Malaysian students in the last few decades played their part in introducing their British friends to the wonders of another culture, through our delicious, unique food and our warmth and hospitality.

Whenever my British friends come across another Malaysian, they would always tell me. And I would always hear how friendly and generous this Malaysian is, how interesting and funny and talented. And how this Malaysian is really into their food. How they cooked for my friend and what an amazingly tasty meal they had together. And how much there was to eat. “Yup, that’s definitely a Malaysian,” I would laugh. Even if their passport might say some other nationality because they have migrated for career reasons, a Malaysian’s heart - and stomach - will always be Malaysian.

In two weeks time (Friday 20 July 2007): what happens when my English friends visit my family in Malaysia

Photos: from my photo album c. 1983/ 1984

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The following series of three posts is taken from an essay I wrote for a collection of essays by various Malaysian-connected writers coming out in Malaysia sometime soon to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Malaysian Independence from British rule.

Part 1 - The meal that made me cry

I stared down at my plate. There was one soggy piece of toast on it, drowned in a pool of orangey-brown baked beans. I looked around me at the crowded dining hall. The girls were all taller and bigger and heavier and stronger than me, all tucking in to their lunch of baked beans on toast, all laughing and chatting. There were a few black faces but otherwise, they were all Caucasian, pale skinned and robust. I was the only South East Asian, skinny and small and caramel-toned. It was my first day at boarding school in the UK. It was 1975 and I was twelve.

The morning had been a tumble of classes and new friends as I trailed behind my new classmates to change rooms for each new lesson. In Malaysia, we had the same teacher for most subjects and any specialist teacher who taught us came to our classroom while we stayed put. This new pattern of packing up my pencils and books after each class and fighting my way through the chaotic corridors to find the next lesson confused me. Several times, I got lost, like a new recruit left behind by her platoon, and stood bewildered as girls hurried past me.

By lunchtime, I was exhausted and disorientated. My legs felt cold in the navy school kilt and my arms felt tightly constrained in a long-sleeved sweater. My knee-high socks prickled my shins. Lunch would help me feel better, I thought. I always liked break-time at school in Kuala Lumpur. My friends and I bought curry laksa at the canteen, the spicy soup ladled out of huge steaming vats into a bowl of noodles, beansprouts, soya and chicken. Sometimes, I brought in fried rice and would eat it lukewarm from the tupperware. Friends would bring in soy sauce noodles and vegetables. But here in this rowdy English place, lunch had not turned out how I had expected. I stared down at the baked beans and toast on my plate.

I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was just after 1pm. I looked at the strange, noisy, pale girls around me. It struck me that I had five years here. Five long years of baked beans on toast. Five years without curry laksa. Or stir-fried vegetables. Or soy sauce chicken or grilled satay or beef rendang or nasi lemak. Or anything that I knew as food. Real food. I burst into tears. The girls sitting at my table fell silent, staring at me uncomfortably. A sixth-former said, “She’s just homesick. She’ll be all right.” And they left me alone to sob despairingly over my baked beans.

Later, when I was older, I realised that this was probably not an uncommon experience for Malaysians going to study abroad - especially back in the ’70s and ’80s. These days, in the 21st century, even the remotest part of the UK will probably have a Malaysian restaurant or at least an eatery that can do a decent curry. Back then, England was still emerging uncomfortably from its post-war troubles and coming to grips with the loss of its empire. It had been used to exporting its culture and habits and food across the world and it would be some decades yet before a new generation would return from the hippy trail with bottles of fish sauce and chilli belacan and recipes for Thai green curry and satay. Back then, curry was a strange concoction involving a plain curry sauce, pineapple and raisins. To my horror, they also mixed curry powder with sweet salad cream to make a weird cold dish called Coronation Chicken.

For five years, I learnt to eat potatoes with everything. Roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, buttered potatoes, jacket potatoes, sauteed potatoes, chips, mash, potato salad. The were lots of interesting things you could do with potatoes. But none of them turned the spud into rice. Every now and then, though, we would have rice. Aaah, rice. Those were my favourite meals. Except that the rice would come with that pineapply-raisiny curry and I’d have to spend ages picking out the bits of fruit. Or with chicken fricassee, a mix of shredded chicken in what tasted like Campbell’s cream of chicken condensed soup - which was marginally better than pineapply curry in that I could pretend it was chicken a la king.

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison….

