On the morning of January 2nd, a Friday, we celebrated our new status as people-who-set-their-own-schedules by taking breakfast at a place that we intend to visit more regularly in 2009: Yut Kee.

I don't have much to add to a post I wrote almost three years ago about this Kuala Lumpur kopitiam institution, other than that I can't think of a better way to kick off Dave's first day at his new 'job' than by enjoying excellent fish congee, coffee, and kaya toast in the company of friends. It's establishments like Yut Kee, and people like its proprietors Jack Lee and his son Mervyn, that remind us why we've come to love KL so much.

This afternoon we're off to another Malaysian place we love - Penang. Four days of investigative eating ahead. Stay tuned. 

                                           Raise a glass to 2009

Yesterday was Dave's last day at work. Not this work, or that work, but the other work, the office work, the work he's been slogging away at for a couple of decades. From today he'll no longer be managing a staff, just himself and a couple of cameras.

Scary, but exciting. A big change, but change is good.

What does this mean for EatingAsia? Not much, initially. We're in the throes of annoyingly time-consuming transition-related tasks. But once we've settled into a new routine we may tinker. I'd like to write more ingredient-focused posts. The photographer will be lurking in the kitchen more often, so you might see a few more recipes here too. And more Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia-focused posts, now that we'll again have time to explore our own backyard. Then there's that site redesign we mentioned last September.

We'll be traveling more (in the very near term, Penang and Jogjakarta) but, free now of time limits imposed by the fact that one of us has a full-time other job, we'll be traveling differently. Some of the best stories come when you've got time to just hang out, observe, become part of the wallpaper - something we haven't been able to do in so long. Now we will, at least sometimes.

We're looking to get started on some larger projects too, some related to food, others not. We'll keep you updated. The latter you'll be able to follow on Dave's photography blog, which should be up and running in a few weeks.

It seems right, today, to thank you, for visiting EatingAsia once and then coming back. We've so appreciated your support and your comments. What a difference three and a half years makes!

New year, new life. Best wishes for 2009 - we hope it's a great year for you.

Christmas came and went without much notice around here. We're preoccupied with a number of other things at the moment, and honestly we've never cottoned to Christmas in Asia, with its somewhat soulless consumerist frenzy that rivals anything in the US (Philippines excepted - there, in spite of the heat, Christmas does feel like Christmas). Besides, we're half still in Vietnam, mentally at least.

Today we're thinking of Saigon (though we're not done with Hoi An yet) and a simple but utterly delicious concoction dished up by a vendor at Tanh Din Market (just off Hai Ba Trung Street). We noticed this woman when we were there last August. Seated next to an enormous metal pot, she was surrounded every morning by a clutch of customers perched on tiny stools spooning up a pale soup from small bowls held close to their mouths. We assumed it was chao (rice porridge) - an excellent chao we figured, if her steady business was any indication - and vowed to investigate further when we had a chance.

Said opportunity presented itself a few weeks ago, and we found that her specialty is not chao but sup cua, or crab soup. Sup cua is fairly viscous, along the lines of a banh canh, but if you can get past the texture you're in for a treat. What we assumed were egg threads crowding the broth turned out to be shreds (and a few chunks) of super-sweet crab meat and the thinnest slivers of dried Chinese mushrooms. This vendor's broth is so redolent of crustacean that it must be made from boiled with crab shells.

She tops each bowl with a sprinkle of fresh coriander and a blob of chili sauce; diners are left to add soy, if they wish, white pepper, and yet more cilantro and chili. It's a small bowl but the soup is filling. Assertively crabby but generally mildly flavored, it makes for a comforting breakfast.

Our neighbor and her mother, residents of the 'hood, told us they eat breakfast here everyday. We sure wish we could.

Sup cua, Than Din Market (front 'food court' - this vendor sits across from the wooden hu tieu cart), early morning to mid-afternoon.

We're moving house in a few weeks. This will be our 16th move and I believe I can say with a certain amount of authority it doesn't get any easier. Nonetheless, we are viewing this chore positively, as an opportunity to pare down, lighten up, downsize.

