Penang Hokkien Mee

Penang in Malaysia was easily one of the top food cities I've visited on this tour of gluttony I call my life. Halfway through my visit I met a gentleman who had spent most of his 66 years in Penang and had very strong feelings on the local cuisine. He took no time in telling me that I had not been trying hard enough, and clearly needed to try MORE food while I was in town. Obviously always up for a challenge, I agreed. We'll start tomorrow, he said, with Hokkien mee for breakfast.



Hokkien mee is a noodle dish, that although is Chinese in original is found more often in Malaysia. It was brought to Malaysia by Chinese immigrants from Fuijan Province--in fact one of the most used languages in Penang is the Hokkien dialect of Chinese.

I've tried two kinds of Hokkien mee (mee means noodles). The ones I had in Kuala Lumpur were billed as "dry" Hokkien mee, meaning that they aren't in soup.


Dry Hokkien mee at Hong Ngek, 50 Jalan Tun H.S. Lee, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The dry ones are also sometimes called Hokkien char mee, and are very heavy on the dark soya. Delicious, but it's definitely advisable to stay well hydrated in the aftermath.

Hokkien hae mee (Hokkien prawn noodles) is another name for the wet version that Penang specializes in. I love Hokkien mee! And keeping in tradition with all of my other favorite soups, it's got a hard-boiled egg in it. With egg noodles and rice noodles, juicy pork, prawns, and most importantly, a broth that is well-constructed and an integral part of the dish (made from prawn heads and shells), this is the perfect breakfast food. And good luck getting it for lunch, they've usually run out by 11am.



Of course I was too flustered by the deliciousness of the stuff to write down the address of wherever we went. Sorry, hounds. But there are a lot of very interesting looking recipes online. Anyone want to try one out and report back?

A love letter to laksa

I realized that perhaps I had not adequately conveyed my passion for laksa. I feel as strongly about laksa as I do about ramen, That's how much I love it. And I've been eating a lot of it in Malaysia. I may only have three weeks here, but I am going to make the most of it.

Penang is Malaysia's food capital--I could have stayed there for weeks. There were so many amazing dishes to try (more on that later) that I felt like I gave the laksa less attention than I should have. But for my last breakfast in Georgetown I sought out the curry mee--also known as curry laksa--stand recommended to me by a local and had a giant bowl (above) at 9am. That's one of my favorite parts about traveling around Asia--finally, a place that has something going on for breakfast. I've always hated breakfast until I realized that miso soup, pho and  laksa are all fair game round these parts. Hunching over a steaming bowl of soup that costs around $1, sweating from the heat and the chilis is how I'd like to start every day.



Laksa is one of the signature dishes of Penang and is significantly healthier than it's coconutty brethren. And that's exactly why I thought I wouldn't like it. But how wrong I was. Penang's asam laksa is a sour, fish-based laksa. I'm not a big fish person, but when I actually had a bowl of it in front of me I realized it was flaked mackerel, one of the only fishies that I like due to its incredible fishy properties. It's also chock full of vegetables, something you won't get a lot of if you live on hawker food in Malaysia. Cucumbers, shallots, mint, some other green I was unable to identify, ginger buds and even some pineapple made it a delicious and refreshing choice after days of calorically rich choices.



And finally, here's the one made in London before I went traveling. Perhaps not 100% authentic--it's a very westernized version--but it was more delicious than many that I tried on the street, probably because of the incredibly expensive ingredients (damn you, Waitrose) and the extra coconut cream. The fact that I only owned a tiny mortar and pestle made it an incredibly laborious process, but once that I repeated several times over the course of August and leading to a much plumper outlook on life.

Melaka Nyonya Laksa

Laksa is another one of the reasons I went traveling. I had Malaysian laksa for the first time in London, and immediately fell in love. How could I not? It's so grossly decadent. Why settle for coconut milk when you can triple the calories and use coconut cream?

I started cooking it myself, and I'm not going to pretend that it wasn't delicious. But it was definitely a very western version. Not enough shrimp paste, not enough excitement. I knew I needed to try it in its natural environment. The way other people want to see the pyramids, I wanted to see the laksa.

