malaysia: i’m a nasi boy

Nasi means rice in Malay. Like the noodles, it can come in a variety of styles.

Nasi goreng is simple fried rice. On the island, this seemed much more puffier than fried rice back in Taiwan, with nice, crispy vegetables that weren’t overcooked. I don’t know if everyone does this, but it certainly was nice at the place we had it.

Nasi pataya was rice fried with soy sauce (and possibly other things), covered with a fried egg with the yolk broken.

Nasi kampung is different from mee kampung – the rice was not cooked in a soy-based sauce, but it was spicy and had little sardines in it, creating a salty, spicy, fishy taste. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t know if I’d order it again. I had bigger favourites on the menu. This is the one pictured to the left.

I don’t have many pictures of rice, as we didn’t order it too much. I guess that makes the title a lie. Frankly, we both preferred the way the Malaysians cooked their noodles. ‘Salright, though – fried rice is fried rice, right?

malaysia: breads

There are two main breads consumed here in Malaysia, both coming from India, I think. The first, roti, is actually the word for bread as well, but when you go into a restaurant, it usually means unleavened dough cooked on a big skillet. There are many kinds to choose from: butter, cheese, egg, sardine are just a few of the most common ones. The most basic order is roti canai (RAW-ti CHA-nai), which is basic roti accompanied by small dishes of curry and daal. This can be ordered at any time of the day at any self-respecting Malay restaurant (with a big skillet). We had it for breakfast a couple of times, it’s nice and filling. I couldn’t get enough of this either, as a matter of fact. It resembles the green onion pancakes I love so much in Taiwan – that probably doesn’t hurt my opinion of it.

The other major bread is, of course, na’an, which is also unleavened. While roti is cooked on a greased skillet, na’an is cooked inside a tandoori oven, so it’s dry, yet still pliable. I love na’an with a deep, consuming desire and I ate a lot of it here. You can get this in a variety of flavours – egg, plain, garlic, even caramel (I didn’t get to try this one, unfortunately). It always comes with daal for dipping – it seems to be impossible to consume na’an without it being coated in something. I’m not going to argue with tradition on this one.

I think chappattis can be found in Malaysia as well, but we didn’t see them.

One last sort-of bread is murtabak. One could say it’s like stuffed roti, but I’m not sure if that’s right. Supposedly, it’s a mix of egg, onions, and meat (I had chicken), covered with or stuffed in roti dough and fried up. I couldn’t find any chicken when I ordered this; it tasted like an omelet wrapped in roti. It wasn’t something I’d recommend or try again – I’d rather eat a couple of roti by themselves. Too bad murtabak!

malaysia: samosas

Remember empanadas? Mmmm, I sure do. Imagine my surprise when we stepped out of our hostel to find wee little delicious fried pastries that suspiciously resembled empanadas on a nearby cart! I immediately picked up a couple and bit into one, discovering curried potatoes and vegetables inside. It only later struck us – duh! – that these were samosas. I guess we were accustomed to the more North American-presented triagle shape. These were fantastic, though. You can find them at almost any market or bus station, and they fill the hunger gap quite easily between meals.

The things in the background are other fried things at this stand.

malaysia: mee mee mee!

Mee in Malay means ‘noodle’, and like Taiwan, there are a large number of ways of ordering your noodles here in Malaysia. We’ve been trying out different kinds, as the guide book and dictionary we borrowed don’t have a lot of food words. (This is something we’re always surprised there aren’t more of and that really should be a gold mine – food dictionaries. And who wouldn’t want to research that?) The ones we’ve tried so far are mee goreng, mee bandung, and mee ayam.

Mee goreng simply means fried noodles, though it’s always found in a soy-sauce based sauce. Usually it’s more pasty and sticks to the noodles, not leaving much after the meal is done, but sometimes it’s a more liquid sauce. It’s an old standby – I don’t think we’ve ever had a bad dish of mee goreng, though there have been some middling ones.