That's what we tell ourselves anyway. In reality when I look at the amount of stuff we'll be giving and/or throwing away I can't help but feel we really haven't risen to the occasion. Cookbooks, for instance. I have a stack of just 15 giveaways -- out of hundreds. Logic tells me that cookbooks should be like clothes - if they haven't seen the light of day in more than a year they're out the door. Given the amount of cooking I do (much less than when I wasn't writing about food, ironically enough) there's no way in Hades I could use all of my books in a year. Yet for whatever reason I can't bear to part with most of them.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to list the titles now sitting on our dining room table, ready to find new homes with friends or in a trash can. I don't dislike any of these books; my tossing them out is not a commentary on either their authors or their content. I only know I won't miss them. Many fellow food bloggers have written about their favorite cookbooks. Here's a list of of ones that I can do without:

Baking in America and Maida Heatter's Book of Great Desserts    I used to bake a lot, but now my cake pans lie unused, my cookie sheets bereft. I use the oven more for warming plates than I do for making anything sweet. I bought the first book a couple years ago, and I've only cracked it a couple times, never used it once. My mom gave me Heatter's book when I was at uni. It's well-used, and I topped off some memorable meals with its creations. But I'm not sentimental. I loved it then, but I couldn't care less about it now. Out it goes.

If I do get the urge to bake I've got this book, which is probably one of the most overlooked baking tomes out there, perhaps because its author died much too young some years ago. I've made countless desserts from it - cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, compotes, puddings, you name it - and they've all been of 'that's the best I've ever tasted' quality. It's all the baking book I need. But I've also got this one just in case I want to whip up something sweetly exotic.

The Minimalist Cooks at Home    Who doesn't love Mark Bittman's columns in the New York Times Wednesday Dining Section? I always read them but I rarely cook from them. Same with this book. Buh-bye.

The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook    This might be the first cookbook I ever owned. It's mammoth, a sort of Chinese cooking newbie's bible. I never took to it, preferring instead Kenneth Lo's Encyclopedia of Chinese Cooking (which I rarely cook from now but do use for reference). We eat a fair amount of Chinese around here and these days I'm mostly using two Sichuan cookbooks. The latter is relatively unknown, but its recipes are quite authentic (if confusingly written). It was given to me by my future mother-in-law shortly after Dave and I returned to the US from Chengdu, where we taught English in the 80s - a very good omen for future in-law relations, I think.

Kitchen Conversations    I like the idea of this book: recipes accompanied by discussions of how different flavors and ingredients work together, and input from a sommelier (the author's son) on pairing wine with the dishes. When we moved to the San Fran Bay Area in 1990 I bought the author's first book and cooked from it extensively - like, cover to cover - and I still think it's fantastic. But I just couldn't get that excited about this one.

Simply Tuscan, Food of Southern Italy, Italian Farmhouse Cookbook     My bookshelves hold almost as many Italian as Asian cookbooks, so I probably should have forced myself to part with more than three. These have sat untouched for too many years. My go-to for Italian (besides, of course, Marcella Hazan) is anything by Lynne Rosetto Kaspar, whom many readers (in the US, at least) know from NPR's Splendid Table. I was cooking from her books before she became a radio star; The Italian Country Table is probably the most oil and sauce-splattered book in my entire collection, and The Splendid Table (about Emilia-Romagna, not the radio show of the same name) combines history and recipes to great effect. 

Cooking at Home on Rue Tatin and The Paris Cookbook    Though I loved Loomis' memoir of living and cooking in a French town my affection for a few other French or French-ish cookbooks left little room in my kitchen for her cookbook. It looks like a good one, but I only cook so much French; I know I'll never get to it. As for The Paris Cookbook well, what can I say? I've never been to the City of Lights (gasp! yes, it's true) and many of the recipes are just too rarified for either my palate or my humble kitchen.

Rustic European Breads From Your Bread Machine     What was I thinking? I've never baked bread. And I don't even own a bread machine. (But I'm hanging onto a couple other bread books. You know, just in case.)

