EatingAsia

Thai'd Up in Kelantan

How to get to Thailand from Kota Baru? Take the Yahya Petra bridge across the Kelantan River, follow the 12 o'clocks off a couple of roundabouts, and turn down a side road that quickly turns narrower than a single car width, dangerously pot-holed, and hemmed in by jungle on all sides. Soon you'll think you were in Malaysia's neighbor to the north: big-eared, ridge-backed dogs loll on shady patches of grass, a radio blares Thai pop, sun glints off the mirrored mosaic pieces adorning a wat. On route to the Thai temple you've passed Ban Kok and Pu Ket; just up the road is Cheng Mai. This is Kelantan's prime Thai restaurant row.

On our third night in Kota Baru, we made the journey to Wakuf Baru, in Tumpat District, for true-taste Thai food. Having lived for a period in Bangkok (admittedly, an all too short one), Dave and I are pretty picky about our Thai treats. Disappointing versions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore have left us wary of any food claiming to be Thai dished up outside the country's borders. It seemed likely though that if good stuff were being dished up outside of Thailand it would probably be by Chinese Thais living less than two hours from the Malaysian-Thai border.

On a rainy night (they were nearly all rainy, in Kota Baru) Cheng Mai Restoran is the by far the most crowded of the bunch (which also includes Sawasdee, on the main road) even though it is also the most difficult to get to. Whole Chinese-Thai families and extended families, and groups of beer-guzzling men, occupy huge round tables. Which may be one reason the two of us are virtually ignored for about 10 minutes after we arrive. Eventually a waitress saunters over to our table with pad and pencil. A few words of the little Thai I retain elicit a grin and soon enough we are ordering way to much food (hey, that's our style): fish deep-fried and topped with chili sauce, squid salad, chicken in pandan leaves, BBQ'd pork, and stir-fried morning glory.

The fish is nothing less than a work of art, slashed vertically to ensure even cooking and expertly fried with a deliciously crispy layer that extends nearly half an inch deep into its flesh. Topped with a "salad" of thinly sliced lemongrass, chili, shallots, and scallions, slivered kaffir lime leaves, and chopped coriander that's been tossed with fish sauce, sugar, lime juice, and tamarind, it's hot and cool at the same time, refreshing and spicy all at once. We asked for it phet phet (extra spicy) and Cheng Mai delivered. To me, the true mark of the dish's authenticity is that sour overwhelms sweet. This is puckeringly good stuff.

Squid salad arrives warm, and it's the classic version: tender squid rings and the odd tentacle cluster or two, chinese celery, shallot, coriander, chilies -- fish sauce-y and aggressively limey, laid out on a couple of lettuce leaves. Wonderful. The waitress has really taken our pleas for spiciness to heart; a few bites of this put me out of commission for a good five minutes, until white rice and cold water can tame the flame on my tongue.

I wish I could share an image of Cheng Mai's memorable grilled pork, notable for its incredible moistness and smoky char mixed with black pepper zing. Served with cucumber wedges, scallion stems, and coriander sprigs, it's not tongue-numbingly spicy, just delightfully zippy.

Ditto the chicken in pandan leaves. Unlike versions I've sampled in Thailand these are not boneless bite-sized pieces of chicken, but big, knobby whole chicken thighs about half the size of my fist, wrapped generously in pandan leaves. The whole package is deep-fried, producing a moist bird touched but not overwhelmed by oil, deeply flavored with a slightly sweet marinade.

Finally, what I would consider the ultimate test of any restaurant claiming to produce "real" Thai food: pak beung fai daeng, or morning glory (water spinach) stir-fried with chilies, garlic, yellow bean sauce, and fish sauce.

These digital camera pictures certainly aren't the best, but I think the photo above shows that Cheng Mai really gets this dish right. Leaves are wilted, stems are still a bit crispy. Garlic is in chunks. Chilies are copious (and darn hot, too!). Sauce is thin, not gloppy. What you can't tell from the picture is that the seasoning is spot-on, just salty enough, just fishy enough, just yellow beany enough. One of my favorites greens dishes of 2005.

Cheng Mai Restoran, Wakuf Baru. From Kota Baru, take the Jambatan Sultan Yahya Petra Bridge, and the 12 o'clock roads from both roundabouts. At the end of the road take a right and then, perhaps 100 meters later, a left at the sign for Pu Ket Restoran (there's also a sign for a wat, in English and Thai). Keep on that road as it twists and turns, past the wat, to the very end, where you'll find Cheng Mai. Closed for Chinese New Year's and major Thai holidays like Songkhran.

