EatingAsia

I Came, I Ate, I Conquered

My, how times - or my taste buds - have changed.

When I lived in Shanghai the scent of chou dofu (fermented - some would say 'rotten' - bean curd) frying in oil sent me running for cover. That was more than ten years ago. In the interim I've developed a taste for durian (as long as it's Malaysian or Balinese durian), innards, and Thai bplaa raa.

So I landed in Taipei eager to revisit this stinky Chinese specialty. I didn't have to look far. It's sold everywhere. And you can smell it a mile away.

This version was dished up by a streetside vendor at the mouth of Taipei's historic Dihua Street. Its scent was characteristically foul - I'm willing to go with the usual 'old gym shoes' descriptive, multiplied dozens of times and supplemented with a slightly stomach-churning cheesiness - but the set-up was so pretty I couldn't resist.

Verdict? Chou dofu tastes nothing like it smells. There's an initial rush of funkiness, no stronger than that of roquefort cheese, but it fades quickly. And then you're left with just the bean curd's fabulous texture: crackly from the fryer but almost grease-free outside, spongy-chewy within. The dofu is served in a pool of soy sauce and rice wine vinegar augmented with shredded garlic and ginger and accompanied by a mound of pao cai (sharp, lightly salted pickled cabbage and carrots), sliced cucumbers, and a dab of extremely spicy chili sauce.

A mouthful of dofu, a bite of cabbage, a nibble on a slice of cucumber - as tasty a Chinese snack as you could imagine. The heat balances the ever so slight funk. As I was eating, thanking whatever or whomever for endowing me with the ability to appreciate the dish's merits, I couldn't help but wonder what the best version in the city tastes like.

The only downside: linger at a chou dofu stall and your clothes will smell like it for the rest of the day. And there's no denying it - the stuff smells baaaad. Nothing like it tastes.

Chou dofu stall, corner of Dihau Jie and Nanjing Xi Lu, morning to late afternoon.

First Taste: Taipei Street Eats

There are many things to love about Taipei (the train system, extensive and easy to use; the taxis, plentiful and driven by mostly personable gentleman who not only know where they're going but use the meter as a matter of course; the people, generally friendly and surprisingly laid back - or at least it seems so to this waiguo ren), but the city's most divine attribute is its street food scene.

Taipei's night markets get all the press, but the truth is that you can go just about anywhere in this city and find a stretch of road, a small lane, or an alley hosting at least a few stalls dishing up delectables sweet and savory. Many of these vendors have been in the business for years, making and serving their specialties from the same spot as the city grew outward and upward around them.

Our first encounter with Taipei street food came in the form of these hujiao bing - black pepper 'pancakes' or 'biscuits' - sold by a husband-and-wife team from the corner of a market on Daan Jie in the shopping/business district of East Taipei. In this case 'meat pie' is a more accurate descriptive than 'biscuit',

for once sliced in half these chewy wheat-flour pucks spill chunks of tender pork and silky caramelized scallion, all seasoned with enough black pepper to briefly numb the tip of your tongue.

The pies are baked in a charcoal-fired, tandoor-style oven, where they're slapped onto the stone walls and left to roast for about 15 minutes. Exposure to the fire gives the pies a fantastic smoky flavor and the high, dry heat really crisps up their bottoms. The wrappers boast the texture of a fine yeasty pizza dough.

Mr. Huang and his wife have been peddling their peppery meat pies from this location for over 28 years; he inherited the business from his father, who left Fuzhou, in the Chinese southeastern province of Fujian, for Taiwan in 1949. Their son helps out after school and on weekends and may one day carry on the trade.

Our maiden pie from this stall was dessert to a tasty (camera-free) dinner at Shin Yeh Table; they're so tasty we returned the next day for a few more. And they're just a teeny sliver of this city's street food paradise. Stay tuned for more.

Fuzhou pepper pork pies, Daan Road (east side), a couple blocks north of Zhongxiao East Road (kitty corner to 85 Degrees coffee shop). Afternoon through the evening.