Paula Wolfert's World of Foods     Wolfert is a true culinary anthropologist. I am totally in awe of what she does, have all of her other books, and at least read, if not cook from, them pretty often. But this collection of unrelated recipes I really don't need, so I'm chucking it.

Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, & Calzone     I don't make pizza, calzone, or pasta. If I decide to, I've got a gzillion other books I can consult (see Italian entry above).

Japanese Cooking and Practical Japanese Cooking     Japanese food is a fave but cooking it isn't. I do hotpots, noodles, miso soup, and that's about it. These titles have been idling on my shelves for perhaps a decade. Shame on me. Let them belong to someone who will pay them some attention. (I'm keeping this one though. Who knows, I may get inspired one of these days.)

And a reprieve: Glorious Foods of Greece sat at the top of my pile last night, but I rescued it this morning. I've cooked from it maybe once, and recently bought this book which is now my Greek food bible. But Glorious Foods includes recipes for so many interesting and little-known regional specialties that I want to hang onto it just in case we ever go to Greece - it would serve as a great guide book.

What cookbook(s) could you do without?

                                      Merry Christmas, everyone!

                                               A pho delivery

They do pho a little differently in Hoi An.

We eyed this popular stall on our first morning at the market, then returned the next day to find the vendor absent, his space empty. It was the first or the fifteenth of the lunar month and most of the market's prepared food sellers - save our favorite cao lau purveyor - had gone veggie or stayed home. When he didn't appear the next morning, or the next, we feared we'd missed our chance. But on our last morning there he was, back in business, sending out tray after tray packed with steaming bowls of pho.

He does a simple beef pho, with what we can only assume is a central coastal twist: after noodles, meat, and broth are in the bowl he adds a hefty spoonful of viscous fermented bean sauce (the pot in the center, below).

And with his noodles he serves a plate containing a jumble of fresh herbs, wide slices of pickled green papaya, and a mound of roasted dried chili flakes.

Diners douse the contents of the saucer with soy sauce (some also add fish sauce directly to their noodles), mix the lot up, and eat it with their pho. (Just dumping the green papaya et al directly on top of one's pho is simply not done.)

What we like here are the the herbs, which are varied (Thai basil, rice paddy herb, teensy-weensy watercress, mint leaves and a parsley-like green) and plentiful, the richness-sans-sweetness that the bean sauce adds to the soup (super-sweet hoisin is more common in Saigon and around), the full-on heat of the dried chili flakes (reminiscent of Thai guayteow nam, for us), and the sour punch of the green papaya which, eaten together with the chewy noodles, makes for a crunchy/soft, steaming-hot/cool texture-temperature contrast tour de force.

We're generally not pho-natics, but this is a great version.

Pho vendor, Hoi An Market, in a corner of the covered seafood section, right near the water

I brought a whopper of a cold home from Vietnam. This seems to be par for the course when we're traveling and cramming a lot of work into a relatively short space of time. It might also have had something to do with the fact that we arrived in Hoi An unprepared for cool weather and lots of rain. Lacking a rain coat - or any warm clothing, for that matter - I spent the better part of 5 days in a locally-purchased rain poncho that resembled a garbage bag with sleeves. (Dave assured me that if I wore the same in San Francisco it would quickly become must-have wet weather garb for the city's fashion divas. Ahem. Nice try, Dave.)

When my cold started to rear its ugly head I wished for something I was drinking quite a lot of exactly a year ago, while battling an even nastier cold while on assignment in Pampanga, Philippines. When a string of early mornings (as in 3am, for dawn mass) and non-stop days lay me low the kitchen angels at our host's home boiled up batch after batch of tea made with an herb growing wild outside the house. They called it 'oregano' (pictured below, and above - same name, two different leaves - two varieties, perhaps?). It eased my sore throat, cough, and general feeling of unwellness.

This 'oregano' is actually Indian borage (Plectranthus barbatus), a fuzzy, fleshy-leafed herb thought to be native to India that's also found in Australia, where it's known as five-in-one (thanks to once-prolific EatingAsia commenter RST for this link and others related to the herb). In India the tuberous roots are also used as a spice or prepared as a pickle. 

