Handy-dandy index of the gazillion Malaysia-related posts I made yesterday:
Malaysia: My New Favorite Country
Langkawi: a Beach Bum’s Paradise
Our Adventures with the Non-fighting Irish
Our Adventures with the Non-fighting Irish, part 2
On Traffic and Spaniards
On Watermelons and Gods

(This is seriously more posts than I usually make in six months. My eyes are kind of fuzzy from staring at the screen all day.)

I’ll say it again: I loved Malaysia. Like with the Philippines, as soon as I landed, I felt smiles and warmth all around. I think it’s the tropical clime cultures – it’s easy to smile when the weather is good, and food just falls from the trees.

Oh, but the eatin’ was good:

My favorite breakfast banana leaf curry stall. You choose what you want, and they wrap it up with rice in a big banana leaf as a handy takeaway container.

Eating the contest of a breakfast banana leaf on the patio of our first hostel, listening to jungle birds.

More banana leaf action. It's a beautiful substitute for a plate.

At a food stall in Little India. Simple but fantastic.

Meat on a stick: the Malaysia variant.

At a food court in Melaka Sentral station. That's a curried fish with greens and rice.

More takeaway, wrapped in a triangle. Left: spicy noodles, right: fried sweet potato.

Curried prawn soup. Almost everything I had was curried, now that I look back, but all tasted different, with complex flavor profiles of varying sweetness, heat, and depth.

Roti and fish curry in the morning. Why were people going into McDonald's?

At an open air food court in the old school Malay neighborhood near Kampung Baru station. Hardly anyone here spoke English and I think I was the only tourist. It was a bit of a trial ordering food, but it was so worth it.

The fish that the man was grilling in the previous photo. I still have no idea what fish that was. Possibly stingray? It had a soft, almost gelatinous texture, but wasn't too unctuous.

Last meal from Jalan Alor, before I had to dash through the rain to catch the monorail. Note to future self: green curried crab, while delicious, is maybe NOT the best dish to order when you have only five minutes in which to eat!

As you can see, gorging senselessly on food was the highlight of this trip. My sister and brother-in-law gave me a food stipend for Malaysia as a Christmas gift, and I certainly put it to good use.

At Merdeka Square.

My recommendation to travelers visiting Kuala Lumpur is to just go with the flow. Don’t get too obsessed with checking off the tourist destinations; I found them to be all right but by no means the best thing about the city. Go where the people go. Eat where the locals eat. The city is eclectic and ever-changing; in addition to the incredible parade I’d posted about, I also caught a glimpse of a street graffiti festival and a protest against an Australian rare earth minerals plant, within a short span of time. Allow yourself to get swept up in the madness.

The one thing on those tourist lists you should definitely be sure to visit, however, is this:

Jalan Alor: how I dream of thee! Such a little street, packed with so many things to eat.

Now I need to go run off this portly food baby I acquired while in Malaysia. Back to the grind!

Last weekend saw my 28th birthday – ever hurtling towards the big 3-0 – so, as a treat, my lovely Eli took me out to eat at none other than Culinaria, the restaurant owned by Chef Baek Sang Joon, from the TV show. Our TV show! Initially I was skeptical, as the first Google result that comes up for “Culinaria Seoul” shows that the establishment is closed. “Are you sure it’s even open?” I asked.

“I don’t trust foursquare,” was the response.

And a sensible one, at that. Culinaria was indeed open, but we were the only ones there for Saturday lunch. Maybe part of that was because this place is nearly impossible to find. I tried my best to map out clear directions on our way back to the station upon leaving the restaurant, but then we just got lost again and so my directions involve useless detours through air-conditioned shopping malls (hey, it’s been MUGGY out here in rainy-season Korea).

