Archive for the 'Food and Drink' Category

I really am. No, don’t laugh, I’m being serious. I’m not being vain or making it up. I really am beautiful.

I have a Dulwich Picture Gallery fridge magnet* proving it. Look, there it is, there’s my name on it: the Chinese ideogram “May” that means Beatiful. It’s more usually written in the Western-style as “Mei” or even “Mai” but my parents spelled it “May” on my birth certificate. They had always thought they’d send me to the UK and they wanted to make it easy for the Brits to spell my name. But all my life in the UK, everyone exoticises my name and refer to me variously as Yang-Mei or Yang-Mai. Sigh.

If you meet a Chinese woman, there is more than half the chance that her name is Something-Mei or Mei-Something. In most Chinese families, there will at least be one daughter with Mei in her name. Why? Because every family would love their daughter to grow up beautiful, of course.

As for the “Yang” bit of my name, it means “reflection”. So putting both parts of my name together, I am technically the reflection of beauty and not beauty itself. To understand why this is so, I need to tell you about my grandmother and her elder brothers and a Chinese belief in the greed of the gods. For the Chinese, the gods are jealous and dangerous. If they see that you have something of value that you treasure, they will take it from you - just because they can. Back in China, when my grandmother was young, she had two elder brothers whom the family loved dearly. Being a Presbyterian minister, her father had turned to the Christian God and left behind old Chinese superstitions. He had named his beloved sons with names that anointed them heavenly and perfect. And for a few years, it seemed that he had been right to forget the old Chinese gods. But these his sons did not live past their twenties, one of them dying slowly and painfully of tuberculosis. The gods coveted the young men’s pure essence and took the boys for themselves.

So for the future generations in the family, to fool the gods, we have never been named for the pure essence and I am just the reflection of beauty - worth nothing to the gods - and not the thing that they might desire, beauty itself.

The fridge magnet is a souvenir from the Lion & Dragon exhibition of photographs from Old China, currently on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

These days I usually buy a coffee on my way into work - and that means most days. It feels very extravagant to spend £1.50 most mornings on a drink I could so easily make myself at home or once I got into the office. But it feels invigorating to walk up to my desk with the steaming ‘tall’ paper cup and the aroma of fresh coffee wafting up to wake me up. It also makes me smile to exchange inconsequential banter with the baristas at the local café who are now familiar with my regular morning stop-off on my way in from the suburbs.

I would never have bought a cup of coffee so easily or so readily in England 10 years ago. Back then, the UK was still a staunchly tea drinking nation and it was a rare thing to be able to get a good cup of coffee anywhere. You would be served instant or some semblance of filter coffee that was stewed too long and sour or so weak that it was tasteless. Either way it was disgusting. One time, I ordered a coffee in Hay-on-Wye, booklovers capital of the UK, in a wannabe trendy café-bookshop which had one of those fancy Italian cappuccino-making machines. The coffee here should be good, I thought.

But here is how they served me: they poured some thick cold coffee ’stock’ which they had boiled down in a coffee filter pot into a cup and added hot water from a kettle. It was the most hideous concoction I had ever tasted. And they were a bit miffed when I demanded my money back.

And then along came the Seattle Coffee Company that made fresh coffee, latte, cappuccino and all the other varieties that we’ve become familiar with. It was bliss, walking into their slick, clean, minimalist outlets and ordering coffee exactly how you want it, with all the associated lingo: skinny, wet, dry… The company was soon taken over by Starbucks, which then proliferated all London and eventually throughout the UK. I hope there’s now one in Hay-on-Wye.

Many people complain that Starbucks, as a global chain, destroys the local economy and makes every high street look the same and have the same shops. For me the significance of Starbucks in the UK is that it has raised the standards of coffee everywhere. For awhile after they arrived, you still could not get a decent coffee in restaurants and cafes - they would stare at you blankly if you asked for an Americano or bring you a weak cafetiere coffee or slop some thick filter into a cup for you. But it wasn’t long before most places realised that they had to keep up with the times and invest in the big Italian coffee machine contraption that hisses and spurts steaming water and milk into freshly ground coffee. Nowadays, you can usually be assured of good coffee wherever you are in the UK - and it’s a delight.

