People tend to give countries labels. France, the land of cheese and wine, Germany the land of beer, mostly they go for edible labels it seems, or at least drinkable. I don't know what they label Malaysia, I have never really heard anyone talk about it. But it definitely is a food country. Food, as in not just one thing but a whole load of food. You got a huge variety here, what with all the different cultural heritages of the people. So, Malay food of course, with lots of chili and chicken, and that blue rice I still haven't tried. Very yummy, an explosion for the taste buds, particularly those that deal with hot spices... Similarly, Indian food around here is the spicy kind. Assortments of curries and various rice and breads... I find this one sort of bread particularly interesting, that my friends like so much in that place around the corner, called tissue bread or something like that. It's real thin, and formed like a traffic cone, and almost the same size too... very crispy, and with a little bit of sugar caramelized on the surface. I still prefer savoury, but when they bring this huge bread cone it just looks real impressive.
And then there is plenty Chinese food around. So many different shops cater to different variants of that kind of food. You can order soups, veggie dishes, all those stir-fried noodle things, a lot of pork dishes, or those yummy sea food stuff, not just fish, but crabs and all sorts of scallops and what have you. So far they seem as yet to be behind the Japanese in their use of things the sea has to offer, at least when I look around the shops. In Japan you have all those different seaweeds, and things like sea cucumbers (which do NOT look appetising, I tell you), and sea urchin and things like that. Over here I haven't really noticed any of that. Which doesn't mean they don't have it anyway.
They also have western food here. A couple of places in the area here do American style food, so burgers and steak and roasts. And are bad. Bland, weird use of spices, if at all, pasta is as a rule overcooked and the bread is soggy and sweet. If you have the choice, don't go there. Unless you don't know any better. If you've never had good pasta, you won't notice the difference, right?
To get your food is fairly easy, with a few drawbacks that is. There is somewhere that sells food on every street corner, and in between. Where there are no actual shops you find these little stalls on bicycles or in trucks that sell anything from coconuts to rojak. I find those truck thingies impressive, where you have a few pots of boiling water, and then a big choice of things on sticks, which you dump into the water for a little while to cook, and then eat with sauces. I have no real clue what that stuff on sticks is, but it tastes good.
Then there are the restaurants. Nothing special really, they look like the same variations as in Europe, you got the diner type, mostly with American style food, the Chinese restaurants with the pictures of horses and landscapes on the wall, the lounge style things that make everything out to be a little fancy, and some pseudo-European places, like the German beer house, which should be called Bavarian, not German (when will they finally learn that Bavaria is just that little bit down south, and everybody else in the country hates them with their lederhosen and dirndl?) and that Swiss Marche thing, where everything is set up like a market, and you pick and choose what you want, but they still don't get the taste right.
I mostly like the sticky table places, as my friend calls them. Because, well, the tables are those cheap plastic kind, as are the chairs or stools, and even though they wipe them off when they clear them for the next person, well, they do remain a little sticky. Still, the best food I have had was in those places. Many are food courts, so someone comes to take your drink order, and else there are stalls around the edge of the area, and you order what you want to eat from them. As such easy, right?
The problem starts, when everything is written in Chinese. And even if not, they have so many things here, and I can hardly remember the names of the food anyway, so unless I have a picture, or a neighbouring table, to point to I'm screwed. But there is always something good you can get. With or without knowing the name.
Communication can also be quite funny. Some speak English, at least enough to make out what I want. Some don't. Then the gestures start. And the game of will-they-actually- bring-the-thing-I-wanted... Well, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Or rather, have the opportunity to try something else. One of my friends here is of Chinese origin, but doesn't speak any Malay. Well, more than he admits, that is. But it's funny to see the guy in that Indian place chat with him, asking him things, and getting a universal smile back in answer to whatever it was he had asked... I kinda thought by now the guy might have learned his lesson, but apparently not. When he sees my friend's face, which is probably familiar by now after those years of occasionally stopping by, he still seems to think chatting with him in high-speed Malay is the right choice. Ah well. As long as he brings some food...
When it comes to me, I like simple food around here. Nasi goreng, especially in that one place down the road that serves it with a piece of chicken that has real yummy spices all over it. Or char koay teow, or as I call them, Stephen fried noodles, because my friend hardly eats anything else, well, the occasional bak kut te (pork in soup) maybe... They are basically fried noodles with some shrimp and scallops in them, you can find it all over the place, but every stall has a different taste. One of the most interesting things I've had here was lui cha, cha as in tea, because the rice and nuts and chopped veggies in a bowl that you get are served with another bowl full of a green soup made from herbs which looks like tea, and which you pour over the rice. It has an incredibly fresh taste to it, if somewhat starchy in the finish. Which is probably why I never manage to finish the soup completely.
Oh, and talking of Chinese food, of course they have these famous 100 year old eggs. Which are not 100 years old, by the way. I don't particularly like them that much, but they are certainly pretty. The marinade in which they stewed that month and a bit made the whole egg dark and transparent, so that it is rather egg jelly than anything else. And it tastes like egg jelly too, probably why I'm not too fond of it; jelly and me, well, we've had a difficult relationship ever since childhood and those bowls of green jelly that still give me the shivers, and I suspect we will never really reconcile. But it is pretty, I grant you that.
Anyway, there is so much edible here to discover, and I've only just begun. All those fruits and veggies and the things you can do with them, not to mention those yummy drinks with sour plums and all sorts of little lemon-like thingies, or just juices of whatever fruit you can imagine... in colours that are difficult to imagine... as the bright purple dragonfruit juice, or the more than orange carrot juice...
Ah, I'm getting hungry. So I guess I'll just stop this here and find myself some food out there...
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