EatingAsia

Blog Alert

We don't often add new blogs to our sidebar. Put it down, in part, to laziness, but also to a lack of time.

Well, our daily reading list has recently expanded a bit. Phil of Cambodia food-focused Phnomenon has moved on to greener (?) pastures and has been drinking his way down the American West Coast and eating his way around Korea and Vietnam at The Last Appetite. The anonymous farang in Bangkok who writes and photographs A Dish A Day investigates the city's snack scene and is about to embark on a bicycle tour of northern Thailand. We love this blogger's unpretentious style and his/her focus on street foods; proof positive that - depite what some uber-famous traveling American chefs might have you believe - Thai street food does not begin and end with bugs. A former restaurant reviewer in Melbourne (soon to be Sydney) writes Elegant Sufficiency. She's smart and funny and a great foodie in the most non-obnoxious way, and, well, she's writing from Australia, which we reckon has some of the best ingredients on this earth. What's not to love? And then there's The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, which we recently told you about here.

Happy reading.

Calling All Asian Grandmothers (and Aunties)

Last April in Chicago I had the pleasure of meeting fellow writer and blogger Pat Tanumihardja. Over a tasty Yunnanese lunch, Pat told me about a book proposal she'd been working on. The idea was to gather, from Asian grandmothers and aunties and their families around the world, recipes and memories, and stories about recipes and food, and wrap all that literal and figurative goodness up between the covers of a book. What a wonderful idea! I thought. (I have to admit that I also thought, Now why didn't I think of that?)

Well, Pat finished up her proposal, got a book contract, and now she's collecting, writing, and testing recipes for The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook. If you're an Asian grandmother or Aunty, or if you have one or know one, and would like to contribute a family recipe, go here or drop Pat an email (contributors will be credited, of course). And if you're keen to try recipes that Pat's collected so far, hop on over here.

Good luck Pat! We look forward to publication in 2009.

Thanks BK Magazine...

...for including EatingAsia in the food blog round-up in your September issue. Here's hoping we see a few more Thais adding their two baht's worth here.

Download bk_magazine_food_blog_writeup.pdf

Huh?

This morning, while flipping through the August issue of Singapore's Food & Travel magazine, I came across this curious sentence (emphasis added):

You can get a sip of Singapore's sling just about anywhere in the world these days, but only in Singapore can you get a quintessentially western breakfast of toast and eggs in the form of coconut jam-smeared, thin-sliced bread and runny eggs with soy sauce, sipped right from the saucer - all served with a frothy cup of teh tarik.

Look north and east, Food & Travel. I think you'll find about 27,222,606 folks who'd disagree.

Funky?

We wonder if the manufacturer is aware that, when used to describe food, the word rarely holds positive connotations.

Northern Thai Flavours

The July-August issue of Malaysia's Flavours magazine includes our feature story (with 5 recipes) on northern Thai food. Thanks to our editor for the absolutely gorgeous 14-page (!) layout - Dave's location shots look great - and to photographer Yap Chee Hong for making the dishes I prepared here at home (and my tableware) look so good.

Flavours isn't available (to the best of our knowledge) outside Malaysia/Singapore and, unfortunately, there's no web link to the story, but perhaps I can rustle up a pdf for EatingAsia.

Better Late Than Never

Just learned of a write-up on EatingAsia in the July 1 South China Morning Post.

Thanks to Food & Wine Editor Susan Jung for taking an interest in Dave's photos and my scribblings, and welcome to anyone in Hong Kong who may have found their way here via the paper's piece. We have a soft spot for Hong Kong, having lived there (at Stanley Fort, no less - now home to the People's Liberation Army) in the early nineties, when the Mid-Levels escalator was just a twinkle in a city planner's eye. We hope it won't be too long before we get back for a visit.

No link to the piece, as archives are open to subscribers only.

EatingAsia on the Radio

This morning I rolled out of bed extra early for a chat with Mira of Toronto's Kampong Ku, North America's only Malaysian language radio show (the interview is in English). I'm told the result will air around 7:35 am Toronto/Eastern time, 7:35pm Malaysia time, tomorrow (July 8) at AM 1430 and then, in the weeks ahead, on AM 1470 (Vancouver) and FM 94.7 (Calgary). To listen live via the web go here and then click on the AM 1430 link.

In the meantime, we'll make an attempt to haul ourselves into the 21st century and add a podcast of the interview to EatingAsia.

Terimah kasih Mira!

We're Blushing

Thanks, TypePad, for making EatingAsia today's Featured Blog.