Mini-Mart

Early tomorrow we head to Taiwan for two weeks of work, play, and - from what I've heard - fantastic food.

It will be strange to be in a primarily Mandarin-speaking environment again. Since leaving Shanghai in late 1998 I've returned to China only once, for a very brief visit (in 2001). China and I did not part on good terms (if you've lived there you might know what I mean), but long before I fell in love with Southeast Asia I was a 'China person'. Lately I've been feeling its pull.

I expect Taiwan to be nothing at all like greater China, but I see this trip as a means of easing back in - very, very slowly.

At any rate, here's a photo from our last visit to Bali, to tide you over until we resurface ... in Taipei!

Georgetown in the PM: Variety Meats and Fujian Fry

Gurney Drive is all well and good (hard to beat the ikan bakar at Song River, though you must wait until 10pm for the vendor to fire up his griddle), but for the most part we prefer to do our Penang nighttime food crawling in Georgetown. Less traffic and fewer tacky (and for the most part, depressingly empty) bars, not to mention hawker stalls selling eats of a generally higher quality.

First up on an evening back in January, the duck and pig innards koay chiap dished up by this man and his son, at their long-running (almost thirty years) stall on Lebuh Kimberley. Their specialty makes me  thank the powers that be for landing us in Malaysia almost four years ago. Despite two years residency in Hong Kong and twice that amount of time in China, I never learned to enjoy offal until I moved to Kuala Lumpur.

Koay chiap are pasta squares made from rice, tapioca, and mung bean flours that curl into fantastically chewy tubes when they hit boiling water. In this dish they share space with slivers of pig ears, stomach, intestine, and tongue, as well as some plain old pork, and duck giblets, liver, and meat. There are a few chunks of blood in there as well, and a hard-boiled egg. Everything's floating in an impossibly intense broth fragrant with five-spice and fairly redolent with that offal funk that's off-putting to some, appetite-rousing to others.

I'm not going to b.s. you - to appreciate this dish you really must enjoy 'variety meats' to some extent, or have a desire to develop said appreciation. (It is possible to order an offal-free version, though the flavor is there in the broth.)

And you must be sure that when your order of koay chiap arrives it's decorated with a blob of chili sauce (11 o'clock in the photo above). If you're a foreigner it won't automatically be added to your bowl; I learned of the stuff's existence from observing other diners drift over to the stall, bowls in hand, and dip up spoonfuls from a plastic tub. It's nothing but dried chilies and a bit of Sichuan peppercorn roasted in oil, but the sauce pairs perfectly with the aggressively flavored innards.

From innards on Lebuh Kimberly we drifted over to Carnavon Road's Chew Kee Fujian chao stall (specializing in stir-fries Fujian/Hokkien-style), and a couple of perhaps more accessible dishes: fish meat meehoon - thick slices of fillet, thick ginger coins, chopped tomato, and plenty of choy sum stems in a thin, black peppery broth made milky with, well, milk -

 

and chen yee foo mei,

the same variety of white fish, deep-fried until golden and crusty and served with choy sum and more ginger, in a viscous gravy poured over a bed of fried wheat noodles. It may look a mess but this dish was full of flavor, so gingery and smoky; despite their almost being lost in the gravy the wheatiness of the noodles came through loud and clear. A simple, soulful stir-fry that we will certainly seek out when we're next in Georgetown.

This vendor will never go down as the most friendly in the history of Penang, but he might be one of the hardest-working. We enjoyed watching him wrestle with the flames as we waited for our dishes to arrive. Meanwhile other tourists obviously in search of something to eat walked on by, eyeing his stall warily as they headed for Chulia Street, where more foreigner-friendly - but almost universally awful - hawker stalls were doing a knock-up trade.

Koay chiap stall, Lebuh Kimberley, Georgetown, Penang. Nights only.

Fujian chao stall, Carnavon Road almost at the corner of Chulia Street, Georgetown, Penang. Nights only.