The best advice I can give to anyone looking to go to Culinaria is to head for the Gangnam-gu Office station on the baby-shit green line (as my friend Mei dubs it), walk out of one of the exits that isn’t completely ravaged due to construction, wander around a bit, give up and flag down a taxi, and shove a dimly-backlit iPhone in the taxi driver’s face with the address on it. Wander around some more after being dropped off, then call the restaurant and tell the English-speaking waiter that you are totally lost and standing next to “a weird-looking building with round windows.” Miraculously, he will find you, and usher you into the lovely Shangri-la that is Culinaria.

It’s a fixed-price menu type place, with a few options to choose for the courses. I’m not sure what the dinner prices are, but the lunch menu is highly reasonable, 40,000 won per person (about $38) – especially considering that it’s Western food in Seoul, and it’s very good. To wit, it’s marginally more expensive than going to TGIF and getting some shitburger potato steak mcpizza saladabortion, but of infinitely better quality.

Consider my bouche amused. Oh ho ho! I slay myself!

You don't win friends with salad! Well, maybe you can with this one.

Second course: Here’s where SERVICE kicked in! For those of you not living in Korea, sadly you are missing out on this wonderful phenomenon whereby people will just randomly give you extra stuff, for free, for no reason whatsoever. “Service” is the term for this. Now I never buy cereal that doesn’t have a box of kleenexes or a DVD glued to the packaging. We were only supposed to get one dish for the second course, either a shrimp souffle or scallops, so Eli and I ordered one of each, thinking we would share. The chef – not sure if it was because he recognized us from the little TV segment, or because he realized how awesome and totally deserving of free shit that we were – decided to make both dishes for each of us. Score!

The shrimp souffle was nice – very reminiscent of dim sum, which I liked. It was a bit on the salty side, which I also liked. Dried shrimp flakes were dusted along the side of the plate, and we were supposed to dip the shrimp souffle into the flakes to add flavor. I found it a little awkward to scoop out the shrimp and drag it along the plate, but that’s a minor quibble.

The scallops were good. I have to confess that I don’t really see why people go nuts for scallops. They’re merely all right to me. These were the same; done well for scallops, but they’re just not my bag. What was my bag, however, was the mushroom sauce, and since I am a shameless American I asked for more bread to sop up the extra sauce on the plate. Clean plate club for the win!

Main course: no service here; we had to part ways on the dishes. Eli ordered the pork belly, and I ordered the steak. I’d had my eye on the pork belly – because, really – but since Eli has this weird thing about eating red meat, something to do with a pet cow he’d had in Germany when he was five years old, I let him get the pork belly, since we’re quite militant about sharing everything anyways. (I *hate* it when I’m out with people to eat at a new restaurant and everybody orders the exact same thing. Diversify, people!)

The steak was lovely. I’m not crazy about steak like I’m not crazy about scallops, but this was very good. The outside was seared to a nice crisp, while the inside remained tender and medium rare. Underneath it was asparagus with a white truffle potato puree. To the right were mushrooms. A good main course, but it didn’t blow me away quite like…

…the pork belly. It was to die for. And by that I literally mean that if this pork belly were in front of me, and you tried to stop me from eating it, I would find a way to make you die. Oh, it was luscious. The outside skin was just like that of a creme brulee – thin and crispy, making that light crackling noise when I tapped my fork upon it. The meat inside was so tender. Just remembering the experience of eating it makes me sad that I am not, at this very moment, still eating it.

Oh, yeah, there was other stuff on that plate, too. The pork belly sat upon a nest of sauerkraut, which was pleasant enough – I’m not the biggest fan of sauerkraut but this wasn’t overwhelmingly vinegary. It was surrounded by beets, my favorite root vegetable, and impossible to find here in the Land of the Morning Calm. The beets were candied and infused with cinnamon, which enhanced the inherent earthiness of the beets. They were a nice complement to the pork belly. I believe that sauce that was smeared onto the plate in a fancy way was also quite good, though in my memory, all that remains is the pork belly. I told Eli at the time that I’d include that pork belly on the menu at my death meal, it so deeply impressed me. (Other candidates include my mom’s canh chua soup, and the lobster macaroni & cheese at a restaurant in Minneapolis. None of these dishes remotely go together at all, so I’m hoping my last supper can stretch out over several courses.)