Photo: thanks to Roberat on Flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve just spent a week in Barcelona, partly attending the IABC EuroComm Conference 2008 where I chaired a panel discussion on social media and partly for a holiday. I’ll be blogging about the conference and the issues that came out of the panel discussion separately. But being a foodie, my first post about the trip has to be about the food we had there!

They call it tapas, the tid-bits of food that the Spanish serve in the early evening before the main meal. It’s very civilised compared to the UK where you generally gobble a packet of crisps and some peanuts with your pint at the pub. The Spanish lay out fried potatoes, spicy morsels of chorizo, sliced octopus, fried calamari and cuttlefish, fried aubergines - the list goes on. Over a long drink and great conversation, it’s just the best way to unwind after a hard day’s sightseeing or shopping. But I have to say, it makes me think of dim sum, the Chinese tid-bits that you generally have for Sunday lunch - in Australia, they call it “yum chah”, I think. My contention is that the Spanish got the idea from the Asia-Pacific region via the likes of Marco Polo, Vasco de Gama etc.

And it’s not just tapas. In Barcelona, there’s a speciality dish which is stir-fried seafood vermicelli - which looks and tastes exactly like the Chinese “chow mai fan” that you get in Malaysia. We would eat it with chilli sauce but they serve it with a daub of garlic butter - equally yummy!

We also came across a fried springroll thing but instead of veg and pork, it is stuffed with chorizo and onions.

And we were struck by the word for butter “mantega”, which is the same word for butter used in Malay. Staying with linguistics, the Spanish word “nona” means woman - I wonder if it is related to the Malaysian word “nonya” which refers to a Straits Chinese woman?

I’m pretty sure these are not merely fanciful connections on my part. Malacca and the Straits of Malacca were critical in the spice trade between West and East during the 1400s so I’m sure words, food and ideas travelled with the sailing ships between the Spanish ports and Malaya. In particular, I was struck by the Arabic influence in Spanish due to the many centuries of Moorish occupation and of course, Arabic continues to be a strong influence in Malay language and culture.

What do you think? If you have any other examples of linguistic or culinary connections between East and West, please do share your thoughts!

Photo: thanks to Gbworx from flickr.com (CCL)

One of my favourite radio podcasts is Thinking Allowed on the BBC, hosted by sociologist Laurie Taylor. A recent programme discussed the sociological implications of the British Sandwich - whether cutting it in triangles shows middle class pretensions whereas cutting it into oblongs demonstrates working class earthiness. I had no idea there was so much that could be read into a couple of slices of bread.

I’ve never been keen on sandwiches. I tend to prefer the Asian way of eating - Asian meals do not involve much wheat or gluten or cold food so the sandwich is a strange concoction from that perspective. But in the UK for many years, the sandwich has been the staple of quick lunches so I tolerate it and have had my fair share of lunchtime sarnies. I’m glad to see, though, that more and more Asian style fast food lunching is becoming available - you can buy a nice hot meal with spicy chicken and rice for around £5 and take it away to eat back at the office, just like in Kuala Lumpur (though the price is probably 3 times more than Asian prices!).

The one kind of sandwich that I did love as a kid in Malaysia was a chicken sandwich with lots of butter and white pepper on soft white bread. Chicken sandwiches were a treat that we had when we went “out station” - meant to sustain us on the long drive to my grandparents’ in Taiping, but often devoured within the first hour or so of getting into the car! Their novelty lay in their being, well, Western but they also tasted great because the chicken was prepared with Chinese style ingredients and included the dark meat and the crunchy skin. (In the UK, shop bought chicken sandwiches are made from the bland skinless white meat so can be dry and tasteless, unfortunately.)

