EatingAsia

Thanks Times Online...

Because no post is complete without a photo (Nang Leong neighborhood, Bangkok)

...for placing EatingAsia Number 2 in your list of 'World's Top Ten Food Blogs'.

And thanks specifically to blogger and author Simon Majumdar, who wrote the piece. Earlier this year Simon chomped his way around SE Asia as - erm - 'research' for his upcoming book (chronicled on the book's blog). I convinced him to include Malaysia in his itinerary (I was, unfortunately, in the Philippines when he passed through). He was not disappointed.

We're so pleased about being included in the list that we're willing, for the moment, to turn a blind eye to an article on the same site about 'the world's best street food' - in Singapore. Sigh.

Liver Into Sausage

Last year a friend introduced me to Weng Kee. Dave and I will forever be grateful. We don't eat at this Petaling Jaya coffee shop as often as we'd like (moderation in all things), but when we do we always wonder why it's been so long since our last visit.

We like Weng Kee's char siew (barbecued pork) - sticky, not too sweet, fatty enough (lean char siew - why bother?), dotted with crispy black bits, and smoky from roasting over charcoal. The roast duck, too, is always a treat. The house vegetable (choy sum, if I'm not mistaken), served from a big pot kept warm by the meat display case, is bright green, perfectly seasoned, and never overcooked.

But the Weng Kee item that exerts the biggest pull on us is the duck liver sausage. Moist, plump, smoky (this weiner does time in the charcoal-fired roaster as well), dotted with nuggets of fat and tasting of liver but not overly offal-ish, it's truly a masterpiece of charcuterie. Weng Kee serves it sliced, with a bowl of sweetish fowl sauce on the side. We ignore the sauce. With a sausage this perfect, who needs it?

Weng Kee makes its own sausage, in a kitchen behind the coffee shop. It starts, as all sausage does, with casing. The sausage makers uses pig intestines that they prepare themselves. Co-owner Mrs. Woon (or Voon, depending on who's doing the spelling) says that purchased casings aren't always up to standard.

'Sometimes,' she says, wrinkling her nose, 'they're not so, you know, clean.'

After the intestines are thoroughly washed they're hung up outside on a clothesline next to the shop to dry. You might see them if you drive by, off-white balloon-animal coils rising and falling with the breeze.

Mrs. Voon recalls the day Weng Kee took possession of a particularly long intestine: 'Fifty feet. That was a big one.'

Sausage is made fresh everyday. Ingredients - in addition to duck liver - include duck meat, pork fat, ginger juice, sugar, and Chinese rice wine. Everything is mixed into a slurry, which is spooned into a long metal funnel.

The funnel is suspended over a work table, and the intestine (which has been moistened) is secured to its 'mouth'. Then the stuffing begins.

After the intestine is stuffed it's tied into links.

The lengths of sausage links are coiled over rods, which will be hung in the roaster. The sausage is roasted three times.

A simple, but awfully labor-intensive, process. Weng Kee's been stuffing, roasting, and serving its duck liver sausage for over thirty years. Not surprisingly, they do a darned good business.

                     Weng Kee: The family behind the sausage

Weng Kee Jalan 17/27 (St. 27 in Section 17). Morning to 3-ish. Closed last Sun/Mon of every month.

Besotted With Bubur

Rice porridge must be Asia's most underappreciated dish. We love the stuff. Chinese congee, Vietnamese chao, Thai khao tom, Philippine arroz caldo, Malaysian and Indonesian bubur ... cook rice to mush, add savory (or sweet) ingredients, and we're there.

Our ardor runs so deep we've pondered a cross-regional rice porridge pilgrimage to target towns, cities, and states known locally for their rice porridge specialties. Maybe a book - The Bubur Chronicles, or the Khao Tom Trail. Problem is, rice porridge's poor reputation outside Asia pretty much precludes publication. Heck, I can't even sell an article on the topic.

That doesn't mean we don't continue to feed our lust for this anytime-of-the-day meal-in-a-bowl. Having first come to know the joys of an expertly made rice porridge in Hong Kong, where we lived in the early nineties, our allegiance long lay with the Cantonese version: minimally flavored (chicken and sesame oil, dried oysters), thick and smooth. These days we're firmly in the Indonesian bubur camp. So much so, in fact, that we'd wager the world's best rice porridge can be found just about anywhere in that vast island nation.

