All over Malaysia.
This here is nasi lemak, one of the most popular Malaysian dishes around. I dare say it can qualify as the national dish, if there was such a thing. I mean, it's bad for health, cholesterol, fat, sodium, you name it. Heck even the name literally means "fat rice". Its trademark packaging is in brown paper like the first pic suggests, layered with a banana leaf cutout (on the inside), and depending on the size and content the prices vary from $0.20 to $1.50 on average. If you're paying any more than that, you're getting ripped off.
In its basic form, the contents are fragrant pandan rice, roasted peanuts, dry fried salted anchovies (ikan bilis), slices of cucumber, a hard boiled egg, and sambal. In the 20 cent packs, you get about 4 spoonfuls of rice and little bits of all that i've mentioned. It's more of a teaser than a real meal then. But who's complaining. The "deluxe" way of enjoying nasi lemak, is to include curry and rendang of all sorts. In this entry, I've got beef rendang, curry chicken and sambal in its own bowl.
So I like to throw on all my extras and pour on some curry, and that's also how most restaurants would serve it too, if it was a la carte. Since it's all curry and rendang, the closest comparison I know of would be indian food, more specifically indian rice, and as far as that goes, it's not as spicy but I think it's much tastier, and flavourful.
Pack of joy.
All laid out.
Before the destruction.
11 years ago
12 comments:
all that for a buck fitee? geeeez... no wonder you're so fat and i can't blame you - i would be a friggin' whale if i got food that cheap.
Funny, you haven't even SEEN me before, kimchi muncher. But I saw your marathon pics and you so fat, when you go sunbathing people shout "BEACHED WHALEEEE". But yea... i'm converting the price, that's why it's so cheap. I'm sure if you found the same dish in the States it'd be dollar to dollar, or probably 12 dollars, just cos it's exotic. Hell I paid 6-8 AU dollars for it in Australia - weekly.
Wow, cool post kinobe! I got nasi lemak at a Singaporean/malaysian restaurant a while back. In american, for some reason those two countries seem to be bunched together in the description of the cuisine. I guess that means they must be similar. Anyways, I got the fragrant rice, the peanuts/anchovies and all that, but i didnt know it was served with rendang. If i have any complaint with nasi lemak as I had it, it was lacking some flavor. But with the rendang sauce, I am sure it is awesome. Make more posts about malaysian food!
Yeah, Malaysian food and Singaporean food are about the same since it's about the race and not the country, and Malaysia and Singapore have the same mix of people/influence - malay, chinese, indian. If you ask a Malaysian, they'll say it's cos Singapore WAS Malaysia until they found independence, and if you ask a Singaporean, they'd go "HELLL no ours are so much better". Up for debate.
Singaporeans have their way of cooking certain dishes available in Malaysia, for example they use ketchup with one of their fried noodles. Not my kinda thing since I don't believe ketchup has any place in asian cooking.
The one thing I found uniquely Singaporean and very awesome was a noodle w/ meat dish that I unfortunately didn't photograph the last time I was there, but that dish rawks.
Yeah, so I guess you got the "regular" nasi lemak without the extras, with the sambal as the only flavouring. It's still good that way, but the full ensemble would include all the extra curry/rendang dishes too.
Thx for comment. I'll post the next unique Malaysian dish I photograph.
lots of places use ketchup for noodles here too. if you look at the pad thai dish i posted, it's orange. they SHOULD be white, if not for the ketchup.
Kinobe, another singaporean/malaysian question for you: I read an article about the hawker stands of Singapore, and how they are all located in massive food courts so that the government can maintain sanitation standards. Are there such massive hawker centers in kuala lumpur as well, or is it more of a scattered road-side operation? The article I read, which was in the New Yorker magazine, suggested that the close proximity of stands in the singapore hawker centers made it so that cross-hybridization of different ethnic dishes had been accelerated, so you find indian-chinese-malay-indian-burmese hybrid dishes that you cant anywhere else in the world. So which one has the better food, Singapore or Malaysia? Anyways, I love singaporean/malay food. Especially roti telur and char quey teow! I hope this cuisine becomes more common in the US.
We have both, the road side stalls with questionable hygiene and "food courts" with around the vicinity of 30 odd stalls, both are available thruout Malaysia. You get your mix, nowadays you find western food as well, the regular fair of chicken chop or steak or fish n chips, pasta maybe, etc. They aren't gonna be awesome of course, but it's an option, and they'll be cheaper than hitting up Fridays or Chilli's.
Me? I like Malaysian food better, so far everything I've found in Singapore we have here and somehow it tastes better, and I have Singaporean friends attesting to that, but they could've just been trying to be polite :). Except for that one minced meat noodle dish. It was pretty awesome. I think it's called "Bak Chor Mien". Dunno what that means. But it's awesome.
It's true, food courts are built so the govt has an easier time maintaining them. Plumbing, drainage, toilets, seats, bla bla bla. Otherwise the stall owners would just go the cheap route and buy crappy plastic seats, shitty foldable tables, and prepare food in ways that you do not want to know.
As for the fusion in food, not so much. Not that I've noticed in Singapore too. Each stall maintains their own dishes and it's usually not a lotta options there are stalls that only do like 1 dish, and it can be quite good, cos that's all they do. But I don't see too much fusion happening, it's mostly tried and true recipes.
Also, you'd find *some* racial separation in Malaysia, some food courts serving mostly chinese food, others malay, etc. It's cos chinese food isn't halal (kosher), and Malays cannot touch pork.