Melaka is a city in Malaysia that has very distinct dishes, often referred to as nyonya cuisine. Nyonya and Baba are wham women and men that are the product of mixed Chinese and Malaysian backgrounds are called. I've also heard nyonya used to describe women of Chinese descent that are culturally Malaysian in language and dress. Melaka had the first permanent Chinese settlement in Malaysia and as such, has the strongest Baba-Nyonya culture. The food combines the best of Chinese and Malaysian food and has resulted in my favorite laksa so far, that the locals call laksa lemak.

It's very similar to curry laksa--or curry mee--but has the addition of lots of cucumber, which has the unfortunate distinction of being my favorite vegetable. (Does this make me a total sap?) Laksa lemak also has fish cake and even more calories, if that's possible, than regular curry laksa.

This bowl, filled with tofu puffs, hard boiled egg, cockles, shrimp, cucumber, bean sprouts, shallots and fresh herbs in a curry gravy was eaten mid-day in 100 degree weather and left me panting and with burning lips. Sweating and exhausted, I was happy.

Laksa lemak, I love you.

No durian allowed!

No smoking, no eating or drinking and no durian!

Because my father has brought this up more than a few times, I thought I would post this picture from my bus ride from Singapore to Melaka. (In Singapore it's against the law to bring the stinky (but delicious) durian fruit on the subways or buses.)

Would you like kidney beans with your iced dessert?

Popular dessert in Malaysia: cendol. Cendol is a shaved ice dessert that is doused in coconut milk, pandan flavored green noodles, kidney beans and palm sugar. Other variations include grass jelly, red beans, durian, glutinous rice and the one that most foreigners gag when they try, creamed corn. Mine came with a healthy serving of chocolate syrup. 

Malaysians aren't the only ones that like beans in their iced desserts--you can find variations on this in Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia.

In the Philippines I had an even more intense version called halo-halo that included garbanzo beans, ube (purple yam) ice cream, condensed milk, mung beans and about a half dozen other unidentified ingredients. It was delicious but definitely has a bit of the wtf factor--I was on a beach eating this delicious dessert and then suddenly I'd remember it was filled with beans. Easy way to get your five-a-day, though. 

Singapore hawker food

In 2007 I read an article in the New Yorker about Singapore hawker stands by Calvin Trillin. I ripped it out and added it to a pile of clippings that I wanted to know more about. (One of my other favorites was one about booking flights on Ryanair without knowing what country the destination was in.)

In 2007 I hadn't ever been to Asia, although by that time, because I was living in Ireland, I think I had an inkling that it was possible. Before my first big move, I thought transatlantic travel was something that would (almost) always be out of my reach. And Asia was even further.

But I clipped that article in 2007, and when I finally quit my job to go travelling, I stuck it in a notebook to re-read on the plane. Eating hawker food in Singapore felt like a real accomplishment. I was making my clippings collection a reality. By the time I got to Singapore, I was well ready to get down to the business of eating.

Singaporean food is a delicious combination of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian food. You can find dishes of all of these cultures, but also dishes that are local to Singapore that combine elements of these cuisines. The only problem is that once I got there, Singapore was so hot that it put a damper on my usually rather impressive appetite. Unfortunately, it also left me unable to take any decent pictures of what I ate, but here's what I got:



A beer hawker.



Jenn ordered satay.



The bang of fish paste off this laksa was intense--really intense. Once my tastebuds adjusted, though, it was delicious. But after I was done it because disgusting again, and I had to get the bowl away from me as quickly as possible.









My last meal before boarding the bus for Malaysia: wantan mee at the Lavender Street food center.

Singaporean ice-cream sandwiches

In Singapore recently I had an interesting take on an ice cream sandwich. First, a very old man takes a block of ice cream (I chose mango, Jenn went with chocolate) from a freezer and hacks off the wrapping, leaving a very large block of ice cream. There are two choices from there--the block can be dressed in two thin wafers, or can be wrapped in a piece of multi-colored sliced bread.







The pictures don't really give a sense of how big these things were. They were a bit much, even for my big fat face.

(The wikipedia page on ice cream sandwiches contains an interesting list of regional variations.)