Interview: Tin Cho Chaw, Author of Burmese Cookbook 'hsa*ba'

Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon     photo courtesy of hsa*ba

In January and February I had a series of unexpected brushes with Burmese cuisine. First, Dave and I 're-found' a Burmese vendor whose food we'd adored on several occasions, until she up and disappeared from her spot just outside KL Chinatown's wet market. Yeechaw is now cooking at another food court in Chinatown. She looks much happier than when we last saw her a couple of years ago (when she had just recently arrived from her hometown of Moulmein and didn't seem to be adjusting so well to life in KL), and her more positive state of mind is reflected in her food, which is better than ever. More to come on that.

Shortly after we found Yeechaw I stumbled upon hsa*ba (the word means 'Please eat' in Burmese), a wonderful website on Burmese food by Tin Cho Chaw, author of the cookbook of the same name. I contacted Cho with a few Burmese food-related questions and, intrigued by both the topic of her book (not many Burmese cookbooks out there, you know) and the fact that her book is self-published, proposed an interview.

Before we could work out the interview Dave and I left for northern Thailand, where we ended up eating quite a lot of Burmese food at various markets and, as part of the assignment that took us there, spent a couple of days on a farm watching a Burmese Shan woman teach 11 North American cooking students how to make lots of extremely tasty Shan dishes (we got to eat them too).

We arrived back in KL hankering for a taste of Burma. Luckily, waiting for me at home was a copy of Cho's book hsa*ba. In the last couple of months I've cooked from it a fair bit, and I've been more than pleased with the results. The recipes are clearly written, easy to follow, and deliver on flavor (my favorites so far: roselle leaves and bamboo curry and tamarind fish). And the book, filled with gorgeous photos by the author and her husband, is as delightful to look at as it is to cook from.

I finally able, a couple weeks ago, to interview Cho by email. After you read the interview, peruse the wealth of material (including videos) on her site - and consider adding her book to your cookbook library.

Thanks Cho, for taking the time to answer my many questions - and congratulations on the recent glowing review of hsa*ba!

You moved to the UK at age eight. What food memories did you carry from Burma with you?

The main road at the top of the street where we lived in Rangoon was a hub of stalls buzzing with life every evening. On our way to Sule pagoda, we would pass by these stalls selling an assortment of sweet snacks made with coconut, palm sugar, and sometimes flavored with pandan leaf. Occasionally I would be treated to these snacks and on hot humid nights we would stop for a faluda or a cooling grass jelly drink.

What was the family diet after you moved to the UK? Was it then - and is it now - easy to find ingredients for Burmese food in London and/or Sydney (where Cho also spends much time)?

Initially it was difficult to cook Burmese food until my mother found a small Chinese store that sold fish sauce and shrimp paste. After that mohingar and other Burmese dishes became more regular. We also ate a lot of British food like fish fingers and chips, baked potatoes with baked beans, though our stomachs were never content unless we ate rice!

Back in the 80s it was fairly difficult to find Asian ingredients in Devon where we lived. I'm glad to see it has totally changed ... In Sydney most supermarkets have an Asian aisle stocked with an assortment of ingredients. The only Burmese ingredient which cannot easily be found is pickled tea leaf, laphet.

When did you become interested in cooking? And in cooking Burmese dishes?

Most of my childhood was spent in the kitchen, where the life of the house was, so I was always interested in cooking. As I am the youngest of four, I mainly watched or helped with the preparations. Then when I left home to study in London, I started to cook Burmese dishes. 

Before you went to Burma to research the book, what was your source of Burmese recipes? All from family?

Yes, they were recipes my mother cooked or learnt from her sisters. Some came from my father's family as my grandmother was an excellent cook. She was famous for her soy sauce pork belly amongst many other dishes.

When and how did the idea of a book come to you? Did you know right away you'd go to Burma to research it?

The idea of collecting the family's recipes came about many years ago when I kept having to call my mother or sister for instructions. As time went by, I felt we had altered and adapted the recipes when ingredients were hard to find so the idea of going back to Burma was to rediscover the food we ate in Rangoon. The notion of creating a book to be published slowly evolved from it with the encouragement of my husband and my family.