I see. Well i hope I can come visit someday and eat in both malaysia and singapore. I really dont give a shit about how my food is prepared as long as it tastes good, so I will be sure to try many roadside stands of questionable hygiene!
On the topic of fusion dishes, I took a recent trip to india and found that indian-chinese was very strongly represented in many restaurants. Heres a wikipedia article that describes the cuisine better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Chinese_cuisine
The new yorker article I read led me to believe that there are many more cross-fusions of cuisines, so Im dissapointed to hear that that isnt really the case. But a food stand that makes only one tried and true dish for the past 50 years is still bound to be awesome.
kinobe, did you ever have this dessert called cendol? I had it at a malaysian place in san francisco called layang layang. That shit was so good. Post more pics!
Whoa, that's something new to me, chinese indian dishes. They all sound like chinese OR indian dishes to me, I didn't know they were fusion. I'll have to ask my friend at work. Thx for the link.
Yeah, some people are too afraid of the shitty outcome (literally), and I won't say it's entirely clean just cos I don't get food poisoning, I grew up on this stuff so I guess I've got resistance. But it's not poison, so give it a go.
The only fusion I can think of that happens a lot is with Thai stuff. As in, chinese or indian or malay food with Thai traits, the sour and spicy flavours. It's good stuff.
Haha cendol, sure, I don't have a sweet tooth but that stuff is good. Most of my aussie friends won't go near it, sez the green wormy things look like snot. That I THINK is a Baba Nyonya dessert, so Malacca (town in Malaysia) is where it should be from.
I remember when I was a kid, my mom pointed me to an old indian man who was preparing cendol by the road side, he had a mini stall hooked up to his bicycle. He shaved the ice the old fashioned way - over a block of wood with a blade fit onto the midsection slit, and he'd just slide a giant block of ice back and forth, and thin sheets of ice would fall into a bowl, before he started pouring on the gula melaka (palm sugar). She said that's how it used to be made when she was young, and that it was a rare sight to find them doing it that way anymore.
Which is true, cos that was the last time I saw someone doing it that way. The ice is usually machine sliced these days. Kinda sad really.
You should try ice kacang if you go anywhere with it. It's funky coloured but it's also pretty kickass, good stuff.
Interesting! My parents used to use a similar device to shave coconut.
The cendol I got seemed to have some palm sugar concentrate drizzled over it, rather than actual palm sugar. It was tasty, but kind of cloyingly sweet. Speaking of which, the same problem seems to happen in US thai restaurants
in sweeter dishes such as pad thai, where regular sugar is added instead of palm sugar, making it as sweet as candy.
I like the sweet taste, but I think I like the subtler sweetness of palm sugar better.
Ive had ice kacang before, with a bunch of toppings, like little jelly things similar to cendol I think it had evaporated milk in it too. Great stuff.
Actually, there is only one malay dish i have tried that I didnt love, and that is asam laksa. I dont know if it was done right or not, but it had a very bitter/sour taste to it. The noodles were tasty, but the sour flavor was overpowering. Perhaps i just need to get used to it.
Another question to keep this nice exchange going: how spicy is malaysian food? I have always ordered the food extra,extra spicy at malay restaurants here, but it always comes out mild, so i need to ask them for chili sauce. The chili sauce is fairly spicy, and is orange in color. I have never found powdered red chili pepper, which is very common at all thai places. I always dump a ton of that stuff on any thai food I eat to make it spicy enough. So im curious why this same thing is not available at malay places.
-uppili
since we are talking so much about US malaysian restaurants, i thought i would post the menu from the place i have been going to.
http://www.layanglayang.us/menu.html
They have a nice slideshow of pics too.
kinobe, tell me some of your favorite dishes to try
Yeah, real gula melaka aka palm sugar is very thick and has this erm.... raw kinda sweetness to it. It gets thicker when it gets cold (over the ice). The erm.. less authentic places will serve gula melaka in a diluted form, watery like liquid sugar. I haven't really had that much gula melaka to know how it SHOULD taste like, only how it should look like haha.
The only sweet Thai dish would probably be green curry, which I think has a sweet taste to it, but I may be wrong. And I don't cook so I don't know if sugar is part of the ingredients, but I like my Thai nerve achingly sour and slightly spicy.
I'm not a big fan of spicy food, I mean I love the taste but I can't take it too much or my stomach will launch a counter attack, also my head starts sweating like a leaking tap. To answer your question, it really depends, every dish can be made spicier or otherwise, while still retaining its taste. Malay food can be REALLY spicy, it depends on what kind of chili and how much of it they use. Same with Indian food, I've had REALLY spicy dry curry and some very flavourful yet not-so-spicy dishes alike.
The red paste you were given I'm guessing is sambal, but as far as I know, the sambal you get from foreign countries are not as strong in spiciness and in flavour, as the ingredients you need to make sambal are not all available there.
There's also chili padi (I think it's called birds eye chili in English), a very small breed of chili that will make most people cry. That's used a lot in Thai and Malay dishes, I dunno if it's the same in Indonesia. Should be, since Malay dishes originated from there.
I haven't had a good look at the menu yet but the first dish happens to be my favourite chinese noodle dish: Prawn Mee/Noodles. I'll try to post that myself, and maybe you can compare to see if it looks different.
Pineapple fried rice is always good, that's Thai. Nasi Lemak is a favourite for sure, you've tried that. I never say no to Wonton Noodles, soup or dry gravy mixed.
Banana leaf rice is good every now and then, I'll try to post that too. That's always fun to eat with your hands, just for the novelty of it.
Hmm... what else...... I know a lot of chinese dishes but I'll put more thought into it later. Perhaps in the form of a post. :)
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