Indonesians treat rice porridge the way Italians treat soft polenta, as a blank canvas on which to paint layers of flavor. We've had spicy bubur and mild bubur, soupy bubur and stodgy, you-can-stand-a-spoon-up-in-it bubur, bubur that's mostly meat and bubur that tastes like a vegetable patch. It's all good. Every Indonesian bubur leaves us hankering for the next.

So it was last week, high in the hills above Cianjur, Java. We were up at 5 with the sun and by 6:30am our bellies were rumbling. Western Indonesia is on the cusp of its rainy season and the dampness combined with the altitude made for a bit of chill, so we were cold too. Hungry and cold - the perfect state in which to dive into a bowl of bubur.

This vendor has been dishing up bubur from this cart, in this village, since 1982. We can't imagine what this part of Java looked like more than 25 years ago, but we're pretty sure his bubur closely resembles its quarter-of-a-century-younger self.

The beauty of Indonesian bubur - or the versions we've tried, anyway - is that it's literally a sum of parts, assembled a la minute. Which means that you can always have it your way. First the rice, thick and so creamy you could moisturize your face with it,

followed by: a drizzle of soy sauce, a sort of 'curried' mixture of chopped leafy greens, onions, and snake beans, shredded chicken meat, a spoonful or three of fiery and slightly sweet cooked sambal made with green chilies, deep-fried soy beans, crumbled rice and melinjo crackers, and a flurry of chopped cilantro.

 

There are several possible approaches here.You can leave the assemblage intact, dipping in here and then there for mouthfuls of discreet flavors, a method adhered to by several baby-toting villagers who alternated a spoonful of plain porridge from the side of the bowl for their charge with a more challenging combination of rice, crunchy toppings, and sambal for themselves. The boys who stopped at the cart to fuel up before class (it's strategically parked right below a middle school), on the other hand, were too busy chatting to pay much attention to their bubur - their spoons haphazardly fell and scooped where they may.

I grabbed my spoon and stirred everything together, which I suppose defeats the purpose of layering ingredients one-by-one but does trigger a pleasant Rice Krispiesean snap-crackle-pop as crisps are subsumed by porridge. When I mix my bubur I tend to rescue a bit of sambal and shove it to the side of the bowl so that I can pepper my generally one-alarm meal with the occasional three-alarm mouthful.

This village bubur was so good that, having ordered one bowl to share, we followed it with another, and then returned the next morning (breathlessly - we'd been out walking and feared that Bubu Man had finished for the day) for two more. Back in Jakarta, we followed that up with tinutuan, a deliciously vegetable-heavy bubur native to Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi.

And all this has me remembering an equally tasty bubur we ate on Bali last March. According to my notes it was doused with a chicken-and-turmeric broth containing noodles and batons of chayote. Seeing as we won't be back to Indonesia for a while, it may be time to get into the kitchen and experiment. 

Pampanga Food Festival (Philippines)

News of this food festival was forwarded to me by Marc Medina, whose Pampanga family home we invaded for our Saveur article. Unfortunately we won't be able to attend, but anyone within driving distance should be making plans to do so. Last December we had the pleasure of sampling a few of the specialties that will be on offer here, and it nearly makes me weep to think that we'll miss out!

If there is anything that makes Pampanga famous, it's the delicious
food! And if the success of the recent Kapampangan Food Fair at the
Salcedo Market last June 21 is any indication, food lovers young and
old will have a blast at the 2nd Pistaung Kapampangan King Sinukwan on
November 29, Saturday evening at the Old Heritage District along
Consunji Street in San Fernando, Pampanga.

The whole stretch of the historical street will closed from 4:30 pm to
12:00 midnight, to light up the ancestral houses and to give way to a
food fair and fanfare that brings together the best of Pampanga
cuisine – from authentic Kapampangan cooking by Everybody's Café (a
Tatler Best Restaurant in 2008), Abe, Bale Kapampangan, Jun Jun's BBQ
and Bibingka, Teresita R. Razon's Palabok and Halo Halo and
home-cooked meals from PAMANGAN by Des Torres. For the
health-conscious, freshly-picked fiddle head fern salad from the Hizon
orchard will be served.