Dessert: a strawberry sorbet, on top of strawberry cream, surrounded by a mint foam. This was Eli’s favorite, him being a sweet-tooth and all. It tasted sweet and light, and the presentation was quite playful – perfect for a summer dessert.

Then we had free coffee and some time to digest, and the chef came out to chat with us. I’m still not quite sure if he’d recognized us when we walked in, but Eli brought up the filming. We mentioned to him the problem of FourSquare listing his restaurant’s status as closed, and he looked around aghast at the empty dining room – “well, that’s why no one is here!” I sincerely hope he gets more business, because this restaurant deserves to be absurdly busy and have reservations out the wazoo. (Food nerds FYI: Chef Baek worked for Thomas Keller at Per Se!) I plan on returning there and getting the pork belly, naturally. And then, with time, nurturing my own little pork belly.

Now…if only I can find this place again!

Culinaria 12538
2F 691-9 Sinsa-dong, Gangnam-gu,
Seoul
Korea
(+82)02-515-0895

The bottom of this news story includes pretty simple and clear directions to the place. We tried to follow these directions, but were a little thrown off by the fact that exit 3 is under massive construction, and because of our complete lack of navigational sense. Eli even had his GPS with him! (a GPS is about as useful as the length of its battery life).

Though I try and wolf them down as fast as I can, inevitably the boxes of strawberries available are a bit too large for one person (and hedgehog) to consume, so inevitably a few go bad. I bought a box yesterday and noticed to my dismay that a few were already starting to turn. For some reason – possibly because I’ve been going back and watching previous seasons of Top Chef in my spare time – I started thinking about what dishes I could do with strawberries, and since I’m much more of a salt-licker than a sweet-tooth, my mind inclined towards the savory. What about strawberry + pasta? Google instantly pulled up a recipe, and I dashed out to the store to go pick up some ingredients. Luckily pasta is available at my local marts, though it’s kind of pricey compared to back home. Cream is also available, but for a whopping 9,000 won (like $7 – $8!) for the equivalent of a gallon. I did not need a gallon of expensive cream, so I decided to do a bechamel sauce since the recipe already called for butter anyways.

My first of what will probably be several attempts at making a savory strawberry pasta dish. The garnish is pineapple sage.

I also don’t have a blender, so maybe the pasta would look more appealing with a more uniform looking strawberry sauce. I’ll consider this attempt a success – it wasn’t quite as weird as I thought it would be. My picky boyfriend tentatively tried a sample and then got himself his own bowl. That said, I kind of want to try and develop a recipe that doesn’t use cream or butter (or in my case, bechamel). Maybe it was because I substituted for a thick bechamel, but I felt like the strawberry got a little lost in the cream. I’ve also been wanting to do a pasta dish with a sauce that isn’t tomato or cream based.

Edit: Of course I find a recipe more closely aligned to what I envisioned, AFTER I make the dish. I guess I have post #2 in the strawberry series already lined up.

I used to say that the only things I would refuse to eat are brains (due to concern about prions; no food can be delicious enough to risk losing one’s brain), but now I have expanded that list to include: dog meat, cat meat, and things that are still ALIVE. At school dinner today, I quietly declined sampling the still-struggling victim, as its dismembered tentacles fastened onto the serving plate while the other teachers tried to pry at them with chopsticks. I can’t imagine it’s that different texturally from eating raw oysters; however, eating food while it’s still sensate enough to put up a fight just strikes me as a bit unsportsmanlike.