Mee bandung is a little bit more exotic. I’m not sure what it translates to, but when I ordered it, I got a bowl full of a spicy curry-like soup, with nice round noodles and lots of good stuff – veggies, squid, prawns, even a bit of chicken, I think. It had a lot of kick to it – I couldn’t finish the broth by itself and had to blow my nose a couple of times during the meal – but I enjoyed it.

Mee ayam is another basic dish – ayam means chicken, so this is just chicken noodles. Thinking that that’s all it is, though, doesn’t do it justice. On top of noodles in broth are some green vegetables, pieces of rather good chicken, green onions, spicy sauce, and a topping of fried garlic. A great basic meal to be found in a lot of market stalls everywhere you go.

Mee kampung is something I tried on Tioman, I’m not sure if it’s available elsewhere, but it was a spicy, soy-sauce based sauce, similar to mee goreng. I kind of wonder if it’s just spicier mee goreng.

Mee pataya is similar to mee goreng again, but with a fried egg with the yolk broken over top of the noodles.

There is another kind of noodle that you can usually find in the same places. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be a 100% consistent spelling of it – I’ve mostly seen it written as bee hoon, but I’ve also seen it written bee horn and mee hoon. The different is the thickness of the noodle – the bee hoon noodle is like vermicelli or angel hair, while the mee noodle is thicker, like a linguine kind of noodle. I like them both. The picture here, if I remember correctly, is simply fried bee hoon.

malaysia: sate ayam

One cannot be in this area of the world and miss out on some sate. Grilled up nicely with spices and served with a small bowl of amazing peanut sauce, this is one of my favourite dishes ever – I ate some every night I was in Kuala Lumpur, even when I was stuffed from dinner. I’ve had some less-than-perfect meat before, but I don’t think I’ve ever walked away from a sate place unhappy. How could you? All the best parts of what I like are here – meat, peanuts, cooking over a fire, easy to eat, portable. I want some right now. Most places in Malaysia and Indonesia have a little coal grill that they can take already-skewered pieces of meat and cook them up nice and fast. You can get your sate served on a plate, as we had in this picture, or on a banana leaf with these little squares that I think are made of rice. Somehow. Not too sure about that, but it’s tasty, whatever it is. The best part about it is how cheap it is – here in KL we paid about 20 cents US a stick, and I think it was even cheaper when we were in Indonesia. I’m going to eat as much as I can before we leave – I always miss this when I leave the -sia countries.

malaysia: ayam masala with na’an bread

This was the meal we came back for. We searched for the restaurant we visited almost daily on our last stay in KL until we found it, then we sat down and ate. Chicken masala and a huge piece of na’an bread with daal each. The chicken was still on the bone and the spices and oil made it turn our cheeks and fingers bright orange, but we didn’t care. The masala was wonderfully spiced (we had some at a different restaurant as well, and though it came in bite-sized pieces, it wasn’t as good) and spicy, and the na’an hot and pliable and delicious. We came back again later for the same dish – it’s that good. I’ve heard friends complain that the Indian food in India wasn’t what they had hoped for most of the time – they should come to Malaysia!

macau: pork chop sandwich

The last thing I ate in Macau (Christine was too full from dim sum to have one) was a pork chop sandwich. This is Macau’s contribution to the cheap, easy, ubiquitous lunch – a pork chop, lightly spicy, tossed into a crumbly roll. It’s not exactly a gourmet accomplishment, but it’s really quite satisfying. Good, fresh bread and tasty, hot meat – I can definitely see how this would make a satisfying quick lunch, especially if you followed it with a ginger milk (as I did). This would be dangerous for me, I think, if I lived here.

