In Penang

J and I are here for a short getaway, and we plan to eat our way to nirvana (small ‘n’) with the help of these guides…

Rasa Rasa Penang (Briolinks: 2006). A fairly recent and fairly extensive guide to local street food and restaurants that the editors estimate would take a visitor five one-week trips of marathon eating to exhaust. It is divided by geographical location and has helpful maps as well as explanations of the types of food for the uninitiated.

The Star Guide to Malaysian Street Food (The Star: 2007). As the guide covers the whole country, the Penang section is much smaller than Rasa Rasa, but as an indication of the endless eating choices on the island, it has many recommendations the other book leaves out. This section is a scaled down version of the more detailed Flavours May-June 2006: Penang Street Food Guide (The Star: 2006).

Penang, Ipoh – The Popular Food Guide (Norvum Organum: 2007). This is an English and Chinese guide to these two popular food destinations.

Streets of George Town Penang (Janus: 2001), by Khoo Su Nin. This is a wonderfully informative guide to the many historic streets of Penang, with many historical anecdotes behind some of the well-known landmarks of the island.

Much of the nitty-gritty details of the places we eat – addresses, hours of operation and so on – are from these books. They’ve done the work, and they can take the blame if they are wrong ☺.

Boon time

J is in town, and she has a list of must-eats. It’s a long list, and we have too few days. As we go around checking off one spot after another, we hear the dreaded footsteps of Gluttony hounding us and the Ghost of Pants From An Earlier Smaller Waist Time whispering in our ears. To ward off the evil spirit Guilty Conscience, we make a pact with the Lord of Sweaty Joints, paying our daily dues huffing and puffing at his temple for an hour or two a day. Sometimes, we pay for parking too.

Was it worth it, all this cosmic bargaining so detrimental to one’s soul? Oh yes, it is. Yes, yes, yesss, YESSSSSSSS! All for this dish…


What, you say? For a mere pomfret in bee hoon (rice vermicelli) soup? Not for sharks’ fin, truffles, lobsters or creamy liver from a force-fed duck? No, no, not for us the merely sinful. This was, to quote J, “silky and pillowy.” The fish perfectly boiled just a little past cooked, its flesh melting and gliding into one’s mouth along with the broth perfectly balanced between tartness and spiciness. In between, one scoops up spoonfuls of bee hoon that has been happily swimming in and soaking up the delightful broth. Ah, perfection.

It was a cool, breezy Klang night, and we were the only ones seated al fresco at Boon Tat Seafood Restaurant. (Everyone else seemed to prefer the air-conditioned dining room.)


Klang is one of many culinary destinations in Malaysia, boasting enduring favourites like bak kut teh that tempts travellers of all ilk, even well-travelled "Sg girls." However, being a seaside town and home to the busiest port in Peninsula Malaysia, seafood restaurants are plentiful in this prosperous royal enclave, and everyone has their favourite.

Boon Tat is a destination of those of us who prefer small, family-run establishments to the garish mega seafood centres big on glitz but not much else. Boon Tat is known for its limited seafood menu – a few well-cooked standards that resist seasonal fetishes (like egg yolk crabs, the current rage in town). At one time, they didn’t even bother to serve white rice!


A popular starter is the deep-fried squid – juicy pieces not dunked in too much batter. However, we much preferred…


… the steamed clams in wine, garlic, green onions and chilli padi (fiery hot tiny Thai chillies) to wake up our tastebuds.


Prawns perfectly steamed – the meat firm and succulent – is another must-have, but one of Boon Tat's more distinctive dishes is the oh chien, or fried oyster omelette.


The photo above does not do justice to the generous servings of scallion-laced fresh oysters laid gently on a thin but very crispy and yummy bed of egg and flour (a “crepe-y edge, like Saturn’s rings” was how J described it).


Yes, they do vegetables too! But remember to save room for the zinger that is the chilli crab – call ahead, for they may run out…


Boon Tat Seafood Restaurant: No. 6, Jalan Soon Huat Jetty, Off Jalan Papan Pandamaran, 42000 Port Klang. Tel: 603 - 3168 7116

[This post scrutinized, copy-edited and improved-upon by J.]

Christmas overload

This past festive season was as much hectic as it was merry, which is probably in sync with the rapid and giddy growth that is driving Singapore of late. The 10 days all went by in a blur, with little time for reflection.


Christmas Eve dinner: A turkey the size of Australia, a leg of ham of comparable modesty, another (a tad smaller) roll of ham, 12 mince pies, a fruit cake, a log cake, a couple of chocolate Santas and some other dessert stuff – all for the 5 of us... Yes, you read that right – FIVE.


We had a salad, though…


… washed down with some champagne.


Breakfast: The next morning saw us mark another recent family tradition – breakfast cooked by B, who served us a sausage casserole (with ciabatta, cheese and eggs) with a side of grits (made with two cheeses), accompanied by Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend, a nostalgic reminder of Berkeley, California. We held off on the salad this time – that would have been a touch too excessive, don’t you think?

