While walking around China Town in KL the other night, one of the stalls we stopped by was selling smashed ducks. Basically this is exactly what it sounds like, ducks that have been plucked (but not beheaded), and then smashed flat. You can see some of them behind Rita's head in this photo. Pretend that her eyes are open...
That same night we drove past a watch repair shop that had a giant sign that said "Kedai Jam 25", this roughly translates to "shop open 25 hours a day". How'd you like to get your watch repaired there?
Another store we drove past a couple of times (along with lots of other places...), was a stall that sells Hokkien Mee. These words are said with some sort of reverence, but with force, as if saying it loud enough will make it even better tasting somehow. I have to admit that it's pretty good once you get past the smell and look. The smell is an oily melange of pasta, sea food, and thickened soy sauce (I think), and the look is like dark slimy worms with bits of vegetable and shrimp, cockles, etc. This particular stall has been referred to innumerable times while I've been here, apparently it's one of the last ones in KL that still cooks on an actual charcoal brazier instead of propane, and it's been in the same place for decades. Each time I eat it, I have to steel myself to get past my initial revulsion, because I know that it actually tastes pretty good, and it's just my Western upbringing that makes it revolting. I find this to be a theme here, especially with the Chinese food for some reason. The Indian and Malay food in general doesn't get this reaction from me, but some of the Chinese food is hard to get by my initial reaction. Of course, I'm married to a Chinese lady, so this has repercussions, although she takes it in pretty good humor, and I'm always willing to try stuff at least once, even though my gag reflex is in full swing. Ask me about shark fin soup and black chicken sometime..."tastes like chicken" takes on a whole new meaning...
At our Chinese New Year dinner with Dato' Soo and his family at Noble House, we had a ten course meal, of which I would only order maybe three or four courses again. My favorite was Yee Sang, which is sort of a shredded salad with raw salmon & what looked like yellow tail, with a plum sauce and crispy crackers over the top. Really-really good, but I had the same reaction, "ugh, do I want to eat this?". One bite convinced me that I did, and I had several servings. I'd go through this same trial for each of the next nine courses, with the exception of when they served "thousand layer cake", which looked good to start with, and tasted better. The suckling pig was pretty good, as were the shrimp, but since I couldn't eat with my hands, I ended up not eating much of the shrimp because I don't have the polite skill of being able to shell a shrimp in my mouth while not offending anyone. What I was able to sort out with a fork and spoon was pretty good, but if I'd have had my hands to work with, I'd have been able to get more shrimp down my gullet. Shark fin soup was nothing like I expected. They only use the "good" part of the fin to make "the best" soup, so the fin is basically a shredded meat that reminds me of pickled ginger both in look and texture. Of course everything you've heard about the shark dying after the fin's been harvested is true, and they even have radio commercials in KL encouraging people to not order the soup to try to curtail the fishing practice of simply trimming the fin and throwing the shark back to die because the meat isn't worth anything. The taste wasn't bad, but the textures and feel in my mouth was hard to get by, and the black chicken that was served in it looked like rotten meat to me. Visually this was a tough one to get by, but knowing that each bowl cost roughly $100US (there were easily 16 guests at this dinner, you do the math) made me want to at least give it the college try. The chicken actually wasn't bad, and the black flesh is simply, um...black flesh, which tastes...just like chicken. Apparently, the chickens are grown this way without any special effort by the farmers, they just have black flesh. Very weird to look at, but I'd eat the chicken again. The soup? Not so much. My least favorite was the dried blood & liver sausages along with some other highly salted and dried foods. I don't remember what this was called, but perhaps it was because I was getting pretty full, and the prospect of more oily salty food just wasn't sitting well, I had to do my best to get this course down. It didn't help that my BIL was serving for me, so I got more on my plate than I wanted in the first place. All of the dried food is eaten with arrowroot, which by itself is pretty bland, but tastes good, so I made a show of taking more (you're very encouraged to take more) by taking more arrowroot and eating that by itself, of with tiny chunks of the dried meats. I've had some of the dried sausages in other places, and I liked them, so I think my problems getting this down could be related to the heat, and my relative fullness. I find that I don't have much of an appetite over here, and I ascribe it to the heat for the most part. This doesn't bother me too much, it's not like I don't have some extra to go around, and dropping some tonnage isn't going to hurt me.
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