Extreme bun cha

I know, I know, I'm being terrible about updating right now. It's just too hot and now I'm falling behind. But bringing up these pictures from two weeks ago have already made me nostalgic about Vietnam. I've written before about how much I love bun cha, and my feelings have only deepened since then. I don't know what it is about bun cha--I think it's that combination of fish sauce and vinegar that gets me. I love just about anything that's doused in vinegar, but find a way to get some noodles into the equation and I'm in fatface heaven.



In case you've forgotten, bun cha is a big plate of vermicelli noodles, a soupy fish sauce and vinegar mix with pickled green papaya and/or carrots and daikon and a bunch of pork in various forms: grilled pork, pork patties and sometimes a few pieces of offal throw into the mix (if you're lucky).

I'd been eating random street bun cha on a daily basis and found that despite the numerous obstacles the universe was trying to put in my way--a bowl of vermicelli filled with hair, an ornery old woman raising the price on my meal post-consumption--that bun cha and I were fated to be together, forever. So on my last night in Vietnam we decided to search out some serious bun cha.

First we tried 20 Ta Hien as recommended by noodlepie but found that the family running the place seemed to have forgotten they had a giant sign up outside that said "bun cha" and were hanging around the place doing nothing bun cha-ish whatsoever. How soon we forget. Instead, we went to the place on Hang Manh Street that noodlepie refers to as "utter bollocks."

All I can say is if this is bollocks, give me more.



I have never seen such large portions of bun cha in my life. It was easily five times the serving you'd get on the street. At first I was certain that they had given us so much food as some sort of weird high bill cum "you're white so must need double helpings" thing. But then a large Vietnamese group came in and all received helpings the same size. The difference was that they didn't feel compelled to eat every last bite on principle as your hero did.

"What are we supposed to do with these?" Jenn hissed, waving around a spring roll. "I'm going to ask the guy next to us."

"Don't, he's a tourist!" I had seen him taking a picture of his meal before tucking in, a dead giveaway. I had visions of Jenn asking some confused American guy how to eat her dinner.

As it turns out, we were both right. He was from Saigon (but had just spent four years at college in Canada) and said he liked to dunk his spring rolls in his fish sauce-soup. He said that bun cha was one of the only foods from northern Vietnam that was better in the north.

He emphasized everything he said by making air quotation marks, which was only heightened by his very long fingernails, a popular trend amongst Vietnamese men. And to be fair, Saigon is generally thought to be a better city for eating.



The group of 10 people that came in after us were done in less than fifteen minutes, leaving bowls and bowls of pork behind. I'd passed a recent resolution "No Pork Left Behind," and as such, we were forced to stay in the place until I had devoured every last morsel.

If you are still wondering what bun cha is or are interested in making bun cha (I made a pretty successful version in Ireland before I had ever tried the real thing) check out the Ravenous Couple's great article and recipe.

Lunch at The Cart, Hanoi

On my last day in Hanoi--where I had somehow stayed for more than two weeks without even noticing--I had lunch at The Cart. The Cart was recommended to me by Hanoian-about-town Steve Jackson who is helping his lovely fiancée Loan run the place.


Steve and Loan (and Jenn Fell in the background)

I had a Number 1 "Ly Quoc Su Street," which was chicken live pate with cucumber, carrot and lettuce. It was a lovely cross between banh mi and something my Austrian faux-grandmother, Lollo, would have served me. If there's a woman who loves feeding people pate, it's Lollo--at least, whenever I think of going to Westchester to see her I think of pate and being "forced" to eat tons of delicious little treats.

Anyway, it was nice to have a fond memory of home while sitting in sweaty Hanoi, and Jenn gave two thumbs up to the coffee as well. The Cart is a great place to visit if you're looking for western-style sandwiches, coffee and desserts. Check their Twitter for daily specials.

The Cart is located 18 Au Trieu (but enter from street behind, opposite The Splendid Hotel), Hanoi

BBQ Chicken Street, Vietnam

I love it when cities have streets that are entirely dedicated to one thing. I like it even more when that one thing is food. There was duck soup street in Gwangju, Korea and bug and snack food street in Beijing and full-on food theme parks in Japan.

So when my pals Jenn and Joe told me about BBQ Chicken Street in Hanoi, Vietnam, I knew that was the place for me.