Pasalubong items such as Carreon's Pastillas and Plantanillas,
Navarro's Taba ng Talangka, WOW Mani, Kuliat Cakes and Empanada and
Lailen's Pastries from the Sweets and Delicacies Association of
Pampanga (SnDAP) will be available; as well as mouth-watering
offerings from La Moderna Bakery (Masa Podrida and Gorgorias),
Bakeline (Mamon Tostado and Empanaditas), fresh sugar cane juice from
Alex Patio, heirloom Desserts from Mitchie Hizon, and barrio goodies
from the town of Sta. Rita such as the DUMAN and freshly-rolled native
barquillos.

Other delectable attractions include Duck Ham from Lubao's Pride,
Ostrich Steak from Orstrichland's Bruno and Diego, and the different
Native Suman from Cabalantian.

There will also be an on-the-spot Cooking Contest (using local
abundant ingredients) that seeks to discover and develop new talent in
the field of cooking, and performances by the Magsilbi Tamu Brass
Band, Arti Sta Rita, Aslag Kapampangan and the newly-formed Teatro Ima
at Arti.

So have a reunion with your family and friends and plan a pilgrimage
to the birthplace of sisig, tocino, buru, tamales and tibuk-tibuk!

Proceeds from the event will go to the Foundation for Lingap
Kapampangan Inc., more popularly known as the Save Pampanga Movement,
which advocates for the preservation of Kapampangan culture and arts.

Come in your most comfortable "barrio Filipiniana" attire and get
ready to go on a hometown feast for all your senses!

Also in Print, Our Kuala Lumpur

Hot on the heels of A Philippine Christmas comes word, again via email, that the December issue of Budget Travel, which includes our feature article on where to eat, shop, and 'play' in and around KL, is also out. If it's the article that led you to EatingAsia, welcome!

KL residents would likely find nothing new in the piece, but we're hoping it puts KL (and Malaysia) firmly on the radar of potential visitors. We had a blast researching and photographing it - it's never a bad thing to be compelled to be a tourist in your own town. We were particularly happy to have the opportunity to tout some favorite eateries, such as Pak Din Ikan Bakar in the Lake Gardens, Yut Kee downtown, Weng Kee (home of heavenly duck liver sausage) in Petaling Jaya's Section 17, and old stalwart Sek Yuen.

A Philippine Christmas

We're about a month too early with this post - it's not even Thanksgiving yet! But this morning two Saveur-subscribing readers emailed to tell me that they'd just received the December issue. So I thought I'd share a story.

Ten years ago we were living in Shanghai, where Dave was managing the local branch office of his employer, a San Francisco-based trading company, and I was doing research for a dissertation on pre-Revolution rural tax protests (not as dry a topic as it sounds), commuting to Nanjing and its massive Republican-era archives during the week.

One of the meals that I remember best from those years I ate in Anhui province, in a small village where the farmers - like most in China - were dirt poor and ground down from years of excessive taxation visited upon them by rapacious and corrupt cadres (local officials). I'd come to conduct interviews with elderly farmers and to mine the local archives, and as a foreign researcher in need of access to otherwise off-limits documents I was obliged to host those cadres one night at a banquet - and afterwards, at a dank karaoke club, where they availed themselves of the services of the bar girls, on my tab. When I left the club that evening sleaze enveloped me like a wetsuit.

The next day the cadres left me and my Chinese graduate student assistant blissfully alone. After spending the better part of eight hours beating our heads against the brick wall that was the archive bureaucracy (never did get to lay eyes on those documents, by the way - but at least the cadres enjoyed their night out) we wandered through the village in search of something to ease our frustration, eventually finding it in the form of a dirt-floored one-wok eatery with a single wooden table and six short stools.