Getting My Fern Fix

So far, my search for fiddleheads in and around greater KL has turned up nada. It appears I may have to fly to Sarawak to feed my craving. In the meantime, I'm making do with pucuk paku, the tender ferns that are available in almost every wet market -- and quite a few grocery stores -- in town. They're not roast-able, as fiddleheads are, but they've got the same sort of pleasing asparagus-crossed-with-artichoke-with-some-grass-thrown-in kind of flavor.

At home I've been tossing them in a fry pan with a bit of garlic and oil. But about a month ago, over lunch with another KL food blogger and a couple other friends at Little Penang Cafe's new KLCC outlet, I sampled a lemak ("fatty" -- usually from coconut milk) and zippy pucuk paku salad that rocked my world. "If you like this, you must try the version at Muhibbah," said food blogger advised. I needed no prodding. The following Saturday Dave (also a pucuk paku fan) and I hot-tailed it over to Muhibbah for a light lunch.

Muhibbah Seafood occupies a cavernous storefront in TTDI, conveniently close to Applied Imaging, where we have our slides developed. Its thirty or so tables, most of them big ten-seaters with lazy susans in the middle, are cooled by copious ceiling fans. This is the sort of place to come for a casual stuff-with-rice kind of meal. The menu lists lots of prawn, squid, and la-la (clams) dishes and a selection of vegetable and dofu preparations. I'm told that barbecued fish is on offer at night.

Let me get right to the point: Muhibbah's kerabu paku pakis (fern "salad", not on the menu - consult the board on the wall) is sublime.

We're talking expertly blanched fern - tender stems and curled tips - that displays not the slightest bit of sliminess (speaking from experience, it can happen, if the pucuk paku is cooked too long) and a satisfying touch of crunch. We're talking carefully sliced bird chilies and shallots, thin shavings of fresh lemongrass. We're talking a snappy dressing of lime juice, palm sugar, perhaps a wee bit of fish sauce or belacan, and a whisper of coconut milk, just enough to add body without overwhelming the vegetable in lemak-y heaviness. There's a bit of Thai influence here, it seems to me, but nevermind. No matter the origin, this salad is glorious.

Oh yeah -- we also (as advised) sampled Muhibbah's deep-fried sotong (squid).

You know, I generally try to avoid things deep-fried. There's something about foods immersed in hot oil that's just so .... well, oily. And deep-fried squid, calamari, whatever you call it, is so rarely done right. Well, someone in Muhibbah's kitchen really knows how to work this dish. To start with, the pieces are small enough to ensure that the squid is cooked to a state of exquisite tenderness in the brief time it takes to crisp the coating. The latter is light and crunchy (oh, how I detest overly breaded deep-fried coatings). Tentacles are the best bites, worth fighting over, blissfully browned and crunchy. These tasties go down easy as popcorn, one right after the other. An accompanying dipping sauce of fish sauce, sugar, vinegar, and chilies is nice but not necessary.

Feeling the need for one more dish, we settled on stir-fried kucai flowers just because we had no idea what they were.

They turned out to be Chinese chives. Another masterful preparation, this time consisting of pungent, garlicky chives stir-fried with carrots, a few small shrimp, tender ginger slivers, garlic, and oyster sauce. This dish suffered only from the fact that it followed the blockbuster combo of kerabu paku pakis and squid; it really was delicious enough to merit ordering again.

The only downside of this meal is that I learned after the fact that we'd ordered a small plate of the pucuk paku, when medium and large sizes are available as well. I'm envisioning a dinner at Muhibbah in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future: ikan bakar (grilled fish), more squid, and a big, BIG fern salad.

Muhibbah Seafood, 50-54 Lorong Rahim Kajai 14, Taman Tun Dr. Ismail. Tel. 03-7727-3153 (within 5 minutes of the TTDI exit off the Penchala Link).

Chicken Town

There were a few things I expected to find in Kota Baru, capital of Kelantan, Malaysia's northeastern-most state. Given the season, I anticipated lots of rain (the monsoonal downpour that began soon after we arrived lasted 23 hours, and we didn't see the sun until an hour before we pulled out of town four days later). I'd read in guidebooks that the city's central market is phenomenal (we spent three mornings there and have the slides to prove it ... more later). I'd heard that it's hard to walk a block downtown without bumping into a temptingly edible something or other (KB is a snacker's paradise).