How long were you in Burma for the book? Did your husband travel with you - if so, had he been to Burma before?

We were in Burma for three weeks which was not long enough. I managed to complete most of the research and do some of the photography. I intended on returning to do more of the photography especially the regional food and people, which have not yet materialized.

My husband, Christopher, came on the trip. It was his first experience of Burma and he absolutely loved it.

 

Steamed crabs     photo courtesy of hsa*ba

Favorite memories from the trip?

My cousin, Min Han, made boiled crab with soy sauce and lime dip (the crabs are on the front cover of the book). It was the best crab I've ever eaten so that will stay with me forever. Both Christopher and I just loved the time we spent in the kitchen, cooking, photographing, and eating.

It was lovely to spend time with my cousins. It brought back all the wonderful memories of growing up surrounded by not only my immediate family but all the aunties, uncles, and cousins.

Were you an avid photographer before you started on this book?

I've always had an interest in photography and when I discovered Steve McCurry I was totally hooked. Majority of the food photography was taken by Christopher as I did the cooking and styling. It was great fun working together.

How long did the book take from idea to publication?

After our trip to Burma in 2004, I had a clear idea for the book but work [Cho is in multi-media design and development] kept me from really starting on it till late 2006 when I decided to seriously take on the project and came up with hsa*ba.

As we are self-published and working mainly in our spare time, it took over a year before we were ready to go to the printers.

Why did you decide to self-publish? What was the biggest challenge?

I had a clear vision for the creative direction and tone of voice for the book. Both Christopher and I have worked in graphic design so designing, laying out the book, and managing printing was fairly straightforward. We both knew that the biggest challenge as a self-publisher would be to market and sell the book as we are a small fish in a big pond.

What's been the reaction to the book?

I've been overwhelmed by the positive feedback from people who bought the book and are cooking from it. I've received several emails that have touched me deeply and certainly made the hard work that went into the book worthwhile. One in particular which I'd like to share is an email from Lynette in Ontario:

'"There is a lovely South Indian restaurant I go to (almost everyday) near my office. On the day I took one copy to the chef (we talk alot about Burmese cooking), he introduced me to two young Burmese boys he had just hired. They are refugees and are helping him to read the titles in Burmese. I had seen the boys before and they looked so scared and sad. Now when I walk in they smile huge sunshine smiles and greet me "Daw Gyi! Hsa*ba!" A deep bow of gratitude for the healing your book has brought them."

Any other Burmese food-related projects in the works?

I'm always researching a new Burmese recipe after talking to my mother. When we're chatting she would suddenly remember eating something while she lived in Shan state or something my father made then we would try to work out how to cook it. 

 

Hand-mixed noodle salad     photo courtesy of hsa*ba

What's your favorite recipe from the book?

I love so many of them. I would probably pick hand-mixed noodle salad (let thote) because it is one that is best eaten with family and friends so I have lots of fond memories. I also think there is something wonderful and sensual about eating with your hands.

The recipes in hsa*ba are mouthwatering, yet so many travelers leave Burma saying that there's little good to eat there. Why do think that is?

You're right. Most travelers go to Burma and end up only eating at tourist restaurants or being served food that's 'westernised'. I think it is part of the Burmese nature of being hospitable and catering to the 'guests'. I thought it was interesting that the word used for travelers or tourists in Burma is 'guests'.

Any advice for food-focused folks heading to Burma?

Learn a few names of Burmese dishes. Christopher always got an amazing response from people when he asked for mohingar or sipyan. People went out of their way to take him to the best place to eat a particular dish. Follow the locals as they usually know where to eat the best food and choose busy places so that there is a high turnover and the food will be fresh.

You've spent time in Kuala Lumpur. When was that?

Our first trip to Malaysia was in 2006 and in late 2007 we decided to go back. We thought it would be a great base for traveling to other Asian countries though we spent most of our time exploring Malaysia. Both Christopher and I are durian fans so we ended up staying for the durian season!