There wasn't anything particularly special on offer, just simple dishes that my Shanghai friends would have disdainfully labelled 'peasant food': boiled thick-skinned dumplings light on meat and heavy on Chinese chives, cabbage stir-fried with dried chilies, tofu cooked with a spoonful of chopped pork and a fistful of Sichuan peppercorns, translucent-thin slices of pork stir-fried with tomatoes and coins of ginger, potato and green pepper matchsticks pulled from the wok when the potato was still crisp-tender. The cook was an old man who'd somehow or other lost his land (that was never really 'his' to begin with, this being China) and oh my, was he gifted. Everything tasted so good, a hundred times better than all the dolled up, expensive dishes we'd eaten at the previous night's banquet. Honest food cooked by an honest man. This is the kind of Chinese food that I loved then and still do, and though it was getting increasingly hard to find in Shanghai and even Nanjing, it was the sort that most Chinese people still ate. It was also the sort of Chinese food that, back then, you'd never read about in most American food magazines.

At the time I subscribed to a new publication called Saveur. I'd picked up a copy on a trip back to the States and liked it immediately. It distinguished itself from other food magazines by featuring stories about and photographs of the kinds of people and foods that I recognized from China - real people  in all sorts of kitchens cooking and eating real dishes (Gourmet wasn't as 'out there' with its food/travel articles as it sometimes is now). No photographs of staged parties with slim models pretending to eat styled food. Just regular food from around the world, in all its often messy glory. I remember thinking that this Anhui cook and his stir-fried pork and tomatoes would make a great Saveur story.

Saigon, 5 years later. By then, after leaving China with a bad taste for political research in my mouth and discovering back at UC Berkeley that I really didn't care for teaching, I'd pretty much abandoned my dissertation, though I hadn't admitted it to myself yet. I finally had admitted to myself, however, that I was obsessed with food and what it means to different people in different places. I knew that I loved writing, and that the best thing about my China research was that it gave me an entree into the lives of ordinary people, an excuse and a means by which to get outside my comfort zone (I'm quite shy) and connect with, well, just about anyone willing to engage. I just didn't know yet what to do with all that.

But I was still reading Saveur. One day Dave, who's been photographing since long before we met, was perusing an issue that included an article on Thai Isaan food by now-Editor-in-Chief James Oseland. 'Hey,' he said, pointing at the piece, 'wouldn't it be great to do something like this, to photograph and write about people and places and food, together?'

---

Looooong story short, the December issue of Saveur includes our feature article on Christmas in the small town of Arayat, Pampanga, the Philippines. Talk about coming full circle, huh? Or something like that, anyway. The article includes four recipes that should change the mind of any Philippine food skeptic, including one for 'real' adobo and the famous (to some Manilans) Medina ensaimada.

While seeing the article in print will be a rush (15 months is quite a long lead time and it is our first major feature article, after all), it won't match the amazing experience we had last Christmas in Arayat, a tiny town that opened its heart to a couple of Americans who made nuisances of themselves with their cameras and their questions. And it can't match our gratitude to the Medinas, who so graciously opened their Arayat home to us, as well as to Lucia and her family (to know who Lucia is, you'll have to read the story instead of just looking at the photos), who welcomed us with open arms and fed us more deliciously than words can ever describe. I gave it the old college try in the article, though.

Update: Here's a pdf of the article. "Days of Feasting", Saveur December 2008

As I Was Saying ,..

...we were in Jakarta last weekend. And ate the most wonderful sate.

On our last stay in the city (July) we had work to do and not enough hours in which to do it. For us, 'work' often means eating so that we can photograph and write about it. It's not a bad gig to be sure, except when you (I) underestimate the amount of time a particular assignment will require, as I had on this trip. There we were, cramming in meals when we weren't hungry and longing for just one opportunity to eat what and where we wanted instead of what and where the story demanded.

At least four times a day we passed Jaya Agung, a sate place up the street from our hotel that seemed perpetually packed with diners tucking in beneath clouds of smoke rising from the sidewalk grill. Crowded local joints - that's our thing! But it wasn't to be. On our last night in Jakarta we were free, but by then I'd come down with a demon of a cold, and all I wanted was a couple of fresh fruit juices and an early bedtime.

I've often thought about Jaya Agung these intervening four months. This trip we finally got our chance to be one of those smoke-saturated diners, and it was worth the wait.