What I didn't expect is that the town smells like chicken. Fried chicken. Roast chicken. BBQ chicken. Chicken in a soup. Chicken on a stick (a.k.a. sate). I challenge anyone to spend an hour or two walking the streets in the center of KB between the hours of, say, 7am and 9pm, and not run smack into a wall of smoke, steam, or otherwise airborne molecules of bird essence.

Rather than fight it we decided to embrace it, starting with a quest for the ultimate ayam percik. Asked for recommendations, an enthusiastic and well-fed (always a good thing to look for in someone making dining recommendations) member of the staff at our hotel sent us to Yati Ayam Percik, a stall-cum-open storefront (with an enclosed air-conditioned room) on a stretch of creepily dark and quiet road about half a kilometer from Kota Baru's hub.

For those unfamiliar with the dish, ayam percik is a Kelantanese mainstay that tastes a lot better than it reads: BBQ chicken with a creamy, flesh-colored sauce that bears a frightening resemblance to Thousand Island dressing (without those little green sweet pickle bits).

Integral to the success of the dish is, of course, a nicely grilled piece of bird. Yati scores high in this regard; the sliced breast above, marinated in a slightly sweet mixture that includes chilies and palm sugar, is lightly crispy and wonderfully charred, without being burnt. The percik sauce, thankfully, has nothing at all to do with salad dressing; it's a smooth and incredibly rich concoction based on coconut milk. Other ingredients include lemongrass, palm sugar, candlenuts, and ...? The combo really works: hot, lean bird tasting of the coals and lukewarm, opulently spiced sauce (more sauce is served on the side). Even better with a dab of Yati's fiery, limey sambal.

Regular EatingAsia readers will understand that, though we'd come to Yati for the ayam percik, we certainly couldn't stop there. The bird shared our table with nasi ayam (lit. rice and chicken), which turned out to be glutinous rice cooked with coconut milk, molded into a patty, and stuffed with chicken dry-cooked with lemongrass, chilies, palm sugar, and a bit of coconut. The whole is wrapped in banana leaf and grilled. Delicious, if a bit filling. In truth, I'd have preferred a bit more chicken stuffing, but the excess rice served as a useful sop for leftover percik sauce.

Along with ayam percik, Yati's most popular takeout item appeared to be its nasi kerabu (rice "salad").

For this dish, rice is heaped with bean sprouts, sliced long beans, chopped lemongrass and scallions and chilies, deep-fried shallots, chicken "floss" (imagine chicken jerky ground in a coffee mill till nearly powder), slivered fresh herbs, and peanuts, and sauced with a bit of sweetish chili and peanuty goo. Toss the ingredients about a bit and what you end up with is a riot of flavors and textures in every mouthful. Straggling end bits are delicious piled onto the dish's accompanying kerepok (fish paste crackers, visible nestling above fork and spoon).

Kerabu perut (cow's stomach "salad") was an ordering blunder -- not because it wasn't good, but because (1) I'm not a huge fan of stomach and (2) we'd mistakenly ordered the same dish at lunchtime two days prior. (That's what I get for not studying bahasa Malaysia... or learning from my mistakes.)

Still, as far as innards go this was quite a decent dish. Imagine all that makes a Thai green papaya salad so delicious (palm sugar, lime juice, fish-based sauce, chilies, garlic, tomato) tossed with slices of stomach instead. If you love stomach, your're swooning. Then again, if you're at all like me you're thinking, "Kerabu stomach please, hold the innards and substitute green papaya or mango."

We couldn't close the meal without trying at least one of the curries contained in a double row of giant woks, balanced on gas burners, that gurgled away steps from our table.

Our choice was duck, and while I couldn't describe the meat as falling-apart tender, this dish vies with the ayam percik as my favorite of the meal. The curry, complex with spices like (I'm guessing here) cinammon and cloves and cardamom, not at all fiery in spite of its vividly chili-red cap of oil, served as the perfect counterpart to an extremely gamey piece of bird. That's a compliment to the cook -- this is one curry in which sauce did not overwhelm the main protein ingredient, and in which spice and meat were perfectly balanced in every bite.

No matter where you stay in Kota Baru, you'll need a car to get to Yati, but it's worth the effort. And that's not just my opinion. On a dismally wet evening this place was fairly crowded when we arrived and packed when we left, all the while doing an admirably steady takeout biz.

Yati Ayam Percik, Jalan Yong Yunus, Kota Baru. Till 11pm or so. Yati also has a stall at Kota Baru's night market.