And Indian borage is found in Vietnam, where it's known as hung chanh, tan la day, and thom long. We first noticed it at a Hue/Hoi An market in Saigon; the vendor told us that it's not for eating, but for boiling into tea when you have a sore throat or cough. According to the link above it also grows wild in Malaysia, where it's known as daun bangun-bangun. We've not seen it in the market here, yet.

The herb smells a bit like Italian or Greek oregano but, to my nose, even more like sage or thyme. In Pampanga I asked if the herb was used for cooking; the response was 'no'. Yet something called 'oregano' is perhaps part of a dried herb mix called sangkot-sangkot that's added to a Philippine stewed meat dish called apritada.

According to that link above Indian borage is added to fish or goat meat curries in Malaysia and on Java (thus one of its Indonesian names - daun kambing or 'goat leaf') and, according to my Vietnamese herb book, there '...young leaves are cut into small pieces to enhance fish or meat as a seasoning before cooking'. (A similarly fuzzy, fleshy, and odiferous leaf, the name of which escapes me at the moment, is cooked with dog in Vietnam to mitigate that meat's distinctive odor.)

Intriguingly, the herb is also used in cooking in Cuba and the Caribbean, where it goes by the name of 'Cuban oregano' or 'French oregano'. In this 2005 Miami Herald article chef and cookbook author Maricel Presilla writes that the plant made its way to Latin America during colonial times. Which begs the question - from where and via whom? From the Philippines with the Spanish? Or from southern India or Malaysia/Indonesia with the Portuguese? Or...? And how did the herb find its way to Vietnam?

Filipinos, Australians, Indians, Malaysians, Vietnamese - anyone familiar with this herb - do you cook with it? And if so, how do you use it?

But back to Hoi An. I searched for Indian borage tea in vain but I did find, bubbling away over a wood fire in a corner near the seafood section, a vat of che tuoi, or 'fresh tea'. The leaves used for this tea are indeed unfermented and, from the looks of it, pretty old.

Branches, berries, leaves - everything goes into the pot and the vendor, who's been pouring cups of che tuoi in the market for over thirty years, gives it all a good boil for a couple hours. This isn't meant as specifically a cold remedy but its slightly bitter, grassy flavor and warmth was most welcome on our misty Hoi An mornings.

My cold, by the way, is pretty much vanquished, and in just over ten days. That's a record for me; these things usually seem to hang on for weeks. I don't know whether to attribute my quick recovery to che tuoi, thoughts of oregano tea, the handfuls of vitamin C tablets I began swallowing at regular intervals as soon as my symptoms appeared .... or candied turmeric.

Candied turmeric is sold alongside candied ginger all over Hoi An's market. Before I even got sick a vendor told me it's good for a cough and sore throat. I bolted at least a half a bag at the first sign of a sore throat and then continued to snack on the astringent treat for a few more days.

What's your (non-Western pharmaceutical) cure for the common cold?

Dave and I spent last Saturday night in a Saigon bar, surrounded by Filipinos who were one moment exchanging misty-eyed hugs as a Filipino band (an exceptionally kick-a** Filipino, band by the way - there is a reason that Filipinos are known as 'the musicians of Asia') performed a sentimental ballad in Tagalog, the next lustily singing along to American hits from the 70s and 80s that even we don't know the words for. It was one of those great, accidental sort of evenings, an evening so fun even the killer hangover that followed me all the way back to KL the next day doesn't mar the memory.

Dave ended up sharing a few beers with a guy from Butuan City (Mindanao). How serendipitous is that - us meeting, in a Vietnam bar, a Filipino native to one of the only three Philippine locales we've spent significant time in (the others being Manila and Pampanga)? It's a small world, indeed. He and his wife were eagerly anticipating a trip home for the holidays. It would be a family reunion and so talk ultimately turned to that pentultimate Philippine special occasion food: lechon.

                                      Lechon tools of the trade

Any Filipino will tell you that all lechon is not created equal. Before journeying to Butuan City last February with our friend Marc (who also hosted us in Pampanga) we heard all about Mindanao-style lechon, uttering words like 'incredible' and 'the best' as we cooled our heels at the Manila airport waiting to board our plane.

