{"id":2139,"date":"2025-05-19T20:24:56","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T03:24:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=2139"},"modified":"2025-05-22T21:02:23","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T04:02:23","slug":"international-meals-malaysia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=2139","title":{"rendered":"International Meals – Malaysia"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have had generally good luck with southeast Asian food so far.\u00a0 Cambodia<\/a>, Laos<\/a>, East Timor<\/a>, and our three Indonesian<\/a> meals were all bangers. (I mean “very good,” not “British sausages” here.) We were less happy with Brunei<\/a>, but I think that’s more down to skill and ingredients than it is to any inherent flaw with the cuisine.<\/p>\n

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

So we were excited for Malaysia.\u00a0 We picked out two dishes to make, since that’s not too much work to do all at once, right?<\/p>\n

Fortunately,\u00a0 we came to our senses and decided to make one for lunch and the other for dinner, since it was Victoria day.\u00a0 (Yay, Canada!)<\/p>\n

For lunch, we decided to go with a strong candidate for the national dish of Malaysia –\u00a0nasi lemak,\u00a0<\/em>which literally means “rich rice.”\u00a0 It’s rice cooked in coconut milk, flavoured (yay, Canada!) with a panda leaf.<\/p>\n

Wait, what?<\/p>\n

\"Pandan<\/a><\/p>\n

Typos aside, that is a\u00a0pandan<\/em> leaf, which has a lovely sweet fragrance, and flavours the rice beautifully.\u00a0 All we had to do was toss the rice, leaf, and coconut milk into the rice cooker and press “go.”\u00a0 This is easy – why did we decide not to do both dishes at once, again?<\/p>\n

\"Nasi<\/a><\/p>\n

Just like building an IKEA bookshelf, there appear to be a few ingredients left over here.\u00a0 What’s going on?<\/p>\n

Well, nasi lemak isn’t just about the rice – it’s also about the accompaniments.\u00a0 Most important is the\u00a0sambal<\/em>, which is one of those generic words like “salsa” or “curry” that has to be narrowed down a bit.<\/p>\n

The sambal we’re making here involves first soaking some chilies and tamarind.<\/p>\n

\"Chiles<\/a><\/p>\n

Sorry, did I say “some” chilies?\u00a0 I meant “many”. Many, many.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 After a quick blitz, the paste gets fried for a solid twenty minutes, until the oil separates.<\/p>\n

Here’s what it looked like at the start of cooking:<\/p>\n

\"Sambal<\/a><\/p>\n

And twenty minutes later, at which point we also added dark soy sauce and the tamarind.<\/p>\n

\"Nasi<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition to the sambal, we also fried some peanuts and more of the anchovies, and sliced up a cucumber.\u00a0 This may be some of the best presentation we’ve accomplished on here.<\/p>\n

\"Nasi<\/a><\/p>\n

Are we ready to be world famous food bloggers yet?\u00a0 Or even famous world food bloggers? I mean, no, of course we aren’t.\u00a0 But that’s still a great picture.\u00a0 And you know what else is great?<\/p>\n

Nasi Lemak, that’s what.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

OK – what’s for dinner?<\/p>\n

A street food dish called\u00a0Char Kway Teow,\u00a0<\/em>which literally means “stir fried flat rice noodles.”\u00a0 It consists of the titular ingredient blasted in the hottest wok you can arrange with a dark sauce that caramelizes onto the noodles.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Here’s our ingredient family photo:<\/p>\n

\"Char<\/a><\/p>\n

Note the three different kinds of soy sauce plus oyster sauce.\u00a0 That’s going to make the dark, sweet sauce that will provide the base of the flavour here.\u00a0 Also pictured, Chinese chives, shrimp, rice noodles, garlic, Chinese sausage, fish balls (snerk.), eggs, and bean sprouts.<\/p>\n

From that, our mise en place:<\/p>\n

\"Char<\/a><\/p>\n

Ready, set, BAKE! er… I mean STIR FRY!<\/p>\n

\"Char<\/a><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Trust us, it tasted as good as it looks. The sweet savoury salty sauce stuck to all of the other ingredients\u00a0beautifully.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>I’m getting hungry again just looking at this.<\/p>\n

Malaysia was fantastic.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Next up, the Maldives!<\/p>\n

Recipes:
\nNasi Lemak<\/a>
\nChar Kway Teow<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have had generally good luck with southeast Asian food so far.\u00a0 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-meals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2149,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions\/2149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}