Season's Greetings

I promise, only one pet picture per year.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! MERRY CHRISTMAS! MERRY CHRISTMAS! MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Going Fishing in Kuala Terengganu

Truth to tell, after a looooong drive to lovely Kuala Terengganu (KL-Kuantan, an easy 3 hours; Kuantan-Kuala Terengganu on the trunk road, a tortuous 3 1/2), it wasn't dinner we were fishing for. Around 7pm on the first day of our east Malaysia road trip, we went in search of a calming, stiff joint-loosening pre-meal aperitif in darkened, seemingly dead-to-the-world KT. First stop, "Traveller's Cafe", which our Rough Guide to Malaysia describes as "one of the few places in the vicinity where you'll get a beer with your meal". Having no interest in the cafe's western fare, we planned to skip the meal, down the beer, and then move on for solid sustenance.

The staff gave us some pretty strange looks when we walked in. Perhaps they knew what we were after, but were no longer serving the hard stuff? "We're here for a beer," Dave muttered out of the side of his mouth, as if he were speaking through the back door of some gin joint during America's Prohibitionist period. Closed for a private party, came the reply.

Back in the car, driving aimlessly and wondering where we'd eat dinner let alone get a drink, we spotted a bright and busy Chinese coffee shop -- with a big green and white Carlsburg sign above the counter. Lucky indeed, because the Straits Restoran turned out to serve not only beer, but truly memorable food as well.

We kept it simple, sticking to seafood (being on the South China Sea coast and all) and vegetables. Of the latter, kangkong (morning glory/water spinach) stir-fried with belacan was a bit overcooked for my taste, the kangkong reduced to a slippery wet rag-like lump with little texture (belacan tasted fine -- sufficiently fishy-pungent and plenty fiery). But a dish listed on the menu board as yu chao dou ya (bean sprouts stir-fried with fish; bean sprouts ikan masin in Malay, I think) was heavenly. The fish in question is a piece of a salted (and preserved) fillet, cut into chunks, rinsed -- and perhaps soaked? -- before cooking to decrease the salinity. The soft (but not mushy) chunks of fish, about half an inch square, proved the perfect pungent complement to bland bean sprouts stir-fried with soy to just crisp-tender.

We hit a home run with our two seafood picks. The first, a snapper (or snapper-like specimen), was prepared malai fengguang (Malaysian-style, or with Malaysian tastes). Thai culinary influence was evident in this taste treat (Terengganu state is separated from Thailand only by Kelantan state), in which the fish was deep-fried and topped with a mango and onion "salad" dressed with a sweet and sour chili sauce. The flavors of this dish, if not the preparation of the fish itself, were reminiscent of a Thai dish known as "exploded" catfish (pla dook foo), in which boned catfish is cooked and deep-fried to a sort of brittle, cottony mass and topped with shredded green mango, chopped chilies and scallions, and coriander, and doused with a lime-fish sauce-chili dressing. My own tastebuds (probably harkening back to some yummy pla dook foo enjoyed in Bangkok) wished for a bit more sour and a lot more hot in our "malai" fried snapper (our elfin waitress -- very friendly and willing to endure with a smile my strangled Mandarin -- warned of its spiciness but frankly the dish didn't register at all on my own personal Scoville scale). Nonetheless, the fish was perfectly crispy, nary a smidge of grease on the plate, and the contrast of hot piscene with cool, sour mango was a lovely one.

Our big splurge this meal was 4 huge prawns (at 28 ringgit total -- well less than U$10 and thus still a bargain in my book) cooked with a method new to me: steamed with egg white (and topped with ginger and scallion shreds, and coriander).

I'm not sure I could say that the egg white itself added a lot to the taste of the prawns (a solidified pool of egg white is just visible at the bottom right of the plate above), but the combo -- a bite of fresh, firm and briney prawn, alternated with soft, gingery egg white -- was wonderful indeed.

All in all an excellent meal (families continued to pour into the Straits as we devoured our dinner; in fact the place was packed when we left around 9pm) for a total of 92 ringgit of which much, much more than half consisted of prawns and ... beer.

Straits Restoran, 99 Jalan Patani, Kuala Terengganu. Open till 1am.

On the Road, Again

Last week was a bad one for posting, I know. Sorry 'bout that. Blame a power outage early in the week (a neighbor's tree knocked out our lines) and some major Typepad problems at the end of the week. Nose back to the grindstone after the holidays, I promise.