When we arrived to Marc's maternal uncle's house lunch was waiting, in the form of the famed local lechon: breathtakingly bronzed, the skin - flabby instead of Luzon- or Cebu-style crispy - cut away from the pig like a leather coat. Butuanons don't prize the skin and we ignored it, concentrating instead on the tender meat fragrant with a blend of herbs roasted inside the pig. We ate with our hands, greedily pulling off ribs and dunking them in dishes of vinegar made from nipa palm sap and spiced up with garlic and chilies. It was a tremendous lechon. Marc hadn't exaggerated.

The next day we headed to Ippie Bantilan's lechon shop to find out what makes the local roast pig so special. The family-run shop has been around for over forty years, and the lechon is prepared live to roasted in-house. The day's orders are kept in a pen in the back; while Dave snapped photos I tried to ignore their existence.

We arrived just after a couple of slaughters to find family members disembowling and cleaning a carcass. The first had been rejected because of its jaundiced liver (note below, the jaundiced liver on the left is pale while the healthy liver next to it is bright red). This is a rare occurrence, Ippie told us.

After cleaning, the carcass is dipped in boiling water to remove bristles and hair

and then skewered on a wooden spit. These days most lechoneros use metal spits.

What makes a lechon a Mindanao lechon (beyond the fact that, unlike Luzon-style lechon, it's not served with a dipping sauce made with grilled pig's liver) is what goes inside - always green onions; garlic; red, orange, and yellow capsicum; serrano chilies; bundles of lemongrass and, at Bantilan's, also star anise and white peppercorns.

After seasoning the pig with a fistful of coarse salt and stuffing it with seasonings Bantilan's prep crew poured a bottle of 7-Up into its stomach,

then sewed it up nice and tight,

and rubbed white vinegar into its skin

before placing it over the indirect heat generated by two rows of burning mangrove wood. After a while one row is eliminated to reduce the heat. The spit is turned constantly by hand, with the help of a bicycle chain.

After one and a half hours the lechon is done, caramel colored and dripping juices,

and is placed on a board, swaddled in paper, and bundled off to the delivery vehicle.

More than a few Bantilan lechon journey well beyond the immediate vicinity. Filipinos don't think twice about packing an especially delicious pig back to family and friends. At the request of his Butuan City-born mother Marc bundled a couple back to Manila, encased in cardboard and checked as luggage.

And we were treated to another for lunch, right before we left.

We went to Hoi An in search of great cao lau. We ate the dish all over town, but the version served at this stall (above) in the market is hands down the best (a version served at a shop not far away runs a close second; unfortunately for anyone squeamish about eating in the market or at a local-style eatery, every version we sampled in a proper restaurant or cafe disappointed).

A proper cao lau - a noodle dish that allegedly originates in Japan - is a porky tour de force, featuring slices of stewed shoulder or leg, a rich dark broth imbued with porcine goodness, and crunchy squares of lard-ified dough (the crispies that top inferior versions are fried in regular cooking oil).

Though pork figures prominently in the dish, its noodles - made with wheat flour; hearty and pleasingly rough-textured; and cut thick, wide, and square - are just as important. (The crunchy 'croutons' are made from the same dough.)

Last but not least the dish incorporates bean sprouts (blanched with the noodles, which have already been steamed before they're sold) and a characteristically Vietnamese mix of fresh greens and herbs, the components of which vary vendor to vendor. Curly leaf lettuce is a mainstay; Thai basil, rice paddy herb, sprouts of one sort or another, wild pepper leaf, mint, and fish mint might also make an appearance.

So what makes this vendor's version Number One? First, her pork is tender and shot through with the flavor of soy and whatever else she stews it in; many others top their cao lau with roasted or boiled pork that has little flavor on its own. Second, her 'broth' is rich and intense enough to call a 'gravy' (have a gander at the dark goo in that pot above). Cao lau is served just enough broth to cover the bottom of the bowl, so it really needs to taste of something besides Maggi sauce or msg-generated umami to make the dish shine.