The non-living sashimi (“hoe” in Korean) platter was all right, if not exactly to my tastes. The fish was at once exceedingly chewy, getting stuck in my teeth and very difficult to fully masticate; while the texture of the flesh of the fish itself turned into this tasteless goo. I guess I have a more Western palate when it comes to that thing; Japanese and Koreans actually really enjoy chewy, almost rubbery types of fish. To each their own, I guess; at least the cursed thing wasn’t trying to make a break for it through my sinuses.

Later, a separate, smaller plate with just a few pieces of sashimi / hoe was set down before my co-teacher. The fish looked appetizing enough; the edges were a rosy color, reminding me a little of fatty tuna. I reached over to grab a piece with my chopsticks. “That fishee has a interesting taste,” said my coteacher.

“Interesting?” I paused, as I was picking it up off the plate. “Interesting bad or interesting good?” As soon as I brought the fish nearer to my face, within olfactory range, I realized she’d definitely meant interesting bad. I cried out and put the offending thing back on the plate, while the other teachers laughed.

That…smell. The flesh of the fish is redolent of ammonia, of months-old cat piss. How could anyone eat a thing with such an unholy stench? I looked across the table at one of the other teachers, who was popping these…things into her mouth like they were tic tacs. (What must her breath smell like, I wonder). My coteacher explained that the fish was rotten (like the shark meat that Anthony Bourdain detested so much in Iceland), and I asked why people would intentionally eat rotted things, and she responded that “many people think it is healthy.” Great, I’ll be sure to lick the mold off the bathroom walls in the name of health from now on! Because that approximated the smell of this “food,” amplified greatly.

I couldn’t, however, let this go without at least saying that I had tried it. I’d already passed on the still-dying octopus. I would not be the type of foreigner who would only deign to eat at McDonald’s (or Lotteria*) and eschew Korean traditional food. With a grimace-smile on my face, I took the edge of my spoon and sawed off the teeniest tiniest nibble of the piece I had taken (and placed back down again once I’d gotten the first whiff), coated it in as much red pepper vinegar sauce
as it would carry, and gulped it down, chasing it with some soju, holding my breath as it came within olfactory range.

Compared to how it smelled, the taste wasn’t much to speak of. Of course, I had doused it in another flavor, so to be fair I would have to try it sans sauce. Eventually I worked up the courage to do this, as well (but I still held my breath again). Huh. The flavor was…nothing. I’m glad it didn’t also taste like uric acid, but I also didn’t see why people would go for it, over a less remarkably stinky fish.

I asked my coteacher for the name of the dish in Korean, so I could stay the hell away from it in the future, and she told me that it is “hongeo.” Later I looked it up, and it is the fermented meat of a skate, which pees through its skin (explaining the intense ammoniac odor). I’m sure that, just like with lutefisk in Norway and hakari in Iceland, there are probably some historical explanations as to why Koreans go through all the trouble of catching this inedible fish, burying it and unearthing it again, if the product still remains so horrid (quite possibly even more inedible post-processing). Isn’t the one of the perks of becoming a developed country, in fact one of the world’s fastest rising supereconomies – isn’t the point that you no longer have to subsist on whatever awful crap you can find to eat?

Here’s a video of the indomitable Andrew Zimmern, rendered nearly domitable by the allmighty “hongeo.” Bon appetit!

* I have yet to eat at either a McDonald’s or a Lotteria here. Wonder if fermented skate nuggets are on the menu?

Here is a song that sums up how I typically feel after Halloweens:

Skip to 1:42 for the song.

I did bake some cool brain bread to go with my zombie chef outfit, though:

Although, since the bread got super poofy, it doesn’t really look like “brains” to me, so much as “challah bread gone waaay unkosher.” What do you think?

Then I had real beets: roasted while still wrapped in their native clothes, drizzled with a little olive oil. Beautiful! How could I have gone through my entire life, without having realized such a simple thing. Beets = totally awesome. After this epiphany I ate nothing but beets for three days straight, pausing in alarm when I discovered that, well, that color? Yeah, that lingers post-processing.