For pure evil indulgence, we tried a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich once - said to be Elvis Presley’s favourite. You butter the white bread on the outside and pile the inside high with the squishy ingredients, then deep fry the oozing slab. Yummy and gruesome all at the same time. I’m not sure what the sociological implications of this type of sandwich would be….

Photo: thanks to sheilaz413 from flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve never appreciated roast turkey with all the trimmings. I find it bland and lacking in celebratory festiveness. I am especially not fond of brussel sprouts! So the traditional Christmas meal is a bit of an ordeal for me. Which is not to say I don’t like turkey as such. We often eat turkey steak or turkey escalope or diced turkey throughout the year - but cooked with wine Italian-style or soy sauce or curry Asian-style.

The problem with the traditional roast turkey meal for me is that when I was a child in Malaysia, Christmas food was just so much more - more tasty, more spicy, more varied, more exciting. We would spend Christmas with my grandparents in Taiping and the preparations would start weeks in advance. As a child, I never was aware of all the effort and hard work that Grandma put into it - with the help of all the aunties, great-aunties, cousins and second cousins all over Taiping. But everyone in the large extended family would have got involved in the vast cooking marathon that would have been needed to lay on the feast that fed over a hundred people.

In the heat of the tropics, we would have a full-blown Christian Christmas, complete with tree, Santa and carols.

The kids’ job was to decorate the house. The older second cousins would be in charge - tall, good-looking Paul who seemed so grown up to us and broad-shouldered, grinning Jason. They would be the ones up the ladders stringing the paper chains, placing the balls on the higher reaches of the Christmas tree. We younger kids would drape tinsel on the lower branches of the tree, balance cards on shelves.

On the day of the big party itself, the living room would be cleared and chairs set out for the carol service. There would be a churchful of people in there, singing our hearts out. One of the fat great-uncles would always dress up as Santa in the red suit and jolly mask, arriving at the end of the service when the lights went out. He would have a sack full of presents and ho-ho-ho his way round the room, scaring the babies with the strange staring mask.

But when it came to the food, we celebrated Malaysian-style - with curries and spicy fried dishes, rice and satay: and enough to feed an army. Memories of delicious Asia will always be associated with festivities and celebration for me so a pallid turkey for Christmas, no matter how moist you might claim it is or how Christmas-y just does not do it for me at all.

What are your memories of childhood Christmases? Please add a comment and let me know!

Photo: thanks to Mr_Woo from flickr.com (CCL)

I blogged about comfort food last week. This week, I got to thinking about comfort drinks. You know, those hot, comforting drinks that just make you feel cosy and safe.

Here’s my list of top comfort drinks:

# hot milk with honey - especially when coming home cold and late on a winter’s evening and you need something soothing to wind you down, ready for bed

# creamy hot chocolate - I tend to prefer this earlier in the evening as it’s usually too rich and makes me feel a bit too full to be going to bed right after drinking it

# hot Milo - mmm, this reminds me of my childhood in Malaysia

# hot Ribena - another childhood reminder. We used to have this in Malaysia if we were sick and in bed.

# hot toddy ie hot water, whisky, lemon and honey - great for colds and flu in winter. I enjoyed a big mug of this every evening for a week recently when I was down with flu - until we ran out of the cheap whisky and found a 40 year old Johnnie Walker at the back of the cupboard, which was too good to mix. That was when we turned to neat vintage whisky instead…. which worked pretty well, too!

What’s on your list of top comfort drinks?

Photo: thanks to wingyipstore.co.uk

Now that it’s cold and wet, and the night seems to encroach steadily on the day, my body is yearning for comfort food. It doesn’t help that the central heating at home seems to be on the blink and the air-conditioning at work thinks it’s still summer and I seem to have spent most of the last ten days scrunched up in a physical huddle, feeling cold and miserable. All I want to eat is everything that is stodgy and unhealthy:

# Deep fried fish in thick batter with greasy chips, reeking of salt and vinegar - preferably in newsprint paper held in both cold hands as the grease oozes through the paper. And with that distinct greasy paper smell.

