If there is a theme running through my life, it is that the things I put in my mouth taste better when they’ve been skewered. This goes double for things like meat and popsicles.
Take, for example, lambs. If you take a lamb, chop it up into tiny bits and put it on a stick, you have successfully created a delicious meal out of a creature that would otherwise be using its adorable cuddliness to waste valuable oxygen. You have done a service to mankind.
I live in a predominantly Indian neighbourhood in Kuala Lumpur. That means that yes, there are tons of restaurants around, but almost every one of them is Indian. This is completely fine with me. I loved Indian food before I came here, and KL certainly hasn’t changed my mind. If anything, I won’t know what else to eat when I return to Canada.
An important staple of my Indian diet is banana leaf. You get this big banana leaf that you use in place of a plate; a guy comes around with a bowl full of rice and a couple buckets of vegetables and curry. Frickin’ awesome.
It’s also nice that in the video I suddenly start laughing and spew rice all over. Flattering.
My trip to Bandung was certainly an adventurous one. Said (mis)adventures included such things as multiple flight delays caused by flooding in Jakarta, eleven deaths, and a night spent on a wooden bench. These are all stories for another time.
Despite these crazy Indonesian events, however, I managed to have a great time, and of course experienced many culinary delights (some of which, if you are both patient and vigilant, will show up on this very site), not the least of which is a dessert-ish pastry kind of thing called soes.
Imagine a tasty light muffin with vanilla custard inside. That is essentially what I am eating in the moving pictures below.
A great man once said, “Balls are delicious.” And great though he may have been, he didn’t know the half of how delicious balls could be, ’cause he didn’t know about kaya.
Kaya is this jam-ish type stuff that people put on toast. The really clever people, however, cook it inside little balls of dough. Screw the toast! I need my food in ball form.
More Bangkok street food, though this is more dessert-oriented. I was actually already incredibly full of food (and beer, for that matter) when I ate this, but I saw the guy on the street selling it and I knew I couldn’t resist. And hell, I was on vacation. No one can stop deliciousity when they’re on vacation.
Spent a week in Bangkok. There were a bunch of these roving barbeque stands, where the guy’s just got a bunch of raw meat sitting out, you tell ‘im how many you want, and he cooks it over the coals in his cart. It’s a pretty handy thing, and I ate a damn hell of a lot of it while I was there.
A computer geek with an appetite.
aaron at foodpile dot net
The foodblog gets updated occasionally.