Some of my great grandfather's descendants ended up in Penang so I was fortunate to have many cousins to show us all the great food spots.

What's your favorite food from your stays here in KL?

My cousin Angeline took us to so many great places to eat. My favorite is fish head noodles at Taman Danau Desa. She also introduced us to her friend, Derek, who is an absolute foodie and through him we discovered pan meen. Once Christopher and I worked out how to navigate the streets of KL, we started to find other great places like roti canai at Raju and going to SS2 market to eat durian and assam laksa.

Retro Thai Sausage Salad

Not 'retro' as in 'a sausage salad that was eaten in Thailand back in the day', but 'retro' as in - a Thai sausage salad that we ate back in the day.

About twenty years ago (that qualifies as 'retro', doesn't it?) we were grad students in Boston, living in a long, narrow South End walk-up. It was a great apartment, on the third floor of a gorgeous old building, lovingly refurbished by our photographer landlord. The kitchen was huge, with reams of counter space. But it was in the center of the apartment, which had windows only at the front and the back. In short - no natural ventilation. No air con. No ceiling fan.

In the summer, when the sun beat through the skylight, the kitchen temp hovered around 86F (30C) degrees. As cash-poor grad students we normally cooked every day, but that summer we spent as little time at the stove as possible. We made sandwiches. We grilled gai yang (Thai grilled chicken) on a mini 'cue on our fire escape. We ate a lot of zaru soba (Japanese chilled buckwheat noodles) and pasta salad with tuna, mayonnaise, tomatoes, and capers (snicker all you like - it's fantastic). We discovered sliced cucumbers napped with chilled thick garlicky yogurt at Nadia's, a cheap Lebanese resto around the corner.

And we ate a lot of Thai sausage salad, which - if you're competent with a knife - takes about as long to pull together as it takes to steam rice in a cooker. It's perfect hot-kitchen food: few ingredients, minimal prep, maybe 2 minutes in front of the stove. And it's spicy-sour-sweetness and mix of textures (chewy and fatty-crackly Chinese sausages, cleanly crisp cucumbers, crunchy scallions) are just the thing to excite an appetite numbed by the heat.

History repeats itself. Our current place is almost perfect - great location, just the right size, pet-friendly, fits the budget. But the kitchen - oh, the kitchen. The ugly fake dark timber cabinetry and black countertop I can deal with. Ditto the refrigerator, the smallest we've ever had. But the heat is something else. No ventilation. No air con. No ceiling fan, and no room for a standing fan. KL is suffering a miserable heat wave, with no end in sight. In short, cooking means sweating, in the form of big, fat drops falling from my forehead.

So last month I pulled an old favorite from the recipe box. We're eating a lot of Thai sausage salad these days.

Perhaps my timing with this post is off. It's not quite summer in the US, well into winter in Australia. But I'm willing to bet that, somewhere in the world, it's as hot as my kitchen.

Thai Sausage Salad (Adapted from Thai Home Cooking from Kamolmal's Kitchen)

If you've ever wondered what to do with those wrinkly Chinese sausages (which, by the way, keep forever in the fridge), here's one possibility. Though they needn't be fried (you could boil or steam the sausages instead), browning them in a pan brings out their sweetness and gives them crackly-crispy charred spots that are a delicious contrast to the chewy rest of them. Proportions are pretty loose here - make the salad spicier, more sour, or sweeter according to your own taste, add more or less cucumbers or sausage. In Boston we used to use jalapeno chilies rather than Thai bird chilies, for the flavor. Use whatever type of chili suits you. Do serve this with steamed rice; the coolish salad with hot rice makes for another wonderful contrast.

Interestingly, we didn't encounter this exact salad, incorporating browned and crisped Chinese sausage, in Thailand until our last trip up north in February, when we found it at a Teochew restaurant in Lampang (photo above).