To be continued next Friday (06 July 2007)…

Photo: thanks to Johnnie Shannon on flickr.com

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While we were on holiday in Crete recently, we spent many long, lazy dinners at the tavernas in our little mountain village. The tavernas spread their tables out in the open air under a light bamboo canopy or a shelter naturally woven from grape vines. Looking up at the stars beyond, we could see the nascent grapes begin to bulge on their tiny stems.

After the meal, we would sit back, stuffed on barbeque lamb or pork chops and baclava. They would then bring us a complimentary fruit basket and a small carafe of Raki on the house.

Raki is a clear colourless spirit, like vodka and seems to be a local speciality which the taverna proudly served us with a flourish. You pour it from the chilled carafe into small thimble shot glasses and knock it back. And feel the burn.

It made me think of arak, a clear colourless spirit, like vodka, that is drunk in Malaysia. I wonder whether how Raki found its way to Malaya (as it would have been back then in the past) from Crete to evolve into arak. Or perhaps it travelled from Malaya to Crete? Most likely, it would have been through the traders from the Middle East, just a short hop East from Crete and regular visitors to Malaya and Indonesia many centuries ago - and who still have a strong connection with modern Malaysia. And both Crete and Malaya in that distant time were hubs in major trading routes from East to West.

I savoured the strong aromatic alcohol burning my palate as I enjoyed this unexpected global connection. It was not my favourite taste - rather like medicine, or even methlyated spirits. Still, I toasted the ancient international adventurers and took another acrid sip.

Photo: thanks to AcornMan at virtualtourist.com

Here is a fabulous site to get you set for the weekend. It’s a site completely dedicated to cakes from around the world, called Cake Tourism. The bloggers there have this to say: “We are intrepid cake tourists, travelling the globe in search of amazing cake. Aghast at the lack of cake information in tour guides we will tell you the reader where to go for the best cake, wherever you are in the world. Obviously this may take some time but we’re willing to do what it takes: eating lots of cake.”

Every post is a review of a cake eaten somewhere in some part of the world and illustrated with the most mouth-watering photos you’ve ever seen of cakes, glorious cakes.

The site is also on the look out for Cake Submissions: “Got a cake tip? Send us a photo and a few words about the cake and where you ate it and we might feature it.”.

The best cakes I’ve had were in Austria. There’s something about the land of mountains and goatherds and music that also gives them the creativity and ingredients to create the fluffiest, creamiest, tastiest cakes in the world. They are like those classic images of ladies in white floating about the ballroom floor to the lilt of a Viennese waltz. In contrast, their savoury dishes don’t quite have the same pizzazz, in my view, being somewhat bland and heavy.

In contrast, the cakes in the UK tend to be quite stodgy and heavy - think fruit cakes and Victoria sponges. They are the sort of things to give you energy after a cold, bracing walk across the moors and eaten to the sound of Morris dancing, perhaps.

Asia doesn’t really do sweet cakes very well. The strength of Asian cuisine for me is in the savoury dishes that are tangy and aromatic and light. Without easy and cheap access to wheat flour, traditionally, sweet things are made from rice flour and the texture can take some getting used to for the Western palette.

What do you think? Am I being unfair to Asian cakes? Am I wrong about UK cakes? Or perhaps you have a view on Austrian dishes? Add a comment and share your views.

The durian is a South East Asian fruit that is so stinky it is banned from airplanes and smart hotels. The smell lingers like a bad fart combined with the ripest blue chees and crusty hard fetid socks that have been worn for weeks in hot humid weather without a change. Mmmmmm! I bet that’s made your mouth water.

But that’s what Asians - and in particular, Malaysians - love about the fruit. The smell is hideous. But as you eat the sticky, custardy, soft flesh, the taste is aromatic and sweet and creamy. And then you have to live with the most dreadful halitosis rotting sewer breath for hours on end.

So some smart guy has come up with a variety of durian that doesn’t smell. Thai scientist Songpol Somsri apparently spent 30 years of his life researching this project, according to the Seattle Times. The article goes on to say that in Malaysia, durian is prized as an aphrodisiac and a farmer is quoted as saying, “If the durian doesn’t have a strong smell the customer only pays one-third the price.”

I picked up this story from Seth Godin, the marketing guru, who uses it to make a great analogy for marketers who try to fix what they perceive as a problem - by focusing on the people who are not buying the product. So marketers aim to fix the problems in order to get the non-buyers to become buyers - in the meantime, destroying the key qualities that the enthusiastic existing buyers rave about and thereby turning away their core customers.