Ahem. So my good friend Marie, of Happy Plate, is leaving for El Salvador soon, and she is a long time beet-advocate. She is even planning on getting a beet tattoo when she returns to the states! Naturally, here is my going away present to her:

A glamorous lady beet!

Since I learned that there are such things as gold beets and even candy striped beets, a new rainbow of potential knitted toys has been opened up for me. What lovelies!

Sometime I simply must invest in a good light source, a ring mold, and maybe a non-chipped plate or two.

Marie made the wontons on the right. The filling consists of tempeh, celery greens, and onions. I am not the biggest fan of tempeh, but this was all right. The tempeh was made locally by a farmer friend; Clayton’s I believe? At any rate, this was a much more pleasant tempeh experience than the ones I have had before, which have tasted of burnt plastic.

The beet salad was my contribution: red beets, gold beets and boucheron goat cheese (which tastes like buttery, heart-clogging heaven). I adapted the recipe from Epicurious, with a few modifications. I omitted the pistachio oil because I don’t know where to get pistachio oil, and it would probably cost a million dollars anyways. Ditto the mâche. Olive oil and parsley worked well enough. I didn’t have any pistachios on hand to crumble and sprinkle over the salad, either.

Also, I own a lot of kitchen equipment…yet strangely enough, no cookie cutter or anything else I could jerry rig into a ring mold. So the salad wasn’t quite as pretty or fancy as the one featured on Epicurious. But it tasted good, and ultimately that’s what matters. And I learned of the existence of gold beets. It was already quite a revelation when I discovered I actually like normal old blood red beets when roasted. But gold beets? Shit, I am totally putting these on everything from now on.

My sweet little niecelet!

But I digress. Since Eli is gone and has taken his picky dietary restrictions with him (good luck with that lutefisk, by the way!), I have been hard at work laboring over strange meats and brews that are more to my liking*. For starters, earlier this week I went over to my friend Marie’s house and had some lovely gazpacho while we made ricotta from scratch – using goat milk she had collected herself! And then yesterday, I made this:

Pate de campagne, using a recipe from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

My roommates make fun of me because I tend to make things that are “high effort, low return.” I guess if you’re thinking in terms of sheer volume, that’s true (though this recipe, even halved, yielded enough pate to feed an army of hungry Frenchmen). Obviously quality isn’t factored into that viewpoint. Sure I could heat maybe fifty cans of Progresso in the time it takes me to make a chicken soup from scratch. But the latter is going to taste better and make me feel better too.

What you can’t get from a can: the slow, methodical ripples across the surface of barely simmering water. Eddies of foam rising from the submerged chicken. The aroma of poultry and water-infused with bouquet garni that permeates the house, subtler and gentler than the reek of scalded autolyzed yeast extract nuked at high heat – more akin to a mother’s touch. The heat that envelopes both you and the chicken, radiating from the pot.

Cooking things from scratch is not unlike performing a bit of magic, or kitchen sorcery. Especially when that preparation involves steps that seem absolutely silly to outside observers like my roommates. I needed a weight to press the pate into its final form, so I scoured the yard yesterday searching for a cleanish brick.

As I stood in the yard, hosing mud off the brick and watching traffic pass by, I thought to myself, “well, this is certainly something I have never thought to do for the sake of food before.”

* -ah, who am I kidding, I do this sort of stuff when he’s here, too. I just have to hear a bit more whining about it!

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”
Harry Balzer, food marketing researcher

Inspired by the quote at the end of this recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” by Michael Pollan, my friend Marie has started a project to create “fast food” from scratch – and from “scratch,” she means visiting the sources of the ingredients, tracking them from start to finish. All ingredients will be organic, locally sourced, and healthy (within reason; we’re not going to be swapping steamed cauliflower for french fries or anything). I’ll be helping her out with constructing the takeout box and the toys! Check out our progress at Happy Plate.