macau: dim sum lights up our day

One food tradition that we were bound and determined to take in here in southern China was dim sum. It was our last full meal and we had to do a LOT of walking to find a restaurant that was reasonably priced, but once we located it, we knew we were in for a treat. Even at one in the afternoon the enormous dining room was full – I think it sat no fewer than 200 people. We had to wait for a while until a table became available – I felt bad taking up a table for eight for just the two of us, but those were the only kind of tables they had. As soon as we walked it, I commented that it smelled like a Chinese restaurant back home – that smell of egg rolls and sweet and sour sauce and deep-fried goodies and fried veggies that every Chinese buffet gives off. It made sense, as most Chinese restaurant fare in North America has a Cantonese base, and that’s what we were about to sample. We sat down and puzzled our way through the menu with some help from the friendly staff. It was almost like a buffet – you could order whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted – we ended up ordering a few dishes, not sure of their size, then ordering a few more after finding out we were still hungry after the first few.

We started with the ’some of this and some of that approach’ – deep fried spring rolls (back left), steamed minced beef with bean curd (meatball-like things with ginger on top in front), and spare ribs with black bean sauce (in the back). They all came with their own attendant sauces. The deep fried spring rolls were exactly what we had expected, with a little bit of a vinegary sauce for dipping. Very well made and very tasty. The steamed minced beef turned out to look like meat balls, though it was definitely steamed – the texture attested to that. It was like someone had steamed hamburger meat, then carefully mashed it together. The bean curd was simply a form of tofu that tasted like the meat’s juices. I wish that people back home could accept that tofu goes with meat quite nicely – there is no requirement for it to be an alternative to meat. The spare ribs were also quite nice, with the black bean sauce making them absolutely succulent (we’re both fans of black bean usage here in Asia).

After discovering that we could stand to sample a couple of other dishes, we ordered deep fried cuttlefish, shredded chicken burgers (just to see what they were), and deep fried cream ball. The deep fried cuttlefish was quite good, the cuttlefish being quite fresh and well prepared. It disappeared rather quickly, assisted by its accompanying sauce.

The shredded chicken burgers turned out to be a kind of dumpling – made with rice flour, they were long and thin. I’m not really sure why they were translated as burgers instead of dumplings or something else, but they were OK. Nothing too special, I think next time we’ll just order another round of spring rolls instead. My personal favourite was the cream balls – really, deep fried cream/dough (?) that becomes all gooey when cooked. The whole ball is covered in sesame seeds. These were our dessert and they were a stupendous way to end the meal. Sweet, chewy, fully of delicious creamy flavour, I loved each bite and cried a little when they were done. A thoroughly-enjoyed meal and a great way to finish our time in Macau.

macau: second night, macanese

On our second (and final) night, we had a goal: african chicken. This classic is pure Macanese, and the descriptions of baked chicken with a long list of spices in the sauce made our mouths water; we had to have it. Our first attempt, at one of the best places to try this dis, was shot down – a reservation was needed to get in, even though the restaurant had just opened and it was empty. They could offer us a table outside, but there was a minimum spending limit. Due to the closeness to the harbour and the desirability of the spot, this limit was at the very top of our budget – outside of it, really, since we still had other things we wanted to experience the next day. And so we found ourselves taking a long walk around the point of the island to another restaurant that served Macanese food. It wasn’t the one we had hoped for, but it was by no means bad in any way (though their AC was cranked to make it feel like winter). Once inside, we ordered the usual bottle of green wine, followed by some portuguese sausage and the african chicken itself.

Once again, fresh bread preceded everything; sometimes I really miss good bread in Taiwan. The sausage was ready in a matter of minutes. It was nice, as far as sausage goes – well-made, flavourful, if a little salty, and artfully presented. We tried to appreciate it fully, it was just so hard to do while we anticipated the chicken. The olives that came with it were pretty fantastic – we’ve gotten olives here and there and let me tell you – it’s been nice having good olives again.