Today -- in about 1/2 an hour, in fact -- Dave and I hit the road again: we are driving Malaysia's east coast from Kuantan to Kota Bahru. I know, I know ... it's the monsoon season. Well, we're not going for the beaches! We're going for the food. I'm thinking nasi dagang, nasi kerabu (with plenty of blue rice, I hope), laksam, lots of ulam, some decent Thai food around KB, and who knows what else.

We're taking a laptop and the digital camera. Expecting to be in the vicinity of a DSL line somewhere around Wednesday, so stay tuned for small posts from the road. And, if anyone out there has recommendations vis-a-vis where to eat in Kuantan, K Terengganu, KB, or anywhere in between, drop me an email or leave a comment here.

Happy Holidays! See you back here on a more regular basis, after the 27th.

A Menu For Hope II

'Tis the season, and uber-blogger Pim is hosting A Menu For Hope II to raise money for victims of the devastating South Asia earthquake.  A donation of just five dollars buys you the opportunity to choose from a droolworthy list of prizes donated by bloggers 'round the world. Donations (tax deductible for readers in the US) will make their way to earthquake victims in India and Pakistan, via worthy international aid organization First Giving and, ultimately, Unicef.

Entering the draw of your choice is easy:

First, have a gander at the long, long list of prizes up for grabs. Make a choice, and then --

donate. Be sure to note the prize you've got your eye on in the Comment Box section of the donation form. Better yet, donate in multiples of $5 and earn the chance to be entered more than once for the same prize, or simultaneously for multiple prizes. Drawings will be held on December 23rd and results announced after January 1st.

I've signed up for the chance to win a few UK-origin cookbooks I've had my eye on for a while, a Benriner Kanekichi Slicer, a recipe collection from a well-known Florence cooking school, and a new cookery tome -- that's garnered rave reviews in food mags worldwide -- plus a choice of three mustards.

EatingAsia is donating a choice of prizes: Food From the Heart: Malaysia's Culinary Heritage, a collection of tempting Malaysian family recipes reflecting the country's Chinese, Indian, and Malay culinary traditions, and a recent copy of Flavours, a glossy Malaysian food mag  OR (to tempt Malay readers who probably don't need any primers on Malaysian food!) a year's subscription to my very favorite U.S. food mag, Saveur. With excellent writing and a focus on authentic foods from around the world, Saveur covers a lot of ground that publications like Bon Appetite and Food & Wine miss -- and it's not often available on Malaysian news stands. It's a great resource for avid cooks and adventurous culinary travellers.

So what are you waiting for?

Roadside Attraction

"Pull over. Pull over!! PUUULLL OOOOVEEEER!!!!!!!"

Dave was barreling down the Karak highway, sights set on a nap back home in KL after a morning of out-of-town culinary exploration (more on that later). But my eyes were drawn to thick puffs of smoke rising from the umbrella-covered wooden stands that began appearing roadside about 30 minutes from downtown. As we sped by one, two, three, then ten of them, I began to panic.

Granted, it might not have been prudent to cut across three lanes of high-speed traffic in quest merely of something edible but as yet unknown. But life is full of risks. I put my foot down and raised my voice.

Just as it appeared we had blown by the last vendor we rounded a corner and, blessedly, there sat three more -- and on the widest-shouldered stretch of road in miles.

What's on sale here is lemang: glutinous rice mixed with coconut milk, packed in a banana leaf-lined tube of bamboo, and cooked slowly over an open fire. It doesn't get much more basic than this; note the hefty logs smoking on a piece of sheet metal roofing. Suspended over the double rack next to the smokin' bamboo are pods of petai  (stink beans). 

Order up a tube o' rice and the vendor splits it,

pries it open,

and slices the rice log, leaf and all, right in the tube before sliding the cut pieces into styrofoam container, which is rubber-banded for the ride home.

It's a tricky preparation, lemang. Smoke the tubes too quickly over too high a heat, and the rice will come out hard and crusty. If the heat's too low, it will simply be undercooked. We watched the hubby half of a Malaysian couple purchasing a couple of tubes ahead of us squeeze theirs up one end and down the other before pronouncing it satisfactory.