6 Chinese sausages

4 large cucumbers

1/2 cup sliced red onion

4 scallions

3 fresh hot chilies (or more or less to taste)

2 Tbsp fish sauce

1/4 cup white vinegar

2-3 Tbsp fine granulated white sugar

2 tsp black soy sauce

handful of coriander sprigs

1. Slice the sausages on an angle (see opening photo) - this will expose the maximum amount of surface to the pan's heat. Fry them over medium heat in a dry skillet or wok until they start to blister. A few black spots are fine, but don't let them burn. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towel
2. Peel the cucumbers or not, as you please. Sliced them thinly. Halve the scallions lengthwise (white and green parts) and then cut them cross-wise into 1-inch pieces. Chop the chilies finely (remove the seeds first if you want less heat). 
3. Place the onion in a large mixing bowl and pour the vinegar over. Leave it aside to soak for 5 minutes.
4. To the onions, add the sausage, cucumber, scallion, and chili.
5. Mix the fish sauce, sugar, and soy sauce, and stir until the sugar's dissolved. 
6. Add the dressing to the onion-sausage-cuke mixture and toss. Taste for seasoning and adjust as desired.
7. Transfer to a plate, top with coriander sprigs, and eat with hot rice.

An Expensive Catch

I've got a couple of looming deadlines but wanted to point you all to a pictorial about a visit we made over the weekend to a fish farm near Pulau Ketam that Dave has posted on his photo blog.

At the farm we watched workers wrestle several longdan (a type of fish - anyone know its name in English?) from the water. Longdan sell, at wholesale, for a whopping 50 ringgit per kilo. The farm purchases longdan 'babies' for 40 ringgit each; after 2 years they reach about 15 kilos (like the ones we saw harvested) in weight. Give them another 2 or 3 years and they can weigh up to 50. That's RM 2,500 (about U$725 per fish).

Though this farm ships their fish as far as Hong Kong, the longdan we saw were destined for a dinner table somewhere on the Malaysian peninsula. I wonder if those longdan tasted like U$725. Unfortunately, we were not invited to join the feast.

Write Your Food a Love Letter

Last week I was contacted by a New York University student about her thesis project. My Food Valentine is a collective storytelling art project in which participants express their feelings for food in the form of love letters.

The project's creator describes her effort as

...an attempt to explore deeper, emotional connections people have with food, but in a fun way,

and adds that she developed the project

...as I felt the need to tell stories and share food-related memories that formed a critical part of my identity. Food is an important part of who I am. And an exercise of writing a letter to the food makes me go back and think why my favorite food is my favorite - and brings out stories about childhood memories, special associations and feelings a food evokes.

The letters added so far make for an interesting and fun read. And I contributed my love-hate letter to Bangkok ice cream chain iberry. .

Isn't there a food you'd like to express your love for? Hop on over to the site and tell it like it is. You can even add a photo.

The Whole Banana - Part 2 (Or, Going Underground)

In addition to the oft-overlooked stem, there's another part of the banana tree - one we never see - that's also edible.

Last March on Bali - between an impromptu gengong recital, Nyepi festivities, and a DIY-coconut oil lesson, we learned that the base of one variety of banana tree is used to make a type of tum. (Tum are steamed banana leaf packets of chopped meat or fish mixed with herbs and spices.)

The variety of banana tree harvested for the tum produces very small bananas that, because of their many hard, black seeds, are pretty much inedible (a similar variety grew in our old KL neighborhood, so it may be common around Asia). The part of the plant that goes into tum is the bulbous portion of the banana tree stem's base - from which grow its roots - that which sits right below the ground. The piece our hosts started with was about 12 inches (30 centimeters) in diameter; its flesh is heavy and dense, a bit like that of a coconut.

 

Much like our friend the banana stem this ingredient loses a lot of mass between harvest and preparation for cooking. After 'peeling' the chunk of stem by hacking away an inch or two on all sides and removing the dark inner core (which is bitter, we were told), the banana stem base was ready for grating. (Note that, like the stem, it discolors when exposed to air).

The flavor base of most Balinese dishes is a bumbu, or spice paste, and this tum is no different. Many of the same rhizomes, herbs, and other flavor-makers appear over and over again in Balinese bumbu. What distinguishes each dish is the proportions in which these ingredients are combined.