Two years ago, B attempted a Christmas morn breakfast, but she short-circuited the oven, and when she put the hot glass casserole pan onto a cool surface, it cracked, and glass pieces got mixed in with the food. She cried. I went out and bought mee pok, instead.

Gifts: This year, without a proper Christmas tree, we placed the presents...


… under the television set, which seemed somehow appropriate.

We caught up with different parts of our extended family through six separate gut-expanding lunches/teas/dinners. We also met friends here and there, including a Boxing Day party thrown in a futile attempt to make a dent on the turkey/ham/cakes leftovers – friends just brought along more chocolate cakes.

In between all that were endless rounds of Christmas shopping amidst listening to taxi drivers complain endlessly about how it took 45 minutes to negotiate the gridlock when attempting to drive from the taxi stand of one Orchard Road mall to another, merely half a kilometer away.


One meal offered a respite from the feeding frenzy… a leisurely dinner, at Mushroom Park, consisting mainly of mushrooms, vegetables and tofu cooked in a light herbal broth.

What was missing throughout it all was any meaningful contemplation and appreciation for the reason why Christians celebrate Christmas in the first place – to mark the moment God became man so as to bridge that unbridgeable gap between them; to mark, in effect, the birth of the faith. For this oversight, it would be easy for us to blame capitalism, or society, or consumerism, or even the Singapore Tourism Board. But the fault was all mine and J’s, I fear; all a matter of wilful, personal choice.

So, here’s to next Christmas, then.


Cheers?

Courier service in Singapore...

Shipping made easy around the world? Indeed!

Bowled over

I was going to pen some original thoughts about a recent trip to Restoran LYJ in Sungai Buloh to have poon choy, a riot of foods cooked in one (huge) bowl, usually served during festive occasions. But I broke one of my cardinal rules of blogging – I googled the term before I started writing. And as expected, the torrent of information that flowed made my stillborn creative attempt small, old and superfluous.

However, all is not lost. Beaten BUT NOT broken, I present to you The Best of the Rest, a plagiari… I mean, aggregate hodge podge (much like the dish itself, actually) of what you will find when you type “poon choy” into Blackle.

But first, a picture, which at least I can claim authorship (Pictureship? Imageship? Okay, ownership) of…

What, then, is poon choi or poon choy? According to the Internet’s most reliable source of information (one that is constantly and only policed by experts in their fields who despite their busy workload spend their precious free time updating, without payment, public-access information for the benefit of mankind while being bombarded with requests to donate to that very same site), the dish is a layered kalaidescope of “pork, beef, lamb, chicken, duck, abalone, ginseng, shark’s fin, fish maw, prawn, crab, dried mushroom, fishballs, squid, dried eel, dried shrimp, pigskin, beancurd and Chinese radish”, served in one gigantouraus basin or bowl.

[You know how those Buffet Buffoons scurry around and cut queue so that they can pile their plates high with all the best stuff on view, then stagger back to their seats while performing a world-class balancing act? Well, this is like someone’s done the scurrying, stacking and carrying for them!]

It seems the dish came about when the Cantonese served it to the retreating Song Emperor, who was then fleeing the Mongol expansion. Putting all the goodies together could have been a form of tribute, or maybe they just ran out of plates [J and J, take note: this last reference comes from a New York Chinatown restaurant blurb – look for the A&B Lobster King House on the page]. Or it could have been that the wily pro-democracy southerners were sending a subtle message to their northern overlord, forcing him to experience eating cheek by jowl with his underlings from one bowl.

A blogger, who I take at face value is a Babe and lives in the city with her boiboi, gives a detailed description of the make-up of this restaurant’s version. But if you're the type that learns best visually (or you're just plain lazy to read more text), here's another view of the dish, taken from another angle, which gives you a different picture because it is truly huge!

Now, logic tells us that it would be impossible for all the stuff in the poon choy to be uniformly excellent. Every dish is unique and needs careful and different preparation from other types of food for it to sing when it touches our palates. And so it was with this poon choy – most of the components were good, as befitting the excellent kitchen – but not all hit a home run.

But as legitimate as this observation was (by the fastidious J), I felt the point of this dish was more social than gastronomic. You need to bring together 14 other people you enjoy being with, so that tucking into this Feast In A Bowl becomes an uproarious special occasion. Eating poon choy is a shared culinary adventure as a whole table picks through a communal basin, the wonderment of discovery heightened by a generous amount of beer or wine. There was a lot of “Oooh, look, I found this,” and “Here, you on the other side of the continent, you gotta have that” going on that night.

Of course, the food itself has to be good to make the merriment worthwhile – and it was. We know, since we ordered a roast suckling pig and a braised claypot fish off their a la carte menu as well!!

Yeah , yeah, there wasn’t enough food already, huh? We were as happy as stuffed little emperors that night. Anyway, we’ll be back there next weekend, to feast on their other wonderful non-poon choy stuff.

I should leave the final word to Miss Babe, who helpfully gives the address of the restaurant, on a napkin!