Third, she adds a nice variety of greens. Elsewhere we were served versions that included only lettuce and a token leaf of Thai basil or two - pretty shoddy, in our book. Also, this lady's cao lau boasts appropriately al dente noodles and crisp-tender sprouts. Finally, she offers alongside an exquisite chili sauce. Ruby red, a little sticky and slightly sweet but quite spicy as well, it might more appropriately be called a chili 'jam', it's a concoction I'd love to spread on garlic toast or dribble onto scrambled eggs.

Definately a cao lau to remember. By the end of our last morning grazing the market we had absolutely no room for a final bowl. Poor planning on our part, and we're still regretting it.

Cao lau, 7am-late afternoon, Hoi An market 'food court' (Look for the blue and white sign; this stall also consistently has the most customers of all the stalls offering cao lau.)

Last week in Hoi An we had time to do something we haven't in ages: hang out in a market.

Hanging in the market is a particularly useful exercise in heavily-touristed Hoi An, where finding good Vietnamese food is a challenge. In the market it's a different story. There's so much fantastic stuff there that by the end of our fourth day our list of favorites had grown too long to manage in one morning. It's a damned sorry situation in which to find yourself - last day at the market, forced by lack of belly space to  pick and choose.

This banh khoai vendor works at a low makeshift stall to one side of the market's 'food court', a line of concrete tiled stalls housing vendors selling everything from pho to fruit shakes. As we walked the food court line on our first morning several banh khoai vendors called out and waved their crepe pans at us - a flashing red light, in my book. We turned a corner and there this was this woman, quietly serving customers, completely oblivious to our existence.

We sat.

Banh khoai is the predecessor to banh xeo, a huge rice flour pancake filled with pork, shrimp, and bean sprouts that's more common in Saigon and south. As it cools banh xeo gets unappealingly soft and heavy with oil; for me it's always been a three-bite wonder.

Not so the smaller, more manageable banh khoai. The filling in this vendor's version is minimal - a single small slice of fatty belly pork and a half a small shrimp layed in the pan after the batter's been poured, a flourish of bean sprouts added just before she slides the pancake out of its pan. To eat, they're opened onto a square of stiff rice paper, layered with a few slices of tart star fruit and young banana and a handful of greens and herbs (sprouts, basil, paddy herb, mint, and lettuce, at this stall), and rolled tight. The dipping sauce alongside is made from soy beans and glutinous rice; chili's optional.

In one, two, three ... maybe four bites you're finished. The pancake's stayed warm and its edges crackly to the end, lightly cooked bean sprouts as crispy as the fresh greens you just added. This is a heavily oiled treat, but not overly so - the extra grease works here, soaking into the stiff rice paper and mixing with the dipping sauce.

Our usual limit was two each, but only because in this market we had other fish to fry - cao lau, central-style pho, ngo bap, banh beo ....

We're currently in Saigon, having just come from Hoi An, where we spent five days on the hunt for the town's best cao lau and ate our way up one side and down the other of its lovely little market (outside of the market food in the Old Town's generally been a disappointment). Yesterday's breakfast - one of them, anyway - was an unexpected joy: ngo bap, plump kernels of rehydrated dried corn, black beans, and roast peanuts tossed with white sugar, peanut powder, and fried shallots in their oil. It may sound a strange combination, but the disparate flavors and textures really work.

More - much more - to come next week.

When Dave and I were in Cianjur a few weeks ago we stayed on a Dutch-era tea plantation. We were there to do a story on The Learning Farm, a wonderful organization that recruits kids at risk (under- or unemployed youth, dropouts, etc.) from around Java and teaches them to be organic farmers.

Though we were there because of the food angle there's so much more than farming going on at The Learning Farm; I have so many good thoughts about this venture that I'm on the verge of gushing. For now, suffice it to say that we had a great experience and we'll post a pdf of the article when it sees the light of day (we think March 2009), along with some photographic outtakes. (If any of you reading this live in Jakarta, you can order organic veggies from the farm to be delivered right to your door, once a week. We tasted some - exceedingly tasty! Contact me if you're interested.)