Rice must be eaten with sauce, of course, and this vendor offers a selection of curries (as, presumably, do all the others): chicken, beef, or lamb. We chose lamb and, back in the car (no, we couldn't wait until we got home), dipped easy-to-handle sticky rice discs into a rich, complex red curry lightened with the tartness of kaffir lime leaves. So impressed were we by this vendor's lamb curry, in fact, that we returned a week later to try the others, and were pleased to find sambal petai (stink beans cooked with stinky-spicy sambal sauce) on offer as well. Beef: coconut-rich, spicy as all get out, meat falling-apart tender. Chicken: a bit lighter, sprightly with lots of lemongrass and more kaffir lime leaves. Sambal petai: a potent combination of stink beans, pungent sambal heavy on the belacan, and -- most delightfully -- plentiful tiny ikan bilis (dried anchovies). What a memorably delicous reek!

Lemang stalls, Karak highway. There are many on both sides of the road -- keep an eye out for a sign advising the presence of gerai lemang (lemang stalls) in the vicinity. And drive carefully!

A Big Feed Under the Big Tree

I can't claim to have discovered this place. In fact, I will never, on this blog, claim to have discovered any of the Malaysian mobile carts, hawker stalls, coffee shops, or restaurants that I might write about. That would be foolishness, because in Malaysia, if it's good, you can be darned sure it's already been sniffed out, scoped out, and tried out by hundreds if not thousands of Malaysians who are ever on the troll for an as-yet unexperienced gastronomic reason to live.

A few Saturdays ago Dave and I joined a couple of friends -- one of whom introduced Asian Wall Street Journal writer John Krich to this restaurant, which he included in his list of top KL chow picks in a 2003 "Eats" column -- and a friend of a friend for lunch at what Krich named "Place Under the Big Tree". What we have here is a dilapidated traditional Malay wooden house stuck in the middle of a neighborhood of auto body shops. The front yard -- which, yes, is pleasantly shaded by a really big tree -- serves as dimly-lit, tin-roofed kitchen at one end and plastic drop-cloth tented dining room at the other. Beyond the reach of plastic canopy sit a number of umbrella-topped tables.

I simply love food shops like this; they're one of the best things about Asia. Completely unpretentious, cursed by perhaps less-than-genteel surroundings (a busy street, a major highway, a dank alley, a front yard within easy hearing distance of metal saws and gas-powered generators) but somehow graced with an atmosphere of utter relaxation. With spots like this it's all about the food, and when the food is good and you're surrounded by people visibly enjoying the grub you can't help but kick back, dig in, and have a good time.

And so it was with Big Tree. Hakka is the cuisine served here. Sometimes mistakenly referred to as an ethnic minority in China, Hakka are a subgroup of the dominant Han majority who migrated from the country's north to primarily Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong provinces a couple of thousand years ago. The name "Hakka" is derived from the pronunciation in Hakka dialect of the Mandarin characters "ke" and "jia". Meaning "guest" and "family", the characters describe the status of the migrant communities in their newly-adopted homes. From southern and eastern China, Hakkas moved to other Asian countries; in Malaysia, they settled primarily in Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) and the states of Johor, Negeri Sembilan, Perak, and Selangor.

Hakka cuisine is characterized by its saltiness (from the use of soy and preserved vegetables), fattiness (associated with its many pork dishes), and rich aromas (from the use of spices like star anise and five-spice and pungent ingredients like black beans and fermented bean curd). Also by its yumminess, judging from our lunch at Big Tree.

Fish head is a favorite here, and with 5 people we could justify two -- one steamed and strewn with minced ginger and garlic (geung jing)

and another with yellow bean sauce (cheong jing).

These are not just the heads, but the moist and meaty "shoulders" too, so to speak, of freshwater grass carp. The flavor of this fish is mild and slightly sweet -- no fresh water muddiness here -- and its texture is soft but not mushy. Both were delicious, but between the two I veer on the side of the bean paste preparation. Krich describes the sauce as "gloppy" but I'd compare it to a thick, lumpy gravy. Lots of salt from the preserved beans and black beans add even more, but it's all balanced by a hint of sweetness and a slight chili kick. The ginger-garlic preparation is thinner, a bit more sweet, and boasts a caramel-ish flavor (from the browned garlic, I think). Though I preferred the former, no one had to twist my arm to dip into my fair share of the latter.

We balanced our heart-smart fish heads with a good dose of Hakka fattiness, in the form of a dish of braised and steamed pork belly with yam slices (khau yoke)

and yet more pork belly with wood ear fungus (char yoke).

