Grace In Asia

ELV Readers: One of our favorite food writers: Grace “It’s Filipino not Philipino!” Bascos, is touring Asia with her family for three weeks. Like all good food writers, she loves to write about what she’s eating; and like all foodies, we can’t wait to read about it….Here is her first installment (reading about sour, smelly feet was never more fun):

Las Vegas to Malaysia

By Grace Bascos

I should preface this by saying that I haven’t traveled out of the
country (save for Canada and pharmy binges in Tijuana) since I was
about 12, when I went to the Philippines with my mother. And so I
embarked on the Asia Eating Tour 2008 (aka the Yellow Tour) with a
quick stop in Hong Kong (more on that later) before heading to Kota
Kinabalu, Malaysia.

A quick geography lesson: Kota Kinabalu is on the eastern coast of
Borneo, in Sabah, Malaysia. Also, it’s bloody hot. And muggy. The type
of muggy that you know it’s 98% humidity, yet somehow, it’s still not
raining.

The brief layover in Hong Kong led me to believe that somehow I’d
manage to fit in this foreign country. Hong Kong felt like, well…
New York or San Francisco’s Chinatown, to be mundane about it. But
that familiarity I felt in Kowloon was nowhere to be found in KK.
Walking, sweating to find a money changer by the hotel, I’m assaulted
by a completely new language, new smells, a totally new kind of dirty,
and I’m starving.

Located right next to the water, KK’s Seafood is impossibly fresh, and
plenty of hawker stalls offer pretty much any live sea creature you
can think of. I succumb to the closest one to our hotel, an open air
plaza with aggressive restaurateurs trying to get you to eat at their
restaurant. I’m in no mood to fight, I just want to eat. NOW.

Picking our fish and crab, we allow the restaurant to cook it for us.
The grouper (or Lapu-Lapu) is steamed, and finished with a light soy
and ginger sauce, the crab what they call “butter crab” which means
it’s fried and then topped with ribbons of eggs scrambled with
margarine. Nope, no butter here.

Sabah veggies (no one can seem to tell me what they look like raw or
what their non-Sabah name is) are quickly sauteed with garlic. The
stems, which we were served at this meal, are similar in flavor and
texture to emaciated asparagus.

I should know better than to head to a tourist trap, but I’ll leave it
by saying the meal was satisfactory. That’s my way of saying: it
tasted okay, it didn’t kill us, we didn’t get sick, and we were full
after eating it.

Kota Kinabalu is named for Mt. Kinabalu, the highest peak in Borneo.

Serendipitously, our driver up to Mt. Kinabalu and his wife became new
friends to our family. During the 2-hour drive to the base of the
mountain, we stopped at roadside stalls selling fresh fruit and
vegetables, and the ubiquitous durian, which had just come into
season.

Yes, I ate the durian. Yes, it tastes quite like a custard of sour
feet that has been marinated in garlic and sewage. But it has a nice
finish, so the the payoff is worth it.

I ate my first fresh rambutan, a fleshy, lychee-like fruit with a
beautiful pink skin tipped with green points.

After spending an entire day doing touristy-Mt. Kinabalu with our new
family, they took us to a restaurant off the beaten path, and of
course where the locals eat, called Berenngis Seafood Restaurant,
about a 10-minute drive from KK. Where, interestingly, we ordered
essentially the same dishes we had at the seafood market the night
before.

But here, of course, it was better.

Instead of the grouper we did a fleshy, mild flavored snapper, and
instead of butter crab, this night’s crab were done Malaysian
sweet-and-sour style.

Malay sweet and sour is nothing like American-Chinese sweet and sour.
None of that cloying, gloopy, red No. 5 stuff, this was a thin, truly
sour sauce, with a subtle sweetness. Nicely balanced, but still
allowing the freshness of the crab to permeate through the sauce.

On every Malay table there is an assortment of fresh diced chilies,
chili sauce, minced garlic and calamansi, a small citrus fruit that
looks like a lime but it closer to a weird grapefruit/orange flavor.
It’s all about customizing your own condiments for dishes, which means
I was laying on plenty of chilies, garlic and a squeeze of calamansi
onto every bite of almost everything I ate.

And so began the Great Asia Eating Tour… learning how to properly
apply condiments.

Coming soon: Part Two: Singapore

4 thoughts on “Grace In Asia

  1. My favorite quote by far: “Yes, I ate the durian. Yes, it tastes quite like a custard of sour feet that has been marinated in garlic and sewage. But it has a nice finish, so the the payoff is worth it.”

    I’ve also eaten durian and didn’t quite appreciate the finish so much as the four shots of whiskey I used to get the taste out of my mouth.

    Good reading, Gracie, talk to you soon.

  2. I should preface this by saying that I haven’t traveled out of the
    country (save for Canada and pharmy binges in Tijuana) = LULZ of the article :-)

    My one question for Grace: don’t all the condiments ruin the chef’s original intended flavor of the dish or are the condiments integral to the malaysian culinary experience?

  3. Some of the condiments in that part of the world are based on a variety of chiles, and they really bring something to the flavor of fish and poultry.

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