# Hot bangers and mash, in a pool of steaming gravy

# Steamed sponge pudding in a pool of treacle, drenched in hot yellow custard

# Juicy minced beef baked into lasagne, moussaka, cottage pie or shepherd’s pie

# Apple stewed with dates and cinnamon and then baked in the oven with a thick, sugary, crunchy crumble on top and enveloped in double cream or more hot yellow custard

# The ultimate English/ American breakfast and/ or mixed grill - bacon, egg, sausages, chips, toast dripping with butter, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, hash browns, steak, grilled lamb chops, grilled pork chops, all washed down with a strong cup of milky, sweet tea

Funny, isn’t it, how the list is made up of primarily English food? Imagine being faced with any of that in the tropical heat, while you’re drenched in sweat and panting. In contrast, this icy, rainy November weather is perfect - especially if you’ve been out in the cold and wet doing something spiffingly British like going for a brisk walk in the rain up a hill or gardening!

What’s your favourite comfort food? Do you try and justify it first like doing some random exercise in the rain? Or do you just eat it anyway, to hell with guilt?

Photo: thanks to ukmari from flickr.com (CCL)

Say Lee added a comment to my post about his blog last week, mentioning old fashioned games that he used to play as a child like spinning tops and collecting bottle caps. It started me thinking back to all the home-made games we used to play as kids in Malaysia. We had our share of Action Man and Barbie doll toys, Lego and toy cars etc so we were fortunate kids in that respect. However, we also had fun playing with home-made gadgets and toys, especially with other kids at school or cousins we visited in my mother’s hometown in Taiping.

Recently, my mum was clearing out our cupboards at home in KL and found a packet of “five stones” right at the back. “Five stones” is a picking up game rather like jacks but instead of a bouncy ball and plastic bits to pick up, you play with cloth-sewn packets of dried rice the size of marbles. You scatter them on the floor, pick one up and throw that into the air - while it’s in the air, you pick up each of the remaining four packets in different sequences, catching the flying one at the end of each move. These ones that my mum found were made out of cloth from old pyjamas and must be over 30 years old! They are rather manky and I’m a bit nervous about picking them up in case they crumble to dust in my hands. She had brought them over instead of chucking them straight in the bin because it was amazing that they had survived all these years and it was fun for us all to look back at those days together.

I would play “five stones” with my friends in break time at school in KL, sitting in a circle on the cement floor. We also used to play a skipping game with a “rope” made out of rubber bands woven together - I was never very good at that, not being terribly well co-ordinated, but I remember enjoying stringing the rubber bands together and marvelling at how a cluster of these little things could become a long rope.

When we were a bit older, there was that paper game where you folded a piece of paper into an opening and closing flower and wrote a “prediction” in different quadrants. Holding it in your two hands, you’d ask someone to pick one of the four colours you had coloured in on the top and then spell the colour out as you opened and closed the “flower”. They would then un-leaf a petal where the last word landed and find their future “predicted” underneath. I have no idea what the paper thingy game is called but I loved creating different flowers with different predictions and colours.

I guess these are all girly games. I wonder if they are still played in my old school back in KL (Bukit Bintang Girls Shool 2). Or perhaps other home-made games have been invented since then. Can anyone tell me?

UPDATE: Oh wow, I was just searching the internet to find a picture of “five stones” and the Singapore Museum shop is selling a set (with pouch) as “traditional toys” for S$8.00! The online store description says: “Five stones (or four, if you prefer) would be played by a group of children sitting in a circle in the hot afternoons and taking turns to throw the stones in the air, catching them with one hand, in a variety of patterns.”

I wonder if they’d like to receive my historic, genuine antique “five stones” to display in the museum?

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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