A Few of My Favourite Things !

We have been home for more than 2 weeks now and I still have not posted anything from our Malaysian holiday. Why not? Well, we had so much wonderful food that I have no idea where to begin. How’s that for an excuse?

I suppose I could start with one of our more memorable meals. Our two week visit coincided with two festivals, one of them being Diwali (Deepavali) the Hindu Festival of Lights. Deepavali is celebrated as a public holiday in Malaysia and traditionally small earthen lamps are lit to commemorate the victory of brightness over darkness, good over evil. The city was decorated brightly for this festival and we saw a number of colourful images like these in the shopping centres:

The night before the Indian community went on holiday, we visited a banana leaf restaurant with some new blogosphere friends. K.L. from Masak Masak had kindly offered to show us around when she found out that we were visiting. We made plans to dine at this restaurant but instead of just meeting there, K.L. and her boyfriend came all the way into the city to pick us up – typical Malaysian hospitality!

After selecting a few marinated seafood items that we wanted to try, we sat at the table in front of our banana leaf plates. The waiters then start piling white rice, pickled vegetables and potato curry onto the leaf – as you can see, my waiter got carried away scooping rice onto my ‘plate’ while I was busy taking photos!

A trio of curry sauces – fish, chicken & dahl – served in silver canisters are also placed on the table for you to pour over the rice at your leisure. We were also served papadums and deep fried bitter gourd (if I remember correctly).

We had a prawn curry, fried calamari, two types of fish and roe. We managed to eat all this without any cutlery, trying very hard to neatly mould rice, sticky with curry sauce, with the fingers of our right hand and manouvering it into our mouths.

A. & I both thought the deep-fried roe was fantastic in all its salty and crunchy goodness!

Here is an ‘after’ shot:

Thanks, K.L. & Y., for being so generous with your time

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Malaysia, Travel, restaurants/cafes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.