To those who've found their way here via the Typepad link (and by any other means, for that matter), come on in! We welcome you with smiles as big as the one the face of this coconut vendor in Medan, Sumatra (Indonesia).

EatingAsia offers up regular servings of writings on and photos of (mostly Southeast) Asian culinary culture. We're not a restaurant-review-a-day blog, we're irregular recipe posters (pure laziness on Robyn's part - she's working on it), and we eat low to the ground (sometimes literally - have you seen those tiny stools in Vietnam?!) so you'll rarely find 'finer' dining-related info here. But if it's everyday Southeast Asian food in situ that piques your interest there's probably a previous post or several that will appeal - snuffle around in the category list at the sidebar.

Enjoy!

A Word From the Photographer

Pickled mustard, Nan, Thailand

I'm of the age that I remember the great compact disc versus vinyl debates of the eighties. The CD had just been introduced, promising unsurpassed quality and convenience. Many of us (OK, myself) scoffed at the notion and swore that we'd never give up vinyl records. Nothing could compete with audiophile Japanese pressings. Like 8-track and Beta, CDs were a fad.

So, in a storage locker somewhere in northern California sits my vast collection of vinyl records. Oh sure, I'd like to have some of them (those that haven't been re-issued on CD), but for the most part they can just stay in storage until the day that I have the time and inclination to clean that locker out. I have embraced CD, the Ipod, and, in fact, much of the digital world.

So when people ask me, 'Hey Photoboy - how do you do it?', the answer is obvious: Film.

Ladies and Gentlemen - I give you FILM (pronounced FIL-muh). This media is also, for reasons that escape me, sometimes referred to as an 'emulsion'. I could bore you with the details about the silver halide crystals and color couplers that allow film to reproduce images. But I have many other things to bore you with so let's bring those issues front and center for now.

For our purposes, try to imagine a very long, thin CF card that holds 36 images and you've got a good idea what this stuff is about.

The FILM goes in the back of the camera like this.

In my camera the FILM is wound automatically. CAUTION: for safety reasons it is important that fingers, neckties, nose rings, dreadlocks, etc. be kept away from the moving parts (trust me on this).

Once the film is loaded you're ready to scream - er, I mean, take photographs.

Readers often ask me what type of equipment I use. And once I tell them, for some reason I never hear from them again.

This is my trusty Canon T90.

These babies were produced in the 1980s (no, I didn't trade my record collection for one) and they're built like tanks. They're manual focus and I use prime lenses (in other words, fixed focal length) of 20mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 200mm.

My 85mm, f1.2 lens is probably my favorite. It's just the thing for shooting markets and portraits. However, most of my photos are shot with the 50mm (which is also a f1.2). A tripod, assorted filters, a speedlite, and 12-inch reflector complete the 'standard' or 'chiropractic' package that I use most of the time.

In this day and age of instant gratification shooting and editing FILM is a relatively slooooow process. Once the images are exposed they are taken for DEVELOPING. It works like this: a mysterious man takes my bag of FILM to a local DEVELOPER.

In a day or two, after I have forked over a load of cash, he returns it to me in the form of SLIDES, also known as transparencies or 'trannies'.

After I get the slides home I view them using a 'slide sorter' and/or under magnification. I often take multiple shots of the same scene - bracketing around an exposure or playing with composition and depth of field, but mostly attempting to get a shot that does not include my thumb. For this reason, the sorting and selection process is key.

Storage is no problem, assuming that Robyn and I have bought enough shoes in the course of a year.

Now comes the fun part (or, the part that I prefer Robyn take care of). The slides are converted to digital using a SCANNER. We have a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000, which we purchased on a wing and a prayer right after we moved from Saigon to Kuala Lumpur. We - all right Robyn, mostly - saves the scanned images as JPEG files which we - yes, yes, she - then loads to this site.

As my heroes in the photo world go digital I tell myself that 'one of these days' I'll follow them. A photographer whose work I admire tremendously (and one of the few still using film) said to me a few weeks ago, 'Dave, here's the thing. You've just gotta do it.'

She's probably right. Film is getting harder and harder to find, and obviously the quality of digital can match, even exceed, film.

Still - there's something about film. Maybe it's the saturation or texture of the images, or perhaps it's the process that forces me to shoot first and ask questions later. Whatever. It would be a shame if film were to disappear altogether, forever. I would mourn its passing.

In the meantime, if anyone out there is interested in purchasing a very used vinyl version of 'Gun Shy' by the Screaming Blue Messiahs, shoot me an email....

Moon over Cubaduk Island, Indonesia