Is there anything that doesn't taste good with a big old dose of fatty pork? Nevermind the sugar, I reckon that this is what can make just about any medicine go down. I am head over heels with Big Tree's khau yoke and the five-spice powder, rice wine, and oyster sauce-induced sweet-savoriness that thoroughly infuses all three layers of pig skin, fat, and meat. The yam, cooked just to tender and not beyond to mushiness, is thoroughly sauced-soaked as well and adds another hint of sweetness to the dish.

Big Tree's char yoke is also five-spiced, but with a somehow stronger hint of anise -- and clove, perhaps? --than its yammy cousin khau. Wide strips of wood ear, in contrast to the rubberband-like nubs that adorn less carefully prepared Chinese food, are both texturally pleasing (chewy and crunchy) and flavorsome while this dish's pork, more stew-meat in texture than that in the khau yoke (but still plenty fatty), is fork-tender.

No Chinese meal is complete without a plate of greens (it also helps to assuage the gnawing guilt often associated with massive consumption of multiple super-fatty meats). Our choice was sweet potato leaves stir-fried with belacan (stinky but luscious Malaysian shrimp paste), garlic, and chilies.

This green veggie, with leaves that wilt as easily as spinach while the stems retain a nice crisp-tender bite (absent any sliminess), may be the ultimate stir-fry green.

Five dishes for five people. Just about right (though if this had been dinner instead of lunch I think we could have taken on another fish head). After paying our bill (all of 60 ringit -- about U$17, including drinks), mopping our mouths, wiping our hands, and stifling a belch or two, we made our way back to the car, a trail of destruction in our wake.

Place Under the Big Tree, opposite 6 Jalan Tiga, Sungai Besi. 11am-4pm, closed Sundays.

Ugly But Tasty

To the uninitiated, Chinese preserved vegetables can be daunting.

First, there's the ugly factor. There they are, in any Chinese provisions shop -- row after row of jars filled with nubs and chunks and leaves in the dullest of colors, ranging from dirty white to olive green and jaundiced beige, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to anything that was ever once alive. Scarier still are the brightly-colored but invariably dirty, sometimes rusty, and almost always dented cans wrapped in amateurish illustrations of what supposedly lies within. They invoke the fear of the unknown.

Then there's the stench factor. Most Chinese preserved vegetables stink. It's the nature of preserved foods, a by-product of the fermentation process. We all know that, but it doesn't make their odoriferousness any easier to stomach.

Yet - if one can get past the ugly and the smelly, these preserved bits and pieces can be a cook's best friend. Salty and crunchy, sweet or sour or searingly spicy (even, sometimes, all three at once), they are the ingredients that can make Chinese dishes -- from the lowliest rice porridge to savory Sichuan dry-fried string beans -- sing.

My favorite specimen is Sichuan preserved vegetable. Sold in bulk in grocery stores, wet markets, and roadside kiosks all over Asia, in the U.S. it's most easily found in red and yellow cans marked "Szechuan Preserved Vegetable" (May Ling Brand). Open one up and (after wincing at the aroma) there lie two or three rubbery knobs of mustard root that's been rubbed with salt and chili powder andl eft to ferment in huge ceramic tubs.

I was introduced to this zesty almost-vegetable more years ago than I care to remember, by a Chinese university exchange student from Chengdu (Sichuan). I was a recent college grad preparing for a year at Sichuan University when I met Yu Qiao -- and all his Sichuan University graduate student friends -- at a 'school's out' gathering at my university's Asian Studies Center. Qiao, a moon-faced 28-year-old with a bowl haircut and a bone-dry, razor-sharp wit, was one of the first wave of Chinese students accepted to university on merit (as opposed to Communist Party connections or 'correct' class background) after the end of the Cultural Revolution. We became friends; I offered Qiao a glimpse of 'normal' American college student life and, through him, began to get an inkling of what I might expect to encounter in China.

One day we ran into each other at the library. I suggested lunch. He was broke, struggling on a stipend, and invited me back to his place. We walked across campus to the biggest, most run-down student co-op in town. Qiao led me to the basement kitchen. It was enormous, dark, dingy, and disgusting - a decade of grease covering every surface, a putrid stink wafting from the incomplete seal of the fridge, mountains of crusty dishes overflowing the sink.