We don't know how long Jaya Agung has been around, but the place looks storied. It's a wide shallow shop open to the street, with a couple long tables outside and inside, a counter that jigs and jags around its corners - sit here and you'll be elbow-to-elbow with stacks of plastic-bagged melinjo and prawn crackers and other diners. The clock on the wall looks fifties-era. Some of the staff do too.

As is appropriate for a shop specializing in sate, Jaya Agung's menu is brief. There's skewered lamb (kambing) and chicken (ayam), a few soupy items including gule kambing (lamb) and various soto, and rice - steamed or pressed into lontong (rice cakes). We did an all-lamb meal: sate kambing and gule kambing.

The lamb soup might more accurately be described as a curry - it's hearty enough, at least, to slosh over rice. Rich and meaty, sweet from caramelized shallots, spicy in a way that makes the back of your throat tingle just a little, the meat drooping off the bones. Well enough good, but we devoted most of our attention to the sate.

                               Sate kambing, good and close

Talk about char. How do they cook the meat so thoroughly, yet insure that it stays tender enough to slip right off the skewer onto your tongue? And yes, that's fat you see nestled amongst those cubes of lamb. At one of the tables out front of Jaya Agung sit the Skewer Brigade; they're charged with threading lamb and chicken fast enough to fill the steady stream of orders. In between the mounds of lamb and chicken on their table is another of cubed lamb fat, to be alternated with meat on the skewer. Talk about self-basting.

 

Jaya Agung's a convivial place. The proprietress, who rules from an old wooden desk out on the sidewalk, gave us the hairy eyeball when Dave pulled out his camera but quickly softened, and even beamed and said 'Thank you' ('Thank me?' I thought. 'For what? Thank you!') when we left. Other patrons nodded and smiled. Dining here is like being welcomed into a sort of family, however briefly.

Jakarta residents are incredibly warm and gracious (are you surprised? we admit that we were, on our first visit), and they love to talk. Our neighbor at the counter mused that Jaya Agung must be a place with some history. He couldn't know firsthand because he'd recently arrived in Jakarta from Papua to work in the Forestry Department.

'What are you doing in Jakarta?' I asked him, half-jokingly. 'There are no forests here.'

He picked up a skewer of kambing, slid a piece into his mouth, and chewed slowly. Finally, he answered: 'That's a very good question.'

Jaya Agung, Jalan Wahid Hasyim No 56C (just up the street from Starbucks), Jakarta.

In Indonesia, Drawing on the Obama Dividend

We'll get back to the all-important topic of sate soon enough, but for now we just have three words: Thank you Obama.

We've been on Java since last week, and as per usual nearly every Indonesian we've met has asked us where we're from. Over the last seven years or so saying we're American has rarely elicited the kind of overtly negative reaction that some Americans abroad have described (in fact, the only time that sort of thing happened was three years ago, in Italy). But the reception to our self-identification as Americans has certainly often been cool.

Wow. What a difference an election cycle makes. This past week, every Indonesian has responded to our being Americans with one word: 'Obama!'  And, sometimes, with three: 'Obama! Obama! Obama!'

'Your first black president,' an elderly villager said to me yesterday, nodding with approval. 'Isn't his father Muslim?' asked a teenager. Smiles all around.

It feels great.

Hey, we're not proclaiming for or against. This isn't a political blog. But whatever your political leanings, there is no denying that being an American abroad is a whole lot more pleasant post-November 4 than it used to be.

Call it the Obama Dividend.

Does this really matter to the bigger picture? Will the good vibes that much of the world is sending in America's direction evaporate overnight?

Who knows? We're just going to enjoy it while it lasts.

Sate!

We've been in Jakarta for the last couple days, with not a lot of free time to choose where we eat. But wee we did manage to stop a sate shop that we've been dying to try ever since our last visit, when we noticed that it was packed every single night. The wait was worth it.

No time for a detailed post now- we're on our way to a farm a few hours outside of town, where we'll be enjoying the fresh air and doing a bit of work for the next few days. But in the meantime - until I can finish this post when we're back in KL later in the week - I'm betting that some Jakarta readers can guess where this photo was taken. The place strikes us as one that's been around for a good long time. It's not too far from Plaza Indonesia....