The Learning Farm recently moved from its previous location in the hill town of Puncuk to the Maleber Tea Plantation, where it leases a lovely old house that serves as dorm-office-canteen, and a plot for the farm. One afternoon, when we weren't hanging with the kids, Manager Hendri Adrianto was kind enough to show us around the old tea processing factory. It was quiet, unfortunately - they're not harvesting enough tea at the moment to be processing 7 days a week - but the tour was interesting nonetheless.

The building is simply beautiful. It dates to 1884 and retains many of its original materials - teakwood walls and staircase and stone tile floors. I love being in buildings with a history almost as much as I love eating and I have to admit that when I walked through those double doors and got a load of its beautiful bones, the crasser side of me couldn't help but think that this old two-story building would make just about the most amazing live-work space ever. But after more than 120 years it's still being used to process tea. And that's even better.

After the leaves are harvested they're brought upstairs to the drying rooms, which are long narrow spaces lined on both sides with stacks of sliding racks. The racks are made of bamboo, and woven bamboo covers the ceilings and walls of these spaces as well, so walking into one is kind of like sticking your head into a big bamboo basket filled with dried tea (only not as claustrophobic) - you're just enveloped in a cocoon of marvelously earthy and somehow stimulating aromas. If Malaber could bottle that fragrance, or incorporate it into a soap, they'd make a mint.

The leaves are laid about 5 cm thick on the racks and left for one and a half days to dry in the heat that rises from the sorting machines on the floor below the drying rooms and the sun that bakes the building's roof.

(An interesting aside - during WWII's Japanese occupation of Java the building was used as a prison. There were deaths and now, Hendri told us, strange sounds are heard at night - footsteps on the floorboards of the hallway outside the drying rooms, the squeak-squeak of the wheels of the carts that ferry the tea leaves from one part of the factory to another. Apparitions have been seen too. )

Downstairs, the leaves are ground between huge rotating metal wheels and then sieved by being tossed around in gigantic metal baskets that are moved back and forth by a motor. (No photos for that, or for fermentation, unfortunately. Dave, where were you?)

The ground tea leaves are put into square, shallow tile-lined tubs in a room where the temperature is kept at about 18 degress celsius. This fermentation room has an ingenious cooling mechanism: the walls are lined with coconut husks held in place behind mesh panels, and water is continuously allowed to drip over them. Fans move the coolness from the walls into the room and keep the air from getting too heavy with humidity (which might rot the tea leaves). Why coconut husks? Because they're cheap and they don't rot when they get wet.

Fermentation, Hendri told us, is the stage at which a black tea's flavor develops (green teas aren't fermented), and it's a crucial one - leave the leave too long and they'll rot, not long enough and they'll taste of nothing.

From the fermentation room, the tea leaves are transferred to furnaces, called 'sirocco', for drying. One of the sirocco is original to the building, if you can imagine that. The sirocco reach a maximum of 150 degrees celsius, and the leaves are dried for about 20 minutes or so, depending on how hot the furnace is.

After drying the leaves are moved to another room where they are sorted by weight. Heavier leaves are considered the higher grade of tea. The highest grade are black orange pekoe.

The lowest grade looks like sawdust, and presumably tastes like it too.

The teeniest leaf scraps - a mixture of high and low grades - go into tea bags, while high-grade leaves are packed, by hand, into these nifty boxes.

I'm not much of a tea connoisseur; when I do drink it I tend to veer to green. But while staying on the plantation we woke up with Malaber's black orange pekoe and I have to say it was a bit of an eye-opener (pun intended). (It was also very fresh.) We made sure to pack a box home, and I'm starting to alternate the Malaber pekoe with my usual green for my afternoon cuppa. Good stuff.

Last March we met a couple friends in a village in Bali's northern hills for Nyepi, the Day of Silence that marks the first day of the Balinese New Year. As soon as we returned to KL Dave's photographs from that trip - and there are plenty of them - got buried beneath deadlines and other obligations, so I never posted much about it. But I just came across a stick drive full of photos, and I've been looking and remembering all the amazing experiences (culinary and otherwise) we had that week.