Qiao seemed not to notice. From his cupboard (he'd magic markered his name on a piece of notebook paper and taped it to the cabinet door) he pulled a newspaper-wrapped bundle of wide Chinese dried wheat flour noodles, a moldering piece of ginger and a a handful of loose garlic cloves, a huge summer tomato that had seen better days, a couple of eggs, bottles of cooking oil and soy, a jar of chili paste, and a plastic-covered bowl containing two lumps of preserved vegetable. He rinsed two saucepans in the sink, filled one with water, covered it with a plate, and set it on a gas burner. While the water heated he used a scarred wooden-handled cleaver to roughly chop ginger, garlic, and preserved vegetable and to cut the tomato into uneven wedges. I was dispatched to find two bowls. By the time I'd washed them and shaken off the water, saucepan number two was spitting and appetizing smells were filling the kitchen, crowding out the odors of neglected food and trash long overdue for the dumpster.

When the noodles were done Qiao divided them between the bowls, then gave the contents of the other saucepan a final stir with chopsticks before unceremoniously dumping it on top. He kept the chopsticks and, without asking, dug a fork out of a drawer for me. The noodles were steaming, and I carefully ventured a taste. What I put into my mouth was nothing short of a revelation to my midwestern suburban-raised tastebuds, and I gave myself over to the dish's strong, exaggerated flavors and unfamiliar textures. I remember spicy heat so high on the Scoville scale I wanted to scream and garlic so plentiful and pungent I imagined it rushing straight to my pores. I savored the extreme saltiness of the preserved vegetable and the sweetness of overripe tomato, and marveled at the way the vegetable's crunch and toughness played off soft, slippery noodles and tender bits of egg. I'd never eaten anything like those noodles, but I knew that if this was what Sichuan tasted like I would dine well, and in great quantities, over the coming year.

I asked Qiao for the recipe. He didn't have one; it was just something he'd figured out how to throw together when his parents were sent for re-education and he took charge of his younger brother and sister.

The next day I drove out past campus to the only Asian grocery store in town, where there was always a chance of running into someone I knew -- my Taiwanese graduate assistant and her husband, kids in tow, or one of the Sichuan University graduate student posse. I bought all the ingredients for Qiao's noodles, except the tomatoes. Those I had waiting at home. That night, I took a stab at duplicating the flavors I remembered from Qiao's mangy kitchen. The noodles didn't taste right, so I made them for lunch the next day, and the next, and into the next week, until I was satisfied.

The last time I saw Qiao was about 10 years ago. He'd earned his Ph.D. in economics, and was living comfortably in Singapore - married, a new father, working a well-paying job in finance. He was considering returning to China; the Bank of China was dangling a lucrative job in Beijing. I suspect that wherever he is now, his namesake noodles are no longer part of his diet. But I still whip them up from time to time, whenever I crave a bit of Sichuan preserved vegetable, my first real taste of China.

Qiao's Noodles (1 serving)

3-inch knob of regular ginger, or 2-inch knob of young ginger

4 or 5 cloves of garlic, peeled

2 or 3-inch knob of Sichuan preserved vegetable

1 large ripe, but still somewhat firm, tomato (about 6 ounces)

1 tbsp. cooking oil

1 heaped tsp. jarred Chinese chili paste (preferably without beans, eg. Chinese chili-garlic paste -- though Chinese chili-bean paste will do)

1 tsp soy sauce

1 egg

3 ounces dried Chinese wheat noodles, preferably wide

good-quality toasted sesame oil (optional)

1. Put a pan of salted water on to boil.

2. If using regular ginger, chop fine. If using young ginger, slice into matchsticks. Roughly chop garlic. Rinse the preserved vegetable to remove excess salt, pat dry, cut in half, and slice thin. Cut the tomato in half, and then each half into 5 or 6 pieces.

3. Heat the oil in a small saucepan or wok over high heat. Add ginger, garlic, and preserved vegetable and stir for a minute or so until ginger and garlic start to change color.

4. Add chili paste and stir for just 30 seconds, then add tomatoes and stir-fry for a minute or so. Add soy sauce and fry another 30 seconds. Lower the heat so that the tomatoes bubble vigorously and release their juices, but don't let them turn to mush. Stir them every minute or so to prevent sticking and burning.

5. Drop the noodles into the boiling water and stir to separate. When the noodles are about 2 minutes from done, give the tomatoes another stir and distribute them evenly over the surface of the pan. Break an egg on top. Tilt the pan to distribute the white over the surface of the tomatoes. Lower heat and place a lid on the pan.

6. Drain noodles and place in bowl. When the egg is almost set, fold it into the tomato sauce. (Don't vigorously stir the sauce -- while you want the egg to break up, you don't want it in tiny pieces. There should be discerable chunks of white in the final product.)

7. Pour sauce over noodles and drizzle a little sesame oil over the top before mixing with chopsticks.