Personally I’m not a great fan and whenever my family have a great durian feast, I have to keep my distance from them all when we’re chatting afterwards! Still, it seems unnatural and sacriligeous to be tampering with the distinctive quality that makes a durian a durian. I’m not sure I’d eat more durian if I was offered the non-stinky variety - the taste and texture of the eating experience just doesn’t do it for me. I’m much more of a mango fan and I’d choose mango over any other fruit any day. So I guess I’m inclined to agree with Seth. What’s the point of a non-stinky durian if the core customers don’t want it - and neither do the ones who never wanted it in the first place?

Photo: thanks to the Seattle Times

I was talking to a friend last week about the etiquette of an English dinner party. In the old days there used to be fairly rigid rules about how to behave but in the 21st century, where we’re all much less formal, you’d think that when someone invited you to dinner, it was just dinner and you would turn up and eat and that was all there was to it. But the more we explored it, the more there still seemed to be unwritten rules and rituals around the English dinner party. Here’s a list of things my friend and I came up with as essential etiquette when you’re invited to or giving a modern English dinner party:

1. These days you’re usually invited by email or telephone. Gone are the days of hand-written letters by fountain pen for your run-of-the-mill dinner parties. And with that, much of the over-formal formalities.

2. Most people ask what they should bring and are usually told: nothing, just yourselves or red or white wine. A Chinese young man newly arrived in England brought a bottle of sherry to a dinner we were both invited to although I specifically warned him ahead to bring wine (”Oh, I like sherry,” he said) and then spent the whole evening beating himself up that he’d brought the wrong thing when he handed over the bottle and the host had looked bewildered.

Even if you are told to bring nothing, you should always bring something - the best bet being a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates. At the more casual end among good friends, you might be asked to bring dessert - we reckon that anything gooey and indulgent from Marks & Spencers should do the trick.

3. At dinner, the host usually has an idea in their mind of a seating arrangement even if there are no name cards for the table. The idea is to get a good mix round the table of people who don’t know each other but who might get on well, splitting up couples so they don’t end up next to each other or opposite each other while being not too far away from each other (diagonal seems to work best, we decided). In the old days, the host would also have to worry about seating boy-girl-boy alternately but in these modern times of girl-girl and boy-boy couples, that rule is by necessity much less rigid.

4. The old adage “no sex, religion or politics” still applies. The most painful dinner parties I’ve been to have usually been the result of someone unaccustomed to dinner parties ranting on about one or other of those topics. Everyone ends up feeling bruised and exhausted.

5. The idea is to be amusing, witty and entertaining, keeping business talk to a minimum. The objective is to end the evening with a warm glow from the food, wine and company. The rest of the world can be out there battling it out over sex, religion and politics and you’ve got the grind of making a living and whatever difficulties may be challenging you at that point. But for a few hours one evening, the world is that convivial dinner table and you can laugh with some friends and delight in a good meal and feel that life is good.

Pic: thanks to allposters.com

When I met Lydia Teh for lunch in Kuala Lumpur, we went to Delifrance in one of the many malls - a chain of cafes selling French-style pastries and coffee. In the UK, the equivalent is Delice de France and it sells croissants and chocalate or almond croissants with savoury flavours such as Chicken Feuillette or Ham and Cheese Croissant.

In the KL Delifrance, I was tickled and delighted to find Green Curry Feuillette and Beef Rendang Feuillette, the ultimate in fusion food. I had the Green Curry Feuillette and it was spicy and yummy, the combination of curry and flaky pastry reminding me of curry puffs.

If you know of any other fusion foods like this, do email me or add a comment!

It was only one week. I was in KL for only one week. And yet, I seem to have got very round and chubby from all the eating I did.

My parents and I spent much of the time trying to work out which restaurants I absolutely had to go and eat at. I only had a limited number of mealtimes in my week - lunch and dinner times 7 days equal 14 meals only! I needed to maximise them efficiently - rather like the best 5 Malaysian books to bring back with me in my suitcase, I had to identify the best 14 meals to have.

Let me say that of those 14 meals, the ones below ranked in the top 3:

Pic 1: Roast Suckling Piggy at Green View Restaurant, Petaling Jaya. Crispy, crunchy pork crackling to die for!

Pic 2: Giant prawns in chilli and garlic sauce, also at Green View. The pic is a bit blurry as I was too excited by the site of them! Each one was larger than my hand and full of succulent, tasty flesh.

Pic 3: The best “char siu” (barbecued pork) in the world, with roast duck, curry chicken, sour spicy vegetable and “archar” (curry pickle) at Siew Ngap Fei, Pudu. In London, the char siu is usually dyed red to con you into thinking it’s barbecued but here, it is truly barbecued with a caramelly, crunchy juicy crust. I used up two lunches eating here!

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