We have had generally good luck with southeast Asian food so far.  Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, and our three Indonesian meals were all bangers. (I mean “very good,” not “British sausages” here.) We were less happy with Brunei, but I think that’s more down to skill and ingredients than it is to any inherent flaw with the cuisine.

But seriously – if you’re looking for some great food ideas, go check out any of those entries and give them a shot.

So we were excited for Malaysia.  We picked out two dishes to make, since that’s not too much work to do all at once, right?

Fortunately,  we came to our senses and decided to make one for lunch and the other for dinner, since it was Victoria day.  (Yay, Canada!)

For lunch, we decided to go with a strong candidate for the national dish of Malaysia – nasi lemak, which literally means “rich rice.”  It’s rice cooked in coconut milk, flavoured (yay, Canada!) with a panda leaf.

Wait, what?

Typos aside, that is a pandan leaf, which has a lovely sweet fragrance, and flavours the rice beautifully.  All we had to do was toss the rice, leaf, and coconut milk into the rice cooker and press “go.”  This is easy – why did we decide not to do both dishes at once, again?

Just like building an IKEA bookshelf, there appear to be a few ingredients left over here.  What’s going on?

Well, nasi lemak isn’t just about the rice – it’s also about the accompaniments.  Most important is the sambal, which is one of those generic words like “salsa” or “curry” that has to be narrowed down a bit.

The sambal we’re making here involves first soaking some chilies and tamarind.

Sorry, did I say “some” chilies?  I meant “many”. Many, many.

Once those are softened up, they get tossed in a blender with onions, garlic, and tiny, tiny anchovies, which we last encountered in our first Indonesian meal.  After a quick blitz, the paste gets fried for a solid twenty minutes, until the oil separates.

Here’s what it looked like at the start of cooking:

And twenty minutes later, at which point we also added dark soy sauce and the tamarind.

In addition to the sambal, we also fried some peanuts and more of the anchovies, and sliced up a cucumber.  This may be some of the best presentation we’ve accomplished on here.

Are we ready to be world famous food bloggers yet?  Or even famous world food bloggers? I mean, no, of course we aren’t.  But that’s still a great picture.  And you know what else is great?

Nasi Lemak, that’s what.  The rice was delicious all by itself, but paired with the variety of flavours and textures from all the accompaniments it was an absolutely amazing meal.

OK – what’s for dinner?

A street food dish called Char Kway Teow, which literally means “stir fried flat rice noodles.”  It consists of the titular ingredient blasted in the hottest wok you can arrange with a dark sauce that caramelizes onto the noodles.  This thing goes FAST, so all you’re getting pictures of is the ingredient list, followed by the dish – there was absolutely no time for photography while the cooking was happening.

Here’s our ingredient family photo:

Note the three different kinds of soy sauce plus oyster sauce.  That’s going to make the dark, sweet sauce that will provide the base of the flavour here.  Also pictured, Chinese chives, shrimp, rice noodles, garlic, Chinese sausage, fish balls (snerk.), eggs, and bean sprouts.

From that, our mise en place:

Ready, set, BAKE! er… I mean STIR FRY!

Oh yeah – that’s the stuff. Actual cooking time was something like 90 seconds, but we were super busy the whole time. And as you can see – the result was pretty exciting.  Trust us, it tasted as good as it looks. The sweet savoury salty sauce stuck to all of the other ingredients beautifully.  I’m getting hungry again just looking at this.

Malaysia was fantastic.  Rather than getting too worked up about Queen Victoria, let’s be happy that one of the countries her empire oppressed has REALLY amazing food.

Next up, the Maldives!

Recipes:
Nasi Lemak
Char Kway Teow

Whenever we discover that there’s some food item that is regarded as quinessentially associated with a country, we prick up our ears a bit.  It’s often so challenging to distinguish neighbors, that anything that is definitely from our target country is welcome news.

In this case, we discovered that there is a hot sauce that is made in Malawi, associated with Malawi, and eagerly sought by Malawian expatriates. It also costs three times as much for shipping as it does for the actual bottle.

It is called Nali sauce, and friends – that label is not joking. The ingredients here are birds eye chilis, paprika, onions, and vinegar.

That’s OK, we like spicy.

So that’s Malawi sorted.

Wait a moment – don’t we need some sort of recipe to go with this?  As much fun as doing Nali shots sounds, shouldn’t we make some actual, you know, food?

And there we ran into difficulty. If I asked you to name a quinessential BRITISH sauce, you’d probably say “HP Sauce.”  Or else “Please go away and stop asking me questions about condiments.”  But either way – a sauce is not a recipe, and while HP is a classic UK sauce, that doesn’t mean you’d necessarily use it to make Boopers and Sploot, or whatever the hell the national dish is. (We don’t do research more than one country ahead.)

So returning to our old friends at United Noshes, (And by friends, I mean “people who have no idea we exist”) we discover that a common use for this stuff is on… fish and chips.  OK, we can do that.  Or rather, we can fry some fish and go pick up some french fries from our friendly neighborhood restaurant with a deep fryer.

I made a simple batter of flour and egg, which completely failed to adhere to the tilapia we selected.  The cooked fish was still good, but was completely uncoated.  The other topping in addition to Nali sauce was shredded cabbage soaked in vinegar.

In addition to that, let’s make the ACTUAL national dish of Malawi, which is another variant on a simple starch paste.  This one is called Nsima, and is made with fine corn flour, such as is used to make tortillas.

Flour, water, heat, stir.

I don’t mean to be dismissive – this actually turned out to be one of the tastier ones we’ve made, and we have no idea why. It doesn’t even have any salt.

The degree to which the Ndima is intended to be the star of the show is indicated by the fact that the accompanying vegetable stew, (Ndiwo) is referred to as a “relish.”  There’s a zillion recipes for these things, but the one we used called for greens (we used amaranth), tomatoes, onion, and salt.

Red amaranth sure is pretty.

So our final meal consisted of a very traditional dish of cornmeal paste and vegetable stew, as well as a modern one of fish and chips with cabbage and hot sauce.

Trust me, there IS fish under all those fries and cabbage.  You’d THINK that we’d just be hurrying past the cornmeal and veg to get to the fish and chips, but you know what?  We weren’t.  Still can’t explain exactly why, but this particular starch paste was really good, and it was even better the next day reheated.  The vegetables spoke for themselves, and combined nicely with the Nsiwa.

Which is not to say that french fries, fish, and hot sauce aren’t delicious, because they totally are.  And the crunchy sour cabbage was a nice contrast, as well as soaking up the SERIOUS heat from the Nali sauce.

All in all, a quite memorable meal.  Next up, Malaysia!

Recipes:
Nsiwa and Ndimo
Fish and Chips: Seriously – go buy some french fries, fry some fish, and put hot sauce and cabbage on it.