Lunch at the Meat Counter

Much in the way that a seafood vendor's stall makes for the perfect setting in which to partake of kinilaw, meat may well be best enjoyed in front of a butcher counter. That, anyway, is what we took away from our lunch at Carniceria Santa Fe, a stubby Pepto Bismol-pink butcher shop cum sundries store just off Santa Fe's Cerillos Road.

Finding great food in spots that fly under the radar is about keeping your eyes open when traversing landscapes that you'd otherwise be tempted to snooze through. Cerillos Road is an unattractive strip mall-lined antidote to Santa Fe's adobified American Southwestern charm. It does not overtly broadcast the presence of good grub. But it was past noon, and we were hungry. Whether because it was tantalizingly hidden on a side street or because its plastic tarp signage suggested newcomer status, Carniceria Santa Fe held promise. We've no doubt that many similar eateries don't deliver on said promise, but this one did.

Carniceria means 'butcher' in Spanish, and while the front of Carniceria Santa Fe is crowded with shelves weighted with canned beans and chipotles en adobo, Mexican herbs and spices, tooth-achingly sweet candies, and plastic toys for the kids, its beating heart lies in back where a meat-filled display case, two tables, and a short counter front a dimunitive cooking area dominated by a table-sized griddle. Tacos, tortas, and burros (burritos) are on offer - choose your filling in its raw state from the meat case. There's also menudo and barbacoa and a daily platillo, the main component of which bubbles away griddleside on a single burner.

This day the scent of costilla en salsa verde (pork ribs stewed with green chilies) slapped us silly the moment we darkened the entryway. It was served with smoky pork nubbin-studded pinto beans and interestingly masa-flavored rice steamed with corn kernels (opening photo). We supplemented with an order of tacos discada, which is the name for both the dish (chopped meats cooked with tomatoes, chilies, herbs - whatever the cook wishes to throw into the mix) - and the traditional flattened wok-like pan it's usually cooked on. Our discada, pulled right from the meat case, was - like everything else save the platillo - cooked on the griddle.

Purists (you know who you are) will rue the presence of lettuce on these tacos but we who come from the land of Sad-Imitations-for-Mexican-Food Restaurants cannot be so choosy. At any rate, the discada (pork? beef? other? we were too busy oohing and aaahing to parse it) was crumbly, fatty in just the right way, satisfying. Even better was the costilla en salsa verde, the ribs so porcine and tender, the sauce not exactly spicy but smoky and even a bit sweet from the roasted green chilies.

'My favorite of our platillo,' is how owner Luis Guzman describes it. He's a native of Chihuahua who works in construction but stops into the Carniceria every weekday to say hello to his wife (behind the cash register) and lunch with his pre-school-age son.

That may explain why the costilla was still on the menu when we returned 24 hours later. No matter. It gave us an excuse to try the torta, carnitas (roast meat) for both of us. Chunks of pork of varying degrees of griddle-infused charred-ness lay on a pillow of chewy grilled bun spread with a layer of guacamole, more lettuce, a sprinkling of chopped jalapenos, a couple slices of tomato. No sour cream, no mayo, red or green salsas on the side only if you wish.

Seated spitting distance from the griddle and a few steps from the butcher case, we ate our meaty Mexican sandwiches gazing at mounds of raw animal flesh while swaddled in the comforting hug of cooked meat aromas, serenaded by the grinding of a bone saw out back.

It seemed, somehow, very right.

Our regret is that we discovered Carniceria Santa Fe late in our New Mexico stay, which left no time to become acquainted with its other platillo or to explore the menudo or barbacoa, let alone the tubs of alluringly creamy, snow-white queso fresco imported from Mexico in the refrigerator case.

Carniceria has been open only 4 months, but it already draws a steady stream of lunchtime traffic, and Luis says it's packed with families on the weekend. The welcome is warm, the food says 'made with love'. Highly recommended.

Carniceria Santa Fe, Felipe Street (at corner of Cerillos Road - a side street just across from the El Rey Inn), Santa Fe New Mexico. 505-983-7281.