These pictures aren't very good, but perhaps give a sense of how dark it was. Not only have I not gotten better at using my camera but I've apparently gotten worse, and a very dark, smoky alley filled with chicken carcasses didn't improve my skills any. The place definitely isn't interested in lighting--and based on the various comments about hygiene in the New Hanoian that's probably for the best.

Ly Van Phuc is the street's real name, but the plethora of BBQ chicken dealers, spilling out from every restaurant into complex street seating arrangements, accounts for the more descriptive 'Chicken Street' moniker.



Here's how it works at Chicken Street. You sit down, and wonder what's going on for a while. There's a menu bolted to the wall somewhere, but you probably won't see it, and have to rely on Jenn's pidgin Vietnamese to order. "I don't know how to say wings!" she shrieks. Cue to start flapping your arms.

The scene at Chicken Street is pretty intense. There are dozens of dimly lit tables spilling from the sidewalk into the street. You'd call them tables if you were a four-year-old, anyway, because that's who they are sized for. Imagine a decent sized footrest. The accompanying stools are about four-to-six inches off the ground. This isn't the sort of ground that you particularly want to be six inches from--in addition to the usual grime and scurrying rats, there are piles of chicken bones. We don't need no garbage cans here (and to be fair, they do come sweep the bones up under your table before the next patron sits down).

After Jenn orders a few wings, a few legs, a few sweet potatoes, a few pieces of bread, bottles of bia Ha Noi--we sat back and waited. Eventually, it all showed up--the beer after much prodding which arrived warm with a dirty glass of ice to pour it into--and then, plate after plate of chicken and grilled bread that had been brushed with honey. For our first round of bread we weren't able to wait for the woman with this scissors--we didn't know about her, you see. But after watching us tear into our food a kind woman at the next table told us to wait, and the scissor woman would come and cut everything into more manageable pieces for us. Who knew that a chicken wing was three servings?



We all had bowls to squirt chili sauce in, and the chicken and honey-drenched grilled bread, once dipped in chili was heavenly.

"See how you feel tomorrow," Joe said ominously. But miraculously, I felt great.

Vietnam's take on ramen: spaghetti?

I was in a Vietnam supermarket, perusing the instant noodle section, when I saw Roma Xao Spaghetti. It's entirely possible that this exists in every culture, but I hadn't seen it before. I didn't have the stomach to buy it--I wonder if the noodles are the same as instant ramen? I can't imagine that this could possibly taste good, but then again, I did end up buying three or four instant ramens when I passed this one up.

More from Hoi An

I'm sort of reaching a stage of blog/journal/writing/keeping track of my budget weariness. I think this may be because I have been staying in dorms with no windows for the last three weeks. Anyway, this means that you, My Big Fat Face readers, have suffered. But now I have my own room and promise you a half dozen posts in the next two days.



Prawn wantons from Khu Am Thoc, the 'Area of Eating and Drinking' near the Hoi An Market. I am not sure if this is a local specialty as well, but I saw it all over town.



This was the most amazing cao lau I tried, and I tried probably half a dozen in Hoi An. This one was from a small stand in the market, and I went there on Eating Asia's recommendation. Robyn has written so much and so well about this cao lau that she has saved me the trouble of bothering to say anything about it. So read about it at Eating Asia.

Filled with mom's heart

I love my mom, and she's got a very big heart, but I don't know that I'd want to eat it inside a pastry.

Is there a doctor in the house?

Check out this little pucker that I found in my soup in Hoi An a few weeks ago. Anyone willing to venture a guess on what it might be? The mind reels.

Whatever the offending item might be, it was served with blood. Overall, soup seemed like the sort that would benefit someone with a cold. Absolutely riddled with iron and vitamins, and possibly a buttonhole.

The soup was the accompaniment to a plate of chicken rice. Not the most thrilling meal of my life, but for $1 and the opportunity to sit on a 4 inch plastic chair, I didn't say no.

And when I saw that I was only charged 2,000 dong more than the locals (in Hoi An, most tourists can expect to get charged triple for everything), I rejoiced. You can't win them all, but losing by 2,000 (about 11 cents) in Hoi An ain't bad.