The Balinese start their New Year's celebrations several days before Nyepi with Melasti, a cleansing ceremony (I'm simplifying this quite a bit). You need water for Melasti. The village we stayed in is about an hour from the sea, and so in the days leading up to Nyepi there was a steady procession of cars and pickup trucks on the road leading down from the hills to the beach, each packed with men, women, and kids dressed in ceremonial garb. Every household brings an offering to the Melasti, which they place on a makeshift altar on the beach (offerings are reclaimed and taken back home afterwards), and a priest and his assistants officiate over a cleansing ceremony accompanied by live gamelan music. At the end of the ceremony an animal - a duck, in the case of both of the Melasti that we witnessed - and a few other items are rowed out to sea, where the animal is sacrificed.

On the day before Nyepi, called Tawur Kesanga, every village holds an exorcism ceremony of sorts, meant to rid everyone's lives of evil. In the weeks leading up to Tawur Kesanga each village constructs an ogoh-ogoh, a huge (bigger than man-sized) scary-looking effigy with bulging eyes, sharp teeth, wild hair, and long fingernails that, on the day, will be the paraded to the village's crossroads and then taken outside the village and burned. The ogoh-ogoh are usually constructed right by the road. No two look alike, and villages compete (informally) to build the biggest and most horrendous looking. It's great fun to take to the road in the lead-up to Nyepi for ogoh-ogoh viewing.

On Tawur Kesanga our friends and I headed to the coastal town of Sererit to check our emails and stock up on food and libations for the Day of Silence, which is to be spent in your home, silently. (In reality not everyone is silent, though you're meant to stay in or very close by your house and be quiet enough not to be heard by neighbors. That goes for tourists too, who must stay in their resorts/hotels/guesthouses. Bali's airport is even closed for the day, barring emergencies.)

In Sererit we had a lunch of sio bak - stewed pork and parts in a thick, slightly sweet gravy made with kecap manis and, from the taste of it, cinnamon and lots of star anise. It's a dish of Chinese origin (the name may mean 'roast pork' in Hokkien) which seems to be associated with Singaraja, a city on Bali's northern coast, and is similar to the sweet stewed pork served over rice in Thailand. On Bali it's accompanied by deep-fried pork skins to crumble over the stew or eat on the side, and a sort of relish of pickled cucumber and chilies that does a nice job of cutting the sweetness of the pork. We ate this version right on Sererit's main drag, at a place called Siobak Sererit. We found it pretty delicious but our friend, who fancies himself quite the pork connoisseur, pronounced it 'just OK' - not as good as a version he'd enjoyed earlier in his trip. We have no basis for comparison, and so shall defer to his judgment. 

As we were finishing lunch a ruckus ensued outside the eatery and we exited to find (1) it raining like heck and (2) a bunch of kids getting their ogoh-ogoh on. Seems that on the day of the eve of the exorcism bands of male munchkins parade their own mini ogoh-ogohs. 

There was lots of macho-in-the-making here as the two groups jostled each other, each trying to claim pride of place in front of Dave's lens. It was a nice warm-up for the spectacle that would unfold in the village later that evening.

In September I spent some time on Langkawi to report my first non food-related feature article. The result - a piece that focuses on the precarious state of the island's natural heritage, appears in this month's issue of Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia - is viewable here:

Download tl_sea_langkawi_feature.pdf

I had a great time on Langkawi but it was a bit surreal to be in a strange place and not spend most of my waking hours exploring its food scene. In fact, I clearly remember only one meal - an absolutely scrumptious Thai-style beef noodle soup, taken at a shop called Kuey Teow Sup Perut (Bangunan Haji Taib, Bukit Tekoh - across from the hospital; 04/966-1357). Very highly recommended.

My next assignment for the magazine? A food-driven feature article. It's always good to branch out but it will be nice to be back in my element.

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.

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.

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. 

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!

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.

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 with an article on Thai Isaan food. 'Hey,' he said, pointing at the magazine, '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, though.