Being that it is made to order and is very complex (I looked for a recipe afterward and I think it had around 20 ingredients), our anticipation was drawn out for a some time – I think it took another 20 or 30 minutes after the sausage was gone for the chicken to appear. When it finally arrived, it was just as we had hoped; smelling of a plethora of spices (finally! spices!) and coloured a bright orange, it looked ready to eat. We tucked in. A little bit of spiciness mixed well with all of the other flavours (bay leaves, paprika, peanut butter, chilies, and more), and fried potatoes on the side, along with the bread, helped ease it when it got to be a bit much.

The chicken was cooked just right and came off the bones quite easily – it is a large portion of chicken that this is made with – and we savoured each bite. There was no lack of sauce, either – we ended up eating the last of it on the potatoes, which we had saved specifically for that purpose. We had paid for every last bit of that chicken and we were going to eat it all! Once again, we made our way out of the restaurant feeling triumphant and happy (if not a little poorer – it wasn’t a cheap dish!), glad that we had managed to capture a taste of this magical dish.

Here’s a recipe I found that doesn’t look too tough to make.

macau: egg tarts and lots of ginger

Macau has its own wonderful sweets, a gourmet tradition that Christine made sure we did not pass up the chance to try. I didn’t want to miss them either!

Our first sought-out treat was the Macanese egg tart. You can technically find this in Taiwan – though that’s possibly because the Portuguese were there as well – but they don’t hold a candle up to the ones in Macau. These are the shining torch of Portuguese legacy of egg tarts, and they bear that burden with ease. The best place in the city is a little deli and bakery tucked away in the back streets called Nata. I found a reference to it on the Internet while I was doing food research for our trip and we made it a point to search out this particular venue. They do sandwiches, soups, and other baking, but overwhelmingly, people visit for the egg tarts. The pastry is delicate and buttery and hot – they’re always freshly made, as they fly off the shelves so quickly that lines develop easily while people wait for a batch to finish baking – and the filling a perfect blend of eggs and milk and vanilla, lightly browned from the oven. This restaurant was one of two places we visited twice, as once just wasn’t enough to enjoy this delicacy. We even tried a tart from another place just to see if this place deserves its reputation – it most certainly does. The other tart was OK, but the flavours weren’t there, the pastry was lackluster – totally in a different league. A stop at Nata for an egg tart and a drink is a must in Macau, in my opinion.

Another Macanese traditional food that we heard mentioned a lot but only found in one restaurant (which was the other place we visited twice) was ginger milk. A delicate dessert that consists only of milk and ginger juice and a dash of vanilla. The key is in heating the milk to the right temperature and mixing it with the ginger juice properly. I’ve tried it myself and have, as yet, had no success. There’s definitely a technique to it. Anyway, when it’s done right, the milk gels a bit, and you get a bit of a pudding, warm and ginger-spicy and divine. As I said, we had a few of these in this crowded little lunch counter place off the main square. I just wanted to keep ordering and eating them, they were so good.

People in Macau seem to like their ginger; I didn’t find a problem with this at all. There was a lot of ginger candy in the candy stores that lined the main tourist areas. Our favourite was the coconut ginger candy – pieces of candied ginger dusted in coconut. Once again, that particular ginger burn accompanied by a dusting of shredded coconut. We bought some for friends and some for ourselves. I don’t know about the friends, but I certainly savoured this souvenir to the last bite.

Ginger figures in the last entry here as well. Somewhere else near the facade of the old church that makes Macau so famous is a little ice cream shop named Lemoncello gelato that contains a few unusual flavours. I wish I could give better directions, but I can tell you that it has some wonderful flavours that we haven’t seen in too many other places, flavours like the two we ordered – black sesame and ginger. The ice cream was nice and creamy as well, so both flavours really came through and complimented each other; the ginger burned, the sesame soothed. Each mouthful was a treat to take in, and there were frowns when it was all done. It made a nice break in the middle of a hot summer day spent walking around town.

I look forward to the day when I can make these myself, as I think it’ll be a long time before we return to Macau, unfortunately. The thought of ginger milk whenever I want it makes me drool with anticipation, though…