Here we have two types of chilies, ginger, galangal, kencur (aka lesser galangal), fresh turmeric root, white peppercorns, salt, garlic, shallots, and trassi (Indonesian shrimp paste). Turning it all to a paste is quick work if you've got a good heavy stone mortar and pestle.

This a pork tum, and a good handful of the stuff, roughly chopped and lightly sauteed, was ground into the finished bumbu. Finally, the bumbu'd pork was mixed with the grated banana stem base. (No banana stem base to hand? Use coconut instead - see the recipe below.)

For this dish the banana tree gives us not only a major ingredient but cooking vessels as well.

 

I have to admit a lack of proficiency when it comes to wrapping foods in banana leaf. From what I observed the process for these tum goes something like this:

Hold the banana leaf sort-of rectangle on your palm, and use your index finger to bring the middle of the edge of the leaf that's farthest from your body up and towards you.

Place a generous spoonful of tum in the middle-ish of the banana leaf, right where the fold created by your index finger ends. Bring one of the corners nearest your body in towards the center of the leaf, and follow with the other corner.

Secure each package with a strip of banana stem.If you know what you're doing (I didn't; the packets pictured above are not my handiwork) the tum packs turn out beautifully.

Twenty minutes in the steamer and the tum were ready to eat.

The banana base lent this tum a little toothsomeness, a hint of sweetness, and 'meatiness', without weighing it down. Each little packet was bursting with flavor and pretty substantial, yet felt light in the stomach. The seasonings came through in all their fragrant glory. They'd make great appetizers to accompany a rum cocktail.

Banana Stem Base (or Coconut) Tum

Makes 16-20 packets, or thereabouts

Ibu Nengah, our cooking teacher, suggests grated coconut as a substitute for the banana base. You might add a bit more lime juice to counter the coconut's added sweetness - or not. You can substitute foil for banana leaf but of course you'll be missing the fragrance the leaf lends to the tum. If you do use foil you might want to lightly oil it, and be sure not to wrap the packages too tight - the tum needs room to 'breathe' and steam.

Bumbu:

5 garlic cloves
1 slice fresh turmeric root (substitute scant 1/4 tsp ground turmeric)
4 hot chilies (such as Thai bird chili) - or less, to taste
1 long red or green mild chili, chopped
4 plump shallots, roughly cut
3/4-inch (2 cm) piece shrimp paste, Indonesian trassi preferably (toast it under the broiler or on a piece of foil placed over a gas flame if you
want to tone down the flavor)
2 slices of galangal
3 slices ginger
about 20 white peppercorns
2-3 small knobs of cencur (or omit or add 1 slice ginger in its place)
salt to taste

about 1 cup roughly chopped pork meat
cooking oil

2 cups grated banana stem base or fresh coconut

5 shallots, thinly sliced and fried in oil till golden, then removed and drained
1 small lime, halved

banana leaves or foil cut into approximately 7-inch (12-cm) squares

1. Grind all the bumbu ingredients together with - preferably - a mortar and pestle, or in a food processor. If you use a food processor don't make the paste perfectly smooth.
2. Lightly saute the meat in minimal oil - just long enough to get the pink out. Set aside to cool, then mix into the bumbu. Grinding is preferably - you want the paste and the meat to really meld, and the meat to break down a bit.
3. Mix the coconut into the mixture with your hands, then add the golden shallot slices and the juice of half a lime. Taste and add more salt and lime juice if you wish (the lime juice should just balance the coconut/banana stem base's sweetness - you don't want a 'sour' tum). 
4. Place heaping spoonfuls of the mixture on banana leaf squares and wrap as described above. Or, lightly oil foil pieces, place the tum mixture in the middle, bring up the foil's 4 corners, and secure to create a somewhat loose - but well-sealed - packet.
5. Steam the tum for twenty minutes. Eat hot, warm, or at room temperature.

Presto Change-o

Forgot to mention that the address for Dave's photo blog has changed (though the name remains the same). He's just started a series on people and places in and around KL.